My original dissertation topic was to be a study of the Cold War and Social Welfare. For it I wrote an extensive paper for Professor Michael Kennedy, Social Security and National Security in a Cold War World An Exploratory Study of the Cold War: International Context as an Exogenous Variable Influencing Elite Consent to Postwar Social Welfare Development, a dissertation prospectus exploration paper, Bringing the World Back In: The Cold War and the Origins of a Guns and Butter Consensus in Postwar Social Policy for Howard Kimeldorf, a 1998 newsletter article, which I distinctly remember my eleven year old daughter helped me edit into the most concise explanation of my thesis—a paper presentation at an academic conference, and Yet Another Typology of Theories of the Welfare State, a paper presented at a conference on the 50th anniversary of the UM Doctoral Program in Social Work and Social Science.
Nothing like reviewing this body to work to produce regrets I’ve never properly completed this project, using the materials now unclassified and available, which will show, for instance, that Porter Goss himself was among a corps of postwar spooks and diplomats who encouraged Western European states to develop what I called a “therapuetic dose of socialism” in order to head off Communist influence. Likewise, in the US, the postwar compact promised workers and managers in large corporations—many of them defense contractors—generous pensions and health benefits in exchange for a realtively high degree of labor-management peace.
I switched my dissertation topic because most of the material I needed was still classified, and I wanted to have a more extensive post-Cold War historical period to look at. I still hope to finish this work, if only I didn’t spent so much time on my substack! (I’m sort of kidding; as this substack is just whetting my appetite for my post “retirement” academic publishing agenda.
My Cold War material bookshelf and file cabinet of articles remains and along with my Endnote database remain periodically updated for this quest. Meanwhile back at the cold war ranch—headquartered at the Pentagon—a new Cold War with China continues to heat up, ever since Obama’s well known This 2022 Monthly Review article by James Cypher tells this story, and I’ll have to read his 2015 book. He is the only writer to properly describe NSC-68 as part of a military Keynesian guns and butter strategy. The New Left revisionist historians largely saw it as militarization of constainment. However, Mary Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights came to many of the same conclusions I came to in my civil rights chapter for Kennedy, namely that many of the victories in civil rights began with elite consent to mass demands out of a realization that retrograde civil rights policies—or the lack of them altogether—were hindering US influence globally and in the Cold War ideological conflict.
I think the lessons of this era, properly construed and communicated, might help us avoid another arms race—this time with China—and jump start efforts at nuclear disarmament.