The title of this book refers to the Cold War that ended in a whimper. Lincoln Landis, a U.S.-Russian liaison during key periods of the Cold War, offers a simple explanation: communism in the Soviet Union began to collapse the moment Premier Joseph Stalin brought the U.S.S.R. into the United Nations in 1945. In the author's view, this fateful act of diplomacy opened Soviet communism to the scrutiny of his one-on-one U.S. liaison activity during such key periods as the Berlin Airlift crisis in 1948, the Berlin Wall crisis in 1961, and the detente period beginning in the 1970s. Chapters...