On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill stood at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri — Truman seated behind him — and told the audience that an iron curtain had descended from Stettin to Trieste. Behind it, Hungary's communist party was deploying what leader Matyas Rakosi called "salami tactics," slicing off the noncommunist opposition one piece at a time. By 1947, former Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy had fled to Switzerland rather than face arrest. The Cold War had begun before anyone had agreed on a name for it.

This is the complete Cold War history of America's 46-year standoff. Historian Catherine Emerson Gallagher covers the full arc: George Kennan's 8,000-word Long Telegram of February 1946, the Marshall Plan, MacArthur's catastrophic advance to the Yalu, McCarthy's Wheeling speech with its contested list of 205 communists, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 58,318 Americans who died in Vietnam and the North Vietnamese tanks crashing through Saigon's gates on April 30, 1975, and Gorbachev's glasnost unraveling what Stalin had built.

Inside this Cold War history:

• The Iron Curtain's construction — Soviet salami tactics in Poland, Hungary's show trials, Jan Masaryk's fall from a Prague window, and 3.5 million East Germans who fled before the Berlin Wall stopped the hemorrhage (Chapter 1)
• Korea and the MacArthur crisis — the Inchon landing's military brilliance, China's 300,000 troops massing in the mountains, the Chosin Reservoir at 30 below zero, and Truman's constitutionally correct but politically devastating dismissal of a national hero (Chapter 5)
• McCarthyism's mechanics and collapse — Alger Hiss, the Rosenberg executions, McCarthy's changing numbers (205, then 57, then "a lot"), Edward R. Murrow's March 1954 broadcast, and Joseph Welch's "Have you no sense of decency?" ending the senator's career (Chapter 6)
• Vietnam from escalation to fall — 630 helicopter sorties evacuating 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese in 19 hours, thousands left behind at the embassy gates, and 800,000 refugees eventually resettled (Chapters 9-12)
• CIA covert action and its consequences — Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, the Bay of Pigs, the Church Committee's revelation of assassination plots against eight foreign leaders, and the Zaire kleptocracy that American backing sustained for 32 years (Chapter 14)
• Reagan and the Soviet collapse — the Evil Empire speech, Stinger missiles for the Afghan mujahideen, Gorbachev's glasnost, and the night of November 9, 1989, when East Germans began dismantling the Wall (Chapters 17-20)

The Cold War killed millions in proxy conflicts from Korea to Vietnam to Angola to Afghanistan while keeping the two superpowers from direct battle for 46 years. Gallagher's Cold War history delivers every major episode — the strategy and the human cost, the intelligence operations and their blowback — from Churchill's curtain speech to the Wall's fall, without flinching from what the standoff required of those caught inside it.

For readers of David Halberstam's THE COLDEST WINTER and Max Hastings's VIETNAM: AN EPIC TRAGEDY.