Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-01069-2 Pbk : £1.15.

As more and more people questioned the assumptions of U.S. foreign policy in the Vietnam era, they began to reexamine the roots of these policies in the diplomacy of the Cold War. This scrutiny made the origins of the Cold War one of the most controversial issues in American diplomatic history. A complete new dimension was added to the debate by the charges leveled here by Robert James Maddox. How did the Cold War begin? Who or what was responsible? Could it have been avoided? Was it a temporary condition created by a combination of individual personalities and historical factors, or did it represent the clash of fundamentally irreconcilable political systems? The orthodox explanation of the Cold War is that it was "the brave and essential response of free men to Communist aggression." A number of scholars more or less identified with the New Left challenged the conventional explanation by asserting that the U.S. bears the major responsibility for its onset. One group of revisionists saw this as the result of a failure of statesmanship on the part of Truman and his advisors, the other as the inevitable outcome of the need of the American capitalist system for continuous economic expansion abroad. Their conclusions have often been challenged in matters of interpretation. Robert Maddox, however, believes that an examination of the manner in which new interpretations are reached should precede dialogues over the ideas themselves. Consequently he examined seven of the most prominent New Left works. After detailed comparisons of the evidence they present with the sources from which it was taken, he concludes that these books are based on pervasive misuse of the source materials and fail to measure up to the most elementary standards of sound scholarship.--Adapted from dust jacket

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