at repression from within and without.
What happened, according to Gaddis, is that the policy makers of the U.S. sank into a kind of groupthink in which the Soviet Union was seen as the embodiment of perfection with respect to its perceived effort to spread communism throughout the world. U.S. policy was rooted not in reason and the latest information, but in the ignorance and fearful fervor of anti-communist, anti-Soviet ideology:
This preoccupation with ideology also led the [Eisenhower] administration to attribute to the Russians a clarity of strategic vision not possible in the western democracies. . . . Moscow had, Dulles insisted, a carefully prepared and superbly implemented program which . . . has brought a small Communist group into control over one-third of the world's population (Gaddis 140).
The same counter-ideology raged in the Soviet Union with respect to the U.S., so that each side, in effect, had a tiger by the tail. Neither side would let g
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