Losing Our Souls: The American Experience in the Cold War

Pessen seeks to show that the arrogance of U.S. anti-Soviet policy during the Cold War, combined with the ``essential recklessness and mendacity'' of the domestic anticommunist crusade, corupted the moral fiber of our nation. He maintains that Soviet conduct, reprehensible though it may have been at times, never justified such behavior on our government's part as the numerous plots to assassinate foreign heads of state. The study offers an unusually lucid account of how the ``containment'' policy was hammered out in 1950 and codified in National Security Council Memorandum No. 68, which became the secret blueprint for anti-Soviet policy and ushered in the arms race and its attendant terrors. Pessen expertly traces the development of a Cold War political atmosphere in the U.S. that was ``congenial to the rise of men whose chief claim to prominence was their ability to exploit the nation's fear of communism,'' including leaders such as J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and Richard M. Nixon. The author's points are familiar, yet the cumulative effect of his argument is powerful and thought-provoking. The late Pessen ( Jacksonian America ) was a professor of history at the City University of New York. (Nov.)