We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (A Council on Foreign Relations book)

Fluidly written and deceptively deep post-revisionism is the order of the day, and there are few contemporary authors to rival Gaddis for sheer persuasiveness.


Right-Winger Gaddis Does Not Have All The Answers.   September 5, 2000
cjh96@aber.ac.uk (Aberystwyth, U.K.)
10 out of 15 found this review helpful

In the 1970s and '80s John Lewis Gaddis established a distinguished reputation as the leader of the post-revisionist school on the origins of the Cold War. Since then, sadly, his writing has been characterised by a drift towards the misguided stance of the Reaganite Right. In his latest work he has made a commendable early attempt to analyise the substantive new reaources made avaliable by the declassification of the Soviet archives. Yet his title "We Now Know" (a notion repeatedly asserted throughout this work) claims far too much. The new evidence has contributed to the debate on the Cold War but does not provide all the answers - indeed, how could they have done? A radically different set of conclusions could be drawn from the archival evidence than those that Gaddis's deeply conservative perspective leads him to. This is a useful contribution to the debate on the Cold War, therefore, but nobody should be deluded into thinking this is a definitive work. "We Now Know More" would have been a more accurate - if less catchy - title. We cannot expect all the arguments concerning the Cold War to be resolved at a stroke. The debate has a long way to run yet.


A 'must-read' for students of the Cold War   March 22, 2000
3 out of 10 found this review helpful

Gaddis has done it again. This time using recently released archives and resources, Gaddis synthesizes together cogent arguments about the Cold War. It is not just another re-hash of his old work but new compelling arguments about Stalin's role in the Cold War for example comes about. Do you know that Soviet troops raped more than 2 million women in East Germany?


Incisive, compelling arguments.   May 14, 1999
5 out of 8 found this review helpful

No, this book doesn't come too soon after the end of the Cold War. As Gaddis says at appropriate points, "we now know," suggesting we know much more and can evaluate much better than we could even at the end of the Cold War, but the "now" is just a temproary point. Obviously, we will eventually know more, perhaps much more. But, for now, Gaddis sheds new light on numerous events, and he does so in a serious but almost self-deprecating manner. For someone just plunging into the Cold War, this would be an excellent place to start. For those who lived through most of the Cold War as I did, and have studied it now and again, this work provides a wonderful reality check.