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Critical Reflection on the Cold War: Linking Rhetoric and History. Martin J. Medhurst and H. W. Brands, eds. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000. 281 pp.
How do you study a conflict that lacks the normal referents to battle lines, troop movements, and casualty reports? In a phrase repeated several times in Critical Reflections, the cold war was a "war of words." As such, it seems only appropriate to study the rhetorical aspects of that conflict, and in this volume, Martin J. Medhurst and H. W. Brands have compiled an impressively eclectic mix of essays that analyzes the cold war as a rhetorical construction. The perspective is almost wholly an American one-no mention of Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech here-but the collection constitutes an admirable attempt to explore aspects of the cold war often ignored, and one hopes that its success in this area will prompt future studies along these lines.
Medhurst bookends the collection with a helpful introduction and afterword that serve both to introduce the contributors and their arguments and place the question of rhetoric in a larger historical and philosophical context. Norman Graebner begins the sequence by...