The Cold War as History

New York: Harper & Row, 1967. First U.S. Edition. Hardcover. good. xiv, 434 pages. Footnotes. Publications Cited. Index. Ink name inside front flyleaf, boards somewhat scuffed. Louis Joseph Halle Jr. (17 November 1910, New York City - 13 August 1998, Geneva, Switzerland) was an American naturalist, author, U.S. State Department official, and professor of international studies in Geneva. Halle received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1932. As a young man, he worked for a railway company in Central America and later with a publishing house in New York. For a year, he did graduate study in anthropology at Harvard, then explored boundary rivers between Guatemala and Mexico by mule and dugout canoe. He served in the US Army before World War II and in the Coast Guard during World War II. He was a Latin American specialist employed by the US State Department Policy Planning Staff from the mid 1940s to 1954. From 1954 to 1956 at the University of Virginia, he was a researcher on American foreign policy. He became in 1956 a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He retired there as professor emeritus in 1973 but remained in Geneva. He was the author of 22 books. Derived from a Kirkus review: In this ambitious book, Halle views the Cold War as a historical process which is determined by various factors. One is a geographic insecurity on the part of Russia; another falls in the realm of national character in which the Communist movement, being as totalitarian as Czarism, "is incidental rather than essential." In terms of these types of conditioning factors, Halle sets forth the history of the Cold War as another chapter in the balance of power story: its origins in the American desire to destroy German power, the resultant vacuum of power, and Russian power stepping in to fill the vacuum. Halle notes all the obvious events of the Cold War, e.g., the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, Korea, Berlin, and ends his account with the Cuban crisis which is seen as the end of the Cold War. If one agrees with his interpretation of the Cold War, then one must ultimately agree with the circumstances he selects to "drive" events. Halle, an academic and practical politician with considerable experience in and out of print, is a name assured of attention and more usually agreement.