Experimental Blog # 185

Quotations and notes from "The Cold War - A New History" by John Lewis Gaddis

"He{Stalin} acknowledged, in a wistful but revealing comment in 1947, that" {had}"Churchill delayed opening the second front in northern France by a year, the Red Army would have come to France < > {we} toyed with the idea of reaching Paris.""

"Atomic bombs were meant to be dropped, as soon as they were ready, on whatever enemy targets yet remained."
"Truman and his advisors < > encouraged Soviet military officers to tour the ruins of Hiroshima, and allowed them to witness the first postwar tests of the bomb, held in the Pacific in the summer of 1946."
"By 1959, he{Eisenhower} was insisting gloomily that if war came "you might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself.""!!

"The charges made against  Khrushchev" < > "on the day his Kremlin colleagues announced their intention to depose him{October 13, 1964}". " He was accused of rudeness, distraction, arrogance, incompetence, nepotism, megalomania, depression, unpredictability, and growing old."!!

On the night of May 9th, 1970, "unable to sleep, the president of the United States{Richard Nixon}, accompanied only by his valet and a driver, slipped out of the White House to try to reason with students maintaining a vigil in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Nixon was nervous to the point of incoherence, rambling on about Churchill, appeasement, surfing, football, his own environmental policies, and the advantages of traveling while young."

"Most experts would probably have agreed", in 1980, that "the global balance of power < > had been tilting in Moscow's favor through most of the 1970s." But "it has long since been clear - and should have been clearer at the time - that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies were on the path to decline, and that détente was concealing their difficulties."