A Different Kind of Cold Warrior

Abstract

Book reviewed: Raymond L. Garthoff. A Journey through the Cold War: A Memoir of Containment and Coexistence. There is no shortage of memoirs by Cold Warriors. Over the past few decades in particular, the often self-serving and sometimes polemical accounts of former presidents, secretaries of state and defense, national security advisors, diplomats, and other policymakers have proliferated. At best, such memoirs give valuable insight into the events of the recent past. At worst, they are poorly argued efforts to rewrite (or reinvent) history. Almost without fail, however, memoirs offer a slanted view of the past that needs to be complemented with a careful reading of the rest of the available record if one is to come up with a reasonably well-informed understanding of the events that the memoirist describes. To some extent, Raymond Garthoff's A Journey through the Cold War shares a number of the pitfalls of any memoir. Its scope and perspective are limited by the author's particular position in the foreign policy-making hierarchy of the United States. Much like any other accounting of the past, the book is at times self-serving and highlights, sometimes (albeit gently) inflates, the author's own role in the events. Yet, given Garthoff's scholarly background as well as his in-depth understanding of the historical process, A Journey through the Cold War differs from the many books that present their author as the prime historical mover of his or her times. The author, wisely, does not paint himself as a larger-than-life figure who single-handedly changes the course of history. Instead, Garthoff's memoir describes the author's role as that of one piece in a puzzle, a contributor to the complex process of decision-making and analysis that produced U.S. foreign and national security policy from the 1950s through the late 1970s. When he claims credit, it is not for a courageous decision that changed the course of history. Rather, the author likes to go back and cite an insightful memo that either contributed to the correct decision at a time or was vindicated later on as a particularly pertinent forecast of things to come.1