The wartime allies had used Iran – with the Soviets occupying northern Iran and the British and American forces occupying the south – as a back-door Allied supply line to the Red Army. For it started when the President of the United States decided to protect Iran from our wartime ally, the Soviet Union. When did the Cold War start? The answer is classic irony in the somber shadow of today’s headlines.

You will find in this text several unattributed quotes those are passages lifted directly from Tom Wilson’s writing. Especially for those parts of the story that I didn’t myself see unfolding, I have leaned heavily, with posthumous thanks, on his version of the whos and whats and whys. Cold War and Common Sense, he called it – and indeed his book is not only readable history but full of common sense, about matters which were most uncommon and often nonsensical.

Shortly before we joined forces in the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, Tom had almost finished a vignette of history, which was published in 1962. I was fortunate to work, during the 1960s, with a superlative writer named Thomas W.

What I will try to do is something in between - an essay about this fascinating almost-half-century – not just what happened,īut why, and especially why it came out the way it did. I was of course an eyewitness to bits and pieces of the whole period we call the Cold War - but don't look for fragmentary anecdotes which would not do justice to the serious purpose of this symposium. NOTE: I am not a historian, so don't look for dispassionate recording of the Cold War in what follows. The National Archives and Record Administration

Why is it called the cold war