The Cold War Read Online Free Page B

could be revised, but the United States considered the Turkish Straits a matter of concern to its own strategic interests. Turkish sovereignty remained inviolate. Acheson did not have to spell out the administration's willingness to risk war.
    The Cold War started on August 19, 1946.
    Confronted by American resolve—symbolized by the naval task force in the eastern Mediterranean, headed by the
Roosevelt
and the
Missouri
—the Russians backed down. A month later, their tone on the Dardanelles was much softer. And after Stalin's death in 1953, the question of even revising the Montreux Convention was abandoned.
    A week after Acheson had sent his reply to Moscow,
New York Times
reporter James Reston noted a shift in Acheson's thinking. While the undersecretaryhad previously held out for a “liberal policy” toward the Soviet Union, “when the facts seemed to merit a change—as he seems to think they now do in the case of the Soviet Union—he switched with the facts.”
    Three years later, as secretary of state, Acheson was dining with President Truman in his private railway car on the way back to Washington from the dedication of the new United Nations Building in New York. Acheson's wife mentioned Central Asia, and that got Truman started. The waiters cleared away the dishes, and the president began to lecture on the history of Central Asia, the various emperors, the military campaigns, the migrations of populations. Toward the end of his exposition, Mrs. Acheson said, “This is amazing. I wouldn't have been surprised that you would know all about the Civil War, but this part of the world, I've never known anyone who knew anything about it.”
    The president laughed and then told her why: “Well, my eyesight isn't any good. I was never any good playing games where you have to see what you're doing at a distance. I couldn't hit a ball if it hit me in the nose, so I spent my time reading. I guess I read nearly every book in the library. I got interested in this part of the world, and ever since I've read everything about it I could find.”
    But, as Acheson commented, what Truman discussed that late afternoon was not simply a collection of unconnected events but the reasons why these migrations took place, and the pressures that were pushing them. His depth of understanding about the region was worthy of a scholar.
    For Truman, as for Acheson, the Turkish crisis meant that the Soviets would not be content with a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Instead, they were engaged in a policy of renewed expansion. Especially in the Mediterranean and the Near East, where the Russians had traditionally sought territory and access to the sea, and where the British had stood fast against them, the Americans must now be prepared to draw the line. With the Truman administration's willingness to risk a hot war over the control of the Dardanelles, the Cold War had actually begun.
    Four years later, the American Mediterranean task force that had been established at the end of 1946 was designated the Sixth Fleet. With this action, the navy's emphasis on the Pacific, which had been the central priority in naval thinking since the 1930s, came to an end. Henceforth, American naval strategy, built around the revived nineteenth-century practice of stationing American warships in friendly ports, was focused on the containment of the Soviet Union—the ultimately successful foreign policy objective of the United States for the next forty-five years.

Cloak-and-Dagger in Salzburg
    HARRIS GREENE
    On a local level, as opposed to a geopolitical one, the Cold War had an even earlier start. In Austria, for example, tensions between the former allies flared almost from the moment World War II ended. With help from the local populace in early April 1945, the Soviets had overrun Vienna: The city would subsequently be divided into four occupation zones—American, British, French, and Russian—as was the entire country. Vienna, like Berlin, was deep