Memoirs Of A Cold War Son

Introduction

Introduction I have been fighting the Second World War all my life. That is not what I expected to discover when I began this book. As a professional historian, I had thought I would compose a general account of the Cold War in the 1950s, spiced with occasional anecdotes to illustrate how memory affects my reading of history. But something happened as I began to write during a sabbatical leave in Paris, 1995–1996. Memory became more important to me than history, and this book became a memoir. I lived in Europe at both ends of what became a distinct historical period. I was a ninth grader in Paris, 1951–1952, at the start of America’s massive military build-up in Western Europe when nato’s young headquarters were in the City of Light. I was an army lieutenant in Germany, 1960–1961, during what turned out to be the last major European crisis of the Cold War. As I was reconstructing those times while sitting at my desk or walking around Paris, the Second World War kept appearing, summoned by memories and emotions that my professional training had taught me to mistrust as unscholarly. Although my father had been too old to serve, the war brought gloom to our house in Madison, Wisconsin. Dad had been to Europe several times before marrying. His study contained books in Latin, French, German, and Italian. There was a picture of the cathedral of Chartres, a Dürer engraving of Saint Jerome reading in his cell, a papal bull made from parchment, a small phonograph on which Dad played opera recordings by Enrico Caruso, Marcel Journet , Claudia Muzio, and Frieda Hempel. I blamed his unhappiness on Germany’s destruction of European things he treasured. But he was losing more than Europe. My mother had hung over the mantel a large watercolor of the Thames in London, yet she stared at the floor much of the time. “Your mother is sick, boys,” was about all Dad would tell my brother, John, and me, although I overheard him saying “nervous breakdown” on the telephone to close friends. He did not tell John and me that she was losing her mind. In those days mental illness was taboo, especially around children, and “crazy” was a cruel epithet for people whose state of mind, it was widely believed, was their own fault. I knew nothing about the alcoholism — not uncommon among hardscrabble ranchers in West Texas — that had killed her father when she was fifteen, about her unfulfilled undergraduate dream at Southern Methodist University of becoming an actress, about her feelings of intellectual inferiority as a faculty wife in a northern university , about her regret that she had no European experiences to share with Dad and his colleagues. In September 1939 the outbreak of war had extinguished Mom’s first opportunity to see Europe. Dad had won a Guggenheim Fellowship for research, and they would have left John and me with her mother in Haskell, Texas, for the year; John had just turned three, and I was two years old. Instead they took us in tow to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Dad did his research in the Widener Library. Back in Madison during the war, I did not understand that Mom was retreating before the combined forces of two rambunctious boys, family bookkeeping, wartime rationing and scrap collecting, neighborhood peacekeeping, a temperamental husband, and volunteer work, such as reading the papers of GIs who took extension courses from the University of Wisconsin. I knew only that she was badly wounded and that I could not make her well. I blamed Hitler and the neighborhood bully for this. Hitler, I had heard, killed the sick. xvi : Introduction As a boy, I did not distinguish between these two wars that my family fought simultaneously. My brother and I practiced tactics for defending our home against invaders, who were German more often than Japanese. In the gutter, we burned leaves or old paint buckets to lay down smoke screens. We made a mortar out of an old bike pump and cherry bombs. We put our front line at the low wall near the sidewalk, booby traps at every door, obstacles on the stairway up to the second floor, trip wire outside our parents’ bedroom at the head of the stairs, last ditch around the double bunk in our bedroom down the hall. Movies, comic books, and neighborhood...