Volume 26, Number 16 · October 25, 1979
The Cold War Revisited
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State
by Daniel Yergin
Houghton Mifflin, 526 pp., $15.00
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945
by Robert Dallek
Oxford University Press, 657 pp., $19.95
Russia and the United States
by N.V. Sivachev, by N.N. Yakovlev
University of Chicago Press, 301 pp., $12.95
Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945
by Vojtech Mastny
Columbia University Press, 409 pp., $16.95
Stalin Embattled, 1943-1948
by William O. McCagg Jr.
Wayne State University Press, 423 pp., $18.95
The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform
by Fernando Claudin, translated by Brian Pearce, by Francis MacDonagh
Monthly Review Press, 2 vols., 831 pp., $11.90 (paper)
The American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, 1943-1947: Universalism in an Area not of Essential Interest to the United States Press
by Geir Lundestad
Universitetsforlaget (Oslo), distributed by the Columbia University, 654 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Thirty years ago, in the agitated days of the early cold war, Sir Herbert Butterfield gave a lecture at Notre Dame called 'The Tragic Element in Modern International Conflict.' The historiography of international conflict, Butterfield said, went characteristically through two stages. 'In the midst of battle, while we are in a fighting mood, we see only the sins of the enemy.' In this Heroic stage, historians portray a struggle of right with wrong, of good men fighting bad. Then, as passions subside, historians enter the Academic stage, when they begin 'to be careful with the defeated party,' to try 'by internal sympathetic infiltration' to find out what was in their minds and to reflect on the structural dilemmas that so often underlie great conflicts between masses of human beings. The 'higher historiography' moves on from melodrama to tragedy. 'In historical perspective we learn to be a little more sorry for both parties than they knew how to be for one another.'[1]
Review, 6911 words
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