Memoirs Of A Cold War Son

Foreword

Foreword albert e. stone Gaines Post, Jr.’s Memoirs of a Cold War Son is the twentieth volume in Singular Lives: The Iowa Series in North American Autobiography. All autobiographies are unique, yet they share common literary features and conventions. This workisno exception. Post’s evolving self is shown as an actor in, or a witness to, significant public events and processes of the Cold War. The accepted term for such a literary convention is memoir , but pigeonholing this book as such can also be misleading. Post’s story asserts throughout allegiance to the forces of time, place, event, and institution as determinants of his autobiographical identity. History dictates the terms on which the immature teenager living in Paris in 1951 with his once-motherless family turns into the adult Army officer in Germany caught in the Berlin airlift crisis of 1961. Moreover, the creator of both selves—the insecure son and the first lieutenant—is the much older and wiser college professorhistorian writing in nineties California. Post is, therefore, doubly caught and at the same time doubly liberated. Cold War history has molded him in essential ways that are honestly and sensitively chronicled here. But the maturing author makes sure that Gaines Post is always at the center of the story. Whether as actor or as witness, it’s his story, no matter how representative of his Silent Generation he becomes. In this sense the book becomes a confession as well as a memoir, a revelation of innerness. Readers should, therefore, be careful not to confuse this autobiographer with biographers working the same territory such as Stephen Ambrose or David McCullough. Nor should they assume a stance of undiscriminating acceptance of this very personal Cold War history. Even as memoir, the truths autobiography affords meld both external event with internal emotion and expression. Nonetheless, historical event and personal experience move inexorably forward toward the remembering author. Temporal momentum is sometimes discontinuous, often overlapping, but also allows private life to run on a separate track from public. Post is sensitive to such shifting relationships. Though privileging war and presidential elections, for instance, he interweaves private concerns, like the psychologically vulnerable mother who is the chief emotional reality in his formative experience. In both narrative streams, Post establishes connections and patterns. One instance of significant overlap involves the word “bully.” To the timid and vulnerable boy, the Madison neighborhood bully is an unnamed but omnipresent threat. On the wider screen of history, “bully” denotes sucessively Hitler, Senator Joe McCarthy, and finally Krushchev. These public figures define, in mysterious ways, his mother’s lingering bouts of crippling depression . Other sequences of public-private experience arrange themselves as paired opposites to be reconciled by the growing youth: northern boyhood in academic Madison vs his family’s southern roots; a reserved historian father and a lively but fragile mother; Europe vs America; World War II (the “good war” even in the wiser writer’s opinion) and the Cold War (“the war that wasn’t”); adolescent agnosticism vs patriotic military service. Of this pattern of contraries , Post observes, Madison, Paris, Haskell. If these places were people they would not stay together for long at the same party. . . . the Left Bank, West Texas, the University of Wisconsin, the Second World War, my parents: this chorus guided me through the fifties believing in fair play, diplomacy, and the long term, all of which were contrary to the nation’s official version of the Cold War. x : Foreword This pattern produces a revealing credo and apologia for himself and his era when Post next observes: “my generation has been called ‘silent,’ as if we simply ducked and held our tongues. . . . In fact, we had a more dynamic collective personality than we have ever been given credit for. Our ambivalence offered us both protection and maneuvering room, in an unprecedented state of war. . . . We began to dissent without leaving home or renouncing institutions.” Such meditations of a one-time “Cold War agnostic” do not affirm a final self. Indeed, Post is always seeking “a best self” within and around intransigent circumstances. This motivates him throughout: from West High to Cornell (where rowing and ROTC meant as much as grades and Phi Beta Kappa); from Fort Sill (where his officer class contained but a single black) to Giessen, Germany, tending nuclear warheads and escorting German and Austrian generals about the field...