Eventually Retired

In this Observer essay from 1998, Gore Vidal discusses the origins of the Cold War:

I have lived through nearly three-quarters of this century. I enlisted in the army of the United States at 17, went to the Pacific, did nothing useful, I was just there, as Richard M Nixon used to say, when the bombs were falling. Actually, the bombs were not really falling on either of us. Nixon was a naval officer making a fortune playing poker while I was an army first mate, writing a novel.

On the Ides of August 1945, I joined the 13 million Americans who headed home to enjoy… well… being alive was always the bottom line. Home turned out to be a sort of fairground where fireworks went off and the band played Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree and a fun house flung open its doors and we filed through.

We enjoyed halls of mirrors where everyone was comically distorted, rode through all the tunnels of love and took scary tours of horror chambers where skeletons and cobwebs and bats brushed past us until, suitably chilled and subdued, we were ready for the exit and everyday life. But unfortunately, to the consternation of some and the apparent indifference of the rest, we were never really allowed to leave the fun house; it had become a part of our world, as were those goblins sitting under that apple tree.

Officially, the US was at peace. We alone had a sort of booming economy, "sort of" because it depended on war production and there was, as far as anyone could tell, no war in the offing. Briefly, the arts flourished. The Glass Menagerie was staged, Copeland's Appalachian Spring was played. A film called The Lost Weekend, not a bad title for what we had gone through, won an Academy Award. But a novelty – television – had begun to appear in household after household, its old, grey, distorting eye relentlessly projecting a film-house view of the world.

Those who followed the ugly, new-minted word media, began to note that often while watching television, we kept fading in and out of the chamber of horrors. Our ally in the recent war, "Uncle Joe Stalin", as the accidental President Harry S Truman had called him, was growing horns and fangs that dripped blood. We were the only great power with atomic weapons, yet we were somehow at terrible risk. Why? How?

The trouble appeared to be over Germany which, on 11 February 1945, had been split at the Yalta summit meeting into four zones: American, Soviet, British, French. As the Russians had done the most fighting and suffered the greatest losses, it was agreed that they should have an early crack at reparations from Germany to the extent of $20bn.

But something bad happened between the euphoria of Yalta and the edginess of Potsdam. As that second meeting progressed, the atom bomb was tried out successfully in a New Mexico desert. We were now able to incinerate Japan or the Soviet Union, for that matter, and so we no longer needed Russian help to defeat Japan. We started to renege on our agreements with Stalin. We also quietly shelved the notion, agreed at Yalta, of a united Germany. Then, as of May 1946, we began to rearm Germany. Stalin went ape at our betrayal. The Cold War was on.

Suddenly, we were faced with the highest personal income taxes in American history to pay for more and more weapons, among them the world-killer hydrogen bomb, all because the Russians were coming. No one knew quite why they were coming or with what. Official explanations for all this made little sense but then, as Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, merrily observed: "In the State Department, we used to discuss how much time that mythical 'average American citizen' put in each day listening, reading and arguing about the world outside his country… it seemed to us that 10 minutes a day would be a high average."

The Nato alliance and the 40-year Cold War were all created without the consent, much less advice, of the American people. Of course, there were elections but Truman-Dewey, Eisenhower-Stevenson, Kennedy-Nixon were of a single mind as to the desirability of inventing, first, a many-tentacled enemy, communism, then, to combat so much evil, install a permanent wartime state at home. Then followed 40 years of mindless wars that created a debt of $5tn that hugely benefited firms such as General Electric, whose long-time TV spokesman, Ronald Reagan, was eventually retired to the White House.