Andrew S.

Terrell
Policy History
Spring 2010

Approaching Cold War Origins Historiography

One of the most contentious debates among historians of the 20th century is centered on

the immediate post-WWII years and the origins of the Cold War. The historiography of the

1945-1953 period developed and evolved alongside the traditional exceptionalist interpretations

of American endeavors, notably during the 1950s; changing domestic situations and attitudes,

best mated with the 1960s; and, for lack of a better word, an enlightenment and appreciate for

larger issues at play during the 1970s and 1980s. Of these three periods came three schools of

thought: the traditional/orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist. The traditional, or orthodox,

school implicated the Soviet Union as the aggressor at the start of the Cold War and wrote in

defense of American exceptionalism and policies. The revisionists, however, were more critical

of American motives noting a long history of economic imperialist-like policies especially since

the 1890s. Post-revisionists, tended to accept parts of both of the former theses, but also

considered macro issues such as transnational movements when seeking a consensus over the

origins of the Cold War. These three schools remain in the 21st century at odds with each other.

Debates among the different schools, however, are what keep history as a discipline interesting

and credible. As we move further into this century, one has to wonder what new approaches and

analyses will be investigated over the Cold War years. For our purposes, however, this essay will

survey how and why scholarship over the origins of the Cold War evolved the way it did. One

maintains that the largest reason for the three schools’ separation, evidence, and conclusions has

most to deal with the periods in which the authors wrote.

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 The Orthodox scholars were the pioneers in the history accounts of the early Cold War

years. The large unifying theme of most memoirs, monographs, and articles of this school

during the 1950s and throughout the 1960s was of Soviet aggression as a central cause for the

Cold War. Because of Soviet perceived motives, the United States worked in reactionary manner

implementing policies in response to Soviet expansion. In a way this school not only placed the

Soviet Union as the primary aggressor at the onset of the Cold War, but also suggested that

America was left with no choice but to become the deemed champion of anti-Soviet, anti-

Communist forces. One reason such a theme was popular was because of limited resources to

counter assertions made in many policymakers’ memoirs. Another reason such a thesis and

consensus was the domestic climate under McCarthyism. Americans were pushed to believe

their system was exceptional and in the right. The Cold War consensus among the public

essentially gave policymakers infinite, unquestioned authority and allowed for the rise of such

extreme nationalist movements such as McCarthyism. To speak or write negatively about the

United States was taboo and likely to invite the offender to a session of the House Committee on

Un-American Activities (HUAC). The public sincerely believed that the United States had won

a good war and that spreading American ideals throughout the world was our moral obligation. 1

It is not this essay’s purpose to ridicule nor downplay the importance of first hand

accounts. Nonetheless, it does seem necessary to point out the possible over extolling and

apologetic nature of memoirs written immediately after incidents. Because there was insufficient

data to support or contradict retellings inside policymaker memoirs, many assertions and

1See J. Samuel Walker, “Historians and Cold War Origins: The New Consensus,” in Gerald K.
Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review
(Wesport: Greenwood Press, 1981) for a very thorough survey of the field as of early 1981.

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narratives were held completely factual. Arguably, there can be many portions of memoirs that

are indeed factual in nature, but the reader must be careful to check later as documents are

released to support everything. Because documentation was not readily available in the 1950s,

memoirs of former diplomats and policymakers composed much of the early literature on the

origins of the Cold War.

Harry S. Truman published the first volume of his Memoirs in 1955. His memoir was in

response to much of the ridicule received during his early administration. From the onset of the

narrative, Truman tried to show how desperate times were when Franklin Roosevelt died.

Truman also touched briefly on what he deemed the resurgence of Congressional opposition and

power in the year after the conclusion of WWII. Throughout his narrative, Truman asserted how

he had to overcome personal challenges to fill the chair left by FDR. What Truman was

attempting to show to the public in his memoirs, was a story of triumphant growth in office and

explain how difficult decisions were thrust on him over night. Of course, having followed such a

popular president, Truman was not considered on par with FDR, even inadequate. So his

memoirs both served the historical community and his own political agenda. This does not deter

from its importance, if anything it became customary for presidents to publish their own

memoirs after their administration. These first hand accounts serve many purposes, and tend to

be read more than historical monographs as well. At the time, mid 1950s, however, this was

what was available to the public, and those curious about events surely were shocked to see how

much the president had to endure early in his administration. Public documents were not yet

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released in bulk, and these memoirs served as part of the first wave of scholarship in the

orthodox school.2

Written by author “X” in 1946 and published at length as the “long telegram,” in Foreign

Affairs in 1947 was George Kennan’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Though not published

as a monograph, this article, more than anything before it influenced anti-Soviet apprehensions.

Written from his first hand experience with the Soviet Union as a diplomat since its revolution,

Kennan sought to write on diplomacy from the outside in hopes of influencing future decisions.

The American public at the time, again, wanted to believe in their leaders and from the long

telegram came part of the Cold War consensus. Kennan asserted that the rising conflict with the

Soviet Union gave the United States an opportunity to become the global hegemon and lead the

free world. Nationalist trends that followed fed off such sentiments and historical scholarship

also alluded to and built off of Kennan’s strong assertions. A few years later, Kennan published

his own Memoirs in 1967 that narrated his time from 1925 to 1950. He furthered attempted to

show how influential he was during his years in Washington, but by the time of its publishing,

such first accounts were not as popular as they were two decades prior. However, his tone also

changed in his memoirs to a more realistic portrayal the world at the end of WWII. Of greatest

interest to readers in 1967 was his admission that the United States was technically incapable of

“conceiving and promulgating and long-term consistent policy toward areas remote from its own

territory.” The Middle East and Southeast Asia were hot topics by 1967 in the public, and

Kennan was suggesting that the country was incapable of sustaining policies for the benefit of

2Harry S. Truman, The Memoirs of Harry S. Truman: Volume I Year of Decisions 1945,
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955); Harry S. Truman, The Memoirs of Harry S. Truman:
Volume II Years of Trial and Hope, 1946-53, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1956).

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societies outside of its sphere of influence.3 What we see from these memoirs by Truman and

Kennan is how influential they were to the historical field. Whether everything within was

precise and accurate is debatable from future document releases, but largely, the orthodox school

began with memoirs from policymakers and only later did professional historians join in.

Historians such as Herbert Feis and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. continued the focus early

memoirs in the 1950s and 1960s. To these historians, much like the policymakers before them,

the Soviet Union was the culprit behind the outbreak of the Cold War. Feis was convinced that

during WWII the Soviets already began their expansionist trends and were seeking to incite

world-wide revolutions. For this reason, more than any other, the American response and

retaliation before 1953 was warranted. Schelesinger, Jr. went so far as to assert that the Cold

War was the “brave and essential response of free men to a communist aggression.” The Cold

War Consensus was exacerbated and expanded as historians joined the band wagon for anti-

Soviet attitudes. So why then did the consensus break apart so quickly? Was it because of the

extremes exerted by McCarthyism? Was it an inevitable conclusion of a manipulative era?

These questions in themselves helped spark a reinvestigation of the origins of the Cold War. In

essence, if the Government was willing to align itself with zealots in HUAC, then what else

could Washington be hiding. This was the root of curiosity that created the revisionist school of

scholarship.4

3X. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, No. 4 (July, 1947), 566-582; George
Kennan, Memoirs: 1925-1950, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1967).
4See Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War they Waged and the Peace they Sought,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Origins of the Cold
War,” Foreign Affairs 46, No. 1 (October, 1967), 22-52.

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 For the most part, historians and political scientists throughout the McCarthy years and

early 1960s saw no reason to challenge what seemed to be a consensus in scholarship over the

Cold War’s origins. However, in 1959, William Appleman Williams published The Tragedy of

American Diplomacy. To Williams, the United States was an economic, “open door,” imperial

entity pushing for world markets. The Cold War was part of the expansion of capitalist motives

and necessities to maintain American economic prominence. Williams was alone initially in his

conclusions, and criticized heavily. Placing the blame for the outbreak of the Cold War on the

shoulders of the United States was unpatriotic, even treasonous at the time. Slowly, throughout

the tumultuous Vietnam War years, other scholars began to reevaluate their former beliefs. Of

great interest to the revisionist was the Atomic Bomb decision, capitalist economic expansion,

and the assertions that the Soviet Union was no legitimate threat to the United States even in

1945. They blamed Truman heavily for abandoning FDR’s relationship with Stalin and the

conciliatory policies towards the Soviet Union at large. Containment policies pushed for the

wars in Korea and Vietnam, which became quagmires in the eyes of the American public (and

politicians for that matter). Revisionists published amid the early years of government

disillusionment in the United States. Lloyd Gardner in Architects of Illusion (1970) went so far

as to contend that the United States was, in 1945, the largest and strongest power in the world

and should have shown more compassion in policies to the Soviet Union who had lost heavily in

WWII.5

5William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York: WW Norton
and Co, 1959); Lloyd Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign
Policy, 1941-49, (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970).

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 The debate over whether presidential power and policies were carried over between FDR

and Truman was also a heavy point of contention for revisionists. Gar Alperovitz in 1965

published Atomic Diplomacy, and from the onset challenged the accepted view of Harry Truman

sharing the same policies as FDR. He believed the Truman launched his own foreign policy

initiative, perhaps at the request and pressure from his advisors, that aimed to reduce Soviet

influence in Europe and Asia. As the title suggests, the atomic bomb was also the focus of a

heated debate among historians at the time, and frankly, persists well into the 21st century. He

was among the first scholars to suggest the bombs dropped on Japan were not meant entirely, if

even at all, to end the war sooner. Rather, they were to intimidate the Soviet Union by revealing

our new scientific marvel. In retrospect, this was a valid point at the time. His reasoning

included citations and estimations of the intelligence community who were as shocked as the

American public when the Soviets detonated their first bomb in 1949 years ahead of

expectations.6

Walter LaFeber in America, Russia, and the Cold War, concurred with much of

Alperovitz in 1967. He believed the quick decay of relations between the United States and the

Soviet Union was because of decades of hostilities from Washington towards the Bolshevik

regime. He also advanced Williams’ thesis that America sought a global economic system

mirroring our own. All along, LaFeber believed, the United States sought to overexert the Soviet

economy and force its demise. What was new with LaFeber’s work was the admission that

postwar foreign policies had followed a similar trend from Truman to LBJ: containment at all

6 Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and
the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, (New York: Random House, 1965).

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cost.7 The revisionist school slowly gained more credence as the disillusionment of the

government continued through the latter 1960s. Historians, like average citizens, were forced to

rethink and reexamine held conceptions of what their government was involved in.

Once both schools developed and expanded by the 1970s, the debates expanded into each

school, especially in the revisionist camp. Michael Leigh published the prominent article in

1974 asking whether there was any consensus among revisionists. While maintaining difference

within the school itself, Leigh concluded that their conclusions were largely similar and not as

different as the orthodox scholars. So the majority of the scholarly debate remained between

revisionists and orthodox traditionalists. The questions and assertions surrounded who (the US

or the USSR) deserved the blame for being more aggressive in the post-WWII years, was

American foreign policy driven by idealism as spoken of during Wilson and FDR’s speeches, or

part of a capitalist expansion, and whether Stalin legitimately sought to expand or was just

setting up what defenses he could muster in the post-WWII years?

Gabriel Kolko, in his 1968 monograph, The Politics of War, asserted that the main

characteristic of the United States followed its aims to expand and promote a global capitalist

system and that policymakers were subservient to big business interests. However, the orthodox

school rebuked such beliefs. They countered famously in 1982 with Thomas Hammond’s

Witnesses to the Origins of the Cold War, by looking at the Soviet system and concluded

communism was infallible and would inevitably decline because of lacking competition.

7Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966, (New York: John Wiley and
Sons, 1967).

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Furthermore, they maintained for communism to survive it would have to expand aggressively

which coincided with the perceived psychology of Stalin.8

In the debate over motives of policymakers, traditionalist believed foreign policy was

geared toward securing international cooperation (as demonstrated in the Korean War and the

United Nations success). In doing so, the new international system could maintain and promote

the welfare of member states in the UN. However, revisionists maintained this was all

superficial idealism attempting to mask the supremacy of capitalist expansion again following

Williams’ thesis from 1959. The thesis on American exceptionalism and idealistic-promotions

faltered heavily during the Vietnam years and fell apart largely in the aftermath of the Watergate

exposing. The third school of post-revisionism would branch off here and tend to agree with the

revisionists.9

Stalin was also a center for large debate. The lack of Soviet archives only exacerbated

discourse. Revisionists served as the apologists for Stalin and the Soviet Union, for they saw

Stalin as a leader pushed into difficult decision making. Lloyd Gardner and Kolko both asserted

that Stalin tended to accept capitalist encroachment, even with the Marshall Plan. Furthermore,

revisionists saw the Eastern Europe occupation as a reaction to American economic and

militaristic aggression. However, orthodox historians were quick to point out how Stalin was not

a conservative, or even moderate leader. They saw the formation of the East European bloc as a

8 Gabiel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and the United States Foreign Policy 1943-1945,
(New York: Random House, 1968); Thomas T. Hammond, “Introduction: the Great Debate over
the Origins of the Cold War,” in Thomas T. Hammond, ed., Witnesses to the Origins of the Cold
War, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 1-9.
9Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1960), 65-70.

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land defense system from future invasions, and even this was a mere excuse for Stalin to exercise

additional authority and dominion. 10

Postrevisionism began to show up in journals and publishing presses in the mid 1970s.

Scholars of this school tend to pick portions of the orthodox and revisionist school and defend

them, or add in other elements to advance historical scholarship. Postrevisionists tended to

identify areas of blame on both the United States and the Soviet Union. They were critical of

American economic expansion and interventions in the third world, yet defend American policies

in Europe. John Lewis Gaddis summed it up in his 1983 article in Diplomatic History by stating

that the goal of the postrevisionist school is to reach “a third stage, beyond orthodoxy and

revisionism, in the historiography of the period.” Essentially, Gaddis, one of the prominent Cold

War historians, sought to create new perspectives and levels of analysis throughout the Cold War

era, including its origins. Gaddis himself asserted that domestic economic interest were not a

driving force in American foreign policy, yet concedes there might have been some discussions

over a fear of another postwar depression. Without full access to Soviet archives in the 1980s,

Gaddis also criticized revisionists who believes Stalin was eager to work in cooperative efforts

with the United States. Gaddis went so far as to say the “primary cause of the Cold War was

Stalin’s ill-defined ambition, his determination to seek security in such a way as to leave little or

none for other actors in the international arena.” Other postrevisionists defended American

initiatives by showing how many other states were concerned with Soviet directives in the post-

WWII era. Revisionists sought to expose the Cold War consensus as a manipulation of the

10Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: the World and the United States
Foreign Policy 1945-1954, (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 619, 710-717; J.L. Richardson,
“Cold War Revisionism, A Critique,” World Politics 24, No. 4, (July, 1972), 587-589.

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people by Washington, but postrevisionists had issue with this simplification as well.

Postrevisionists, including Gaddis, believed public opinion against the Soviet Union was

founded long before the post-WWII era and that the public and members of Congress sought a

shift toward containment even before Truman did.11

Most important of the late post-revisionist school, is the implementation of

multidisciplinary models and levels of analysis. Psychology, Political Science, Sociology,

Anthropology, each discipline can be found in many post revisionist publications. The benefits

include more comprehensive illustrations of the minds of policymakers, the public and the

Soviets; new insight into policy analysis formerly overlooked or understudied in the historical

community; and the integration of different types of history into one school, at least when

approaching the origins of the Cold War. Post revisionists accept international trends such as

globalization and the global market system as viable reasons for what is perceived as a capitalist

economic empire by revisionists. Transnational cultural movements and civil and human rights

iniatives and movements were also investigated thoroughly for the first time in the latter 1970s.

The revisionists writing in the mid 1960s, as well as the 1970s and forward postrevisionists had

resources unavailable to the older orthodox historians. The Foreign Relations of the United

States volumes first appeared in the mid 1960s for example. Presidential Library and millions of

formerly classified documents invited the younger generations of historians. This is not to say

that all historians, even in the same school came to the same interpretive conclusions. Post

11 John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1972); Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar
American National Security Policy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Gaddis, We
Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Gaddis, “The
Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 7, No.
3 (Summer, 1983), 171-181.

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revisionist Melvyn Leffler asserted the beginning years of conflict after WWII were largely in

response to American policies, not Soviet; he saw the Soviets like the revisionists did as

defensive actors who eventually had enough. Bottom up and new top down approaches revealed

insight into policymaking in the post-WWII era formerly unexplored. Agencies were assigned

blame, possibly even more so than revisionists had done in the wake of Watergate. Localized

historical analysis seemed to be blending with international relations as a field, and cultural or

societal movements behind the Iron Curtain revealed that social historians and sociologists had

so much to identify and write about. The post revisionist rise in the 1970s and 1980s was a fresh

revival of Cold War beginnings’ scholarship. 12

The corporatist model of early Cold War history developed because of the

multidisciplinary scholarship. Historians like Michael Hogan and Robert Pollard believed they

saw connections, specifically collaborations, between national and international corporations,

public and private agencies, supranational organizations. They asserted these collaborative

ventures influenced the American foreign policy initiatives in the first years of the Cold War. At

the center of this assertion was the Marshall Plan. Such postrevisionists believed this was a way

for big business to move more into military assistance programs and oil policies. Of course one

of the first direct intervention by the corporatist bloc was Iran in 1953, so scholarship was not

solely focused on the Marshall Plan but the ramifications and possibilities created by it. The

corporatist bloc also saw the internationalization, or globalization, movement bridging the gap

between American foreign policy and those of her allies. In doing so, historians among many

12Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration

and the Cold War, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Leffler, “The American
Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-1948,” American
Historical Review, 89, (April, 1984), 346-363.

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nation states could compare conclusions and see more complete analyses of the effects of

America’s influence at the beginning of the Cold War.13

What is left to analyze over the Origins of the Cold War for historians? All along, the

three major schools relied on first hand accounts and memoirs, some US archives, and a few

western archives and interviews. By 1991, however, the Soviet Union was on its last leg and

Gorbachev was pushing a new policy of openness towards US and other Western scholars.

Though no consensus ever came to full fruition in the decades before the 1990s, the debate in

journals seemed to calm down during the 1980s. By 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union, and

the subsequent opening of documents in mass, historians revived the controversy over the origins

of the Cold War. Former Soviet researchers also joined discussions in the United States

following the USSR’s collapse. Additionally, the Cold War International History Project was

established at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1991. The National

Security Archives at George Washington University began pushing for expedited declassification

and digitizing of documents including those from the former Soviet Union as well. The general

mood of historians was that definitive conclusions could finally be drawn with evidence on both

sides of the Cold War rivals.14

13Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security
State, 1945-1954, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Hogan, The Marshall Plan:
America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952, (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1987); Robert A. Pollard, “The National Security State Reconsidered: Truman
and Economic Containment, 1945-1950,” in Michael Lacey, ed., The Truman Presidency,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 205-235.
14See Odd Arne Westad, Vladislav Zubok, “Symposium. Soviet Archives: Revelations and Cold
War Historiography,” Diplomatic History 21, No. 2 (Spring, 1997); Norman M. Naimark, “Cold
War Studies and New Archival Materials on Stalin,” Russian Review 61, No. 1 (January, 2002),
1-15.

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 Largely, but not completely, recent scholarship has been able to take advantage of the

newer documents and archives. Indeed the newest generation of historians are connected to

unprecedented amounts of raw data. Since the turn of the century, two final works for this

essay’s purposes were published that further the aims of Gaddis in the 1980s when he sought to

add new depth of research and analysis to an already expanded postrevisionist school. Wilson

Miscamble’s From Roosevelt to Truman, and Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko’s The

Atomic Bomb both illustrate how far the field has come since Kennan’s 1947 “large telegram.”

Miscamble does not solely seek to be an apologist for Truman, but also to show how Truman did

not immediately dissolve FDR’s efforts at collaborative relations with Stalin and the Soviet

Union. Miscamble revealed how Secretary of State James Byrnes and Truman worked together

from 1945 to 1947 in an attempt to continue FDR’s policies. However, he also revealed how

with so much happening in these short years, no president nor secretary of state could have

calmed everything with even some mystical force. The international hegemony of America,

began with Truman’s implementation of policies after 1947 Miscamble believed. In truth, such

an assertion is likely to revive even more debate over one of the fundamental questions of

Truman’s foreign policy experience (or lack thereof) prior to his administration.15

Another larger question that has survived since the early years of the orthodox writings, is

the atomic bomb and its effects. Craig and Radchenko add most to Cold War origins scholarship

by implementing new archival evidence in support of an already vastly accepted thesis that the

atomic bomb drops on Japan spurred the bipolar conflict unnecessarily. What is a twist from this

revisionist thesis, is the admission that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were

15William Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 34-75, 218-241.

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adequately prepared for the Cold War standoff. Additionally, they expand on the postrevisionist

thesis that neither superpower exercised to their fullest any attempt to avoid confrontation. They

liken it to two bullies with their own psychological insecurities fighting for domain over a

playground. War was all either country knew at the time, but neither wanted to invest in another

direct conflict, so their problems were not resolved until one ran out of money.16

The origins of the Cold War remain a heated debate well into the 21st century. The three

major schools are without synthesis other than a few major distinctions between ideologies. The

largest changes in historical writing on the origins of the Cold War were the disillusionment era

and subsequent retrenchment from government trust and the end of the Cold War consensus, the

opening of archives since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the digitization of world records. It

also stands to reason that the appearance of the postrevisionist school coincided with the

changing domestic situation of the 1970s and 80s where Americans moved to expand their

horizons in scholarship and bridge the gap between sister disciplines of history. That there is no

solid consensus yet is a testament to the study of history. We are working, as a field, more like

sciences in maintaining individual assertions and theses only until a newer reexamination can

disprove or at least raise issues with our conceptions. The next generation of Cold War

historians will likely continue the move towards smaller issues and try to place them in the

context of the already established macro issues that define the three major schools of thought on

the Cold War origins. What is still lacking, if one must find something, is more partnered and

collaborative work among foreign historians and American scholars. The language barrier,

however, closes more with each passing year.

16Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

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18