My reading of history doesn’t often take me to the twentieth century. There’s just so much of history that came before the last hundred years, much of it history with which I am much less familiar and therefore more likely to learn something new and exciting when I read about it. If I’m going to read a book about more modern times, therefore, I like it to be one that doesn’t merely retread the same worn ground as other histories with some purportedly new-fangled interpretation or spin that never quite lives up to its advertisements. The Quiet Americans fit the bill perfectly.
While I’m no avid student of military history, like the people who can recite for you by name and in chronological order every battle fought in both World Wars, I do consider myself reasonably informed, and I’ve both done a fair amount of reading on my own, and taken several courses specifically on American military history. With that background, I more expected to learn about events with which I was already familiar from a new perspective, rather than of events wholly new to me, but there was a mix of both in Anderson’s novel. It picks up, with some preceding biographical information on its four main subjects, about where The Accidental President leaves off, as the Cold War is beginning, and focuses on just the first few years of it, beginning its wrap-up with Eisenhower’s reelection. Plenty happens in those intervening years to more than fill a single volume.
By presenting his book as a sort of biography of four spies at the opening of the Cold War and the creation of the CIA, Anderson is able to provide a more personal, narrative approach to the events and people involved. That renders the book more approachable, the players involved more sympathetic (even the adversarial ones), and leaves less need or room for historical “analysis,” which I consider a particular benefit. Still, Anderson, like nearly every author writing about this time period, feels obliged to sneak in some commentary on nuclear weapons policy that is of only tangential relevance to the book’s foci – at least he didn’t drop Iraq War politics into a book about the Middle Ages.
Reading this book, and the events it discusses, caused me to ponder how, like news outlets and organizations influence/control what becomes “news,” the choices made in teaching history can have a similar effect. The American military teaches its officers that the Vietnam War was only lost because the politicians tied their (the military’s) hands, and no history course I’ve taken ever gave mention to the very different trajectory that Vietnam was taking before Diem’s slide into paranoid autocracy with America’s more-than-tacit support. The observation that Vietnam was lost not because of not enough bombs, as military history courses teach, but because of too many, is one that could use a great deal more attention.
Unlike many books about the CIA’s adventures and misadventures, Anderson manages to critique the agency and the policies surrounding it (and overall American foreign policy during the time) without falling into pure excoriation. The biographical nature of his text, and the sympathetic light in which the people involved are portrayed, help convey the idea that even when the worst mistakes were made, they were not made because the people involved were being deliberately evil or good, but because they were being people. People who believed they were doing the right thing to the best of their abilities and knowledge at the time. That does not mean that the book stints in its justified critiques, but it does frame them and provide more context than is often offered in more one-sided accounts.
With hindsight, it is easy to find fault, to see opportunities that could have been taken and paths that could have been trod that would not have been so obvious with the information available contemporaneously. Anderson sometimes falls into that trap, but mostly, The Quiet Americans offers a balanced, detailed, biographical insight into the early days of the Cold War and the CIA. The events of the past century continue to affect our world today, and learning about them can help us understand why the world now is the way it is, and where it might go in the future. That’s just one of the reasons we study history, and it’s one of the reasons I encourage you to read Anderson’s The Quiet Americans.
IGC Publishing 