Fine Arts faculty member Mark Cooper and students created a replica of the Berlin Wall that was dedicated on the Campus Green as part of a series of events commemorating the 20th anniversary of the wall’s destruction — and the symbolic end of the Cold War. (Photo by Lee Pellegrini)
Oh, What a Cold War It Was
Twenty years ago, a wall fell and a war (of sorts) ended. As the world remembers, a new generation tries to comprehend the Cold War era.
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Bonnie Jefferson was only in third grade, but she had heard enough about the threat of US-Russian nuclear war that she felt obliged to save her family from annihilation.So when her parents failed to embrace the idea of building an underground bomb shelter, Jefferson enlisted the aid of her younger brother. The two kids took shovels, walked out to the field near their West Virginia home, and started digging.
“We actually dug a square hole about three feet deep before we quit for the day,” recalls Jefferson, now an adjunct associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Communication Department, of the incident in the early 1950s. “Then we forgot all about it, and the hole became overgrown and covered with grass and weeds — until one day my father drove his tractor into it, and wanted to know how it got there.”
Jefferson may or may not have thought about her unrealized civil defense effort more than 30 years later on Nov. 9, 1989, as she watched television coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But as the events in Germany unfolded, she found herself marveling at the end of the Cold War, an era whose atmosphere of menace and uncertainty could compel a little girl to make a bomb shelter.
“I think about how obsessed we all were, with civil defense drills in schools, and instructional films and TV programs about nuclear war,” she says. “The Cold War was here, there, everywhere. And then, one day, it’s over.”
On the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s destruction, and the Cold War’s symbolic finish, a generation with memories of neither wall nor war is nearing adulthood. They include Boston College students who are learning about the Cold War world from faculty members like Jefferson — the world in which she and many of her colleagues came of age.
As faculty note, the Cold War — a four-decade period marked by intense US-Russian political, military and economic competition --encompassed numerous events, trends and phenomena: the Vietnam and Korean wars, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear proliferation, among many others. While opposition grew to many facets of the Cold War, especially the US role in Vietnam, plenty of Americans strongly supported these and other policies touted as guarding against Soviet Bloc aggression.
But whatever one’s ideology, the Cold War mentality seemed to pervade most every aspect of American society, from politics to media to sports (patriotic fervor over the US hockey team’s defeat of heavily favored Russia in the 1980 Olympics) and popular culture — some TV critics cited what they saw as Cold War parallels in shows like “Star Trek.”
BC faculty and students recently mused on the legacy of the Cold War, as a major part of American history and as a point of demarcation between their respective generations.
“One important feature of the early Cold War in particular was that ideology was taught through the entertainment industry as well as government,” says Jefferson. “Russia, being Communist, was the bad guy, and anything or anyone associated with it was equally bad. You saw or heard this in the media continually.”
Even religion seemed to be a Cold War battleground. Says Fine Arts Professor and department chairman John Michalczyk, “I recall vividly the priest at Mass in pre-Vatican times, coming down at the conclusion of the Mass and saying three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and three ‘Glory Be’s for the conversion of Russia.”
Associate Professor of Political Science Timothy Crawford remembers discussions about “underground churches in the USSR because no one could practice their faith. At church, you’d see brochures about people who were rotting in jail for giving out Bibles.”
But the specter of nuclear war was probably the most ubiquitous aspect of the Cold War, say faculty.
“Ask any American over 40 if he or she had nuclear ‘drills’ in grade school, and odds are he or she will say ‘Yes,’” says History Professor Seth Jacobs. “I remember my third-grade teacher solemnly lecturing us kids about the importance of putting our hands over our heads during the drill — I guess because it was crucial to vaporize your hands first, or something.
“That does something very twisted to a young child’s mind, and a whole generation grew up with the ‘mushroom cloud’ as an omnipresent possibility. There’s no parallel to that nowadays.”
Present-day college students, their impressions collected from books, TV, films or conversations with parents or other older adults, often struggle to find a connection between the Cold War and their own era.
“Our generation has grown up in a world in which America has always been an uncontested superpower,” says College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Zachary Zimmerman. “This is why many of us have little regard for the study of history - we have the luxury of not caring. We have no way to conceptualize such events. Unless we have a family member in the military, we have no personal connection to the wars that have been fought. The terrorist attacks of 2001 are the only concrete experience we have had with actual political turbulence.”
Although September 11th and the War on Terror are the most obvious parallels to the Cold War undergraduates cite, they acknowledge that the comparison is tenuous. Students point to the relatively fewer media resources available through much of the period, for example, which tended to limit Americans’ ability to follow Cold War events and issues — unlike today’s 24-hour news and information bounty.
And while undergraduates recognize that there was dissent during the Cold War, they see Americans of that era as far more willing to trust their government than today.
“After 9/11, there seemed to a national consensus with the Bush Administration about what our response should be,” says Russell Lauletta ’11. “But that changed in a pretty short space of time. And now, even after Bush, people still are ready to question the government’s policies on terrorism.”
Senior Brenden Dougherty says, “I think that my generation has really turned away from politics as a result of the actions of the Bush Administration and the cacophony of mindless arguing on cable television. So, while we have been forced into adulthood faster, my generation is not making their voice heard through the ballot, as I think younger generations were better able to do in the Cold War.”
Gretchen Losordo ’10 feels that Americans’ fears “were exploited” in the name of promoting patriotism and anti-Soviet attitudes.
“During the Cold War, Russians in general were demonized. People were taught to fear the ‘Commies’ and to be on the lookout for their spies’ infiltration. Patriotism trumped any form of political correctness. People were expected and encouraged to be afraid in order to protect the country.”
But Losordo sees the response to security threats during her time as going to another, also troubling extreme. “In my generation, we were taught that it was wrong to feel nervous in the airport when people who appear to be Middle Eastern boarded your flight. And if you were afraid, you felt guilty about it because your fears were based on discriminatory stereotypes. I think my generation is more anxious about expressing their fears because they are worried that such fears may be offensive or illegitimate.
“Attitudes toward patriotism is one of the major differences with my generation; we meet it with cynicism. We have learned that patriotism is exclusionary and that the attitude that we are somehow better because we are Americans is wrong.”
Jacobs also believes the Cold War-War on Terror parallel is limited.
“The Soviet Union was a superpower with millions of men in arms, thousands of nuclear weapons, tanks, guns and gulags. It had a fixed address, as did Communist China. Shadowy terrorist organizations whose membership lists keep changing, whose command centers shift from one point to another all over the globe, and who operate on a shoestring budget just don’t constitute the same kind of adversary, which may be why this generation of college students doesn’t seem to have blithely decided to ‘live with’ the fact that they could die in an instant in a nuclear holocaust the way my generation did.”
Crawford, who was in his senior year of college when the Berlin Wall came down, thinks his generation was especially well-positioned to
appreciate the changes wrought by the end of the Cold War.
“Seeing these major tectonic shifts taking place really appealed to your sense of history. I just remember how there was a general feeling that ‘International politics is really interesting, and big change is possible.’ Reality settled in, of course, and the post-Cold War era had its own conflicts, like Yugoslavia and Rwanda. But November 1989 and the months afterward was definitely an exciting time for a college student just starting out in the world.”
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Boston College students' impressions of the Cold War
Michael Tuntevski ’10: The phrase “Cold War” brings some pretty particular images to mind: cookie-cutter American families huddled in their bomb shelters which are crowded with shelf upon shelf of pint sized water bottles and cans of beans bought in bulk. In this vein, it reminds me of Y2K, an event that was obviously blown out of proportion...Though the circumstances surrounding both of these
incidents are vastly different, I think Americans shared a similar fear - the idea of “not knowing” is, after all, terrifying.
Elizabeth Glatzer ’10: My impression is that it was a time in American history characterized by a sense of threat. My parents have expressed that during the Cold War there was a general anxiety due to being on the verge of nuclear war. I still do think that there is threat existing for the potential of nuclear warfare, but I have to imagine that decades ago when nuclear was a term that everyone was very unfamiliar with (especially the common civilian) it was probably was much scarier.
Brenden Dougherty ’10: I would have to classify this era as a time of “normalized tension”...I think people during this time were of the mindset that the USSR was always going to be a threat and that they might as well learn to live with this fact. At the same time, I think the Cold War did implicitly strengthen the morale of Americans. Although the threat was, for the most part, in the back of everyone’s minds, the threat was still present and the enemy still apparent.
Emily Koruda ’10: In many ways, along with the Vietnam War, the Cold War introduced feelings of uncertainty that had never really appeared before in US history. And I think a lot of those same feelings have been reflected once again with current events abroad.
Sean Smith can be reached at sean.smith.1@bc.edu