Posted on 03/12/2004 1:58:39 AM PST by JohnHuang2
The 'Cold' hard truth
© 2004 Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
Books about the Cold War are a dime a dozen. It would be nice to read them all, or at least all of the good ones, because the Cold War was the defining event of the last half of the 20th century. Its outcome determined mankind's basic direction for centuries to come. Whether you are old enough to remember all of the Cold War, or just parts of it, or whether you have only heard about it, you need to understand the basic story.
Although we can't read everything about the Cold War, or even everything we ought to, a just-published book, Thomas C. Reed's "At the Abyss" (Presidio Press, 2004) fortunately covers the essentials superbly. It is unlikely that any other book on the subject will ever surpass its colorful, detailed description of that immense struggle.
The book's great strength is the fact that it is, in large part, a first-person narrative of events. There may be people who were more deeply involved in the Cold War, over its 40-year length, than Reed, but if so, they haven't written their memoirs. If they did, it is highly unlikely that they would write them half so well. Reed saw much of it first-hand while working in the Ford and Reagan administrations, and has told the story with clarity, urbanity, and even touches of humor.
Reed's book is a fascinating account of many previously unfamiliar Cold War episodes, laced with colorful descriptions of the chief personalities involved. Would you like to know what would really happen, minute by minute, if the president reached for that "football" that always accompanies him, and ordered nuclear weapons launched? Reed tells you. Or would you prefer his hilarious account of how we allowed Soviet spies to steal the blueprints for an oil pipeline (carefully doctored to self-destruct)? Our own observers were inadvertently baffled when a year or two later they noticed a huge explosion in a part of Siberia that had not previously excited their suspicion.
Reed's personal history is impressive. Graduating from Cornell in 1956, Reed, an Air Force lieutenant by virtue of his service in the ROTC, joined the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in June 1957. In February 1958, in Albuquerque, N.M. ("the central node of the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment"), "we discussed the technical details of integrating warheads into reentry vehicles, but I had glimpsed the nuclear genie. It would never let me go."
In November 1959, Reed left the Air Force BMD to work at the Livermore Radiation Laboratory in California under its fabled director, Edward Teller ("the father of the H-bomb"). In 1962, he witnessed the nuclear tests at Christmas Island in the Pacific. In the ensuing years of civilian life, he worked as a political aide to Gov. Ronald Reagan and served as Republican National Committeeman for California. But in the Nixon years, Reed returned to the Pentagon, becoming director of Telecommunications and Command and Control Systems for the Secretary of Defense in 1974. Not long thereafter, President Ford made him Secretary of the Air Force.
In 1982, during the Reagan administration, he served in the National Security Council under Bill Clark. Even the end of the Cold War in 1991 brought new insights, as Reed's counterparts in the defunct Soviet regime became his friends, and swapped hair-raising stories with him.
And Reed's account of his close relationship with Reagan, and of that formidable man's view of the Soviet Union ("It is an evil empire. It's time to close it down.") are alone worth the price of the book. There may be aspects of the Cold War Reed has missed (though he takes care to give careful accounts of most of the major events that he personally did not witness), but it is hard to imagine any book conveying more of the flavor of that long and deadly struggle. We are lucky there were people like Tom Reed on our side.
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