How we won: John Lewis Gaddis's new history of the Cold War should be next on the president's reading list.

• Author: Thompson, Nicholas
• Position: On Political Books - The Cold War: A New History - Book review

The Cold War: A New History By John Lewis Gaddis Penguin Press, $27.95

I was terrified when the mailman showed up, straining under the weight of Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis's new book. The paper galleys clock in at four pounds and the title is imposingly simple: The Cold War. Likely the country's most esteemed historian of this particular topic, Gaddis has already churned out the following works: Origins of the Cold War, Rethinking Cold War History, and Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. What could be new and fresh in this volume? I expected a long, dry exegesis of how recently opened Soviet archives reveal the unappreciated influence of Anatol Gribkov.

But the enormous galleys contained a real surprise. Gaddis hasn't produced something new. Instead, he's mercilessly cribbed from his previous books, compressed key episodes, macerated major themes--and produced something terrific. The big, thick cover hides wide printing on every other page, and, inside, a short first-rate description of an era that Gaddis lived through and now has the luxury of treating as history. Eschewing the micro debates he's had with his colleagues, this new volume is about providing a readable summary of the world's most dangerous era. While doing so, he also provides useful lessons for Washington today.

The Cold War begins with the American and Russian armies converging on the Elbe River in Germany on April 25, 1945, five days before Adolf Hitler bit into a glass vial of cyanide and took a pistol to his own head. This should have been a moment to celebrate. But as Gaddis explains, the Russians and the Americans, with their incompatible ideologies, were doomed from the beginning. As his soldiers were approaching the Elbe, Joseph Stalin was avidly reading reports from his spies in America (he knew about the atomic bomb well before Harry Truman) and mulling how far he could expand his borders without earning America's ire.

Soon, the game began--coup in Czechoslovakia, Marshall Plan, Russia's atomic bomb, America's hydrogen bomb, Soviet missiles in Cuba, American soldiers in Vietnam, arms control, and the Berlin wall falling--and Gaddis smoothly describes each exchange. Throughout, he also keeps the reader aware of the conflict's most amazing fact: that the superpowers killed almost none of each other's citizens. In his one rhetorical flight of fancy, Gaddis writes a spoof section that begins by declaring, deadpan, that Douglas MacArthur ordered atomic...