The last several months have brought forth the first major histories of the Cold War based on new archival sources. While this may be good news for historians, the appearance of such books also marks the end of a disappointing period of what may be called popular historiography. A brief epoch of instantly gratifying factual revelation is fading fast into an era of ponderous tomes, and no matter how wise some of these books may turn out to be, it is inevitable that, given the present state of the American academy, the good will before long be shadowed, if not overwhelmed, by the intellectually bad and the morally ugly.
It may be only a standard taunt of the modern historians' trade to end up muddying with equivocation a slice of reality that was uncharacteristically clear-cut, but it is sad all the same. The end of the Cold War brought emotional and intellectual closure to too few Americans, and that is unfortunate, for the civic rituals of collective celebration, no less than of collective mourning, are a part of what knits political communities together. They give its members a common history to recite, to extol, and to bequeath, and the less of one any society has, the poorer it is liable to be in both virtue and verve.
One reason why relatively few Americans enjoyed the end of the Cold War is that the American media elite showed only cursory interest in its historical revelations. Between 1989 and 1992 several symbolically charged arguments that we once feared might never be settled due to the standard secrecy and stealth of communist regimes were in fact resolved. Five examples will make the point.
Did South Korea trick North Korea into invasion in June 1950, as many revisionist historians have argued, or did South Korea even attack first? We got the answer in 1990 directly from North Korean officials: Stalin knew about and encouraged North Korea's aggression, and so did Mao Tse-tung.
