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How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America

af Jon Wiener

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2021,091,121 (3.83)2
Hours after the USSR collapsed in 1991, Congress began making plans to establish the official memory of the Cold War. Conservatives dominated the proceedings, spending millions to portray the conflict as a triumph of good over evil and a defeat of totalitarianism equal in significance to World War II. In this provocative book, historian Jon Wiener visits Cold War monuments, museums, and memorials across the United States to find out how the era is being remembered. The author's journey provides a history of the Cold War, one that turns many conventional notions on their heads. In an engaging travelogue that takes readers to sites such as the life-size recreation of Berlin's "Checkpoint Charlie" at the Reagan Library, the fallout shelter display at the Smithsonian, and exhibits about "Sgt. Elvis," America's most famous Cold War veteran, Wiener discovers that the Cold War isn't being remembered. It's being forgotten. Despite an immense effort, the conservatives' monuments weren't built, their historic sites have few visitors, and many of their museums have now shifted focus to other topics. Proponents of the notion of a heroic "Cold War victory" failed; the public didn't buy the official story. Lively, readable, and well-informed, this book expands current discussions about memory and history, and raises intriguing questions about popular skepticism toward official ideology.… (mere)
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In How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America, Jon Wiener argues, “Despite the immense effort by conservatives to shape public memory of the Cold War, their monuments weren’t built, their historical sites have had few visitors, and many of their museums have shifted their focus to other topics. The public did not embrace a heroic story of the triumph of good over evil in the Cold War” (pg. 2). He continues, “The launch of the Victims of Communism Memorial project was something else. It came with all the trappings of official Cold War ideology, starting with bipartisan support in Congress and approval by a Democratic president. The initial proposal, of course, came from the heart of the Reagan right” (pg. 30). Further, “Another kind of skepticism about the proposed monument was expressed by historians and journalists who had long criticized the conservative argument about the Cold War. The Cold War, they argued, should not be seen as a struggle between good and evil but rather as a more ordinary conflict between states with particular interests that they worked to defend and advance; this was the ‘realist’ view” (pg. 31). To this end, Wiener traveled the U.S. to study the narrative presented at various national parks and monuments with a connection to the Cold War.
Wiener writs, “The world’s leading conservatives have come here to declare, again and again, that the Cold War, like World War II, was a good war, a war to defeat totalitarianism, and that victory in the Cold War was equal in significance to the defeat of Hitler” (pg. 45). He continues, “Naming names was one of the central features of Cold War America, and even today looms large in the memories of those required to participate” (pg. 65). Looking at nuclear tourism, Wiener writes, “According to the conservatives’ ‘good war’ framework, the United States was able to prevail in the Cold War first of all because American nuclear weapons deterred the Soviets from attacking the United States and then because the Soviet Union was bankrupted by a renewed arms race in the Reagan years – which included nuclear weapons testing…Thus the Nevada Test Site ought to provide a place to tell the story of how active testing of nuclear weapons, the weapons that defined the Cold War, guaranteed America’s freedom and then brought America’s eventual victory in a fifty-year struggle to defeat an enemy that was as significant, and as evil, as Hitler” (pg. 113). In this way, “Conservatives were trying to find ways to commemorate victory in the Cold War. They hoped to bring coherence to their cause by enshrining nuclear weapons in an honored place in American history” (pg. 121).
Turning to the role of media, Wiener writes, “Eisenhower’s Farewell Address is regarded as a classic today, but at the time it was a different story. The warning did not receive a lot of attention, in part because it was overshadowed by Kennedy’s Inaugural Address three days later, with its potent ‘ask not’ rhetoric” (pg. 196). In this way, “Although Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex constitutes one of the key moments in the history of the Cold War, it has received little attention in the official repositories of public memory. The video of the speech at the unofficial site YouTube, on the other hand, reveals just how widespread is the popular interest in Eisenhower’s address” (pg. 209). Further returning to nuclear threats, Wiener writes, “The fallout shelter demonstrated the determination of ordinary Americans to survive Soviet attack and thus constituted a key element in America’s victory in the Cold War. That was the idea. You’d think it would provide a popular subject for exhibits on the 1950s. But fallout shelter exhibits are few and far between. I couldn’t find any in New York or Chicago or L.A. One of the few can be found in Bismarck” (pg. 206). Finally, of Nixon, Wiener writes, “Liberals may still hate Nixon, but that doesn’t mean conservatives like him. For those on the right celebrating Cold War victory, Nixon was part of the problem. Instead of fighting as Reagan did to roll back and eventually defeat communist totalitarianism, Nixon negotiated détente with the Russians and traveled to China to open relations with Mao” (pg. 241). ( )
  DarthDeverell | Jan 6, 2018 |
A remarkably polite liberal critique of the unsuccessful efforts to sustain a tale of victorious triumphalism in regards to America's role in the Cold War. Wiener's method is incremental, as he examines sites of memory that aspired to keep a certain hardline conservative vision of the Cold War alive, but which have mostly failed in their didactic role. A less polite person would note that the Cold War is the period that made "official version" a term of insult, and in which "national security" was used in bad faith by both parties to pursue their respective agendas. It should therefor be no surprise that people's memories of the abuse of their patriotism is still strong.

That said, Wiener then looks at the memorials that are successful at some level, and points to those such as the Truman Library or the Vietnam Memorial, which allow individuals to project their own sense of the meaning of things on the great events of the geopolitical struggle between Moscow and Washington. This is only fair, seeing as in retrospect that the real fight was not between Washington and Moscow (at least with the demise of Joseph Stalin), but between competing definitions of America. Even if the demands of Great Power competition could not be avoided, the whole conduct could have been done with less hysteria.

On that note, the single most ironic portion of the book is that dealing with the Nixon Presidential Library, and how it celebrates Nixon's statecraft; the same diplomacy Wiener reminds us that self-described conservatives complained about demeaning America's imagined moral superiority. Wiener ends by noting that the examination of this sense of moral superiority will likely be part of the interpretive portion of any future Museum of Operation Iraqi Freedom. ( )
  Shrike58 | Feb 21, 2013 |
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Hours after the USSR collapsed in 1991, Congress began making plans to establish the official memory of the Cold War. Conservatives dominated the proceedings, spending millions to portray the conflict as a triumph of good over evil and a defeat of totalitarianism equal in significance to World War II. In this provocative book, historian Jon Wiener visits Cold War monuments, museums, and memorials across the United States to find out how the era is being remembered. The author's journey provides a history of the Cold War, one that turns many conventional notions on their heads. In an engaging travelogue that takes readers to sites such as the life-size recreation of Berlin's "Checkpoint Charlie" at the Reagan Library, the fallout shelter display at the Smithsonian, and exhibits about "Sgt. Elvis," America's most famous Cold War veteran, Wiener discovers that the Cold War isn't being remembered. It's being forgotten. Despite an immense effort, the conservatives' monuments weren't built, their historic sites have few visitors, and many of their museums have now shifted focus to other topics. Proponents of the notion of a heroic "Cold War victory" failed; the public didn't buy the official story. Lively, readable, and well-informed, this book expands current discussions about memory and history, and raises intriguing questions about popular skepticism toward official ideology.

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