How could war occur in spite of restraints?

When did the Cold War start? The answer is classic irony in the somber shadow of today's headlines. For it started when the President of the United States decided to protect Iran from our wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The wartime allies had used Iran with the Soviets occupying northern Iran and the British and American forces occupying the south as a back-door Allied supply line to the Red Army. At their Teheran Conference in 1943 all the allies had agreed to clear out of Iran within six months of an armistice in Europe. The Western allies withdrew before that deadline, which was March 6, 1946. The Soviets did not. Indeed, in early March one Red Army column started south from Azerbaijan toward the Persian capital, Teheran, and another swung west toward Iraq and Turkey. Iran, Britain and the U.S. complained to Moscow; when that didn't work, the case was appealed to the UN Security Council. Since the Soviets had a veto there, that couldn't work either. So it's still March 1946 -- Harry Truman decided (after consulting only with his Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes) to send Stalin secretly what he describes in his memoirs as an ultimatum. He threatened to deploy U.S. naval and ground forces in the Persian Gulf if the Soviets didn't pull the Red Army out of Iran. Before the end of March Andrei Gromyko announced that Soviet troops would leave Iran, and before long they actually left. During that same spring, it became clear that the Soviets wouldn't abide by the Potsdam agreement that Germany should be treated as an economic unit. The Western allies â?? Britain, France, and the U.S. started to consolidate the non-Soviet zones, thus ratifying the de facto division of Germany. That summer, another crisis brewed. The Soviets proposed to put an end to the international supervision of the Dardanelles and establish Soviet bases in Turkey. Twenty-five divisions of the Red Army were maneuvering near the Turkish border to show they meant it. This time President Truman did consult his Cabinet officers and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and summed up their consensus with Trumanesque informality: We might as well find out now, rather than five or ten years from now, whether the Russians are determined to take over the world. Faced with resistance from Turkey and tough U.S. and British diplomacy backed by the aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt's "courtesy calls" in the Mediterranean, Stalin stayed his handâ in Turkey but tightened the screws on Greece. The climax came when the Greek government, controlling only a "shrunken area" around Athens, appealed for international help. Almost at the same moment, in February 1947, the British government delivered to Washington a formal note saying that it could no longer afford to help either Greece or Turkey beyond the end of March. Also in February, a rigged election put Communists in power in Poland and another piece of Allied postwar planning, the Yalta agreement, was snuffed out by Soviet noncompliance. In American politics, the stars were not aligned for a strong reaction to all this. Americans were delighted the war was over, welcomed the wholesale demobilization of troops, They were looking for some normalcy, maybe even some prosperity. They were certainly far from ready for another kind of war. In November 1946, U.S. voters had put Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress. Senator Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican" in those days, was focused, he said, on "straightening out our domestic affairs." Yet in March 1947, with the indispensable help of a senior Republican, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, President Truman laid it on the line in a historic address to a joint session of Congress. He called for massive help to both Greece and Turkey -- which was authorized and funded by overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House in less than two months. The great confrontation we came to call the Cold War had quite suddenly become the next stage of world history. What began in Iran in 1946 lasted for 45 years, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Four months after the Truman Doctrine speech, a Commencement address by Secretary of State George C. Marshall added another theme to the symphony of Western cooperation. Marshall was already famous as the general manager of America's largest and most successful war, and more recently renowned though unsuccessful -- as a mediator in China's civil conflict. He had just come back from weeks of fruitless haggling at a Moscow conference of foreign ministers. On the flight home, he had witnessed the hopelessness of a Europe soon to be described by Winston Churchill as "a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate." The Marshall speech was not in itself a cold war maneuver. "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos." In this humanitarian tone of voice, General-now-Secretary George Marshall launched the United States and its European allies on the most ambitious, riskiest, and arguably the most successful peacemaking adventure in American history. The Marshall Plan was a brilliant series of improvisations on a deceptively simple theme: Europe needed help, and only America could supply it. Precisely because it wasn't a cold war move, it turned out to be a key to the cold war's outcome. It was even open to the Eastern Europeans; but once the Soviet foreign minister Molotov attended a first planning session in Paris, the Kremlin pulled its satellites out of what looked, from Moscow, like a dangerous opportunity to cooperate. Measured by the cost of failure, let alone the standards of modern war, the Marshall Plan was not expensive. Its first-year cost, five billion 1948 dollars, did provide something like five percent of Western Europe's GNP. But the total amount of transatlantic aid, $13 billion in its four years, was a fraction of defense spending and a marginal blip on Europe's own recovery effort though hugely important because it lifted Europeâ??s spirits and helped fill Europe's dollar gap. The priceless ingredient was of course immeasurable: reassurance and hope from across the Atlantic Ocean, for Europeans who were losing hope fast as the Soviets mounted an impressive political effort on the quite rational assumption that Americans, weary of Europe's wars and anxious to get back to creating America, would stay out of Europe's next crisis. The Marshall Plan provided above all a source of dynamism-in-action to reverse a growing hopelessness in Europe. Without the Marshall Plan, Western Europe was endangered by poverty, desperation, and chaos; and Communist parties backed by the Soviet Union were poised to pick up the pieces. With the Marshall Plan, the Western Europeans were able to jump-start their economic recovery from World War II; to commence a bold if baffling effort to build a European Union; and to create an inclusive framework within which a new Germany could be both strong and safe. And then, the Europeans were able to face east with such comparative prosperity and panache that their Eastern European neighbors in time decided to join the Western future and the Soviet Union itself eventually dissolved. But meanwhile, the Marshall Plan provoked a wide range of Soviet efforts to sabotage it. Tom Wilson the historian watched this at close hand, and eloquently describes it: Every medium of propaganda which the Communists controlled was used to the hilt. Communist posters plastered the walls of the cities. Handbills were passed out to the workers leaving their factories. News sheets appeared on the walls of remote villages. Counter propaganda was torn down or painted red by Communist crews in the streets by night. The radio programs from Eastern Europe kept up a drumfire of anti-Marshall Plan messages. "Rocks were thrown through the screens of motion-picture theaters showing newsreels of Marshall Plan projects. Riots were staged at U.S. information exhibits. Bundles of U.S.-sponsored newspapers were thrown into rivers from trains crossing bridges by night. The Communists spent seven times as much for propaganda as the United States spent for the Marshall Plan information service. "Against these odds, the U.S. services worked overtime and well. The best film crews that could be assembled turned out news clips, film magazines, and documentaries at prodigious rates. . . ." Some of you have seen excellent examples of this good work in the "Selling Democracy" screenings shown by Sandra Schulberg at the National Archives this week. We Americans also derived from the Marshall Plan benefits that are as hard to quantify as they were obvious to see and to feel. We were associated with a dependable group of European allies in a troublesome postwar world. We helped build a large and congenial market in which to buy and sell. We helped create a political attractant that lured Eastern Europe away from totalitarian rule, and withered Soviet Communism on the vine. And we generated, besides, the good feeling among Americans that we could do something right something that we hadn't known how to do. A young historian David Reynolds, too young to have lived through it but very perceptive about its place in history summed up the Marshall Plan this way: "Between 1948 and 1951, the United States pumped about $13 billion into Western Europe. Between 1948 and Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union extracted some $14 billion from Eastern Europe. These statistics are crude but telling. They deserve a place in any history of postwar Europe." Helmut Schmidt of Germany said it all in one sentence: "The high probability of failure was averted thanks to leaders who did not act according to plan, but instead relied on their moral and national visions as well as their common sense." Even before the Marshall Plan got underway, the transatlantic allies had put together a military alliance designed to persuade the Soviet Union that military militancy would not pay. The architects of historyâ??s greatest peacetime alliance were acting out one sentence of a speech by a Soviet Foreign Minister to the U.N. General Assembly two decades later, in 1968. "History takes revenge for forgetfulness," Andrei Gromyko declared with unintended irony, "if somebody deliberately forgets the significance of European affairs or neglects them." The North Atlantic Alliance was signed in 1947. Six decades later, despite pressures, threats, ultimatums, provocations, and crises, there has been no war among, or armed attack on, the members of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Anyone with a smattering of modern European history can appreciate how extraordinary and unprecedented a piece of good news this is. Something must have been done right. The early stress on a massive program of economic recovery; the psychological and economic lift of the Common Market; the curiously credible threat of strategic nuclear retaliation for tactical transgressions; the symbolic integration of NATO armies; the willingness of wartime allies to make an ally of West Germany without awaiting a final peace settlement; the long and ultimately successful search for an Atlantic nuclear sharing arrangement; the West's espousal of a policy broad enough (and ambiguous enough) to accommodate both defense and détente the willingness to bring in additional members each of these policies played its part. But shining through the military half-measures and the tepid ministerial communications was a moral solidarity that somehow made more out of what was objectively not enough. The real deterrent to Soviet ambitions was this: by and large, with occasional and temporary exceptions which fortunately turned out not to be critical, the Atlantic allies stuck together. The glue that has held the allies together is a large, complex, and dynamic bargain â?? partly an understanding among the Europeans, but most importantly a deal between them and the United States of America. The specifics of the bargain, and the comparative burdens to be shared keep changing. But the constant is that there has to be a bargain. The Treaty form of the deal is "We'll help defends you if you'll help defend us." But despite Secretary of State Dean Rusk's legally correct allusion to the Bering Straits as the "Western flank" of NATO, most Americans think of NATO the way most Europeans do, as essentially an arrangement to ensure the defense of Western Europe. The price of mutual help is self-help: "We Americans will help you Europeans if you will (a) help defend yourselves, and (b) get on with building a united Europe." The transatlantic bargain, kept alive by continuous consultation, kept 7,000 U.S. nuclear weapons and some 300,000 U.S. troops in Europe for the long generation we call the Cold War. Whether that was enough for the defense we fortunately never had to discover. It did turn out, in the end, to be enough for détente. The Cold War was called cold because of the featured heavyweights, the Soviet Union and the United States, were nominally "at peace." But they engaged in circling each other, jabbing at each other, testing each other supposed weaknesses in every part of the world, in the Byzantine politics of the United Nations, and in a couple of dozen other international organizations. We don't have all day for a complete inventory, but it may be useful to provide some examples of the variety of "preliminary bouts." One early bout was in divided Berlin, where the Soviets had a natural advantage: Berlin was completely surrounded by East Germany. In 1948 they suspended all road and rail traffic between Berlin and West Germany. In response, the Truman administration decided to supply Berlin entirely by airlift. This extraordinary operation, run by Air Force General Curtis LeMay, came to be known as the LeMay Coal and Feed Company. It "flew in corridors only twenty miles wide, at staggered altitudes, in all weather, twenty-four hours a day, sometimes harassed by Soviet fighter planes, and landing at airports only four minutes from each other. . . .At its peak, an incredible 1,398 trips brought 13,000 tons of supplies into Berlin within a twenty-four hour period. . . . More than ten months after it began, and more than 250,000 flights later, the Berlin airlift came to an end. . . .The Western Allies were still in Berlin [and] the cold war was still cold." But the world seemed to be heating up fast. In 1949 the Soviet Union tested an atomic explosion. In 1950 the North Koreans rolled south across the 38th parallel in their Russian-made tanks. Under a UN mandate, the U.S., South Korea, and more than a dozen other countries resisted; three years later the dividing line in the Korean peninsula was about where it had been before. But casualties on both sides had been enormous. And the resulting arms race engaged all the NATO allies the U.S. itself moved to a state of semi-mobilization, jumping its military budget from $18 to $35 billion. Before long, the United States was formally allied with forty-two nations in military pacts around the world. Josef Stalin had pushed as hard as he could. Harry Truman, with plenty of help from others, had pushed back just as hard. After seven years of not-quite-war, the result was a stalemate. But the Soviet Union was still in control of whatever the Red Army had controlled at the end of World War II. In 1953 General Eisenhower, whose last military job had been Supreme Commander at NATO, became President of the United States and two months later Stalin died. The Soviets achieved an H-bomb, which meant that deterrence had become mutual. And Nikita Khrushchev began to emerge as a new kind of Soviet leader â?? just as pushy, occasionally more reckless, but also more inclined to play the peace-and-coexistence card, and much more confident that the Soviet economy could compete with Western capitalism and attract support around the world with economic and technical aid "without strings." Later he more dramatically cut ties with the earlier regime by denouncing the cult of personality and the absolutely insufferable character of Stalin. But he continued to dramatize his own personality at every turn. The notion of "rolling back" Communists from Eastern Europe, floated in 1953 by President Eisenhower' read less

When did the Cold War start? The answer is classic irony in the somber shadow of today's headlines. For it started when the President of the United States decided to protect Iran from our wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The wartime allies had used Iran with the Soviets occupying northern Iran and the British and American forces occupying the south as a back-door Allied supply line to the Red Army. At their Teheran Conference in 1943 all the allies had agreed to clear out of Iran within six months of an armistice in Europe. The Western allies withdrew before that deadline, which was March 6, 1946. The Soviets did not. Indeed, in early March one Red Army column started south from Azerbaijan toward the Persian capital, Teheran, and another swung west toward Iraq and Turkey. Iran, Britain and the U.S. complained to Moscow; when that didn't work, the case was appealed to the UN Security Council. Since the Soviets had a veto there, that couldn't work either. So it's still March 1946 -- Harry Truman decided (after consulting only with his Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes) to send Stalin secretly what he describes in his memoirs as an ultimatum. He threatened to deploy U.S. naval and ground forces in the Persian Gulf if the Soviets didn't pull the Red Army out of Iran. Before the end of March Andrei Gromyko announced that Soviet troops would leave Iran, and before long they actually left. During that same spring, it became clear that the Soviets wouldn't abide by the Potsdam agreement that Germany should be treated as an economic unit. The Western allies â?? Britain, France, and the U.S. started to consolidate the non-Soviet zones, thus ratifying the de facto division of Germany. That summer, another crisis brewed. The Soviets proposed to put an end to the international supervision of the Dardanelles and establish Soviet bases in Turkey. Twenty-five divisions of the Red Army were maneuvering near the Turkish border to show they meant it. This time President Truman did consult his Cabinet officers and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and summed up their consensus with Trumanesque informality: We might as well find out now, rather than five or ten years from now, whether the Russians are determined to take over the world. Faced with resistance from Turkey and tough U.S. and British diplomacy backed by the aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt's "courtesy calls" in the Mediterranean, Stalin stayed his handâ in Turkey but tightened the screws on Greece. The climax came when the Greek government, controlling only a "shrunken area" around Athens, appealed for international help. Almost at the same moment, in February 1947, the British government delivered to Washington a formal note saying that it could no longer afford to help either Greece or Turkey beyond the end of March. Also in February, a rigged election put Communists in power in Poland and another piece of Allied postwar planning, the Yalta agreement, was snuffed out by Soviet noncompliance. In American politics, the stars were not aligned for a strong reaction to all this. Americans were delighted the war was over, welcomed the wholesale demobilization of troops, They were looking for some normalcy, maybe even some prosperity. They were certainly far from ready for another kind of war. In November 1946, U.S. voters had put Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress. Senator Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican" in those days, was focused, he said, on "straightening out our domestic affairs." Yet in March 1947, with the indispensable help of a senior Republican, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, President Truman laid it on the line in a historic address to a joint session of Congress. He called for massive help to both Greece and Turkey -- which was authorized and funded by overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House in less than two months. The great confrontation we came to call the Cold War had quite suddenly become the next stage of world history. What began in Iran in 1946 lasted for 45 years, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Four months after the Truman Doctrine speech, a Commencement address by Secretary of State George C. Marshall added another theme to the symphony of Western cooperation. Marshall was already famous as the general manager of America's largest and most successful war, and more recently renowned though unsuccessful -- as a mediator in China's civil conflict. He had just come back from weeks of fruitless haggling at a Moscow conference of foreign ministers. On the flight home, he had witnessed the hopelessness of a Europe soon to be described by Winston Churchill as "a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate." The Marshall speech was not in itself a cold war maneuver. "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos." In this humanitarian tone of voice, General-now-Secretary George Marshall launched the United States and its European allies on the most ambitious, riskiest, and arguably the most successful peacemaking adventure in American history. The Marshall Plan was a brilliant series of improvisations on a deceptively simple theme: Europe needed help, and only America could supply it. Precisely because it wasn't a cold war move, it turned out to be a key to the cold war's outcome. It was even open to the Eastern Europeans; but once the Soviet foreign minister Molotov attended a first planning session in Paris, the Kremlin pulled its satellites out of what looked, from Moscow, like a dangerous opportunity to cooperate. Measured by the cost of failure, let alone the standards of modern war, the Marshall Plan was not expensive. Its first-year cost, five billion 1948 dollars, did provide something like five percent of Western Europe's GNP. But the total amount of transatlantic aid, $13 billion in its four years, was a fraction of defense spending and a marginal blip on Europe's own recovery effort though hugely important because it lifted Europeâ??s spirits and helped fill Europe's dollar gap. The priceless ingredient was of course immeasurable: reassurance and hope from across the Atlantic Ocean, for Europeans who were losing hope fast as the Soviets mounted an impressive political effort on the quite rational assumption that Americans, weary of Europe's wars and anxious to get back to creating America, would stay out of Europe's next crisis. The Marshall Plan provided above all a source of dynamism-in-action to reverse a growing hopelessness in Europe. Without the Marshall Plan, Western Europe was endangered by poverty, desperation, and chaos; and Communist parties backed by the Soviet Union were poised to pick up the pieces. With the Marshall Plan, the Western Europeans were able to jump-start their economic recovery from World War II; to commence a bold if baffling effort to build a European Union; and to create an inclusive framework within which a new Germany could be both strong and safe. And then, the Europeans were able to face east with such comparative prosperity and panache that their Eastern European neighbors in time decided to join the Western future and the Soviet Union itself eventually dissolved. But meanwhile, the Marshall Plan provoked a wide range of Soviet efforts to sabotage it. Tom Wilson the historian watched this at close hand, and eloquently describes it: Every medium of propaganda which the Communists controlled was used to the hilt. Communist posters plastered the walls of the cities. Handbills were passed out to the workers leaving their factories. News sheets appeared on the walls of remote villages. Counter propaganda was torn down or painted red by Communist crews in the streets by night. The radio programs from Eastern Europe kept up a drumfire of anti-Marshall Plan messages. "Rocks were thrown through the screens of motion-picture theaters showing newsreels of Marshall Plan projects. Riots were staged at U.S. information exhibits. Bundles of U.S.-sponsored newspapers were thrown into rivers from trains crossing bridges by night. The Communists spent seven times as much for propaganda as the United States spent for the Marshall Plan information service. "Against these odds, the U.S. services worked overtime and well. The best film crews that could be assembled turned out news clips, film magazines, and documentaries at prodigious rates. . . ." Some of you have seen excellent examples of this good work in the "Selling Democracy" screenings shown by Sandra Schulberg at the National Archives this week. We Americans also derived from the Marshall Plan benefits that are as hard to quantify as they were obvious to see and to feel. We were associated with a dependable group of European allies in a troublesome postwar world. We helped build a large and congenial market in which to buy and sell. We helped create a political attractant that lured Eastern Europe away from totalitarian rule, and withered Soviet Communism on the vine. And we generated, besides, the good feeling among Americans that we could do something right something that we hadn't known how to do. A young historian David Reynolds, too young to have lived through it but very perceptive about its place in history summed up the Marshall Plan this way: "Between 1948 and 1951, the United States pumped about $13 billion into Western Europe. Between 1948 and Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union extracted some $14 billion from Eastern Europe. These statistics are crude but telling. They deserve a place in any history of postwar Europe." Helmut Schmidt of Germany said it all in one sentence: "The high probability of failure was averted thanks to leaders who did not act according to plan, but instead relied on their moral and national visions as well as their common sense." Even before the Marshall Plan got underway, the transatlantic allies had put together a military alliance designed to persuade the Soviet Union that military militancy would not pay. The architects of historyâ??s greatest peacetime alliance were acting out one sentence of a speech by a Soviet Foreign Minister to the U.N. General Assembly two decades later, in 1968. "History takes revenge for forgetfulness," Andrei Gromyko declared with unintended irony, "if somebody deliberately forgets the significance of European affairs or neglects them." The North Atlantic Alliance was signed in 1947. Six decades later, despite pressures, threats, ultimatums, provocations, and crises, there has been no war among, or armed attack on, the members of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Anyone with a smattering of modern European history can appreciate how extraordinary and unprecedented a piece of good news this is. Something must have been done right. The early stress on a massive program of economic recovery; the psychological and economic lift of the Common Market; the curiously credible threat of strategic nuclear retaliation for tactical transgressions; the symbolic integration of NATO armies; the willingness of wartime allies to make an ally of West Germany without awaiting a final peace settlement; the long and ultimately successful search for an Atlantic nuclear sharing arrangement; the West's espousal of a policy broad enough (and ambiguous enough) to accommodate both defense and détente the willingness to bring in additional members each of these policies played its part. But shining through the military half-measures and the tepid ministerial communications was a moral solidarity that somehow made more out of what was objectively not enough. The real deterrent to Soviet ambitions was this: by and large, with occasional and temporary exceptions which fortunately turned out not to be critical, the Atlantic allies stuck together. The glue that has held the allies together is a large, complex, and dynamic bargain â?? partly an understanding among the Europeans, but most importantly a deal between them and the United States of America. The specifics of the bargain, and the comparative burdens to be shared keep changing. But the constant is that there has to be a bargain. The Treaty form of the deal is "We'll help defends you if you'll help defend us." But despite Secretary of State Dean Rusk's legally correct allusion to the Bering Straits as the "Western flank" of NATO, most Americans think of NATO the way most Europeans do, as essentially an arrangement to ensure the defense of Western Europe. The price of mutual help is self-help: "We Americans will help you Europeans if you will (a) help defend yourselves, and (b) get on with building a united Europe." The transatlantic bargain, kept alive by continuous consultation, kept 7,000 U.S. nuclear weapons and some 300,000 U.S. troops in Europe for the long generation we call the Cold War. Whether that was enough for the defense we fortunately never had to discover. It did turn out, in the end, to be enough for détente. The Cold War was called cold because of the featured heavyweights, the Soviet Union and the United States, were nominally "at peace." But they engaged in circling each other, jabbing at each other, testing each other supposed weaknesses in every part of the world, in the Byzantine politics of the United Nations, and in a couple of dozen other international organizations. We don't have all day for a complete inventory, but it may be useful to provide some examples of the variety of "preliminary bouts." One early bout was in divided Berlin, where the Soviets had a natural advantage: Berlin was completely surrounded by East Germany. In 1948 they suspended all road and rail traffic between Berlin and West Germany. In response, the Truman administration decided to supply Berlin entirely by airlift. This extraordinary operation, run by Air Force General Curtis LeMay, came to be known as the LeMay Coal and Feed Company. It "flew in corridors only twenty miles wide, at staggered altitudes, in all weather, twenty-four hours a day, sometimes harassed by Soviet fighter planes, and landing at airports only four minutes from each other. . . .At its peak, an incredible 1,398 trips brought 13,000 tons of supplies into Berlin within a twenty-four hour period. . . . More than ten months after it began, and more than 250,000 flights later, the Berlin airlift came to an end. . . .The Western Allies were still in Berlin [and] the cold war was still cold." But the world seemed to be heating up fast. In 1949 the Soviet Union tested an atomic explosion. In 1950 the North Koreans rolled south across the 38th parallel in their Russian-made tanks. Under a UN mandate, the U.S., South Korea, and more than a dozen other countries resisted; three years later the dividing line in the Korean peninsula was about where it had been before. But casualties on both sides had been enormous. And the resulting arms race engaged all the NATO allies the U.S. itself moved to a state of semi-mobilization, jumping its military budget from $18 to $35 billion. Before long, the United States was formally allied with forty-two nations in military pacts around the world. Josef Stalin had pushed as hard as he could. Harry Truman, with plenty of help from others, had pushed back just as hard. After seven years of not-quite-war, the result was a stalemate. But the Soviet Union was still in control of whatever the Red Army had controlled at the end of World War II. In 1953 General Eisenhower, whose last military job had been Supreme Commander at NATO, became President of the United States and two months later Stalin died. The Soviets achieved an H-bomb, which meant that deterrence had become mutual. And Nikita Khrushchev began to emerge as a new kind of Soviet leader â?? just as pushy, occasionally more reckless, but also more inclined to play the peace-and-coexistence card, and much more confident that the Soviet economy could compete with Western capitalism and attract support around the world with economic and technical aid "without strings." Later he more dramatically cut ties with the earlier regime by denouncing the cult of personality and the absolutely insufferable character of Stalin. But he continued to dramatize his own personality at every turn. The notion of "rolling back" Communists from Eastern Europe, floated in 1953 by President Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was itself roll read less