Lately some on the left have been working hard at revising downward Ronald Reagan’s legacy of ending the Cold War and creating the opportunity, since lost, for the first period of extended peace since WW II.  The Soviet Union, Kathy says, was never a threat at all.  In fact, the U.S. was the antagonist all the while. 

Ronald Reagan did not “win” the Cold War. If any one person can be credited with bringing the Cold War to an end, that person was Mikhail Gorbachev.

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On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union placed the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit. Fifty years later, I remember that day quite well. I was 11 at the time — just old enough to have a general awareness of something called the Cold War. I can recall the utter shock and fear the Soviet accomplishment engendered. Until that day, Americans were united in a belief in the technological superiority of the U.S. Sputnik’s launching caused that confidence to completely collapse. All of a sudden, that perception was replaced by its opposite.

The immediate reaction was an intensive scrutiny of the American educational system, which, it was decided, wasn’t producing enough scientists and engineers. (more…)

An interesting question: Some scholars argue that the United States and the Soviet Union, along with China, were primarily interested in protecting and advancing their political systems—that is, democracy and communism, respectively. In other words, these scholars postulate that the Cold War was a battle over ideology. Another camp of scholars contends that the superpowers were mainly acting to protect their homelands from aggressors and to defend their interests abroad. These theorists maintain that the Cold War was fought over national self-interest. These opposing theorists have in large measure determined how people understand the Cold War, a conflict that had been a long time in the making.

My question: what do you think? Battle over ideology or over national self-interests.

One of America’s best columnists, in my opinion, David Ignatius wrote a fascinating column for today’s Washington Post. The subject? The assassination of U.S. President, John F. Kennedy. Major players: the KGB, the CIA, and spies.

Roll back the tape to January 1964: America is still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and investigators don’t know what to make of the fact that the apparent assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, lived for three years in the Soviet Union. Did the Russians have any role in JFK’s death?

Then a KGB defector named Yuri Nosenko surfaces in Geneva and tells his CIA handlers that he knows the Soviets had nothing to do with Oswald. How is Nosenko so sure? Because he handled Oswald’s KGB file, and he knows the spy service had never considered dealing with him.

For many spy buffs, the Nosenko story has always seemed too good to be true. How convenient that he defected at the very moment the KGB’s chiefs were eager to reassure the Warren Commission about Oswald’s sojourn in Russia. What’s more, Nosenko brought other goodies that on close examination were also suspicious — information that seemed intended to divert the CIA’s attention from the possibility that its codes had been broken and its inner sanctum penetrated.

The Nosenko case is one of the gnarly puzzles of Cold War history. It vexed the CIA’s fabled counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, to the end of his days. And it has titillated a generation of novelists and screenwriters — most recently providing the background for Robert De Niro’s sinuous spy film “The Good Shepherd.”

Now the CIA case officer who initially handled Nosenko, Tennent H. Bagley, has written his own account. And it is a stunner. It’s impossible to read this book without developing doubts about Nosenko’s bona fides. Many readers will conclude that Angleton was right all along — that Nosenko was a phony, sent by the KGB to deceive a gullible CIA.

Read David’s entire column at The Washington Post.

The cold war, with its conspiracies, spies, traitors, defectors, etc. etc. will fascinate quite some generations to come.

If Nosenko lied, why? “What larger purpose did the deception serve?” Was it to protect “an early mole inside the CIA”? Or…?