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Article: We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History / The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1991
- Article from:
- Chief Executive
- Article date:
- September 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Chief Executive Magazine, Incorporated Sep 1998. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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We Now Know: Re Cold War History. By John Lewis Gaddis. Clarendon Press, $30.00, 425 pp.
The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1991. By Ronald E. Powaski. Oxford University Press, $35.00, 356 pp.
The Cold War may be over, but the war over interpreting it may just be beginning: Who started the conflict? What happened? Why did it end? Who won?
Most Americans in the initial post-WWII years saw it as Stalin's fault. But like most things American, this view fell out of fashion in the late 1960s. Revisionist intellectuals developed what one writer calls the "social worker's view of the Soviet bad boy." That is, Stalinist policy was merely a rational reaction to American ...