The Fifty-Year Wound: the True Price of America's Cold War Victory.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Political booknotes: bad company

THE FIFTY-YEAR WOUND: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory by Derek Leebaert Little, Brown & Co., $29.95

FEW THINGS ARE MORE COMFORTing to historians than neatly dividing up eras. "Russia, 1917-1991" or "Germany, 1815-71" fits snugly into a course catalogue. The problem with this approach, of course, is that real life isn't that tidy. History is a messy business, filled with characters whose beliefs have been shaped in one era, but emerge to influence the next. Did Konrad Adenauer, age 73 when he became Germany chancellor in 1949, represent something new or continuity with a past that predated Nazism? More recently, did Osama bin Laden and his followers signal an entirely new era--or did they have their origins in earlier U.S. policies in the Middle East and elsewhere?

These musings are prompted by Derek Leebaert's The Fifty-Year Wound. Leebaert, who teaches at Georgetown University, has written a history of the Cold War that continues up to September 11. Though he doesn't say so explicitly, he does see a connection between the Cold War and the new war on terrorism. His book is an attempt to assess the efforts the U.S. made in nation-building, peacekeeping, and fighting terrorism. Above all, Leebaert focuses on the role that the CIA played during the Cold War. His account of the CIA is riveting and offers much new information about its hapless record. At a moment when the CIA has attained new importance, funds, and powers, Leebaert provides sound reasons for skepticism about its ability to fight terrorism.

Leebaert quite rightly begins by emphasizing how episodic America's attention to foreign events has been. After World War II, the U.S. demobilized as quickly as it could, even as the Soviet Union's tactics and policies became progressively more threatening to the welfare and freedom of western Europe. British foreign minister Ernest Bevin noted that "If the Americans are to be made conscious of anything, they have to be shocked into consciousness." CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow made much the same point in writing to an English friend: "It seems the only way to induce action in this country is through the creation of fear and hysteria." No doubt this sense of urgency prompted Harry S. Truman to seek to frighten the American people when he announced the Truman Doctrine in 1947. Leebaert does not say so, but perhaps it was this sense of urgency that led Truman and his associates to create the CIA. Nothing could be more effective...