For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (review)

The year 2007 was a memorable one for Cold War scholarship. Among the outstanding books on the Cold War published that year were Wilson D. Miscamble's From Roosevelt to Truman, which at long last has replaced John Lewis Gaddis's classic The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972) as the most important book on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union in the 1940s; Vladimir M. Zubok's A Failed Empire, the most valuable study yet to appear of Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War; and Jeremi Suri's Henry Kissinger and the American Century, an unusually balanced and insightful work on Kissinger's contributions to international relations in the 1960s and 1970s. These three books belong on any list of the most illuminating studies of the Cold War.

Despite significant shortcomings, Melvyn D. Leffler's For the Soul of Mankind belongs in this distinguished company. Like Leffler's two other major books, The Elusive Quest (1979) and A Predominance of Power (1992), his new study is ambitiously conceptualized, prodigiously researched, and vigorously argued. Perhaps more to his credit because of how hard it is for scholars to change, the new book is much more clearly and engagingly written than his previous books. Indeed, the writing is often eloquent and pithy, two adjectives seldom used when describing scholarly discourse these days. The book also presents policymakers as full human beings, deserving praise as well as criticism, much more effectively than Leffler has ever done before.

An example of Leffler's extraordinary writing is his summary of the "remarkable relationship" between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan: "They had shared a sense of optimism, an appreciation of human agency, and a sense of destiny. They had brought warmth, humor, and candor to their interactions. They could listen to one another and learn from one another. They understood the principles that separated them and appreciated the values that united them, most particularly their aversion to nuclear weapons and their yearning for peace" (p. 422).

The book's scope is well described in the titles of its five long chapters. These are "The Origins of the Cold War, 1945-48: Stalin and Truman"; "The Chance for Peace, 1953-54: Malenkov and Eisenhower"; "Retreat from Armageddon, 1962-65: Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Johnson"; "The Erosion of Detente, 1975-80: Brezhnev and Carter"; and "The End of the Cold War, 1985-90: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush." The basic argument is that U.S. and Soviet leaders, beginning with Joseph Stalin and Harry Truman and extending through Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter, were unable to bridge the ideological and other chasms that separated their two countries. In contrast, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush were able to do so, spurred by Gorbachev's leadership, thus ending the Cold War.

This summary does not begin to do justice to the subtlety and complexity of Leffler's argument. Every chapter—especially the last four—deserves a careful reading both for the development of Leffler's generally persuasive argument and for the numerous quotations from U.S. and Soviet-bloc officials. Many of these quotations, derived from extensive research in Western sources and in recently published Eastern-bloc materials, will be new even to specialists in ColdWar history. Only the first chapter compares poorly with other outstanding works on the subject—notably Miscamble's From Roosevelt to Truman.

Leffler is especially to be praised for giving weight to ideology as a cause of the Cold War in the mid-1940s and as a major reason for its continuation until the late 1980s. The book begins with an apt quotation from former president George H. W. Bush in 2004: "The Cold War was a struggle for the very soul of mankind. It was a struggle for a way of life" (p. 3). This view is similar to my favorite one...