Cold War

By Brian Wright O'Connor Nearly 50 years after leaving the University of Pennsylvania for Vietnam, Lt. Col. Mortimer Lenane O'Connor will receive a posthumous Ph.D. today in a ceremony honoring academic achievement and sacrifice on the field of battle. My father, who set aside his dissertation to lead soldiers in war, will be included in the Class of 1968, the year he would most likely have completed his doctorate had fate not intervened. Born in 1930, my dad grew up in the company of soldier-storytellers on Army garrisons from Manila to the Old West, and watched his own father and three uncles set off for war in Europe.

I recently spoke at the library and birthplace of President Harry S. Truman to reflect on his leadership in the early days of the Cold War and to consider what lessons might apply to another - and in many ways very different - struggle that could occupy our country for a good many years ahead. With the perspective of history, the many new institutions and programs of the Truman years - such as the doctrine of containment, the Marshall Plan, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - can seem as part of a broadly supported strategy that led to what now almost seems like an inevitable victory in the Cold War. But, of course, things didn't unfold that way. Our country was tired after the Second World War, and strong strains of isolationism still persisted.

Director Elia Kazan and playwright Arthur Miller were colleagues, friends and titans of 20th-century theater. With plays such as Death of a Salesman (which Kazan directed and Miller wrote), they redefined American drama, bringing heat and realism to the stage. But then came the Cold War and Kazan's cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee. While Kazan named names of Communist Party members, Miller refused to cooperate and didn't speak to Kazan for a decade. This created difficulties for their intimates, among them Miller's wife Marilyn Monroe, who had once been Kazan's mistress.

John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a startlingly fine adaptation of Richard Condon's part political satire, part paranoid prophecy, stealthily made its way into movie theaters months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It stars an implosive Frank Sinatra doing his best work as Maj. Bennett Marco, a Korean War vet tormented by the recurrent nightmare that under Communist directive, his Army buddy Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is out to assassinate the men in his platoon.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's effort to abolish the CIA and transfer its functions to the State Department is a recipe for disaster. Giving the secretary of state the responsibility for intelligence raises the specter of "cooking" intelligence to support a preconceived policy. As Dave Durenberger, ex-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: "There's danger when your eyes and ears become your brain. You start seeing what you want to see. " Moynihan is using his bill to promote certain theories.

You probably don't remember Ronald Reagan's grizzly bear. It lumbered across your TV screen in 1984. It was a canny metaphor for the Cold War - brought to you by the same folks who had created ads for Gallo Wines and Meow Mix. There it was, two months before Election Day, trudging along a hilltop. The narrator intoned: "For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear?"

A recent report by a presidentially appointed panel of experts supports the surprising conclusion that the country's space program is an unexpected casualty of the end of the Cold War. NASA's public woes, from Challenger to Hubble, were less on the panel's mind than the space agency's long drift in search of a mission and its symptoms of what Robert M. White, president of the National Academy of Engineering, calls "an acute case of giantism....

THANKS TO the Daily News for your recent editorial on utility bills ("The Cold War Begins Again," Nov. 26) - but you missed the point. The "cold war" is not beginning. It was never over. The real issue is fairness. House Bill 824 is not about derailing Act 201. It's about striking a balance between the interests of consumers and utility companies. Since passage of Act 201 in 2004, PGW, PECO and utility companies statewide have enjoyed several rate increases. Unfortunately, these increases have occurred at a time when the salaries of moderate-, middle- and low-income workers have remained flat.

The Cold War in Europe may or may not be over just yet. But it seems to be ending. And some experts miss it already. They say the day may come when the world looks back on the 40 years after World War II as the good old days - when life was simple, people knew which side they were on and a standoff between superpowers kept the peace. "We are witnessing the loss of our tidy little world," Josef Joffe, foreign editor of Suddeutsche Zeitung, the largest newspaper in West Germany, said here last week at a conference on The Changing Face of Europe.

"The Hunt for Red October" is a happy cinematic event, the first motion picture that allows us to experience the sweaty-palm thrills of the Cold War without worrying that the world will blow up this year. The movie is an entertaining journey back to the days of mutually assured destruction, nuclear winters and scowling Soviet dictators who always died of colds. Now, with bits of the pulverized Berlin Wall in the hands of greedy entrepreneurs and Big Mac wrappers blowing around Red Square, everybody is concentrating on more important things, like getting their cut of the peace dividend.

It's entirely possible that the West owes its triumph in the Cold War, at least in part, to a dead rat. Freeze-dried, with a secret compartment built into its belly, the rat was one of many contrivances used by Central Intelligence Agency agents in Moscow and their handlers to pass communiques and other covert documents back and forth. You can see one up close at the Franklin Institute's new exhibition, "Spy: The Secret World of Espionage," through Oct. 6. Anyone who has ever fantasized about being (or foiling)

By Brian Wright O'Connor Nearly 50 years after leaving the University of Pennsylvania for Vietnam, Lt. Col. Mortimer Lenane O'Connor will receive a posthumous Ph.D. today in a ceremony honoring academic achievement and sacrifice on the field of battle. My father, who set aside his dissertation to lead soldiers in war, will be included in the Class of 1968, the year he would most likely have completed his doctorate had fate not intervened. Born in 1930, my dad grew up in the company of soldier-storytellers on Army garrisons from Manila to the Old West, and watched his own father and three uncles set off for war in Europe.

Sports and games serve as peaceful proxies for war, made possible by the absence of actual hostilities; think the Olympics or the Fischer-Spassky Cold War chess championship. That is part of what makes an act of violence against an athletic event so deeply sickening: It shows the best impulses of humans undone by their worst. Monday's apparent attack on the Boston Marathon was replete with such distressing juxtapositions. Participants were photographed running toward an explosion in the moment that the glorious sight of the finish line was transformed into a savage crime scene that people fled.

HAVANA - Cuba and the United States may be longtime enemies with a bucket overflowing with grievances, but the fast return of a Florida couple who fled U.S. authorities with their two kidnapped children in tow shows that the Cold War enemies are capable of remarkable cooperation on many issues. Indeed, diplomats and observers on both sides of the Florida Straits say American and Cuban law enforcement officers, scientists, disaster-relief workers, Coast Guard officials, and other experts work together on a daily basis, and invariably express professional admiration for each other.

What is the legacy of the Iraq war? Is it the staggering number of lives lost? The trillions of dollars added to the national debt? The precedent of invading a country and overthrowing a government to bolster U.S. interests? Since the war began a decade ago today, as much ink has been spilled on paper as blood on the battlefield in trying to answer these questions. But the Iraq war's greatest legacy might be the opportunity it presents for the American public to demand a standard of transparency and accountability that policymakers must meet before they can waste trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives while violating the Constitution.

The NHL's third lockout in 18 years, which started after the collective bargaining agreement expired at 11:59 p.m. Saturday, had both sides putting on their respective public-relations spin Sunday. The NHL said that despite the CBA's expiration, the league "remains committed to negotiating around the clock" to reach a new agreement fair to both sides. But according to the NHL Players Association, the league was unwilling to go back to the bargaining table on Saturday night. In other words, it sounds as if it will take a while before common ground is reached.

Foreign policy hasn't figured much in the presidential campaign, which is lucky for Mitt Romney. With scant foreign policy experience, Romney has had trouble projecting himself as a statesman. His foreign policy statements have veered from vague to disturbingly hawkish. So this week, he's off to Europe and Israel in hopes of burnishing his image as the future leader of the "free world. " Unfortunately, the world Romney seeks to lead no longer exists. Romney's foreign affairs statements have a Rip Van Winkle quality, as if he had just emerged from a sleep of two decades.

Reagan and Thatcher The Difficult Relationship By Richard Aldous W.W. Norton & Company. 342 pp. $27.95 Reviewed by John Rossi Otto von Bismarck, who forged a united German nation from an array of German-speaking states in the late 19th century, once observed that the key to the 20th century would be that Americans spoke English. The so-called "special relationship" between the two largest branches of the English-speaking world proved decisive in two world wars.

Bertil Stroberg, 79, a former Swedish air force officer who was convicted of spying for Poland during the Cold War but always maintained his innocence, died in Stockholm on March 25 following a yearlong battle with cancer. Stroberg was sentenced to six years in prison for spying in 1983, but released on parole after serving three years. The key evidence in his case was a letter the prosecution said he had written to the Polish Embassy offering to sell military secrets. Handwriting experts failed to link the letter to Stroberg.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - In a world where China is rising, and Islamist movements are thriving, the alliance between America and European democracies takes on new importance. So it was sobering last week to attend the Brussels Forum, an annual high-level meeting of North American and European leaders who discuss the pressing challenges facing both sides of the Atlantic. The Europeans showed a lack of self-confidence - and the Americans a lack of strategic clarity - that was unsettling. And when it came to the future of NATO (whose leaders will be convening in Chicago in May)