ABSTRACT
John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History was strongly criticized when it was first published. Melvyn P. Leffler, another prominent Cold War historian, was one of the most vocal critics of the book. Leffler made further criticisms. He argued that Gaddis had come to the firm conclusion that the Cold War was unavoidable while Joseph Stalin was in charge of the Soviet Union “without closely examining Stalin’s actions.” Discussing the Cold War in that book’s preface, Gaddis accepts that: “Any attempt to reduce the history of it to the role of great forces, great powers, or great leaders would fail to do it justice. Any effort to capture it within a simple chronological narrative could only produce mush.” In We Now Know, Gaddis helped start the movement by suggesting that the “new Cold War history” needed to leave the old polarized arguments behind and treat the Cold War as a particular episode instead of a permanent condition.
