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Article: We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- December 31, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, by John Lewis Gaddis (Oxford, 425 pp., $30)
Mr. Rodman is director of national-security programs at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom and a senior editor of NR.
THE struggle over history is not an exercise in pedantry. The Soviets understood this well, as they went about the Orwellian business of regularly rewriting the past: it was a way to try to shape the present and future. It is poetic justice, therefore, that the Soviet defeat in the Cold War is now being ratified by the historiographic confirmation -- from Communist archives -- of certain basic truths about how that great East - West contest began. For ...