Books, Arts & Manners: Friends to the End

FDR & Stalin: A Not So Grand Alliance, 1943-1945, by Amos Perlmutter (Missouri, 331 pp., $29.95)

AMONG the cultural benefits of the collapse of Soviet Communism has been the cornucopia of secrets flowing out of Soviet and Soviet Bloc archives and coming through the cracks in the crumbling walls. This has yielded its tactical advantages—such as the intelligence windfall (from East German sources, by one report) that put the CIA onto Aldrich Ames, or the North Vietnamese document on U.S. POWs that Stephen Morris unearthed in Moscow—but it has also had strategic value. By this I mean the immeasurable pedagogical benefit of illuminating once and for all some core truths about the Cold War. The cynical collusion of Stalin and Kim II Sung in launching the Korean War, for example, has already been exposed in Soviet documents. We can thank the Hungarians for the recent revelations concerning Noel Field’s interrogation, which confirms Alger Hiss’s guilt. A Cold War history project coordinated by the Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smithsonian has produced eye-opening studies of such topics as the Berlin crisis, Sino-Soviet relations, Soviet-Vietnamese relations, and so on.

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Peter W. Rodman

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

FDR & Stalin: A Not So Grand Alliance, 1943-1945, by Amos Perlmutter (Missouri, 331 pp., $29.95)

AMONG the cultural benefits of the collapse of Soviet Communism has been the cornucopia of secrets flowing out of Soviet and Soviet Bloc archives and coming through the cracks in the crumbling walls. This has yielded its tactical advantages—such as the intelligence windfall (from East German sources, by one report) that put the CIA onto Aldrich Ames, or the North Vietnamese document on U.S. POWs that Stephen Morris unearthed in Moscow—but it has also had strategic value. By this I mean the immeasurable pedagogical benefit of illuminating once and for all some core truths about the Cold War. The cynical collusion of Stalin and Kim II Sung in launching the Korean War, for example, has already been exposed in Soviet documents. We can thank the Hungarians for the recent revelations concerning Noel Field’s interrogation, which confirms Alger Hiss’s guilt. A Cold War history project coordinated by the Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smithsonian has produced eye-opening studies of such topics as the Berlin crisis, Sino-Soviet relations, Soviet-Vietnamese relations, and so on.