The initial moves were disorganized to say the least. Plus, the US had the Bomb, so-problem solved.īut soon enough domestic politics in the form of the Red and Lavender Scares merged with the obvious facts on the ground in Europe and Asia: the USSR was a dangerous enemy, and the US needed to confront Stalin’s expansion in some way. This was not an easy sell in Washington or the US, which was eager to stand down, and hoped for the best for post war cooperation with Russia. Stemming from the war time OSS, a core of people shifted concerns from defeated Germany to the clearly expansive Stalinist USSR. At the center of the American efforts was the CIA, which emerged in these years and existed mainly to fight the Cold War.Īnderson makes clear the improvisational nature of the early developments.

The Quiet Americans examines the critical period at the end of World War II and just after, the time when the Soviets and Americans developed their strategic stances. Circular reasoning and self-interested saber rattling justified endless arms races and dubious wars.

This seemingly unchanging and unchangeable struggle seemed inevitable, even if not easy to explain. The onset of the Cold War made that position untenable, and in 1947 Truman acceded to the creation of the CIA, part of a major national security restructuring that effectively put the United States on a permanent wartime footing.For anyone who lived in the last third of the twentieth century, life was dominated by the Cold War, a global standoff between the US and Soviets. Even after the war, Harry Truman’s first instinct was to return to the earlier status quo he shut down the Office of Strategic Services, the country’s fledgling intelligence/clandestine-operations agency, as soon as he could. Though it can be hard to remember in 2020, when the Department of Homeland Security boasts almost a quarter of a million employees, before World War II the United States maintained no substantive foreign intelligence service.

He also admires their seat-of-the-pants ingenuity, as they attempted to conduct near-impossible missions with little guidance or experience.

Anderson enjoys his characters and brings the reader in on their jokes, such as Burke’s cover as a producer for the fictitious “Imperial Pictures” or Lansdale’s fake job as an “assistant historian” of the Thirteenth Air Force, the lowest of the low.

The quiet americans book