Thomas J. Fleming

#2

2005

Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres of influence--and millions of others perished in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Angola, where this cold war flared hot. Such a consideration of the Cold War--as a military event with sociopolitical and economic overtones--is the crux of this stellar collection of twenty-six essays compiled and edited by Robert Cowley, the longtime editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Befitting such a complex and far-ranging period, the volume's contributing writers cover myriad angles. John Prados, in "The War Scare of 1983," shows just how close we were to escalating a war of words into a nuclear holocaust. Victor Davis Hanson offers "The Right Man," his pungent reassessment of the bellicose air-power zealot Curtis LeMay as a man whose words were judged more critically than his actions. The secret war also gets its due in George Feiffer's "The Berlin Tunnel," which details the charismatic C.I.A. operative "Big Bill" Harvey's effort to tunnel under East Berlin and tap Soviet phone lines--and the Soviets' equally audacious reaction to the plan; while "The Truth About Overflights," by R. Cargill Hall, sheds light on some of the Cold War's best-kept secrets. The often overlooked human cost of fighting the Cold War finds a clear voice in "MIA" by Marilyn Elkins, the widow of a Navy airman, who details the struggle to learn the truth about her husband, Lt. Frank C. Elkins, whose A-4 Skyhawk disappeared over Vietnam in 1966. In addition there are profiles of the war's "front lines"--Dien Bien Phu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs--as well as of prominent military and civil leaders from both sides, including Harry S. Truman, Nikita Khrushchev, Dean Acheson, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Richard M. Nixon, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, and others.Encompassing so many perspectives and events, The Cold War succeeds at an impossible task: illuminating and explaining the history of an undeclared shadow war that threatened the very existence of humankind.From the Hardcover edition.

#3

"In this book, acclaimed historian Thomas Fleming undertakes nothing less than a drastic revision of America's experience in World War I. He reveals how the British and French duped Wilson and the American people into thinking the war was as good as won, and there would be no need to send an army overseas. He describes a harried president making speech after speech proclaiming America's ideals while supporting the Espionage and Sedition Acts that sent critics to federal prisons. Meanwhile, a government propaganda machine created a hate-driven "war will" that soon spilled over into attacks on ethnic Americans. On the Western Front, the Allies did their utmost to turn the American Expeditionary Force into cannon fodder. At the Paris Peace Conference, the cynical Europeans mocked Wilson and his ideals, and browbeat him into accepting the vengeful Treaty of Versailles, sowing the seeds of World War II."--Jacket.