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How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America, by Jon Wiener
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Hours after the USSR collapsed in 1991, Congress began making plans to establish the official memory of the Cold War. Conservatives dominated the proceedings, spending millions to portray the conflict as a triumph of good over evil and a defeat of totalitarianism equal in significance to World War II. In this provocative book, historian Jon Wiener visits Cold War monuments, museums, and memorials across the United States to find out how the era is being remembered. The author’s journey provides a history of the Cold War, one that turns many conventional notions on their heads.
In an engaging travelogue that takes readers to sites such as the life-size recreation of Berlin’s “Checkpoint Charlie” at the Reagan Library, the fallout shelter display at the Smithsonian, and exhibits about “Sgt. Elvis,” America’s most famous Cold War veteran, Wiener discovers that the Cold War isn’t being remembered. It’s being forgotten. Despite an immense effort, the conservatives’ monuments weren’t built, their historic sites have few visitors, and many of their museums have now shifted focus to other topics. Proponents of the notion of a heroic “Cold War victory” failed; the public didn’t buy the official story. Lively, readable, and well-informed, this book expands current discussions about memory and history, and raises intriguing questions about popular skepticism toward official ideology.
- Sales Rank: #1530849 in Books
- Brand: Brand: University of California Press
- Published on: 2012-10-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.50" w x 6.00" l, 1.45 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 376 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Simultaneously hilarious and the best thing ever written on public history and its contestation." --Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz.
"A fascinating and entertaining book." --Eric Foner, author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.
"Combines the author's splendid skills as a reporter with the eye of a scholar. Lively and fun, yes, but also analytically and scholarly grounded. . . a rare and remarkable achievement." -- Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland.
"trenchant . . . and uncommonly frisky." Tom Carson, The American Prospect.
"As popular reading, it's got the humor and wit of Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation and James Loewen's Sundown Towns and DJ Waldie's Holy Land. By which I mean it's witty and kinda mean, and exhilarating bad fun."--O.C. Weekly: Orange County News, Arts & Ent
"Wiener's wit and deft grasp of geopolitics make for one of the season's most intriguing historical books."--Philadelphia City Paper
"Who knew the Cold War was funny? Wiener's adventures in American historical memory are surprisingly lively."--Zocalo Public Square
"A provocative and fascinating new book."--Los Angeles Review of Books
From the Inside Flap
“Here’s a book that would've split the sides of Thucydides. Wiener’s magical mystery tour of Cold War museums is simultaneously hilarious and the best thing ever written on public history and its contestation.“ —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz
“Jon Wiener, an astute observer of how history is perceived by the general public, shows us how official efforts to shape popular memory of the Cold War have failed. His journey across America to visit exhibits, monuments, and other historical sites, demonstrates how quickly the Cold War has faded from popular consciousness. A fascinating and entertaining book.” —Eric Foner, author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
"In How We Forgot the Cold War, Jon Wiener shows how conservatives tried—and failed—to commemorate the Cold War as a noble victory over the global forces of tyranny, a 'good war' akin to World War II. Displaying splendid skills as a reporter in addition to his discerning eye as a scholar, this historian's travelogue convincingly shows how the right sought to extend its preferred policy of 'rollback' to the arena of public memory. In a country where historical memory has become an obsession, Wiener’s ability to document the ambiguities and absences in these commemorations is an unusual accomplishment.” —Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
“In this terrific piece of scholarly journalism, Jon Wiener imaginatively combines scholarship on the Cold War, contemporary journalism, and his own observations of various sites commemorating the era to describe both what they contain and, just as importantly, what they do not. By interrogating the standard conservative brand of American triumphalism, Wiener offers an interpretation of the Cold War that emphasizes just how unnecessary the conflict was and how deleterious its aftereffects have really been.”—Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America
About the Author
Jon Wiener is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine and a contributing editor of The Nation. Among his books are Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (UC Press) and Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Power in the Ivory Tower.
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Remembrance of Things Past
By The Ginger Man
This book is a mixture of travelogue, history and polemic. Jon Weiner conducts the reader on a visit to virtually all US Cold War related monuments, museums and memorials. In doing so, he argues that those sites reflect political attempts to assure that some interpretations of the Cold War take precedence.
The primary battle is between conservatives who see the struggle between the US and USSR as an unavoidable final clash between good and evil, in which the men in white hats prevailed thanks to the leadership of Ronald Reagan. Interpretations from the center and left see a more nuanced struggle between nation states that, if it could not have been avoided, certainly could have been reduced in length and impact. Mainstream policymakers pursued goals of "containment" and deterrence" while conservatives argued for "rollback" and victory. Overall, suggests Weiner, "the Republican right lost all the big policy battles of the Cold War" as presidents from both parties rejected their arguments. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he argues, conservatives in congress began to make plans to establish their interpretation as the official memory of the Cold War.
Weiner crosses the country to find many of the 30 locations where parts of the dismantled Berlin Wall are displayed. He tells the story of the Victims of Communism Museum, authorized by Congress in 1993, but never constructed. He visits the Churchill Museum in Missouri and the blacklist exhibit at the Motion Picture Academy in Beverly Hills. Along the way, Weiner recounts events that were memorialized at each site and comments upon visitors and their reactions. One of his most unusual trips is to the Whitaker Chambers pumpkin patch National Historic Landmark in Maryland. This site commemorates the location of evidence used to convict Alger Hiss of espionage. The Landmark is not on the map, the area is not signed and Weiner finds, perhaps not surprisingly, that he is one of only two visitors to the Whitaker Chambers memorial that year.
There are some problems in this book. Weiner's political sympathies are not on the conservative side and are often on display as when he triumphantly informs the reader, "there seems to be nowhere in America where a history museum defends the blacklist or presents HUAC in a positive light." The author also has a tendency to present quotes from members of the public attending these sites as if such statements are revealing, if not definitive. Finally, the book moves a bit slowly.
On the positive side, I can't remember a more comprehensive effort to trace how memory has been made material through the often haphazard process of creating monuments. Weiner provides a map of 47 locations scattered from Northampton, Massachusetts (the Julie Nixon nuclear bunker), to the B Reactor in Washington, the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona and the Reagan monument in Grenada. One can argue whether the Private Presley exhibit at Graceland or the MacArthur Museum are, strictly speaking, Cold War memorials but Weiner is nothing if not inclusive. At times, he presents interesting arguments as when he wonders if the Alger Hiss evidence was forged and the typewriter that was used to create the documents is in the Nixon Museum.
How We Forgot the Cold War is actually about how a society remembers. The text is often polemical and the writing can be discursive. The book does, however, have both descriptive value and interest as an examination of the fragmented and not wholly disinterested process by which a free country decides how to create memory. Photos are often well chosen and helpful to the reader. I found the book flawed but often fascinating; an argument for Amazon to allow reviewers the use of half stars as I am left firmly between 2 and 3 stars on this one.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Can you win the war if you lose the Commemorative battle?
By Vanessa R. Schwartz
Jon Wiener, one of the foremost historians of post-war American culture at work today, has undertaken a journey across the American landscape to ask how and whether the triumphalist conservative narrative of American victory in the Cold War is being celebrated or even remembered at all. He finds pieces of the Berlin Wall in Vegas bathrooms, the site in Fulton Missouri where Churchill coined the term "Iron Curtain" devoted more to the Prime Minister's wartime heroics than to his Cold War rhetorical flair; he can't even reach the Whitaker Chambers farm where the "Pumpkin Papers," key items in the Alger Hiss case were hidden because of its overgrown state. Its condition suggests it is more ready to play the role of Halloween spooky farm than national commemorative site. What, he asks, does this tell us about what people think of the story we tell about the Cold War today?
Written with wit, an easy style and a provocative set of questions about the important role public landmarks, museums, movies and television play in history and memory, this book will intrigue amateur historians to set off across the country, will engender criticism from the protectors of the political Right's version of who won the Cold War and will stand as testament to how quickly attitudes about the past can outpace the memorials designed to preserve them.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Insightful Guide to an Overlooked Political Landscape
By Jeff Wasserstrom
Many of the best works of history and of journalism are driven by an effort by an author to figure out why something happened. But there are also excellent books in these fields that focus on trying to make sense of why something did not happen, even when it seems like it should have, that focus on Holmesian dogs that didn't bark in the night. That's the case with this latest impressive book by Jon Wiener, a specialist in American history who writes regularly for newspapers and is a contributing editor of The Nation.
In How We Forgot the Cold War, Wiener is fascinated by a conundrum: even though a lot of Americans seem to think that we "won" the Cold War and that Ronald Reagan deserves much of the credit for that imagined triumph, very few commemorative sites in the United States celebrate the "success" in question. Why, he asks, is there such a deep-rooted ambivalence about the Cold War? Why is it downplayed even at sites where you might expect it to loom large (even the Reagan Library doesn't pay it the attention you would assume it would)? Why do Americans seem so much more interested in revisiting other wars--even ones we clearly lost?
The reader is offered answers to these questions, but this is much more than just a rumination on remembering and forgetting and the politics of public history. Reading it also provides the pleasure that comes from being immersed in a work of high quality travel literature by a witty and informed person who has gone to and is skilled at describing intriguing places. Wiener criss-crossed the country, stopping in at a variety of sites, some of which you will wish you had been able to accompany him to, but others of which you're very happy just to be told about (places known for their ties to plutonium, for example). Wiener knows his history and his politics, but also his popular culture (as you'd expect from the author of works on John Lennon), and we see him bringing all those forms of expertise to bear in this entertaining and illuminating book.
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