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The American Paradox
A History of the United States Since 1945

v4.0 Steven M. Gillon
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1.9 Selected Reading

  1. Robert J. McMahon provides a concise, brief overview of the period in The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (2003). Two books by Melvyn P. Leffler are essential: A Preponderance of Power (1992) and For the Soul of Mankind (2008). John L. Gaddis provides the most up-to-date synthesis in The Cold War: A New History (2006). The Cold War from the Soviet Union’s perspective, using recently declassified materials, is contained in Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (1996), by Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov. Robert Dallek offers an alternative view of missed opportunities in The Lost Peace (2010). Odd Arne Westad documents the impact of the U.S.-Soviet competition on the Third World in his Bancroft Prize–winning book, The Global Cold War (2007). He offers a global perspective in The Cold War (2017).

  2. Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound (2002) is a good account of the im- mediate postwar period. John L. Gaddis, in his Bancroft Prize–winning book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War (1972), illuminates the many factors—domestic, political, and bureaucratic—that influenced American foreign policy regarding the Soviet Union. In Debating the Origins of the Cold War (2002), Ralph Levering examines the beginnings of the conflict from both the Soviet and American perspectives. Lloyd C. Gardner’s Architects of Illusion (1970) has biographical vignettes of America’s leading foreign policymakers and explores mistakes that contributed to the Cold War.

  3. George Mazuzan and J. Samuel Walker collected a wealth of information for their book on nuclear regulation and the Atomic Energy Commission, Controlling the Atom (1985). The part played by the Soviet military in maintaining control of the Eastern bloc nations is the focus of Christopher Jones’s Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe (1981), and Peter Grose’s Operation Roll-back (2000) discusses America’s secret programs to encourage resistance behind the Iron Curtain.

  4. Lawrence Wittner focuses on the Greek civil war in American Intervention in Greece (1982). Howard Jones examines the reasons for the development of the Truman Doctrine, its application in the Greek civil war, and its long- lasting effect on American foreign policy in A New Kind of War (1989). Michael Hogan’s The Marshall Plan (1987) is a good one-volume history of that ambitious initiative. Imanuel Wexler’s The Marshall Plan Revisited (1983) offers a more critical analysis of the plan. Timothy P. Ireland examines the formation of NATO in Creating the Entangling Alliance (1981). A 1989 conference at the Truman Library on the birth of NATO and its first decade of operation served as the basis for editors Francis Heller and John Gillingham’s work, NATO (1992).

  5. Bruce R. Kuniholm’s The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East (1980) has good material on the formation of Israel, as does Paul Merkley’s American Presidents, Religion, and Israel (2004). The division of Germany is the subject of Carolyn Eisenberg’s Drawing the Line (1996), while W. R. Smyser’s From Yalta to Berlin (2000) traces the history of the German question from the division to the collapse of communism. A detailed history of the Berlin blockade can be found in Thomas Parrish’s Berlin in the Balance (1998). The history of the National Security Council, from its inception by Truman as a channel for collective advice to its massive expansion as an institution that dictates foreign policy, can be found in John Prados’s Keeper of the Keys (1991).

  6. George Kennan’s American Diplomacy (exp. ed., 1985) and Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation (1970) offer intriguing insider accounts of the early Cold War, while John L. Harper compares these two men to FDR in American Visions of Europe (1994). Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s The Wise Men (1986) provides incisive profiles of Truman’s advisors and their impact on American foreign policy. John Lewis Gaddis  chronicles Kennan’s life in his Pulitzer Prize winning, George Kennan: An American Life (2012).