Rollback, New Style

The term “rollback,” once fashionable, has dropped out of use. It had its moment of popularity in the days of John Foster Dulles, when the generation of cold-warriors in power in Eisenhower’s Administration used it to show they were breaking away from the passive concept of “containment” rightly castigated by James Burnham, the originator of this column.

How the Soviet imperial presence in Eastern Europe was, in cold fact, to be rolled back was never explained. In the run-up to the Summit conference of July 1955 (which I covered as a working journalist, along with 2,999 other working journalists assembled in Geneva for the occasion), the current Western line was to call for free elections in East and West Germany, leading to reunification, the presumption being that the Easterners would choose freedom from Soviet oppression. On their side, the Russians said the two German governments, as then constituted, should just get together and reach their own formula, which was another way of holding onto what Stalin had grabbed right after World War II.

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Brian Crozier

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The term “rollback,” once fashionable, has dropped out of use. It had its moment of popularity in the days of John Foster Dulles, when the generation of cold-warriors in power in Eisenhower’s Administration used it to show they were breaking away from the passive concept of “containment” rightly castigated by James Burnham, the originator of this column.

How the Soviet imperial presence in Eastern Europe was, in cold fact, to be rolled back was never explained. In the run-up to the Summit conference of July 1955 (which I covered as a working journalist, along with 2,999 other working journalists assembled in Geneva for the occasion), the current Western line was to call for free elections in East and West Germany, leading to reunification, the presumption being that the Easterners would choose freedom from Soviet oppression. On their side, the Russians said the two German governments, as then constituted, should just get together and reach their own formula, which was another way of holding onto what Stalin had grabbed right after World War II.