Cameron Hays Period 4 Cold War Interview The subject of this interview is Sheldon Anderson.

Sheldon is a 60-year-old history professor Miami University who primarily teaches European history. Not only did he grow up during the time of the Cold War, but he also spent significant time in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s playing professional basketball. Q: In general, what was it like being alive during the Cold War? A: As a kid I really didnt pay too much attention to it, although I grew up in Moorhead, Minnesota, which is right across the border from North Dakota and thats where all the ballistic missiles were stationed so that wouldve been a target for the Soviets. I remember as kid having civil defense drills, people talking about building bunkers to survive a nuclear war, and things like that. As a kid you didnt really think about it. It wasnt right there. It was kind of an abstract threat. The older I got, the more I realized what a crazy idea this was to have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other and the fact that we could kill each other a thousand times over. So, it was called mutually assured destruction, it really was MAD. The more I got to learn about it the more I realized that this was really a MAD period of history. And we still have that threat of course. Israels got nuclear weapons, Pakistan and India are pointing at each other, the Soviets and the United States still have well over a thousand nuclear warheads. This threat is certainly still there. And the more I studied about it, you know this is my business studying the history of it, the more I realize that the Soviets really had no intention of attacking us. They had no intention of attacking Western Europe. They had no intention of entering a war with the United States and we didnt either. And so there were really a lot of misconceptions about that threat and how serious it was in terms of their aggression on us or our aggression on them. What was going to happen was some kind of war in which were involved with, say, keeping missiles out of Cuba and they put missiles in Cuba, some kind of indirect conflict over in some part of the Third World. That was where the big threat came, it seems to me. But we werent going to confront them in Europe. We werent going to confront them in Berlin when they built the wall. They werent going to shoot down our airplanes in Berlin during the Berlin Blockade. There were never those direct threats to each other that would escalate into a Third World War. Q: Do you remember what it was like when the Berlin Wall came down? A: Oh absolutely. You know this is the area of my study. Lets see. I was just out of grad school. I finished my PhD in 1989 and my first job was in Tacoma at the University of Puget Sound. My dissertation was on Eastern Europe on Poland and Polish-US relations. 1989 just came as a complete

shock. Gorbachev finally said were not going to use tanks to keep this thing going, were not going to use force. Its kind of like whats happened in Tunisia and Egypt. The leadership said were no longer going to use force to keep these illegitimate dictatorships going. And that was the difference. When Gorbachev said were not going to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe it was over. So it was a complete and total surprise. And a great surprise. I have some very good friends in East Germany. They were now free. I had some friends in Poland. They were now free. It was just a wonderful time. But I was teaching in Puget in Tacoma at the time and we were all just flabbergasted that they allowed that to happen. It was a great day. Q: When you were growing up, did you ever come to view Soviets as the enemy? A: No. I mean, as a kid, of course you hear about communism and so on. No, you really didnt because it was a conventional power in a way. This was a revolutionary idea but the Soviet Union played by the rules for the most part. When they signed agreements, they kept them, for the most part. Terrorists theres no negotiating with terrorists. Like Al Qaeda. What are their political objectives? You cant sit down with them and say Alright, well solve the Palestinian problem, get American troops out of Saudi Arabia, out of Afghanistan and then youll stop attacking us. No. Theyre terrorists, they keep doing it. Their frustrations are often with their own governments, which were seeing in the Middle East right now. I see the terrorist threat as a much greater threat. Its a different kind of threat but I think we escalate its importance, its significance, whether its going to touch me. Im not worried. Im on a plane every week and I dont worry about that. So I think that Americans often tend to exaggerate the threats to our existence. Q: Do you remember the draft of the Vietnam War? A: Yeah, very well. I often say if you want to have democracy work in terms of deciding whether to go to war or not we should have a draft again. Because then you would be interested in Afghanistan, you would be interested in Iraq, you would know where those places are on the map, your parents would be interested. Itd be a very different political scene if it wasnt some private, voluntary army that agrees to go to war. People sign up for this. So I remember it very well and thats how it democratized those wars that average Americans had to go. Now I should say that most of them were lower class Americans because you could get out of the draft, as I did, if you were a student and went to college. My brother, he was of the Vietnam generation four years older than I am, he wouldve had to go but after college he got a teaching job. He wasnt trained as a teacher but he got a teaching job to stay out of the draft because teachers could stay out of it. So the middle and upper classes had ways of staying out of the war. The grunts in Vietnam were a lot of working class folks. But it did democratize the war in a sense that people had to pay attention.