A Journey through the Cold War: A Memoir of Containment and Coexistence - Softcover

Garthoff, Raymond L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815701012 ISBN 13: 9780815701019

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press, 2001

Synopsis

In this memoir, Ambassador Ray Garthoff paints a dynamic diplomatic history of the cold war, tracing the life of the conflict from the vantage points of an observant insider. His intellectually formative years coincided with the earliest days of the cold war, and during his forty-year career, Garthoff participated in some of the most important policymaking of the twentieth century: · In the late 1950s he carried out pioneering research on Soviet military affairs at the Rand Corporation. · During his four-year tenure at the CIA (1957-61), in addition to drafting national intellingence estimates, Garthoff made trips to the Soviet Union with Vice President Richard Nixon and as an interpreter for a delegation from the Atomic Energy Commission. · As a special assistant in the State Department, Garthoff worked with Secretary Dean Rusk., and he was directly involved in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Later he served as executive officer and senior State Department adviser for the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) delegation. · In the 1970s he served as a senior Foreign Service inspector, leading missions to a number of countries around the globe. · As U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria (1977-79), Garthoff gained first-hand knowledge of the workings of a communist state and of the Soviet bloc. · In the 1980s, Garthoff wrote two major studies of American-Soviet relations. He traveled to the Soviet Union nearly a dozen times in the final decade of the cold war, and in the early 1990s he had access to the former Soviet Communist Party archives in Moscow. Garthoff”'s journey through the Cold War informs the views, positions, and actions of the past. His anecdotes and observations will be of great value to those anticipating the challenges of reevaluating American post-cold war security policy.

About this title

About the Author:

Raymond L. Garthoff is a guest scholar in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He is the former ambassador to Bulgaria, former Deputy Director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, former Executive Officer and Senior Advisor to the SALT I delegation and ABM Treaty negotiations (1969-1973). He also served in the Office of National Estimates at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Review:

"... interesting for its detached reflections on U.S. government workings during [the Cold War].... [Garthoff] continues to set an honorable and challenging example for his peers." —Philip Zelikow, Foreign Affairs

"Garthoff has certainly seen it all, being an insider almost from the start and ending up as a highly placed academic in the Brookings Institution as the Berlin Wall came down.... Students of the Cold War and the US policy process will find much of interest here as Garthoff describes his life at the top of the American foreign policy establishment." —Mike Bowker, University of East Anglia, Political Studies

"[A Journey Through the Cold War] is inextricably drawn to the events that defined the Cold War. Perhaps no other author has been as singularly successful in capturing these events as Ambassador Raymond Garthoff.... by far one of the most personal and thoroughly credible accounts of this period." —Robert H. Taylor, Editor, Parameters/ Colonel U.S. Army, Retired, Parameters, 1/1/2003

"... a unique book.... [Garthoff] does a very good job of capturing what it was like to analyze intelligence or to negotiate an arms control treaty [during the Cold War].... This book will be of great interest to those... who seek to understand what it was like to live through the conflict." —Beth Fischer, University of Toronto, International Journal

"In 'A Journey Through the Cold War' [Garthoff] offers an illuminating and crsiply written account of his own Cold War career, which never deviated far from the central loci of U.S. decision-making." —Susan L. Carruthers, Rutgers University, Slavonic and East European Review(SEER)

"Scrupulous reporting and rigorous analysis make this a fascinating and valuable resource on the history of the Cold War." — Foreign Service Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0815701012
• ISBN 13: 9780815701019
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 434