Someone Is Out to Get Us
A Not So Brief History of Cold War Paranoia and Madness
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From UFOs to Dr. Strangelove, LSD experiments to Richard Nixon, author Brian Brown investigates the paranoid, panicked history of the Cold War.
In Someone Is Out to Get Us, Brian T. Brown explores the delusions, absurdities, and best-kept secrets of the Cold War, during which the United States fought an enemy of its own making for over forty years -- and nearly scared itself to death in the process. The nation chose to fear a chimera, a rotting communist empire that couldn't even feed itself, only for it to be revealed that what lay behind the Iron Curtain was only a sad Potemkin village.
In fact, one of the greatest threats to our national security may have been our closest ally. The most effective spy cell the Soviets ever had was made up of aristocratic Englishmen schooled at Cambridge. Establishing a communist peril but lacking proof, J. Edgar Hoover became our Big Brother, and Joseph McCarthy went hunting for witches. Richard Nixon stepped into the spotlight as an opportunistic, ruthless Cold Warrior; his criminal cover-up during a dark presidency was exposed by a Deep Throat in a parking garage.
Someone Is Out to Get Us is the true and complete account of a long-misunderstood period of history during which lies, conspiracies, and paranoia led Americans into a state of madness and misunderstanding, too distracted by fictions to realize that the real enemy was looking back at them in the mirror the whole time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and documentarian Brown (Ring Force) delivers a vivid revisionist history of the Cold War, redefining the period from the end of WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall as a "compendium of misconceptions, fallacies, frauds, comedies, tragedies, lies, and deceits." Arguing that the Soviet Union was much weaker than the American public was led to believe, Brown details how the Cold War distorted U.S. politics. His examples include FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's creation of an "illegal" surveillance state; the laundering of the reputations of Nazi doctors and scientists so they could research mind control and biological warfare for the U.S. military; McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist; the "domino theory" that led to the Vietnam War; the "unconscionable waste" of the "heedless" nuclear arms race; and the CIA's destabilization of democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Iran. After paying close attention to the first two decades of the Cold War, Brown breezes through the rest of the 1960s and the 1970s before crediting "once-in-a-millennium" Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for thawing relations with the West by ending the arms race. A closer look at what was happening behind the Iron Curtain would help Brown to make his case that the U.S.S.R. wasn't the threat it seemed to be, but his selective portrait of U.S. government misbehavior will shock many readers and confirm others' worst suspicions.
