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  • Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy by Ned O’Gorman
  • Timothy Barney
Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy. By Ned O’Gorman. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press; 2012. pp. xi + 321. $59.95 cloth.

In February 1952, Congressman O. K. Armstrong of Missouri was invited to give a keynote speech at a convention called the Conference on Psychological Strategy in the Cold War, where he declared a maxim that, by that time, likely did not raise many eyebrows: “Our primary weapons will not be guns, but ideas . . . and truth itself.” Rep. Armstrong spoke from experience—a few months before, he had made national headlines at a peace treaty signing in San Francisco by blindsiding Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko with a map locating every secret Gulag prison camp. Calling the Soviet Union a slave state through international media was certainly one provocative way to wage a war of informational weaponry. For Armstrong, the Cold War was not simply about instrumental goals, it also was essentially performative, steeped in aesthetics and judged in the arena of public opinion, not just State Department conference rooms. That performance, though, also was self-directed, as such practices oriented strategists and their audiences toward accepting a particular postwar American identity. The Cold War, in short, involved specific ways of being and acting in the world, an important claim that forms the basis of Ned O’Gorman’s excellent Spirits of the Cold War.

O’Gorman’s “spirits” in the title are not some kind of metaphysical entity—they are worldviews, born of discourse, and part of America’s “social imaginary.” Such worldviews “are not just outlooks, they entail . . . self-images, or identities” (236). By toggling between these outward and inward perspectives, O’Gorman makes a significant contribution to critical scholarship on Cold War security ideologies, building on Frank Ninkovich’s [End Page 202] notion of “image-based internationalism,” which emphasized the role of symbols and the projection of American power in foreign affairs, and John Lewis Gaddis’s arguments about the elevation of “means over ends” in Cold War strategy. At one point, O’Gorman uncovers an Eisenhower-era Department of Defense report that declares these developments plainly: “What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the enemy thinks we have. The central objective of a deterrent weapons system is, thus, psychological. The mission is persuasion” (169). However, one of O’Gorman’s key contributions is his assertion that these worldviews were not just tactics for manipulation—Cold War strategies corresponded to deeply held and shared beliefs about the world. Recall that Rep. Armstrong did not just believe he had “ideas as weapons,” he also believed he had “truth” on his side. In O’Gorman’s words, “strategy entails reckoning with a nation’s ‘best interests.’ It seeks to organize a nation for successful being in the world, however, and by whomever, that is envisioned” (22). Strategy, then, is much more pervasive (and potentially explosive) because it aligns so closely with value and ideology.

O’Gorman’s four strategic worldviews (stoicism, evangelicalism, adventurism, and romanticism) efficiently form the basis for the book’s arrangement. The classic strategic doctrines of containment, liberation, massive retaliation, and deterrence are still rendered significant, but they are decentered from their usual places of prominence, and that is refreshing for readers burned out on rehashing the same old tried-and-true terms—especially those easy binaries of realism and idealism that are often the “bread-and-butter” of foreign policy studies. O’Gorman articulates his worldviews through particular public personalities: usual suspects like President Eisenhower, George Kennan, and John Foster Dulles get new recastings, while C. D. Jackson, a Time/Life executive, psychological strategist, and wordsmith for Eisenhower, gets elevated to this rarefied company. And while scholars like Ninkovich would trace the security doctrines of the Cold War back to Wilsonianism, the intellectual lineages of O’Gorman’s four personalities go deeper. Spirits of the Cold War features the Bergsons, the Clausewitzes, the Webers, the Freuds, and even the Lipsiuses. O’Gorman...

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