Heritage Of Fear: Illusion And Reality In The Cold War
Here we have revisionist cold-war history with a vengeance, covering the entire period since 1917. The general theme: we do not have, and never have had, anything to fear from the Soviet Union or world communism; what we see there is but a mirror reflecting our own anxieties. The villain of the piece is Harry Truman, and the cold war the result of his poor decisions and misguided policies, unfortunately carried on by his benighted successors. There is, undoubtedly, some substance to the charge that American policy has at times been warped by the inordinate fear of communism, and parts of Miller's narrative hit a number of nails on the head. But the presentation here of Soviet and Western policies, especially in regard to Eastern Europe and the Third World, is so full of exaggeration, distortion and simplification as to deflate the argument and defeat the author's own purposes.
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