The Cold War was the war of the century.
I was already an experienced political hand when I opened up my sixth grade first issue of Junior Scholastic of the fall term which announced the invasion of South Korea. I had been following the events in Korea in the New York Post ever since the war started in June. And much before, in 1948, I had listened to H. G. Kaltenborn say on the radio in his staccato voice that Dewey would win and both I and Harry Truman went to bed after that news and were both surprised in the morning to find that Truman had won though my personal choice of the American Labor Party, whose standard bearer was Henry Wallace and backed by Socialists and Reds, had not even won New York State and so did not even have a symbolic victory.
Looking at the military maps available in the newspapers showed that the American and Republic of Korea troops had been pushed back into a square, the eastern and southern edges to the sea, the lower right vertex the city of Pusan and the northern and western edges where the fighting was with the northwest vertex at Teigu. What should be done with the increasing American buildup? The obvious choice was to put more and more troops through Pusan, solidify the Pusan Perimeter, and then attack north and west. But I thought of a bolder move. Attack far to the north, perhaps at Inchon, the sea entrance to Seoul, and roll up the North Korean soldiers between the Americans moving south and those moving north out of the Pusan Perimeter. And that is just what General MacArthur, with better maps, actually did. He was more worried than I that the long mud flats at Inchon would have wiped out the Americans if the North Koreans had been prepared, but they were surprised. I also appreciated but did not invent the Hungnam Retreat whereby American troops engaged in what the general called “moving forward, but in a different direction”, extricating American forces from the Chosin Reservoir, near the Yalu River, down a coastal road, with American flankers protecting them from the Chinese to the west in the hills, and down to Hungnam where they could embark on rescue ships. Seoul was lost and then recaptured and a stalemate resulted at the lines where the truce line between what were now the division of the two Koreas were divided,
Never say wars don’t make a difference or resolve some problems. I am thinking of “Escape From Busan”, the new name for that city, which is about a zombie movie made fifty years later when South Korea is a major cultural and economic force while North Koreas is an economic pauper dependant on China and whose main product seems to be reeducation camps. Great zombie movie.
World War II veterans on the street corner asked me about Truman having dismissed MacArthur as commander in Korea. I remember seeing MacArthur’s speech live from Congress intoning that “Old soldiers never die; they only waste away”, which never made any sense, just MacArthur fustian. I said to the vets that Truman was Commander in Chief and could fire any general he cared to, even as illustrious a one as MacArthur, and the vets said there was some wisdom in that.
I remember reading in the New York Post that the hair on Ethel Rosenberg’s hair had sizzled purple when she had been electrocuted in Sing Sing. People in my neighborhood were frightened that Jews would be punished because of the Rosenbergs being traitors and some insisted they were innocent. There were so many spies. There was Judith Copland and headlines about who promoted Peress, who was a dentist serving in the Army but from a Red family who had been promoted to Major as part of ordinary advancement. I followed Joe McCarthy’ slimy leer when he was revealed by Ed Murrow and my eighth grade teacher thought the tv program was an historical event of unmasking a villainous man. I had supported Eisenhower in 1952 because of his experience, the last time I preferred person to party, but I was twelve years old and didn’t know better, switching back to Stevenson in 1956 and doing some paperwork for the Bronx Democratic Committee and preferred Stevenson over Kennedy in 1960, though I still wasn’t allowed to vote. I did not trust to his family connections, but was won over to him at the time of the Democratic National Convention because of his charm and his support for flexible response on foreign policy as opposed to Eisenhower’s view of “more bang for the buck”, which made it impossible for Eisenhower to fight insurgency wars because everything was in the atomic basket. But that brings us into the Sixties, which were a different kettle of fish.
It is fun to refight the battles in the American Civil War or in the Second World War. The dead have all been counted and the battles are so complex that there might have been very different outcomes in many of them. War is more complicated than chess if for no other reason that the values of the elements of force can change over time. So long range artillery are more important in the Russia-Ukraine War than are jet planes. Maybe Italy wouldn’t have been such a long slog that was not decisive if Mark Clark had better handled Salerno. Would Hawaii have been invaded if we lost at Midway? What if Union forces had not taken the heights on the first day of Gettysburg or Grant had not persisted on the second day of Shiloh and turned defeat into victory? So many imponderables that are no longer at anyone’s expense. Unless you worry that Jefferson Davis and Hitler might have won. Now, those would be nightmares.
On the other hand, I don't like to refight the Cold War. I lived through the entire thing, from the late Forties, when I heard Gabriel Heater on the radio say that the United States was developing what was called “the Super'', which was the Hydrogen Bomb, far more powerful than the Atomic Bomb, and left me with dread of the Apocalypse, which lasted for me through 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and I had nightmares throughout the period. During the Korean War, friends of mine in junior high school sang “MIG’s are a’comin; their planes are In sight” to parody the then popular tune “Shrimp Boats Are A Comin’ ''. I calculated that I would survive a nuclear attack in my neighborhood, the central Bronx, if the A Bomb hit Lower Manhattan but not if it landed in Midtown. My friends and I were asked to tell our school how we went back and forth to home, probably for the innocuous purpose of redistricting school catchment areas. We took it as meaning that the school authorities could find where our bodies laid, though, of course, no one would bother. School shootings in the present day are not as un settling as preparing for an atomic attack that might come any day by learning how to cower under school desks waiting for the explosions.I dreamed of whether radiation was like a sunburn that fried me and, in my dreams, avoided windows because the shards of glass would riddle me as sure as a tommy gun. Pamphlets told me a brief coating of soil would keep me from radiation, but that didn’t help inside an apartment building.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was a graduate student, Kennedy had announced on television that an attack on the United States by Cuba would be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union and to be responded accordingly. A young woman was heard on Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley, yelling out that she didn’t want to die and my friends and I made plans to go to the Oregon coast because I thought the wind currents were west to east and so likely to have little fallout where I would be. I found out many years later that friends at another university, and perhaps many, had made similar plans. The crisis eased when Russian ships carrying missiles turned back from the American blockade of Cuba but I did not know at the time that there was a secret agreement that Kennedy would withdraw the Jupiter IRBM from Turkey because they were only offensive missiles in that they took time to get fueled and so could only serve as a first strike, not a response to the enemy's nuclear strike.
And remember that this was in the early Sixties. Herman Kahn wrote, also in 1962, a book called “On Thermonuclear War'', which I read rather than digging even more deeply into the English novel. Kahn said that the bad news would begin in the late Sixties when both sides would have second strike capability, which meant that they would have enough nuclear armed missiles to retaliate against the other side even if the other side had sent the first salvo and had hit only missile bases rather than attacking cities, whose purpose was to so demoralize a remaining population so that it would surrender. All of this was speculation, reams of books and articles of what might happen while anticipating that it might well happen. “The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” moved the clock closer or farther from midnight but mostly only about five minutes away and came to one minute away. Einstein had said that no one knew what the next war would be like but the war after that one would be with sticks and stones.
There were so many loose ends in mutual deterrence that it seems likely that one of them would ignite the nuclear fire. Early on, writers wondered about what a war would be like. Collier’s Magazine, while in the Fifties, before it folded, had a sense that a war might be punctuated with atomic bombs but more conventional warfare would also be obtained. It believed the Allies would conquer Russia by land although New York City would have been hit by two nuclear attacks. Comic book artists imagined that the Soviets would attack the west coast of South America with an army. Science fiction authors postulated the Soviet occupation of America. No way out of a conventional war then, only the apocalypse.
The coronavirus pandemic is pretty bad as catastrophes go. It has killed more people in the United States than the number of U. S. soldiers killed in World War I and World War II combined. It has had a heavy economic impact and we did not know how quickly the country would recover from the economic downturn. It has had a psychological impact in that people are asked to stay home and they are rebelling against that because it disrupts their lives too much, whatever may be the dangers of contagion. It leaves everybody with the feeling of how vulnerable we are to the almost invisible world of microbes. And the situation could have gotten worse rather than better. What if the pandemic turned into a general panic, with people roving the streets to attack who knows what? I have been told that Periclean Athens survived a plague and life went back to normal. I am not so sure that will happen this time around. The Black Plague changed the European economy and may have been responsible for the end of feudalism.
But this pandemic, I would insist, has not been the scariest time in the past hundred years, dating back to the last pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which was, in fact, of American origins. That “honor” is to be reserved for the Cold War which was waged between the United States and the Soviet Union from, let us say, the time of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, which all but declared it, the President of the United States sitting behind Churchill at the time, to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and Reagan had arrived a few years before at what amounted to a Soviet surrender arrangement with Gorbachev, the details of which have not yet been made public. During that 43 year long war, the United States also lost as many soldiers as it had in World War I, if you add together Vietnam and Korea, two wars in which the United States and its allies engaged with Soviet or Communist proxies, and also add in the dead among our allies that resulted from other proxy wars in Africa and South America (Remember Chile? Remember the Bay of Pigs?). Worse than that, during the Cold War, we were under the threat of most of us dying as a result of a nuclear exchange in which both sides would destroy one another within thirty minutes of launching. The talk was of “Better Red than Dead” and children were taught to hide under their desks to avoid bomb blast.
Somehow we managed to survive, miscalculations averted, as when a flock of geese over Canada had put the West on High Alert. The demise was not what informed people thought would happen. Liberals like Barrington Moore, Jr. thought that the Soviet Union was so ingrained with its totalitarian ideology that generations would pass before the Soviet economy had matured enough to be run by technocrats no longer interested in war. Conservatives thought ending the Soviet Union meant that the solution was military or maybe espionage, the CIA undermining the European nations under the control of the Soviet Union. Instead, there was a negotiated surrender, organized by George Schultz and under the auspices of Ronald Reagan, whereby agreements of arms control were negotiated and I suspect the clinching deal, hinted at in Schultz’s memoirs, that the Soviet in charge of the Soviet Rocket Forces would be vetted and approved by the Americans. The Soviets had to give in, to end the Cold War, because the U.S, was so outspending the Soviet Union. It couldn’t catch up despite experts in the Kremlin assuring their leaders that the Strategic Defense Initiative, whereby the United States could create an impenetrable dome to protect America, couldn’t work, and indeed it couldn’t, as many American advisors said, but it worked whether it was meant as a bluff ort just a mistaken waste of money. Life is as strange and eerily comical as Kubtick’s “Dr. Strangelove or How I Came to Love the Bomb”. And the end of the Cold War as negotiated was a surprise in that diplomacy had failed to avert either the First or the Second World War.
But the Cold War has become an episode of cultural amnesia. My daughter, who was a teenager during its last few years, did not have the dread of the future catastrophe that preoccupied me in my youth and which still lingers in my sense that nothing since that time comp-ares in terror to that time, neither the War on Terror that began with the attack on the World Trade Center nor the Covid Pandemic that killed more than a million people, much less the rectifications of the boundaries of Europe that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union: pacifying the states that resulted from the co;lapse of Yugoslavia; NATO and Madeleine Albright rushing to expand Europe to its “legitimate” borders because Europe shared the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and democracy, while Russia had none of that; the present Russian-Ukraine War because western Ukraine is a European country while Crimea is a Russian country. The present is a reverberation of the Cold War even if Trump and his acolytes never see it that way We don’t think about the Cold War as the climactic event of the Twentieth Century, even more than was the Second World War, of which there are no end of memories and retellings.