At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War - Softcover

Reed, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0891418377 ISBN 13: 9780891418375

Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

“The Cold War . . . was a fight to the death,” notes Thomas C. Reed, “fought with bayonets, napalm, and high-tech weaponry of every sort—save one. It was not fought with nuclear weapons.” With global powers now engaged in cataclysmic encounters, there is no more important time for this essential, epic account of the past half century, the tense years when the world trembled At the Abyss. Written by an author who rose from military officer to administration insider, this is a vivid, unvarnished view of America’s fight against Communism, from the end of WWII to the closing of the Strategic Air Command, a work as full of human interest as history, rich characters as bloody conflict.

Among the unforgettable figures who devised weaponry, dictated policy, or deviously spied and subverted: Whittaker Chambers—the translator whose book, Witness, started the hunt for bigger game: Communists in our government; Lavrenti Beria—the head of the Soviet nuclear weapons program who apparently killed Joseph Stalin; Col. Ed Hall—the leader of America’s advanced missile system, whose own brother was a Soviet spy; Adm. James Stockwell—the prisoner of war and eventual vice presidential candidate who kept his terrible secret from the Vietnamese for eight long years; Nancy Reagan—the “Queen of Hearts,” who was both loving wife and instigator of palace intrigue in her husband’s White House.

From Eisenhower’s decision to beat the Russians at their own game, to the “Missile Gap” of the Kennedy Era, to Reagan’s vow to “lean on the Soviets until they go broke”—all the pivotal events of the period are portrayed in new and stunning detail with information only someone on the front lines and in backrooms could know.

Yet At the Abyss is more than a riveting and comprehensive recounting. It is a cautionary tale for our time, a revelation of how, “those years . . . came to be known as the Cold War, not World War III.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas C. Reed is a former Secretary of the Air Force. He has been Director of National Reconnaissance, a Special Assistant to President Reagan for National Security Policy, and a consultant to the Director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where much of the country’s nuclear weapons research takes place. He lives in northern California.

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“The Cold War . . . was a fight to the death,” notes Thomas C. Reed, “fought with bayonets, napalm, and high-tech weaponry of every sort—save one. It was not fought with nuclear weapons.” With global powers now engaged in cataclysmic encounters, there is no more important time for this essential, epic account of the past half century, the tense years when the world trembled At the Abyss. Written by an author who rose from military officer to administration insider, this is a vivid, unvarnished view of America’s fight against Communism, from the end of WWII to the closing of the Strategic Air Command, a work as full of human interest as history, rich characters as bloody conflict.

Among the unforgettable figures who devised weaponry, dictated policy, or deviously spied and subverted: Whittaker Chambers—the translator whose book, Witness, started the hunt for bigger game: Communists in our government; Lavrenti Beria—the head of the Soviet nuclear weapons program who apparently killed Joseph Stalin; Col. Ed Hall—the leader of America’s advanced missile system, whose own brother was a Soviet spy; Adm. James Stockwell—the prisoner of war and eventual vice presidential candidate who kept his terrible secret from the Vietnamese for eight long years; Nancy Reagan—the “Queen of Hearts,” who was both loving wife and instigator of palace intrigue in her husband’s White House.

From Eisenhower’s decision to beat the Russians at their own game, to the “Missile Gap” of the Kennedy Era, to Reagan’s vow to “lean on the Soviets until they go broke”—all the pivotal events of the period are portrayed in new and stunning detail with information only someone on the front lines and in backrooms could know.

Yet At the Abyss is more than a riveting and comprehensive recounting. It is a cautionary tale for our time, a revelation of how, “those years . . . came to be known as the Cold War, not World War III.”


From the Hardcover edition.

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Chapter 1

Communist Takeovers and Makeovers

Why was there a Cold War? Fear. Fear of what “they” would do to “us” if they took over.

Citizens of the Western democracies watched in horror as one ancien régime after another fell to Marxist ideology, fearing the slaughter and suffocation that inevitably followed those takeovers. They did not want such horrors visited on themselves or their children. To the east, in the fact-free Soviet empire, the government generated a fear of capitalist imperialism. It invoked the horrors of World War II, horrors that we westerners can never comprehend. On a personal level, Soviet citizens came to fear the obligations and risks that logically follow individual freedom.

To me, there was the immediate fear of the war in Korea. In 1951, I was about to graduate from high school, so events there began to get my attention. A war started on the Korean peninsula during the previous summer; President Truman had threatened to use the A-bomb to protect American forces there. By the spring of 1951 that war had stagnated into a mindless meat grinder. No one was winning, but it was clear to us high school seniors, primary draft bait, that we could be the big losers. Our silent generation reacted to that war differently than did our children when faced with Vietnam, but the underlying feelings were the same: something was terribly wrong, our government did not know what it was doing, and we were being set up to pay the price. In the shadows stood some greater conflict, a fundamental struggle between good and evil only dimly perceived.

In a speech to the U.S. Congress that spring, on the occasion of his recall from command of the UN forces in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur spoke words that resonated with the righteous weariness of the Old Testament. He praised the men he had left behind in Korea, then spoke of the challenges ahead: “Once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very objective is victory, not prolonged indecision.” He was speaking of Korea, but he just as well could have been laying out the markers for the forty years to come.

Whittaker Chambers Explains It to the Free World

In the spring of 1952, Whittaker Chambers’s book Witness was published.* It was the defining work for many of my generation, certainly for the cold warriors then taking up arms. In a preface to its republication in 1987, columnist Robert Novak describes how, as a twenty-two-year-old Army lieutenant, it changed his worldview, and how, over the ensuing thirty-four years, he found a large fraternity of like-minded leaders whose lives were similarly impacted.

Witness is an unforgettable book in part because Chambers was a talented writer. In 1928, as a freelancer, Chambers came to national literary attention with his translation of Bambi, by the Austrian novelist Felix Salten, into beautiful English. That book became a best-seller, then a Disney movie, and created a demand for his talents. In due course Chambers went to work for Time magazine, starting out as a book reviewer in 1939. He was an immediate success, and by 1944 was

*Whittaker Chambers. Witness. Random House, republished by Regnery Gateway, 1987.

in charge of the foreign news department. From that vantage point he

illuminated the foolishness of Yalta and the disintegration of China. He explained the meaning of “Iron Curtain” and “Cold War,” terms new to the American lexicon in the late 1940s. Henry Luce, publisher of Time, described Chambers as, “the best writer Time ever employed.” My acquaintances there agree.

In addition to its beautiful literary form, however, Witness is a book of immense historical substance. It documents Chambers’s life as a student at Columbia University in the early 1920s, as a recruit to communism in 1925, his selection in 1929 for “Special Tasks” by the Soviet intelligence service, and his promotion to management of the Ware espionage group in the United States in 1934. The book then tracks his disenchantment with communism as Stalin began to kill off competitors in the purges of 1937-38. The denouement was Chambers’s defection and flight into hiding on April 15, 1938.

In 1939, Chambers began his work for Time, hoping the visibility of that job also would give him protection from kidnapping or assassination. But this also was a time of sudden national interest in communist activity. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August and the subsequent bilateral invasions of Poland made the Communist party an instrumentality of a potential enemy. On September 2, 1939, Chambers told a part of his tale to Adolph Berle, a U.S. government official.

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government lost interest in communist underground activity. Overnight, the Soviet Union had become an ally, but from the minarets of Time, Chambers kept calling attention to that nation’s dubious geopolitical aims and its moral rot.

With the breakdown of the end-of-war Yalta accords, the new Republican Congress of 1946 decided to take a serious look into the matter of communist influence on U.S. policy during the Truman administration. In August 1948 the House Committee on Un-American Activities called Whittaker Chambers as a witness, based on his reve- lations to Adolph Berle almost a decade earlier. At those hearings, Chambers revealed his prewar membership in the Communist party, his break with communism, and the identities of individuals prominent in the U.S. government who were still active in the Communist party. State Department official Alger Hiss was the name of greatest interest to the committee, and he was called to testify. Hiss denied ever having transmitted government documents to Whittaker Chambers, and denied even meeting with Chambers after January 1, 1937.

At first only one young congressman, Richard Nixon, believed Chambers, but within eighteen months Nixon’s persistence led to Hiss’s January 20, 1950, conviction on two counts of perjury. Hiss served a forty-four month term in federal prison. The Venona transcripts,* released in 1997 and identifying Hiss via his code name Ales, and the postwar testimony of defecting Soviet code clerk Igor Gouzenko, remove any doubt about Hiss’s guilt.

In the spring of 1950, after Hiss’s conviction and sentencing, Chambers wrote two chapters of what was to become Witness. The book was published in May 1952, becoming the ninth best-selling book of the year. His twenty page foreword, in the form of a letter to his children, describes the seductive appeal of communist theory and the horrifying consequences of its reality. In those pages, Chambers tries to answer the questions: What is communism? Why do men become communists, why do they continue to be communists? Why do some break with it and some go on? He identifies communism as a call to change the world, to dispense with God and to enthrone man as the supreme being.

My definition is more prosaic. To me, communism is a nice theory on how to meet noble human goals, but in reality it relies on terror to make it work, and even with the full application of terror, the system does not deliver. Communist states always have dictators because the concentration of economic power means the concentration of all power. Such power corrupts; the dictatorship of the proletariat never withers away. The people lose their freedoms because communism denies the existence of a soul, of a conscience able to judge right from wrong, or of any authority higher than the state.

Chambers explained what communism gave to its adherents: “A reason to live and a reason to die.” Then he tells why, despite...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0891418377
• ISBN 13: 9780891418375
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar