Someone Is Out to Get Us: A Not So Brief History of Cold War Paranoia and Madness

Novelist and documentarian Brown (Ring Force) delivers a vivid revisionist history of the Cold War, redefining the period from the end of WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall as a “compendium of misconceptions, fallacies, frauds, comedies, tragedies, lies, and deceits.” Arguing that the Soviet Union was much weaker than the American public was led to believe, Brown details how the Cold War distorted U.S. politics. His examples include FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s creation of an “illegal” surveillance state; the laundering of the reputations of Nazi doctors and scientists so they could research mind control and biological warfare for the U.S. military; McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist; the “domino theory” that led to the Vietnam War; the “unconscionable waste” of the “heedless” nuclear arms race; and the CIA’s destabilization of democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Iran. After paying close attention to the first two decades of the Cold War, Brown breezes through the rest of the 1960s and the 1970s before crediting “once-in-a-millennium” Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for thawing relations with the West by ending the arms race. A closer look at what was happening behind the Iron Curtain would help Brown to make his case that the U.S.S.R. wasn’t the threat it seemed to be, but his selective portrait of U.S. government misbehavior will shock many readers and confirm others’ worst suspicions. (Nov.)