At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War (review)

I confess that I was prepared to dislike this book when I began reading it. The Cold War memoir has become its own literary genre and, as such, suffers from the same kind of misguided triumphalism and displaced nostalgia that characterize nineteenth-century British travel writing. Thomas C. Reed—who was Secretary of the Air Force under President Gerald Ford, later headed the National Reconnaissance Office, and was a senior adviser during the Reagan administration—is certainly a Cold Warrior, and the preface to the book by former President George H. W. Bush seems a sure warning of what is to come. But At the Abyss is in fact well worth reading—not for its predictably rosy, retrospective account of "how the Cold War was won" but for an insight into the mindset of those who were waging the war at the time.

That said, Reed as a memoirist labors under the disadvantage of those who hold top-secret security clearances. He is largely unaware of how many secrets have already become available in the open literature. The book could also have used a more careful editor and fact-checker. To note just a few examples, the story of the origins of the U.S. missile program appears in the text no fewer than three times; J. Robert Oppenheimer was not the director of Los Alamos in 1949 when he recommended against proceeding with the hydrogen bomb; and the 1945 Smyth Report was released by the U.S. government for the purpose of setting strict limits on the information available about the bomb and was not "a road map that proved to be very useful to the early proliferators" (p. 105).

True to the genre, the book begins with a veritable Cliffs Notes of Communist atrocities, as though the West's half-century-long battle against Soviet and Chinese Communist tyranny needed further justification. After that, however, Reed's memoir becomes interesting. (One tip-off actually comes early on, in Bush's introduction: "Although I occasionally disagreed with Tom's interpretation of events or judgment of people . . .")

Memoirs are traditionally an occasion for retired officials to settle scores with their enemies, but Reed goes further than most and is surprisingly outspoken for a former Air Force secretary and campaign adviser to Ronald Reagan. Anger begins to seep into the book with Vietnam. Reed claims that Navy pilot James Stockdale told his men they were about to engage in "a replay of Pearl Harbor" (p. 150) when they launched a "retaliatory" attack on North Vietnam after the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964. Reed declares flatly of that incident, which became the casus belli for U.S. involvement in Vietnam: "No North Vietnamese PT boats attacked the Maddox or the Turner Joy" (p. 148). Stockdale, who later became Ross Perot's vice-presidential running mate, is the hero of Reed's piece, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara—who tells a very different version of this story in the documentary film The Fog of War—is one of the villains.

Other villains, from other wars, also populate the book, including Nancy Reagan, Michael Deaver, and James Baker—indeed, a goodly number of those who were close to Reagan and whom Reed collectively blames for ultimately squeezing him out of the president's good graces. But Reed's particularly enmity is reserved for those he calls the "wise men," that is, the "visually challenged intelligence counselors, dreamy Nobel laureates, Soviet-trusting cabinet officials, and rigid bureaucrats" (p. 141). Reed gives himself and his fellow Cold Warriors credit for undoing the damage done by those who, he argues, lacked not only vision but also common sense.

Some readers may wonder, however, whether Reed himself has a grip on reality when he fantasizes, as he does in the book, about the neglected opportunity to establish a cordon sanitaire of tactical nuclear "backpack" bombs along the Chinese-Vietnamese border at the height of...