BIBLIOGRAPHY, NOTES, AND CONTEXT

In a recent New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Caro wrote about the paper trail he’s been following for his multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson. The piece opens with Caro speaking about an early and vital lesson in journalism. The year is 1959 and Newsday’s crusty managing editor at the time, Alan Hathway, has summoned Caro to his office. Following an “attaboy” for dogged work, Hathway supplies Caro with what will be the essential commandment of his life as an investigative journalist and historian. “Just remember,” the editor tells him. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.”

Caro goes on to paint the scene of his first research visit to the Johnson Library and Museum in Austin. It’s now 1976 and he’s confronted by an almost unimaginable blizzard of documents.

“In front of me,” he writes, “was a broad, tall marble staircase. At its top was a glass wall four stories high. Behind the glass, on each of the four stories, were rows of tall, red boxes—a hundred and seventy-five rows across, each row six boxes high.… There were about forty thousand boxes, the archivist told me; each had a capacity of eight hundred pages.… There were thirty-two million pages in all. I had a bad feeling: during all the years since Alan Hathway had given me that first piece of advice—‘Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page’—I had never forgotten it; it was engraved in my mind. There would be no turning every page here.”

When I began working in journalism, some twenty years later, turning the page still meant literally turning the page. At the New York Times, we visited “the morgue”—not to see dead bodies, but to obtain small packets with articles individually cut out of past editions and other major publications. When I became a TV producer, investigation was still hands-on. The search for audiotape, videotape, and film often required hunting in dusty basements, garages, and attics. When I was tasked by NBC with creating a research binder for the opening ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, my first step was buying a global almanac from the U.S. government diced up into handy index cards, which I received via snail mail.

Old habits run deep and I went old-school as I began research on this topic. I roamed the Strand Book Store in Manhattan (“legendary home of 18 miles of new, used and rare books”) and left with four bags containing fifty or so purchases. I was also ready to make the hike to the Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri (for insight on the first U.S. president of the Cold War), and take a train to the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (“founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy… leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act”).

As soon became clear, however, both the Truman Library and the National Security Archive are institutions that can now be visited remotely, at all hours, at their web address in cyberspace. Moreover, almost every brick-and-mortar establishment relevant to my education on this topic maintains a 24/7 virtual reality in our brave new digital century, where every day we are multiplying Everything We’ve Ever Learned by Everything We’ve Ever Learned, creating (as per computer scientists) more new data every twenty-four hours than all of the information amassed by the ten thousand years of civilization that came before us. In short, I didn’t have to go anywhere to find almost everything.

With a click, you can access the contents of Harry Truman’s diary and declassified CIA memos. You don’t need a projector to watch the totemic 1951 U.S. Federal Civil Defense film Duck and Cover, starring Bert the Turtle. It’s instantly available on YouTube. You don’t need an employee ID to gain access to the New York Times morgue; the paper’s online archive contains articles going back to 1851. As of this writing, there are 5,802,421 submissions in English on Wikipedia. The ever-multiplying feast of cyber research includes the nonprofit JSTOR, which “provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.” The Hathi Trust Digital Library—an international community of universities “committed to long-term curation”—provides access to nearly 17 million volumes, or 5,922,762,300 pages. Cold War historians are tweeting, blogging, and podcasting. While sitting on my ass in the comfort of my home office—wearing sweats, picking my nose, noshing on pretzels—I can stream every notable Cold War film, hear Curtis LeMay tell John Kennedy he’s a coward, and listen to Richard Nixon obstructing justice.

Given this instantaneous and enlarged frame of reference, I believe I’ve been able to more deeply grasp the mentalities and foibles that fostered and maintained the Cold War. However, I also feel obligated to profess a giant measure of humility. As more and more previously inaccessible documents and media are uploaded to computing clouds across the world, my version of events—at least a portion—will in some future be revealed as incomplete and perhaps wholly naïve. I’m put in mind of Donald Rumsfeld’s response when, as secretary of defense in 2002, he was asked about the lack of evidence linking Iraq with supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Said Rumsfeld:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

These “analog” texts below also provided important big-picture perspective and assistance:

Chang, Jung, and Jon Halliday. Mao: The Unknown Story. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia. 3rd ed. Columbia University Press, 1994.

Evans, Harold. The American Century. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Finder, Henry, ed. The 50s: The Story of a Decade; The New Yorker. Modern Library, 2016.

. The 60s: The Story of a Decade; The New Yorker. Random House, 2016.

Finder, Henry, ed., with Giles Harvey. The 40s: The Story of a Decade; The New Yorker. Modern Library, 2014.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. Penguin, 2005.

Garraty, John, ed. The Columbia History of the World. Harper & Row, 1972.

Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, 2001.

Halberstam, David. The Fifties. Villard, 1993.

Johnson, Paul. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties. Harper & Row, 1983.

McMahon, Robert J. The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Moore, Kathryn. The American President: A Complete History. Barnes & Noble, 2007.

Webber, Elizabeth, and Mike Feinsilber. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Allusions. Merriam-Webster, 1999.

Woodward, Bob. Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate. Touchstone, 1999.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial, 1995.

These were some of my principal sources for a broad view of Soviet history:

Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Random House, 2016.

Amalrik, Andrei. Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Harper & Row, 1970.

Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956. Anchor, 2013.

. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. Doubleday, 2017.

Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Vintage, 1994.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Harper Perennial, 2002.

The Cold War coincides with the birth of the nuclear era. These books acted as tutorials on the development of the atom and hydrogen bombs and their effects:

Fussell, Paul. Thank God for the Atom Bomb, and Other Essays. Ballantine, 1988.

Hersey, John. Hiroshima. Vintage, 1989.

Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb. Yale University Press, 1996.

Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Kelly, Cynthia C., ed. The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians. Black Dog & Leventhal/Atomic Heritage Foundation, 2007.

Lanouette, William. Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Lifton, Robert Jay, and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995.

Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1995.

. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Soviet Russia had a suffocating security bureaucracy from its birth, in 1917. The organization was first known as the Cheka; it became the KGB in 1954. The KGB officially ceased operations in 1991. The United States had a foreign intelligence organization during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was disbanded after the war. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established in 1947, and the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began in 1908 as an unnamed investigative arm of the Justice Department. Britain’s intelligence bureaucracy was established in 1909. MI5 is the British equivalent of the FBI; MI6 is the equivalent of the CIA. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the British also maintained separate military-run intelligence organizations. Russian military intelligence is still known by its Soviet-era name: the GRU. These books were immensely helpful in sorting out the alphabet soup of Cold War spydom:

Andrew, Christopher. The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books, 1999.

Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB: The Inside Story. HarperCollins, 1990.

Bamford, James. Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Anchor, 2001.

Garthoff, Raymond L. A Journey Through the Cold War: A Memoir of Containment and Coexistence. Brookings Institution Press, 2001.

Haslam, Jonathan. Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015.

Hoffman, David E. The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal. Anchor, 2015.

Hunter, Edward. Brain-Washing in Red China. Vanguard, 1953.

Kalugin, Oleg. Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West. Basic Books, 2009.

Kessler, Ronald. Inside the CIA: Revealing the Secrets of the World’s Most Powerful Spy Agency. Pocket Books, 1992.

Kinzer, Stephen. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013.

. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. Times Books/Henry Holt, 2006.

Kris, David S., and J. Douglas Wilson. National Security Investigations and Prosecutions. 2nd ed. Thomson/West, 2012.

le Carré, John. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Viking, 2016.

. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Penguin, 2013. (First published 1963.)

Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Marton, Kati. True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy. Simon & Schuster, 2016.

Miller, Scott. Agent 100: An American Spymaster and the German Resistance in WWII. Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. Secrecy: The American Experience. Yale University Press, 1998.

Powers, Thomas. The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA. Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.

Roberts, Sam. The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case. Random House, 2003.

Talbot, David. The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. Harper Perennial, 2015.

Trento, Joseph J. The Secret History of the CIA. MJF Books, 2001.

Wall, W. H. From Healing to Hell. Author House, 2018.

Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Doubleday, 2007.

Woodward, Bob. Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987. Simon & Schuster, 1987.

The hazards of an out-of-control U.S. “military-industrial complex” were first famously noted by President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961. These books deconstruct and assess the contours of the exploding U.S. defense establishment:

Brzezinski, Matthew. Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Race. Macmillan, 2007.

Graff, Garrett. Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die. Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Jacobsen, Annie. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base. Little, Brown, 2011.

. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America. Little, Brown, 2014.

. The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency. Little, Brown, 2015.

Kenney, L. Douglas. 15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011.

Knebel, Fletcher, and Charles Bailey II. Seven Days in May. Bantam, 1962.

Marks, John D. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control; The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. W. W. Norton, 1991.

Mills, Charles Wright. The Causes of World War Three. Literary Licensing, 2011.

Schlosser, Eric. Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. Penguin, 2013.

Simpson, Christopher. Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on the Cold War. Collier, 1989.

The principal Soviet political figures during the Cold War were Joseph Stalin (1926–53); Nikita Khrushchev (1953–64); Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82); and Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–91). I consulted these biographies and assessments:

Amis, Martin. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Vintage International, 2002.

Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. Penguin, 1991.

Fursenko, Alexander, and Timothy Naftali. Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary. W. W. Norton, 2006.

Medvedev, Roy, and Zhores Medvedev. The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death, and Legacy. Overlook Press, 2004.

Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Vintage, 2005.

Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography. Pan Macmillan, 2004.

Taubman, William. Gorbachev: His Life and Times. W. W. Norton, 2017.

. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. W. W. Norton, 2003.

The Cold War–era U.S. presidents were Harry Truman (1945–53); Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61); John F. Kennedy (1961–63); Lyndon Johnson (1963–69); Richard Nixon (1969–74); Gerald Ford (1974–77); Jimmy Carter (1977–81); Ronald Reagan (1981–89); and George H. W. Bush (1989–93). I consulted these biographies and assessments:

Ambrose, Stephen. Nixon: The Education of a Politician. Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward. All the President’s Men. Warner Paperback, 1975.

Brands, H. W. Reagan: The Life. Anchor, 2016.

Caro, Robert. Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Ferrell, Robert E. Harry S. Truman, A Life. University of Missouri Press, 1994.

Mann, James. The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War. Viking, 2009.

McCullough, David. Truman. Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Minutaglio, Bill, and Steven L. Davis. Dallas 1963. Twelve, 2013.

Morris, Edmund. Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Random House, 1999.

Newton, Jim. Eisenhower: The White House Years. Doubleday, 2001.

Summers, Anthony. The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. Viking, 2000.

Thomas, Evan. Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World. Little, Brown, 2012.

Unger, Irwin, and Debi Unger. LBJ: A Life. John Wiley & Sons, 1999.

Weiner, Tim. One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon. Henry Holt, 2015.

I consulted these biographies and histories involving other principal U.S. figures during the Cold War: J. Edgar Hoover (head of the FBI from 1924 to 1971); Senator Joe McCarthy; Roy Cohn (McCarthy’s Senate staff attorney); British spy and traitor Kim Philby; iconic author George Orwell; and iconic tycoon Howard Hughes:

Bartlett, Donald L., and James B. Steele. Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness. W. W. Norton, 1979.

Buckley, William F., and L. Brent Bozell. McCarthy and His Enemies. Regnery, 1995.

Cook, Fred J. The Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy. Random House, 1971.

Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. W. W. Norton, 1991.

Hoover, J. Edgar. Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. Henry Holt, 1958.

Jewell, Richard B. The RKO Story. Arlington House, 1985.

Kessler, Ronald. The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI. St. Martin’s, 2002.

Macintyre, Ben. A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. Broadway Books, 2014.

Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New American Library, 1974.

. Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. 4 vols. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.

. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Penguin, 2008.

Ricks, Thomas E. Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom. Penguin Press, 2017.

von Hoffman, Nicholas. Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn. Doubleday, 1988.

Weiner, Tim. Enemies: A History of the FBI. Random House, 2013.

These books discuss and dissect the architects of Cold War U.S. policy:

Acacia, John. Clark Clifford: The Wise Man of Washington. University Press of Kentucky, 2009.

Hitchens, Christopher. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Twelve, 2002.

Issacson, Walter, and Evan Thomas. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Kennan, George. At a Century’s Ending: Reflections, 1982–1995. W. W. Norton, 1996.

Robertson, David. Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes. W. W. Norton, 1994.

Smith, Hedrick. The Power Game: How Washington Works. Ballantine Books, 1988.

Thomas, Evan. The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared; The Early Years of the CIA. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Thompson, Nicholas. The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. Picador/Henry Holt, 2009.

Notable Cold War journalism took place in print, on the radio, and on TV:

Alsop, Joseph W., with Adam Platt. “I’ve Seen The Best of It”: Memoirs. W. W. Norton, 1992.

Cloud, Stanley, and Lynne Olson. The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism. Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Frankel, Max. The Times of My Life, and My Life with The Times. Random House, 1999.

Gabler, Neal. Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Keever, Beverly Deepe. Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting. University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

Moyers, Bill. Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times. New Press, 2004.

These books address the kaleidoscope of the Cold War zeitgeist and culture:

Álvarez de Toledo, Lucía. The Story of Che Guevara. Quercus Publishing, 2016.

Andersen, Kurt. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire. Random House, 2017.

Arnold, Jeremy. 52 Must-See Movies, and Why They Matter. Running Press, 2016.

Bartholomew, Robert E., and George S. Howard. UFOs and Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery. Prometheus Books, 1998.

Berlitz, Charles. The Bermuda Triangle. Doubleday, 1974.

Blanchard, Paul. Communism, Democracy and Catholic Power. Nabu Press, 2011.

Bryan, C. D. B. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind. Penguin, 1995.

Burdick, Eugene, and William Lederer. The Ugly American. W. W. Norton, 1999. (Originally published in 1958.)

Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010.

Chase, Alton. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. W. W. Norton, 2003.

Cohen, Michael A. American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Condon, Richard. The Manchurian Candidate. Pocket Star, 2004. (Originally published in 1959.)

DeLillo, Don. Underworld. Scribner, 1997.

Feldman, Jay. Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America. Anchor, 2011.

Ferster, C. B., and B. F. Skinner. Schedules of Reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957.

Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge. New Left Books, 1975.

Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. Penguin, 2002. (Originally published in 1955.)

Hansen, James R. Spaceflight Revolution: NASA Langley Research Center from Sputnik to Apollo. Forgotten Books, 2018.

Hitchens, Christopher. Arguably: Essays. Twelve, 2011.

Hughes, Robert. Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Hynek, J. Allen. The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Ballantine, 1972.

Johnson, Paul. Intellectuals. Harper & Row, 1988.

Lindsey, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth. Zondervan, 1970.

Loken, John. Oswald’s Trigger Films: The Manchurian Candidate, We Were Strangers, Suddenly? Falcon Books, 2000.

Miller, Arthur. Collected Essays. Penguin, 2016.

Munn, Michael. John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth. Berkley, 2005.

Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Scribner, 2009.

Reich, Charles A. The Greening of America. Crown, 1995.

Ronson, Jon. The Men Who Stare at Goats. Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Sagan, Carl, and Ann Druyan. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Ballantine, 1997.

Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New Press, 1999.

Seuss, Dr. The Butter Battle Book. Random House, 1984.

Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Tompkins, Peter, and Christopher Bird. The Secret Life of Plants: A Fascinating Account of the Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and Man. Harper Perennial, 1973.

von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

Wertham, Frederick, MD. Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth. Clarke, Irwin, 1953.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. Picador, 1979.

Other sources—interviews, memos, letters, government reports, unclassified documents, diary entries, newspapers, magazines, academic studies, websites, blogs, videos, radio and TV broadcasts, films, and more—are noted below, by chapter:

Introduction

Yuri Bezmenov: Interview with Edward Griffin, 1984.

Russian hacking: William Burns, “How We Fool Ourselves on Russia,” New York Times, January 8, 2017; Michael Smith, “The Trump Campaign and the Russians’ ‘Active Measures,’” Washington Examiner, September 4, 2014; Mark Kramer, “The Deep Roots of the Russian Election-Hacking Campaign,” Cognoscenti (WBUR), January 10, 2017; Julia Ioffe, “What Putin Really Wants,” Atlantic, January/February 2018; Anton Troianovski, “A Former Russian Troll Speaks,” Washington Post, February 17, 2018.

Nuclear launch codes: If a president decides to launch nuclear weapons, he turns to a military aide who is always within easy reach. The aide carries the so-called nuclear football, the nickname derived from the code word for the first set of nuclear war plans, DROPKICK. From Garrett M. Graff, “The Madman and the Bomb,” Politico, August 13, 2017: “There is no one who has to confirm a launch order, no one has to certify that the man giving the order is of sound mind, no congressional leader or Cabinet secretary who has to countersign the order.”

Joseph Stalin: Anne Applebaum, “How Stalin Hid Ukraine’s Famine from the World,” Atlantic, October 13, 2017.

Effects of World War II on the USSR: From Sheila Fitzpatrick, “War and Society in Soviet Context: Soviet Labor Before, During, and After World War II,” International Labor and Working Class History, no. 35 (Spring 1989): “The total number of working adults in 1946 was only 71 percent of what it had been in 1940 and the number of male working adults was less than half of what it had been at the beginning of the war.”

Communists in the United States: Wendy Wall, “Anti-Communism in the 1950s,” Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History.

Reader’s Digest: Joanne Sharp, “Rise and Fall of Reader’s Digest,” CNN, February 20, 2013.

Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program: Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” New York Times, December 16, 2017.

Roger Morris: Roger Morris, “Tomgram: Roger Morris, the CIA and the Gates Legacy,” TomDispatch, June 25, 2007.

Primal scream therapy: Publicly introduced in 1970 by California psychotherapist Arthur Janov.

1. Scorch, Boil, and Bake

Curtis LeMay: “World Battlefronts: Battle of Japan: V.L.R. Man,” Time, August 13, 1945; Richard Rhodes, “The General and World War III,” New Yorker, June 19, 1995; Joshua Rothman, “Waiting for World War III,” New Yorker, October 16, 2012.

B-29: Daniel Wyatt, “World War II: 40th Bomb Group,” Aviation History, September 1994.

Strategic bombing: Richard Overy, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940–1945 (Viking, 2014).

Robert Pape: Alastair Gee, “Aerial Bombing: Turns Out It Almost Never Works,” Ideas.Ted.com, November 17, 2014.

Sexiest branch: From Louis Menand, “Fat Man,” New Yorker, June 27, 2005: “In 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan, the Air Force was still a branch of the Army. The bombs changed that. An independent department of the Air Force was created in 1947; the nation’s nuclear arsenal was put under its command; and the Air Force replaced the Army as the prima donna of national defense.”

Bombing Japan: Richard Tanter, “Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War: Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima,” Asia-Pacific Journal, August 3, 2005.

Air Force on film: Sam Edwards, “12 O’Clock High and the Image of American Air Power, 1946–1967,” in American Militarism on the Small Screen, ed. Anna Froula and Stacy Takacs (Routledge, 2016).

Strategic Air Command: Col. Phillip S. Meilinger, “How LeMay Transformed Strategic Air Command,” Air and Space Power Journal, March–April 2014.

Above and Beyond: Screenplay by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama; released by MGM (1952).

Bombing during the Korean War: Blaine Harden, “Rocket Man Should Know His History,” New York Times, September 24, 2017.

Warrior truism: Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George; released by Columbia (1963). Principal photography started at Shepperton Studios, England, in January 1963. From Louis Menand, “Fat Man,” New Yorker, June 27, 2005: “Stanley Kubrick began reading intensively on nuclear strategy after he finished directing Lolita, in 1962. His original plan was to make a realistic thriller. One of his working titles was taken from an article by [Albert] Wohlstetter [the head of Air Force think tank RAND] in Foreign Affairs, in 1959: The Delicate Balance of Terror.… But Kubrick could not invent a plausible story in which a nuclear war is started by accident, so he ended up making a comedy adapted from a novel by a former R.A.F. officer called Red Alert.” Additional source material: Grant Stillman, “Two of the MADdest Scientists: Where Strangelove Meets Dr. No; or, Unexpected Roots for Kubrick’s Cold War Classic,” Film History 20, no. 4, Politics and Film (2008).

2. Operation Paperclip

Wernher von Braun: Brian Crim, “Wernher von Braun’s ‘Rocket Team’ and America’s Military-Industrial Complex,” A Library of Social Science Essay; Daniel Lang, “A Romantic Urge,” New Yorker, April 21, 1951.

Operation Paperclip: Annie Jacobsen, “What Cold War CIA Interrogators Learned from the Nazis,” Daily Beast, February 11, 2014.

Hill Project: Derek R. Mallett, “Western Allied Intelligence and the German Military Document Section, 1945–6,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 2 (April 2011).

3. Face-to-Face

Elbe: Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, ed. Walter Kempowski (W. W. Norton, 2015); Mary Williams Walsh, “Battling to Save a Bridge to Peace: The Elbe River Span Where U.S. and Soviet Soldiers Joyously Met in World War II Is Slated for Demolition,” Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1994.

Russia’s image in America: After the August 1945 Gallup poll indicated that 54 percent of Americans had a positive view of the Soviet Union, that figure dropped to just 25 percent in a January 1946 poll. In March 1946, following Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech and the first revelations of Soviet spying in America, 71 percent of the U.S. public named the Soviet Union as “a nation seeking world domination.”

Jimmy Byrnes: “The Nations: The Year of the Bullbat,” Time, January 6, 1947; Kenneth Davis, “Mr. Assistance,” New York Times, December 18, 1994; Jason Spencer, “A House in Converse Heights Played a Role in the Use of the Atomic Bomb,” GoUpstate.com, August 9, 2005.

Leo Szilard: “Memorandum of Szilard Correspondence,” NuclearFiles.org; “Leo Szilard Interview: President Truman Did Not Understand,” U.S. News & World Report, August 15, 1960; Leo Szilard, Reminiscences, ed. Gertrud Weiss Szilard and Kathleen R. Winsor (1968); Nicholas and Robert Halasz, “Leo Szilard: The Reluctant Father of the Atomic Bomb,” New Hungarian Quarterly, November 30, 1974; interview with William Lanouette by Cindy Kelly, Atomic Heritage Foundation, April 11, 2014; Alex Wellerstein, “Remembering the Chicago Pile: The World’s First Nuclear Reactor,” New Yorker, December 2, 2017.

Albert Einstein: Dennis Overbye, “New Details Emerge from the Einstein Files; How the F.B.I. Tracked His Phone Calls and His Trash,” New York Times, May 7, 2002.

Soviet atomic spies: Marian Smith Holmes, “Spies Who Spilled Atomic Bomb Secrets,” Smithsonian.com, April 19, 2009.

Decision to drop the atomic bomb: Gar Alperovitz, “Did America Have to Drop the Bomb? Not to End the War, but Truman Wanted to Intimidate Russia,” Washington Post, August 4, 1985; Evan Thomas, “Why We Did It,” Newsweek, August 23, 1995; Margaret Mary Barrett, “Atomic Bomb: Why Did President Harry S. Truman Order the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?,” History in Dispute, 2000; Margo Dowling, “Viewpoint: President Truman Used the Atomic Bombs in Order to Bring a Quick End to the War,” History in Dispute, 2000; William Barr, ed., “The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II: A Collection of Primary Sources,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 162, August 5, 2005); Douglas J. MacEachin, The Final Months of the War with Japan: Signals Intelligence: U.S. Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb Decision, Central Intelligence Agency, March 19, 2007; Josette H. Williams, The Information War in the Pacific, 1945, Central Intelligence Agency, April 14, 2007.

U.S. reaction to the atomic bomb: “Atomic Yellow Pages,” Conelrad.com.

Soviet entry into the Pacific theater: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “The Soviet Factor in Ending the Pacific War,” University of California–Santa Barbara, National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, October 28, 2003.

Norman Cousins: Norman Cousins, “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” Saturday Review, August 10, 1945.

Edward R. Murrow comments: August 12, 1945, radio broadcast.

Who started the Cold War: From a 2016 New York Times letter to the editor by Eric Alterman: “No one would argue that the Soviets ‘held’ to the spirit of the Yalta Accords with their brutal behavior in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. But even allowing for some misunderstanding and ambiguity on the American side regarding Poland, it was the United States that undertook the first indisputable repudiation of the agreement’s letter. Roosevelt and Stalin had agreed there that only countries that had declared war on Nazi Germany by March 1 would be admitted to the General Assembly. But once the UN talks got underway in San Francisco, the United States went back on its word and voted to seat Argentina, which had failed to meet that rather generous deadline—a decision promoted by Nelson Rockefeller, the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.”

4. Cold War Bibles

George Orwell profiles and assessments: Murray N. Rothbard, “George Orwell and the Cold War: A Reconsideration,” in Reflections on America, 1984: An Orwell Symposium, ed. Robert Mulvihill (University of Georgia Press, 1986); Jacob Weisberg, “Orwell, Listing: The Author of 1984 Was Right to Name Names,” Slate, August 16, 1998; Louis Menand, “Honest, Decent, Wrong,” New Yorker, January 27, 2003; Thomas E. Ricks, “What Orwell Saw—and What He Missed—About Today’s World,” Politico, May 23, 2017.

Communist Manifesto: From Peter Gordon, “Call Him Karl,” New York Times Book Review, October 23, 2016: “Just a year before his death and gravely ill, Marx wrote with [Friedrich] Engels a short preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto. It entertained the prospect that the common ownership system in the Russian village might serve as ‘the starting point for a communist development.’ Three and a half decades later, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, and by the late 1920s, the government commenced its brutal collectivization of agriculture. Like all intellectual legacies, Marx’s work remains open to new interpretation. But it seems clear that the man himself would never have accepted the inhumanity undertaken in his name.”

Joseph Stalin: From Robert S. Robins and Jerrod M. Post, “The Paranoid Political Actor,” Biography 10, no. 1 (Winter 1987): “As we have noted, sooner or later the paranoid will indeed be surrounded by enemies.… Consider Joseph Stalin, who while highly suspicious for most of his life was probably not clinically ill. His exaggerated alertness to conspiracy—appropriate in the plot-laden Kremlin—was highly adaptive and time and time again permitted him to eliminate potential rivals before they eliminated him. At the same time, however, it created an atmosphere of fear and produced a widening circle of rivals and enemies. As Stalin’s fear magnified, so too did the extent of his actions to eliminate threats to his power; witness the extent of the purges, variously estimated to be upwards of twelve million victims.”

H. P. Smollett/Smolka: Peter Foges, “My Spy: The Story of H. P. Smolka, Soviet Spy, and Inspiration for The Third Man,” Lapham’s Quarterly, January 14, 2016.

Superstates: In a 1947 essay for The Partisan Review, “Toward European Unity,” Orwell wrote, “The fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them.… It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast super states, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion. In all probability, their structure would be hierarchic, with a semi-divine caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom, and the crushing out of liberty exceeding anything the world has yet seen. Within each state the necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outside world, and by a continuous phony war against rival states. Civilization of this type might remain static for thousands of years.”

5. Concepts of Containment

Bolshoi speech: Transcript of “Speech Delivered by Joseph Stalin at a Meeting of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow,” February 9, 1946, Wilson Center, Digital Archive. The multiple titles given to Stalin were tracked in one of the definitive texts about the final days of the USSR, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lenin’s Tomb, by David Remnick. His book is based in part on his superb reporting as the Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post.

Kennan profile: Louis Menand, “Getting Real: George F. Kennan’s Cold War,” New Yorker, November 14, 2011.

Kennan’s containment: Transcript of telegram, “The Change in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State,” received in Washington, D.C., February 22, 1946, at 3:52 p.m. (known informally as the “long telegram”); X, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947; Walter Lippmann, “The Cold War,” Courtesy of the Office of Recording Secretary—President & Fellows of Harvard College; Nicholas Thompson, “A War Best Served Cold,” New York Times, July 31, 2007.

Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech: Transcript of “Sinews of Peace” at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946.

Princess Ileana: Transcript from Senate Judiciary Committee, The Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States, hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, May 1956.

6. Small and Devastating

Bernard Baruch’s UN speech: Transcript of text of speech presented to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, June 4, 1946, NuclearFiles.org.

“Billy’s Blacklist”: Wilkerson’s “A Vote for Stalin” appeared in the July 28, 1946, issue of the Hollywood Reporter. From Kat Eschner, “The Columnist Who Shaped Hollywood’s Most Destructive Witch Hunt,” Smithsonian.com, July 28, 2017: “Despite personal misgivings and career ones, Wilkerson went forward with identifying people as communists in his column.… By 1950, a pamphlet naming more than 150 movie workers helped to formalize the blacklist—but there was never just one list, which was part of what made this period in Hollywood history so frightening and dangerous for performers and workers. People of color, Jewish actors and those who were not born in the United States were under particular threat.”

7. Communism and Republicanism

“The American Century”: Essay by Henry Luce in the February 17, 1941, issue of Life. His call to wean America from—in his view—a pinkish New Deal philosophy also included this language: “We start into this war with huge Government debt, a vast bureaucracy and a whole generation of young people trained to look to the Government as the source of all life. The Party in power is the one which for long years has been most sympathetic to all manner of socialist doctrines and collectivist trends.… The President of the United States has continually reached for more and more power, and he owes his continuation in office today largely to the coming of the war. Thus, the fear that the United States will be driven to a national socialism, as a result of cataclysmic circumstances and contrary to the free will of the American people, is an entirely justifiable fear.”

8. Dachau Model

The Nuremberg trials: R. F. Tannenbaum, “The Devil’s Chemists,” Commentary, January 1, 1953.

U.S. interest in Nazi science: Alfred McCoy, “Science in Dachau’s Shadow,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 43 (Fall 2007).

9. United States of Surveillance

Dean Acheson’s “rotten apples” comment: Made to senators visiting the Oval Office on February 27, 1947.

10. Unidentified Objects

Science fiction: The genre, as defined by author Brian Aldiss: “The world is in some sort of state, and something awful happens. It may not be evil, it may be good or neutral, just an accident. Whatever they do in the novel, at the end the world is changed forever.”

NICAP: Dan Barry, “Dad Believed in U.F.O.s. Turns Out He Wasn’t Alone,” New York Times, December 30, 2017.

Day the Earth Stood Still: J. Hoberman, “The Cold War Sci-Fi Parable That Fell to Earth,” New York Times, October 31, 2008.

11. Hollywood on Trial

Ayn Rand: Josh Jones, “Ayn Rand Helped the FBI Identify It’s a Wonderful Life as Communist Propaganda,” Open Culture, December 25, 2014. In her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand wrote: “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”

HUAC: Rand, Walt Disney, and Ronald Reagan testified during hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, October 20–30, 1947.

Disney labor issues: Ken Tucker, “‘Walt Disney’: The Genius, the Empire Builder, the Vindictive Jerk,” Yahoo Entertainment, September 14, 2015.

12. Cultural Content

I Married a Communist: Daniel Leab, “How Red Was My Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War Film, and I Married a Communist,” Journal of Contemporary History 19, no. 1 (January 1984).

I Was a Communist for the FBI: From Tony Perucci, “The Red Mask of Sanity: Paul Robeson, HUAC, and the Sound of Cold War Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 53, no. 4 (Winter 2009): “The Communist was always seen to be acting, while the anti-Communist American was transparently truthful. The American citizen, constituted in noble sincerity, refused mimesis and instead inhabited an authentic citizenship. So strong was the belief in the anti-Communist dishonesty, that the fictionalized film adaption of professional informer Matt Cvertic’s memoir, I Was a Communist for the FBI, was nominated for Best Documentary Oscar.”

The Third Man: Screenplay by Graham Greene; released by British Lion Films and Selznick Releasing Organization (1949); Julia Driver, “Justice, Mercy, and Friendship in The Third Man,” Ethics at the Cinema, August 20, 2010; Lawrence Osborne, “Agents of Betrayal,” Lapham’s Quarterly; Madeline Ashby, “Noir Films Perfected: The Third Man,” Tor.com, August 17, 2011.

13. Insane Era

Hughes profile: Purnell W. Chopin (president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute), “Three-Headed Bit to a Major Philanthropy: The Surprising Legacy of Howard Hughes,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142, no. 3 (September 1998).

Paul Jarrico: In 1958, still blacklisted, Jarrico renounced his membership in the Communist Party: “I thought the Soviet Union was a vanguard country fighting for a better future for the entire world, including the United States. That was an illusion, I discovered.… Even the slowest of us realized that the accusations against Stalin and Stalinism were true… and that we had been defending indefensible things.… But the illusion didn’t make me disloyal; it made me a fool. And that’s what I wound up feeling like. Not that I’d been deceived, but that I’d deceived myself.”

Hughes in Las Vegas: Mary Manning, “Howard Hughes: A Revolutionary Recluse, Las Vegas Sun, May 15, 2008; Ken Cooper, “‘Zero Pays the House’: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette,” Contemporary Literature 33, no. 3 (Autumn 1992).

14. Impossible Missions

CIA radio and Soviet attacks on U.S. race relations: In 1954, when the Supreme Court overturned school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, “the opinion gave the State Department the counter to Soviet propaganda it had been looking for,” wrote Mary L. Dudziak in “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 41, no. 1 (November 1988), “and the State Department wasted no time in making use of it. Within an hour after the decision was handed down, the Voice of America broadcast the news to Eastern Europe.” On May 18, 1954, the New York Times quoted a VOA official saying that behind the Iron Curtain “the people would know nothing about the decision except what would be told them by the Communist press and radio, which you may be sure would be twisted and perverted. They have been told that the Negro in the United States is still practically a slave and a declassed person.” In contrast, Robert Patterson, the founder of the white Citizens’ Council, judged Brown as a symptom of a “communistic disease” and that “people are resigning themselves to seeing their children crammed into schools and churches with children of other races and being taught the Communist theme of all races and mongrelization.” Georgia’s segregationist governor Herman Talmadge wrote, “In some instances, we have shaped our national policy by trying to please the Communists.… Who cares what the Reds say? Who cares what Pravda prints?”

Willis Conover: “The Voice of Jazz Behind the Iron Curtain,” broadcast of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon, July 25, 2015. From his May 19, 1996, obituary in the New York Times, “Willis Conover Is Dead at 75; Aimed Jazz at the Soviet Bloc,” by Robert McG. Thomas Jr.: “There were immediate grumblings in Congress about wasting taxpayers’ money by broadcasting frivolous music, but Mr. Conover, a scholar who discussed music and interviewed musicians but never mentioned politics, won the day. In 1993 the House of Representatives honored him with a resolution praising the man who had been called one of the country’s greatest foreign policy tools. An independent-minded man, Mr. Conover had his share of run-ins with Voice of America officials but never backed down. As an independent contractor, he had full control over his programming choices, and besides, he had listened to too much jazz to do things any way but his own.”

The power of jazz in the Cold War: From Billy Perrigo, “How the U.S. Used Jazz as a Cold War Secret Weapon,” Time, December 22, 2017: “The music of jazz, which was structured around improvisation within a set of commonly agreed-upon boundaries, was a perfect metaphor for America in the eyes of the State Department. Here was music of democracy and freedom.… By sending bands comprised of black and white musicians to play together around the world, the State Department could engineer an image of racial harmony to offset the bad press about racism at home.”

Radio Free Europe: Kenneth Osgood, “The C.I.A.’s Fake News,” New York Times (op-ed), October 14, 2017.

Ukrainian covert operations: Kevin C. Ruffner, “Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists,” CIA report, 1998.

15. Charming Betrayal

Psychology of the Magnificent Five/access to “Inner Ring”: From David Brooks, “The Art of Thinking Well,” New York Times, October 10, 2017: “In every setting—a school, a company, or a society—there is an official hierarchy. But there may also be a separate prestige hierarchy, where the cool kids are. They are the Inner Ring.… There are always going to be people who desperately want to get into the Inner Ring and will cut all sorts of intellectual corners to be accepted. As [C. S.] Lewis put it: ‘The passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a bad man do very bad things.’”

John le Carré : Interview by Sarah Lyall, New York Times Book Review, August 21, 2017.

Harvey’s Oyster House: Pamela Kessler, “Cloak-and-Swagger,” Washington Post, March 3, 1989.

“Wilderness of mirrors”: From Arthur Redding, “A Wilderness of Mirrors: Writing and Reading the Cold War,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 4 (Winter 2010): “[James] Angleton himself likened the duplicitous world of intelligence to the paradoxical play of signs in modern poetry.… If the ‘intentional fallacy’ suggests a radical break between intent and utterance, then it is just a short, contrarian step to disbelieving everyone’s account of themselves: the more reliable an agent’s credentials, the more likely he was, in Angleton’s mind, to be a Soviet agent.” Author Terrence Hawkes noted that Angleton described his work as “the practical criticism of ambiguity.”

Yuri Nosenko: John Hart, “Monster Plot: Counterintelligence in the Case of Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko,” CIA, December 1976; James Risen, “What Cold War Intrigue Can Tell Us About the Trump-Russia Inquiry,” New York Times, March 30, 2017.

Angleton’s madness: Jefferson Morley, “Wilderness of Mirrors: Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of James Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance,” The Intercept, January 1, 2018.

Kim Philby in the USSR: Ron Rosenbaum, “Kim Philby and the Age of Paranoia,” New York Times, July 10, 1994.

16. Tragic Climax

Motive for Forrestal’s suicide: Alexander Wooley, “The Fall of James Forrestal,” Washington Post, May 23, 1999.

World petroleum market: David S. Painter, “Oil and the American Century,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (June 2012).

17. Approaching Midnight

Kennan’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb: “Memorandum by the Counselor (Kennan),” Department of State Atomic Energy Files, Top Secret [Washington, D.C.], January 20, 1950.

Kennette Benedict: Interviewed in Chicago on November 17, 2016, by Cindy Kelly as part of the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s Voices of the Manhattan Project.

NSC-68: From Louis Menand, “Fat Man,” New Yorker, June 27, 2005: “The early Cold Warriors… were at least as worried about American attitudes as they were about Soviet intentions. Obsessed with preparedness, they sometimes did not scruple about overstating the threat for which preparation was necessary. They practiced psychological warfare on their own people.” From Samuel Moyn and David Priestland, “A Problem Worse Than Tyranny,” New York Times, August 13, 2017: “Focusing on exaggerated threats to freedom and stigmatizing the communist enemy undermined… progressive goals. [NSC-68] argued that the Cold War justified the reduction of non-military expenditure by the ‘deferment of certain desirable programs,’ including welfare. And while the New Deal was not dismantled, efforts to extend it were denounced as pink tyranny. Casualties included attempts to create a national health care program. The consequences for American politics have been huge.” From Tony Perucci, “The Red Mask of Sanity: Paul Robeson, HUAC, and the Sound of Cold War Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 53, no. 4 (Winter 2009): “NSC-68 can be seen as an example of… ‘crisis talk,’ which is often used to create an illusion of scarcity of resources as well as of permanent political stasis.… As a result, political dissent must be restricted, ‘extravagant’ social services must be cut or canceled, and labor must cooperate with the liberal corporate establishment to maintain labor stability.”

Norman Cousins: Norman Cousins, “Literacy of Survival,” Saturday Review, September 14, 1946.

Henry Stimson: Henry L. Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1947.

U.S. opinion on dropping atomic bombs: A 1945 Gallup poll conducted immediately after the bombing found that 85 percent of Americans approved the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By 1991, approval had fallen to 63 percent, according to a survey by the Detroit Free Press.

CIA report on the Korean War: P. K. Rose, “Two Strategic Intelligence Mistakes in Korea, 1950,” CIA, May 8, 2007.

Truman says U.S. fighting for survival in Korea: Transcript of presidential news conference, November 30, 1950.

U.S. national security infrastructure: Loch Johnson, “Congressional Supervision of America’s Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee,” Public Administration Review 64, no. 1 (January/February 2004).

“two scorpions in a bottle”: Robert Oppenheimer, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July 1953.

John Sommerville: Mike Granberry, “Octogenarian Coined ‘Omnicide’ During Lifelong Push for Peace,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 1986.

U.S. obsession with the USSR: “Never in the history of the world was one people as completely dominated, intellectually and morally, by another as the people of the United States by the people of Russia in the four years from 1946 through 1949,” Archibald MacLeish wrote in The Conquest of America (1949). “American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic politics were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn’t like it. American political controversy was controversy sung to the Russian tune; left-wing movements attacked right-wing movements not on American issues but on Russian issues, and right-wing movements replied with the same arguments turned round about.… All this took place not in a time of national weakness or decay but precisely at the moment when the United States, having engineered a tremendous triumph and fought its way to a brilliant victory in the greatest of all wars, had reached the highest point of world power ever achieved by a single state.”

18. Absent Evidence

Judith Coplon profile: Posted in www.spartacus-educational.com by John Simkin, August 2014.

VENONA intercepts and surplus of secrets: From Jack Shafer, “America’s Secret Fetish,” Columbia Journalism Review: “Official secrets have been reproducing faster than a basket of mongooses thanks to the miracle of ‘derivative classification,’ and this rapid propagation has compounded the maintenance costs. Whenever information stamped as classified is folded into a new document—either verbatim or in paraphrased form—that new derivative document is born classified. Derivative classification—and the fact that nobody ever got fired for overusing the classified stamp—means that 92.1 million “classification decisions” were made in FY 2011, according to a government report, a 20 percent increase over FY 2010. Once created, your typical secret is a stubborn thing. The secret-makers’ reluctance to declassify their trove is legendary: In 1997, 204 million pages were declassified, but since 9/11 only an average of 33.5 million pages have been declassified annually.”

Ex-RAND and Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg on first having access to the highest level of security clearance: “After you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t… and that all the other people are fools.” Kevin Drum, “Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge,” Mother Jones, February 27, 2010.

Alger Hiss case: Allen Weinstein, “The Alger Hiss Case Revisited,” American Scholar 41, no. 1 (Winter 1971–72); John Ehrman, “The Alger Hiss Case: A Half-Century of Controversy,” CIA, August 3, 2011.

19. Crime of the Century

Roy Cohn: Alvin Krebs, “Aide to McCarthy and Fiery Lawyer Dies at 59,” New York Times, August 2, 1986; Jerry James, “The Stories Behind the Story of Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America,’” TheRogueTheatre.org; Frank Rich, “The Original Donald Trump,” New York magazine, April 29, 2018.

Donald Trump: Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, “What Donald Trump Learned from Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man,” New York Times, June 20, 2016; Marie Brenner, “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America,” Vanity Fair, June 28, 2017.

Eisenhower’s reaction to the Rosenberg case: From Tony Perucci, “The Red Mask of Sanity: Paul Robeson, HUAC, and the Sound of Cold War Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 53, no. 4 (Winter 2009): “For Eisenhower, policy decisions were to be made for their theatrical efficacy. Statecraft for him was indeed a form of stagecraft. In anticipation of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, he explained to his Cabinet that preventing the execution would only be justified when ‘statecraft dictated in the interests of the American public opinion or of the reputation of the United States government in the eyes of the world.’ As enactments of the statecraft of stagecraft, domestic political acts were theatrical expressions of the United States Government in the eyes of the world.”

Other sources: Peter Daniels and Bill Van Auken, “Fifty Years Since the Execution of the Rosenbergs,” World Socialist Web Site, June 15, 2013.

20. Third-Rate Speaker

The onset of McCarthyism: From the 1950 CQ Almanac: “[Joe] McCarthy took the Senate floor Feb. 20, [1950,] and in a six-hour speech described, but did not name, 81 persons whom he said were disloyal employees of the State Department.… McCarthy refused to name names despite repeated efforts by Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas (D Ill.) to pry them out.… As the Senate continued into the night, Brien McMahon (D Conn.), recalled from a black-tie party, entered the chamber in formal attire to challenge briskly McCarthy’s information sources. McCarthy again refused to divulge them on the floor.… The Senate did not quit for the night until 11:43 p.m.… The following day, Feb. 21, Lucas convened a Senate Democratic caucus which approved his plan of introducing S Res 231 calling for an investigation of McCarthy’s charges.… Loyalty files of the FBI would be involved, and Lucas and McMahon declared that confidential data and methods of the FBI could be impaired if the records were revealed during the course of the probe.… The investigating subcommittee was named by the Foreign Relations Committee Feb. 25 [soon to be referenced as the Tydings Committee]. On it were: Millard E. Tydings (D Md.), chairman, Brien McMahon (D Conn.), Theodore F. Green (D R.I.), Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (R Mass.), and Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R Iowa). The Subcommittee was given the following instructions by the full Committee: ‘Make a full and complete study and investigation of all government employees now in the Department of State and former employees of the Department of State now in other agencies of the government against whom charges are made, in order to determine whether or not said employees are, or have been, disloyal to the United States and to use the power of subpoena whenever necessary.’… McCarthy was the principal witness during the initial hearings which began on March 8, [1950,] under the authorizing provisions of S Res 231. During the course of his appearances before the Tydings Subcommittee, McCarthy charged 10 individuals by name with varying degrees of Communist activity: Prof. Frederick L. Schuman, Williams College; Prof. Owen J. Lattimore, Johns Hopkins University; Prof. Harlow Shapley, Harvard; Dorothy Kenyon, New York attorney; Gustavo Duran, former State Dept. employee, and then a UN official; Haldore Hanson, State Dept. officer; Philip C. Jessup, Ambassador at large; Mrs. Esther Brunauer, State Dept. Officer; John Service, Foreign Service officer; and Stephen Brunauer, Navy scientist.”

McCarthy’s dishonesty: A newsman of the period was quoted as saying, “My own impression was that Joe was a demagogue. But what could I do? I had to report—and quote—McCarthy. How do you say in the middle of your story, ‘This is a lie?’ The press is supposedly neutral.”

The church’s holy war: On March 30, 1930, the New York Times reported that Pope Pius XI conducted a “solemn rite” to a Vatican congregation of fifty thousand praying for Russians and denouncing atheism. The pope reportedly concluded by chanting a psalm “for the repose of the souls killed in the Russian persecutions.”

Mary Ann Van Hoof: Susan Hogan, “‘Pray and Pray Hard’: When 100,000 Waited to See the Virgin Mary on a Wisconsin Farm,” Washington Post, August 26, 2018.

Greater Christian anticommunism: From Molly Werthen, “A Match Made in Heaven,” Atlantic, May 2017: “By the 1950s, Billy Graham was rallying huge crowds with his dark predictions about the communist menace, an ideology ‘masterminded by Satan.’… In blending their movement’s libertarian inclinations with anti-communist hysteria and anxieties about cultural change… evangelical leaders helped catalyze the most powerful ideology in modern American politics: Christian free-market mania.… In the United States, conservative white Protestants ensured that the welfare state remained anemic.” From Sam Tannenhaus, “The Right Idea,” New Yorker, October 24, 2016: “The Conservative Rally for World Liberation, held in March 1962, drew a crowd of eighteen thousand, with pickets and protestors gathered outside. Organized by a new rightist group, the Young Americas for Freedom, the event was greeted as evidence that the ‘silent generation’ might be shaking off its apathy and finding a political voice.… The star of the event was L. Brent Bozell.… Bozell gave a speech… equating the ‘heresy of Gnosticism’ in Kennedy’s liberalism with Khrushchev’s Communism, and then summoned conservatives to reject both in order to ‘build a Christian civilization.’ Its divine mission was to harry Communists across the globe—in Africa, in Cuba, in Europe.”

21. Notoriously Disgraceful Conduct

Sources: Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” essay adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University in November 1963.

Supposed link between homosexuality and communism: In a 1955 report, RAND analyst Nathan Leites claimed that the “Bolshevik belief” in an imminent attack by the West was a “classical paranoid defense against latent homosexuality,” and Soviet aggression was “an effort to ward off fear-laden and guilty wishes to embrace men and be embraced by them.”

Judith Atkins: Judith Atkins, “‘These People Are Frightened to Death’: Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare,” Prologue magazine 48, no. 2 (Summer 2016).

Roy Cohn profile: Ken Auletta, “Don’t Mess with Roy Cohn,” Esquire, December 1978.

Cohn and Schine: Richard H. Rovere, “The Adventures of Cohn and Schine,” The Reporter, July 21, 1953.

Eric Sevareid’s criticism of Edward R. Murrow: From Nicholas Lemann, “The Murrow Doctrine,” New Yorker, January 23, 2006: “By the time the first See It Now program on McCarthy aired, on March 9, 1954, McCarthy was past the height of his powers.… At that point, the most powerful press baron in the country was Henry Luce, and his magazines had been intermittently critical of McCarthy for years. Of the major news organizations, only Hearst was ardently pro-McCarthy.… Murrow picked an opportune moment to strike; if he’d waited even two more months, it would have been difficult to present him now as the man who discredited McCarthy.”

22. Cross of Iron

Dwight Eisenhower profile: Rick Atkinson “Ike’s Dark Days,” U.S. News & World Report, October 28, 2002.

Military-industrial complex: Robert Biggs, “The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis,” Explorations in Economic History, July 1, 1994; William D. Hartung, “Eisenhower’s Warning: The Military-Industrial Complex Forty Years Later,” World Policy Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 2001); Stephen Schwartz, “The Cost of U.S. Nuclear Weapons,” Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), October 1, 2008; John Swift, “The Soviet-American Arms Race,” History Review, issue 63 (March 2009).

First SIOP: Andrew Rice, “403 Minutes with Daniel Ellsberg: Staring into the Abyss with the Famous Pentagon Papers Leaker,” New York magazine, November 27–December 10, 2017; Thomas Powers, “The Nuclear Worrier,” New York Review of Books, January 18, 2018; interview by Dan Amira, “Daniel Ellsberg Thinks We’re in Denial About Nuclear War,” New York Times Magazine, February 11, 2018.

Castle Bravo test: Daniel Lang, “Fallout,” New Yorker, July 16, 1955.

Godzilla: John Rocco Roberto, “Study of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Japanese Culture,” HistoryVortex.org, 2000; Steve Ryfle, “Godzilla’s Footprint,” Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2005; Brian Merchant, “A Brief History of Godzilla, Our Walking Nuclear Nightmare,” Motherboard Blog, August 23, 2013.

23. Civil Defense

Fallout shelters: Garrett M. Graff, “The Doomsday Diet: Meet the All-Purpose Survival Cracker, the US Government’s Cold War–Era Nutrition Solution for Life After a Nuclear Blast,” Eater, December 12, 2017. From Alison McQueen, “How to Be a Prophet of Doom,” New York Times, May 13, 2018: “In a series of works published in the early 1960s, Herman Kahn, a RAND strategist, was arguing that the United States could survive an all-out nuclear war and even resume something like a normal life.… Within a few days of a nuclear attack, a Time article predicted that people might begin to emerge: ‘With trousers tucked into sock tops and sleeves tied around wrists, with hats, mufflers, gloves, and boots, the shelter dweller could venture forth to start ensuring his today and building for tomorrow.’” From Louis Menand, “Fat Man” New Yorker, June 27, 2005: “[Kahn] was the champion salesman of the fallout shelter, and was especially excited by the potential of mineshafts as evacuation centers.…But—and this is the strange logic of deterrence—the essential purpose of investing billions in civil defense was not to save lives but to enhance the credibility of America’s nuclear threat.… [Kahn] contemplated the possibility of several mass evacuations every decade in order to bolster American credibility.”

U.S. government doomsday plans: Transcript of interview with author Garrett Graff, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, June 21, 2017.

U.S. bases overseas: From Jimmy Carter, Faith: A Journey for All (Simon & Schuster, 2018): As of 2017, “there were 240,000 American troops stationed in at least 172 foreign nations, plus more than 37,000 others in places militarily classified as secret.” At the same time, U.S. “infrastructure investment gap,” Carter noted, “is the largest of the 50 richest nations.”

Bomber gap: “Weapons of Mass Destruction/The Bomber Gap,” GlobalSecurity.org.

Vulnerability of nuclear command-and-control system: Eric Schlosser, “World War Three, by Mistake,” New Yorker, December 23, 2016.

The peace sign: Zoe Levornik, “What the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots Can Learn from the Antinuclear Weapons Movement,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 29, 2018.

24. Serving Money

John Foster Dulles: John M. Mulder, “The Moral World of John Foster Dulles: A Presbyterian Layman and International Affairs,” Journal of Presbyterian History 19, no. 2 (Summer 1971); Peter Dale Scott, “The Dulles Brothers, Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, and the Fate of the Private Pre-war International Banking System,” Asia-Pacific Journal, April 20, 2014; William Jefferson Hedrick II, “John Foster Dulles and the Gospel of Corporate Internationalism” (BA honors thesis, Florida Atlantic University, April 28, 2015).

Edward Lansdale: Marc D. Bernstein, “Ed Lansdale’s Black Warfare in 1950s Vietnam,” Vietnam Point of View, February 16, 2010. From Louis Menand, “Made in Vietnam,” New Yorker, February 26, 2018: “[Lansdale] was a fabricator of fronts, the man behind the curtain. He manipulated events—through payoffs, propaganda, and sometimes more nefarious means—to insure that indigenous politicians friendly to the United States would be ‘freely’ elected. Internal opposition to these leaders could then be characterized as ‘an insurgency.’…(The Soviets, of course, operated in exactly the same way, through fronts and election fixing. The Cold War was a looking-glass war.)” Menand continued, “The Vietnam he imagined was a Western fantasy.… He was a liberal internationalist. He believed if you scratched a Vietnamese or a Filipino, you found a James Madison under the skin.” Lansdale did not speak either of the principal languages in South Vietnam: French and Vietnamese.

Ho Chi Minh: More from the same Menand essay: “[Ho] was a Communist but he was a Communist because he was a nationalist. Twice he had appealed to American Presidents to support his independence movement—to Woodrow Wilson after the First World War, and Truman at the end of the Second—and twice he had been ignored. Only the Communists, he had concluded, were truly committed to the principle of self-determination in Asia. The Geneva Accords called for a national election to be held in Vietnam in 1956.… Many people in the American government thought Ho would have won.”

Nepotism: Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu reportedly funded the family’s political party with piracy, extortion, opium trading, and currency exchange manipulation. Menand: “Thousands of Vietnamese suspected of disloyalty were arrested, tortured and executed by beheading or disembowelment.”

Marilyn Young: Her obituary: Sam Roberts, “Historian Who Challenged Foreign Policy,” New York Times, March 9, 2017.

Doolittle report: From Wikipedia: “The Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency is a 69-page formerly classified comprehensive study on the personnel, security, adequacy, and efficacy of the Central Intelligence Agency written by Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle. United States President Dwight Eisenhower requested the report in July 1954.”

H. Stuart Hughes: H. Stuart Hughes, “A Politics of Peace: Reflections on C. Wright Mills’s ‘The Causes of World War III,’” Commentary, February 1959.

25. Dry the Grass

Failure in Vietnam: Thomas L. Ahern Jr., “CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Actions in South Vietnam (1954–63),” CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, June 2000. CIA agent Donald P. Gregg in a 2017 New York Times letter to the editor wrote, “We should have seen it as the end of the colonial era in Southeast Asia, which it really was. But instead, we saw it in Cold War terms, and we saw it as the defeat for the free world that was related to the rise of China. And that was a total misreading of a pivotal event, which cost us very dearly.” During Senate hearings in 1966, George Kennan opposed the U.S. policy of regime change: “Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country.” In 2008, Henry Kissinger told Newsweek, “Hanoi’s leaders had fought a decade against France and battled the United States for a similar length of time, not to achieve a political compromise, but to prevail.” From Louis Menand, “Made in Vietnam,” New Yorker, February 26, 2018: “Political terms are short, and so politics is short term. The main consideration that seems to have presented itself to… Presidents, from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon, who insisted on staying the course was domestic politics—the fear of being blamed by voters for losing Southeast Asia to Communism. If Southeast Asia was going to be lost to Communism, they preferred that it be on another President’s head.” From Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes, “The War That Killed Trust,” New York Times, January 8, 2017: “Vietnam changed us as a country. In many ways, for the worse: It made us cynical and distrustful of our institutions, especially of government. For many people, it eroded the notion, once nearly universal, that part of being an American was serving your country.”

Castro’s revolution: The October 19, 1959, issue of Time reported that Fidel Castro had even nationalized the country’s bat guano caves.

The Godfather: Part II: Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo; released by Paramount Pictures (1974).

Cambodia: Fred Branfman, “Henry Kissinger: Enlightened Statesman or Odious Schlumpf?,” Salon, November 15, 2002; Ben Kiernan, “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969–1973,” Vietnam Generation 1, no. 1, article 3 (1989).

Proxy conflicts during the Cold War: Milton Leitenberg, “Deaths in Wars and Conflicts in the 20th Century,” Cornell University, Peace Studies Program, Occasional Paper #29, August 2003. Wars “won” by Soviet-backed forces included: China (6 million combatants and civilians killed); Vietnam (3 million killed); Cambodia (2 million killed); Angola (1.6 million killed); and Mozambique (1 million killed). Wars “won” by U.S.-backed forces included: Afghanistan (1 million killed); Ethiopia (1 million killed); Guatemala (212,000 killed); Greece (154,000 killed); and Congo (100,000). The Algerian civil war (1 million killed) was a military victory for the West, but a political victory for the Soviets, who supported an insurgency that ultimately gained independence from France. Wars in Korea (4.5 million killed), Sudan (750,000 killed), and Lebanon (130,000 dead) ended in stalemate.

26. Burying History

Soviet living conditions: Dmitry Sudakov, “What Was It Like to Live in the Soviet Union?,” Pravda.ru, March 6, 2016. One of David Remnick’s most noteworthy Moscow dispatches was a Washington Post story on December 4, 1989, headlined “Meanwhile, Soviets View a Hit Parade of Shoddy Goods”: “Thousands of Soviets… caught the metro out to northern Moscow’s Exhibition of Economic Achievements and looked at a collection of economic underachievements…[‘The Exhibit of Poor Quality Goods’] features oblong volleyballs, cross-eyed teddy bears, rusted samovars, chipped stew pots, putrid lettuce, unraveled shuttlecocks, crushed cans of fish and, perhaps the show-stopper, a bottle of mineral water with a tiny dead mouse floating inside.… ‘It was time to inject a little reality into the scene here,’ said one of the park’s guides, Sveta Redichova. The sheer crumminess of nearly every product sold in Soviet stores is an appalling fact of life. Towels scratch, milk sours, cars collapse. The leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union is exploding televisions. In order to assemble the exhibit, [Maria] Nitchkina said, ‘We didn’t have to go to much effort. We just went into a few stores picked at random and that was that.’”

Peter Preston: Peter Preston, “The Dead Hand by David Hoffman—Review,” Guardian, February 4, 2011.

27. Space Race

Sputnik: Marina Koren, “How Sputnik Launched an Era of Technological Fragility,” Atlantic, October 4, 2017; Jacey Fortin “Orbit of Sputnik Surprised Many, but American Spies Saw It Coming,” New York Times, October 7, 2017.

Soviet space dogs: “Remembering Laika, Space Dog and Soviet Hero,” Alex Wellerstein, New Yorker, November 3, 2017.

Bernard Schriever: Steve Coll, “The Cabinet of Dr. Strangelove,” New York Review of Books, February 25, 2010.

Kurt Stehling: Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask, Vanguard: A History (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Technology Utilization, 1970).

28. Mind Games

Manchurian Candidate: Screenplay by George Axelrod; released by United Artists (1962).

Brainwashing: Louis Menand, “Brainwashed: Where the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ Came From,” New Yorker, September 15, 2003; Lorraine Boissoneault, “The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America,” Smithsonian.com, May 22, 2017; Susan Carruthers, “Who’s Afraid of Brainwashing,” New York Times, January 21, 2018.

Korean War POWs: POW: The Fight Continues After the Battle, report by the Secretary of Defense’s Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, August 1955.

LSD: Albert Hofmann, “Exploring an Alternate Universe: Albert Hofmann Discovers the Effects of LSD,” Lapham’s Quarterly.

MK-ULTRA: W. Henry Wall Jr., “How the CIA’s LSD Mind-Control Experiments Destroyed My Healthy, High-Functioning Father’s Brilliant Mind,” AlterNet, August 8, 2012 (excerpt from Healing to Hell, NewSouth Books); Chris Calton, “When the CIA Partied with LSD on the Taxpayers’ Dime,” Mises Wire, March 15, 2017.

Errol Morris: Matthew Gault, “Wormwood Is an LSD-Soaked True Crime Masterpiece,” Motherboard, December 28, 2017.

Masters of Deceit: In the book, Hoover describes communists as “ordinary looking people, like your seatmate on the bus or a clerk in one of your neighborhood stores.”

Ted Kaczynski: Alton Chase, “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber,” Atlantic, June 2000; Janet Maslin, “The Unabomber and the ‘Culture of Despair,’” New York Times, March 3, 2003.

29. Dance with Détente

Soviet secrecy: From Sheila Fitzpatrick, “War and Society in Soviet Context: Soviet Labor Before, During, and After World War II,” International Labor and Working Class History, no. 35 (Spring 1989): “It is remarkable… to think that the systematic falsification of all published maps of the Soviet Union, instituted around 1938 as a method of battling foreign spies and potential invading armies, was still practiced as late as 1988, when it was likely to baffle nobody but the car-driving grandchildren of Soviet war veterans.”

Joe Alsop: Edwin M. Yoder Jr., “Joe Alsop Resisted Soviet Blackmail in the 1950s,” Raleigh News & Observer, January 18, 2017.

30. Send in the Clowns

Cold War rhetoric: From Louis Menand, “Fat Man,” New Yorker, June 27, 2005: “If the United States assigned the Soviets the role of mechanized Enemy Other, the Soviets did their best to play it.… It served both sides in the Cold War to take each other’s rhetoric at face value. We have yet to learn how not to do this.”

Ultra-right fanatics: From the San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964: “The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor.… The Xerox Corporation, however, intends to go on with the programs.… Birch official John Rousselot said, ‘We hate to have a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.’” None Dare Call It Treason was a 1964 privately published best-seller by John Stormer claiming communist infiltration at all levels of government, from school boards to the White House. As Jim Dwyer reported in the New York Times, January 11, 2017, “a full-fledged excavation of the book’s footnotes, None Dare Call It Reason, was published in a monograph form in 1965 by Julian Foster, a political science professor at California State University, Fullerton, and five colleagues. It catalogued twisted quotes and distorted paraphrasing everywhere.”

William Fulbright: Giles Scott-Smith, “Bill and Ed’s Big Adventure: Cold Warriors, William Fulbright and Right-Wing Propaganda in the U.S. Military, 1961–62,” Histoire@Politique, no. 35 (May–August 2018).

John Glenn: John Noble Wilford, “John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95,” New York Times, December 8, 2016.

31. Grand Settlement

Berlin Wall: An estimated 5,000 East Germans escaped over the Berlin Wall, and 138 were killed in the attempt.

Cuban Missile Crisis: Graham Allison, “The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50: Lessons for U.S. Foreign Policy Today,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2012; Michael Mosettig, “Cuban Missile Crisis: Memories of a Young Reporter,” PBS NewsHour, October 22, 2012; Benjamin Schwarz, “The Real Cuban Missile Crisis,” Atlantic, January/February 2013; Ross Douthat, “The Missiles of August,” New York Times, August 12, 2017; George Perkovich, “The Other Terrifying Lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Politico, January 4, 2018; “Nuclear Close Calls: The Cuban Missile Crisis,” Atomic Heritage Foundation, June 15, 2018.

Downing of U-2: Sergei Khrushchev, “How My Father and President Kennedy Saved the World: The Cuban Missile Crisis as Seen from the Kremlin,” American Heritage, October 2002.

Vasili Arkhipov: Avery Thomson, “The Time a Single Soviet Officer Averted a Nuclear War,” PopularMechanics.com, September 27, 2016.

32. Chaos Theory

Chaos theory: Peter Dizikes, “When the Butterfly Effect Took Flight,” MIT Technology Review, February 22, 2011.

Byron De La Beckwith: From Kelly J. Baker, “White-Collar Supremacy,” New York Times, November 25, 2016: “The 1950s saw another surge of ‘respectable’ racism, this time in the form of Citizens Councils, founded in Mississippi by Robert B. Patterson in response to the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board of Education decision. Rather than the vigilantism and terrorism of the 1950s and ’60s Klan, the councils relied on more middle-class methods of opposing civil rights: boycotting black-owned businesses and denying mortgages to black people. The sociologist Charles M. Payne describes them as ‘pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary Club.’”

Bob Dylan: “Only a Pawn in Their Game” was released on Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ album (1964).

Thomas Hughes: Mary Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 41, no. 1 (November 1988).

Stan Lee: Tegan O’Neil, “How the Cold War Saved Marvel and Birthed a Generation of Superheroes,” A.V. Club, March 31, 2016.

FBI letter to Martin Luther King: Beverly Gage, “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals,” New York Times, November 11, 2014.

Malcolm X’s assassination: Wayne Drash, “Malcolm X Killer Freed After 44 Years,” CNN, April 28, 2010; Garrett Felber, “50 Years on, Mystery Still Clouds Details of the Case,” Guardian, February 21, 2015; DeNeen L. Brown, “Malcolm X Didn’t Fear Being Killed,” Washington Post, February 26, 2015.

Watts riots: From Kurt Andersen, “Hands Up. It’s Showtime,” New York Times, September 8, 2017: “Yet long before President Trump, the militarization of the police was being shaped by fantasy and entertainment with roots in 1960s Los Angeles.… Darryl Gates was persuaded that the department needed its own special-ops corps, with military equipment and outfits, so that the cops could look and act like soldiers. He wanted to call the new units Special Weapons Attack Teams: SWAT.… The first SWAT team trained on a Universal back lot.”

Conservative backlash: From Rick Perlstein, “Apocalyptics,” New York Times Magazine, April 16, 2017: “In 1965, Congress once more allowed large-scale immigration to the United States—and it is no accident that this date coincides with the increasing conservative backlash against liberalism itself, now that its spoils would be more widely distributed among nonwhites.”

1968 presidential election: Louis Menand, “Been There,” New Yorker, January 8, 2018. More from Perlstein’s New York Times Magazine piece: “Educated whites in the prosperous metropolises of the New South sublimated the frenetic, violent anxieties that once marked race relations in their region into more palatable policy concerns about ‘stable housing values’ and ‘quality local education,’ backfooting liberals and transforming conservatives into mainstream champions of a set of positions with an enormous appeal to the white middle class.”

Curtis LeMay’s famous “Stone Age” quote about Vietnam: The quote comes from Mission with LeMay: My Story (Doubleday, 1965): “My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese communists] frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.”

1968 Wallace-LeMay rally at Madison Square Garden: After the rally, fights between Wallace supporters and Wallace protestors became so violent that New Republic columnist Richard Strout observed, “Never again will you read about Berlin in the 1930s without remembering this wild confrontation here of two irrational forces.”

Nixon subverts LBJ Vietnam peace talks: John Farrell, “Tricky Dick’s Vietnam Treachery,” New York Times (op-ed), December 31, 2016.

Night of the Living Dead: A. O. Scott and Jason Zinoman, “Provocative Old Masters of Horror,” New York Times, July 18, 2017.

The White Album: Released on November 22, 1968, the ninth studio album by the Beatles—officially titled The Beatles—was recorded largely at London’s Abbey Road Studios in the summer of 1968 and ultimately distributed in an all-white sleeve. It is a so-called double album of two vinyl records with tracks on both sides. Other than the name of the band embossed in Helvetica typeface, there is no other graphic or text. The first track of thirty is “Back in the USSR.” Like virtually all the songs on the album, it was conceived in the first few months of 1968, while the band was chilling in Rishikesh, India, at the ashram of Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The song had an unofficial collaborator, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, who had joined the Beatles on the retreat and provided McCartney with feedback. As Love recalled, “Paul came down to the breakfast table one morning, saying, ‘Hey Mike, listen to this.’ And he starts strumming and singing ‘Back in the USSR.’ And I said, ‘Well, Paul, what you ought to do is talk about the girls around Russia, Ukraine girls and then Georgia on my mind, and that kind of thing.” In one nod to Love’s Beach Boys, McCartney’s lyrics would flip “California Girls” to “Moscow Girls,” and the background harmonies would include a definitive Beach Boys “Oooeeeeoooo.” The double entendre suggested by Mike Love, “Georgia on My Mind,” was a tip of the hat to Ray Charles. The tone and texture was deeply influenced, like much of the Beatles’ music, by the formative American rockers of the fifties: The title and the bluesy feel evokes Chuck Berry’s 1959 hit “Back in the USA,” and the percussive propulsion was informed by the manic style of Jerry Lee Lewis. After melding the pop genres, McCartney supplied his inimitable lighthearted, cheeky narrative. Said McCartney, “In my mind it’s just about a [Russian] spy who’s been in America for a long time and he’s become very American but when he gets back to the USSR he’s saying, ‘Leave it ’til tomorrow to unpack my case, Honey, disconnect the phone,’ and all that, but to Russian women.” “Back in the USSR” opens with the sound of a screaming British Viscount jet flying from left to right across the speakers, an innovation of the new stereo age. When the song was released, it was criticized by conservative voices in the United States. The John Birch Society charged the Beatles with fomenting communism. Others judged it as a “tactless jest” because it was released not long after the Soviets had invaded Czechoslovakia. In the USSR, where the Beatles were seen as a welcome “belch of Western culture,” the song was heard through smuggled tapes. There was even a rumor inside the country that the Beatles had secretly visited the USSR and given a private concert for the children of top communist party members, and had written the song for that occasion.

Charles Manson: Kory Grow, “Charles Manson: How Cult Leader’s Twisted Beatles Obsession Inspired Family Murders,” Rolling Stone, August 9, 2017; Margalit Fox, “Mass Killer with a Dark, Indelible Place in the American Psyche” (obituary), New York Times, November 21, 2017.

Dirty Harry: Screenplay by Harry Julian Fink, R. M. Fink, Jo Helms, and Terrence Malick; released by Warner Brothers (1971).

Vigilante justice: Rick Perlstein, “Apocalyptics,” New York Times Magazine, April 16, 2017: “In 1973, the reporter Gail Sheehy joined a group of blue-collar workers watching the Watergate hearings in a bar in Astoria, Queens. ‘If I was Nixon,’ one of them said, ‘I’d shoot every one of them.’ (Who ‘they’ were went unspecified.) This was around the time New Yorkers were leaping to their feet and cheering during screenings of Death Wish, a hit move about a liberal architect, played by Charles Bronson, who shoots muggers at point-blank range.”

Decade of violence: Author Heather Anne Thompson (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971), interviewed by Ana Marie Cox, New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2017: “When you tell the nation that hippies are violent, the anti-war protestors are violent, prisoners are violent, civil rights is really about thuggery instead of genuine rights, then, all of a sudden, you look at Kent State, you look at the Chicago convention of ’68, you look at Attica and you completely miss the fact that all the violence was state violence.”

33. Nixon by the Numbers

Pentagon Papers: They were leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, and assessed U.S. involvement in Vietnam. From Greg King, in a 2018 New Yorker letter to the editor: “The Pentagon Papers… revealed a pattern of deception and subversion by American leaders going back as far as 1945. Those documents clearly demonstrate that the people who initiated American involvement in Vietnam were neither decent nor acting in good faith. They understood exactly what they were doing: propping up French imperialism through force… then inventing the Gulf of Tonkin incident to generate popular support for entering the conflict.”

34. Watergate Dictionary

Nixon’s enemies: In a New York Times op-ed, December 19, 2016, “Will Trump Play Spy vs. Spy?,” Evan Thomas wrote, “The bureaucracy can find ways to fight back. During the Nixon Administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff grew so distrustful of the White House that they planted a spy on the staff of the national security advisor [Henry Kissinger]. Deep Throat, the famous source behind some of the earliest Watergate revelations… turned out to be the deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt.”

Watergate overview: Joseph Okpaku and Bonnie Schulman, “Who’s Who and What’s What in Watergate,” Transition, no. 45 (1974).

All the President’s Men: Screenplay by William Goldman; released by Warner Bros. (1976).

Nicholas von Hoffman fired: From a 2005 syndicated column by James J. Kilpatrick, headlined “My Gifted Counterpoint on ‘60 Minutes’ Wrote Like an Angel.”

35. Mad as Hell

Don DeLillo: Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135” (interview), Paris Review, issue 128 (Fall 1993).

Cigarettes: A committee established by the surgeon general released a report in 1964 linking smoking to a 70 percent increase in rates of mortality, lung cancer, bronchitis, and other diseases (New York Times, “On This Day in History”).

Heroes and villains: On its one hundredth anniversary, the American Film Institute named its “100 Greatest Heroes and Villains.” Movies from the seventies placed multiple characters in the top twenty. These are the seventies-era Heroes, with ranking: no. 7: Rocky Balboa (Rocky, 1976); no. 14: Han Solo (Star Wars, 1977); no. 15: Norma Rae Webster (Norma Rae, 1979); no. 17: Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry, 1971). Villains, with ranking: no. 3: Darth Vader (Star Wars, 1977); no. 5: Nurse Ratched (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975); no. 9: Regan MacNeil (The Exorcist, 1973); no. 11: Michael Corleone (The Godfather: Part II, 1974); no. 12: Alex De Large (A Clockwork Orange, 1971); no. 16: Noah Cross (Chinatown, 1974); no. 18: The Shark (Jaws, 1975). Overall, the no. 1 Hero was Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962); the no. 1 Villain was Dr. Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs, 1990).

William Powell: Richard Sandomir, “Writer of ‘The Anarchist Cookbook,’ a Mayhem Manifesto,” New York Times, March 30, 2017.

JFK assassination theories: Marcus Raskin, “JFK and the Culture of Violence,” American Historical Review 97, no. 2 (April 1992).

Network: Screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky; released by MGM (1976).

Hal Lindsey: Erin A. Smith, “‘The Late Great Planet Earth’ Made the Apocalypse a Popular Concern,” Humanities 38, no. 1 (Winter 2017).

Science vs. superstition: David Ropeik, “The Rise of Nuclear Fear—How We Learned to Fear the Radiation,” Scientific American, June 15, 2012. From Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World (1995): “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost their ability to set their own agenda or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media… lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

Escalating crime: The FBI’s behavioral science unit introduced the term “serial killer” in the 1970s to distinguish between a mass murderer (someone who killed all at once) and a “spree killer.” A number of factors contributed to a rise in serial killers: easy access to guns and hallucinogenic drugs; escape made easier by a vast interstate highway system; cheap gas; and a lack of coordination between police departments.

The NRA: Jill Lepore, “Battleground America,” New Yorker, April 23, 2012. From Nicholas Kristof, “Let’s Talk About the N.R.A.,” New York Times, November 4, 2018: “N.R.A. advocacy is one reason the United States diverged from the path of other advanced nations—and one reason there are now more guns in America (393 million) than people (326 million).… Americans in their late teens are 82 times more likely to be murdered with guns than their peers in other advanced nations.”

The Second Amendment: In 1979, one of the first campaigns by conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie falsely warned that “federal and state legislatures” were “literally flooded with proposed laws” aimed “at total confiscation of firearms from law-abiding citizens.”

Fusion paranoia: Michael Kelly, “The Road to Paranoia,” New Yorker, June 19, 1995.

Peoples Temple: J. Oliver Conroy, “An Apocalyptic Cult, 900 Dead: Remembering the Jonestown Massacre, 40 Years On,” Guardian, November 17, 2018.

36. A Minuet with Malaise

Agent Orange: From a 2017 New York Times letter to the editor by Debra J. Bardavid: “My husband was [in Vietnam] for only 40-plus days, but that was long enough for Agent Orange to leave its mark in the form of three separate cancers over the past 49 years. And during the two trips we took to Vietnam in 2013 and 2015, when we visited orphanages and homes for the elderly and infirm, we saw firsthand the diseases and deformities that are still affecting generations of Vietnamese people.”

Apocalypse Now: From Vietnam veteran Michael J. Gorman, in a 2018 New Yorker letter to the editor about Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979): “The war was an immoral political game played by politicians who lacked respect for human beings. As Coppola’s movie showed (and came to symbolize), the mission was corrupt from the start, and it cost the lives of almost sixty thousand American soldiers (millions more were mentally and physically damaged), and more than two million Vietnamese people. It’s not possible to reframe this war as something noble.”

Carter White House: Theodore H. White, “The Party That Lost Its Way,” New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1982.

Olympic boycott: John Powers, “Lost Games,” Boston Globe, July 28, 2010.

37. Tit-for-Tat

Tom Hayden: Robert D. McFadden, “Tom Hayden, Civil Rights and Peace Activist Turned Lawmaker, Dies at 76,” New York Times, October 25, 2016.

Prisoner’s dilemma tournament: Artem Kaznatcheev, “Short History of Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments,” The EGG (Theory, Evolution and Games Group), March 2, 2015.

Peace Magazine: Metta Spencer, “Rapoport at Ninety,” Peace Magazine, October–December 2001.

38. Arming for Bear

CIA analysis of USSR: James Risen, “Files Show CIA Warned of Soviet Decline,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1995.

Trident submarine: Sebastien Roblin, “This Picture Is North Korea’s Worst Nightmare: The Story of America’s Ohio-Class Submarines,” The National Interest, January 18, 2019.

Nicholas Thompson: “Dr. Strangelove’s ‘Doomsday Machine’: It’s Real,” transcript of interview with Nicholas Thompson, NPR’s All Things Considered with Guy Raz, September 26, 2009.

Magic healer: Hearst Newspapers, “Soviet Leaders Took ‘Rejuvenating’ Pills, Records Show,” April 8, 1994.

Letters between Reagan and Gorbachev: Jason Saltoun-Ebin, “Recently Released Letters Between Reagan and Gorbachev Shed Light on the End of the Cold War,” HuffPost, April 29, 2013.

39. Peak Paranoia

Tony Dolan: Fred I. Greenstein, Leadership in the Modern Presidency (Harvard University Press, 1988).

Hendrik Hertzberg: Juan Williams, “Writers of Speeches for President Claim Force Is With Him,” Washington Post, March 29, 1983.

Star Wars/Geneva summit: John Newhouse, “Annals of Diplomacy: The Abolitionist—I,” New Yorker, January 2, 1989; John Newhouse, “Annals of Diplomacy: The Abolitionist—II,” New Yorker, January 9, 1989.

KAL 007: Max Fisher, “Hawaii False Alarm Hints at Thin Line Between Mishap and Nuclear War,” New York Times, January 14, 2018.

Stanislav Petrov: Fiza Pirani, “‘The Man Who Saved the World’ Died and the World Didn’t Notice—Who Was Stanislav Petrov?,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 18, 2017; Eresh Omar Jamal, “The Man Who Saved the World,” Daily Star (Bangladesh), September 22, 2017.

War Games: Fred Kaplan, “‘War Games’ and Cybersecurity’s Debt to a Hollywood Hack,” New York Times, February 19, 2016.

Nuclear winter: Matthew R. Francis, “When Carl Sagan Warned the World About Nuclear Winter,” Smithsonian.com, November 15, 2017. In a letter to the New Yorker on February 27, 2017, Rutgers climate change expert Alan Robock wrote, “Despite the overall decrease in Russia and the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal, the two countries still have the capability to produce a nuclear winter: a nuclear war that used less than one percent of the current global arsenal would cause a climate change unprecedented in recorded human history.”

The Day After: David Hoffman and Lou Cannon, “ABC’s ‘The Day After,’” Washington Post, November 18, 1983.

Alex Wellerstein: Alex Wellerstein, “What We Lost When We Lost Bert the Turtle,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2017.

40. Nine Reasons

Ronald Reagan’s transition from hawk to dove: Jacob Weisberg, “Ronald Reagan’s Disarmament Dream,” Atlantic, January 1, 2016.

Thatcher: Bill Keller, “Maggie and Gorby,” New York Times (op-ed), April 8, 2013.

41. Teen Pilot

Principal source: Tom LeCompte, “The Notorious Flight of Mathias Rust,” Air & Space Magazine, July 2015.

42. Basket Three

Helsinki Accords: Stephen Sestanovich, “Did the West Undo the East?,” The National Interest, no. 31, Special Issue: The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: An Autopsy (Spring 1993).

43. Stirred-Up Muslims

Global blowback from Afghanistan: From Lawrence Wright, “The Man Behind bin Laden,” New Yorker, September 16, 2002: “After the Soviet pullout, many of the Afghan Arabs returned home or went to other countries, carrying the torch of Islamic revolution. In the Balkans, ethnic hostility among Muslims, Croats, and Serbs prompted Bosnia-Herzegovina to vote to secede from Yugoslavia; that set off a three-year war in which a hundred and fifty thousand people died. In November of 1991, the largely Muslim region of Chechnya declared its independence from Russia—an act that soon led to war. In 1992, civil war broke out in Algeria when the government cancelled elections to prevent the Islamist party from taking power.… The conflict has taken a hundred thousand lives. In Egypt, the Islamic Group launched a campaign against tourism and Western culture in general.… And the war in Afghanistan continued, only now it was Muslims fighting Muslims for political control.”

44. Sound of Silence

Vladimir Putin in the DDR: Chris Bowlby, “Vladimir Putin’s Formative German Years,” BBC News, March 27, 2015; Simon Kuper, “The Long Shadow of 1989,” FT Magazine, November 3, 2016.