The grand struggle to control the future of humanity was fought by bureaucrats, spies, and proxies, in secret, deniably, off-screen. The Cold War had no storming of the Bastille, no Gettysburg, no Omaha Beach.
This was partly because of the world-historic immensity of the opposing systems and partly because of the relative absence of overt conflict between them.
But the Cold War exaggerated the tension to an extreme degree. In a way, the gulf between the high principles that justify a movement and the low pragmatism with which it pursues its aims is common to every political conflict: the French Revolution wrote fraternité on the banners it hung above the guillotines. The Cold War was a conflict staged between grand ideologies but fought by amoral operatives it was freedom versus oppression in the newspapers and liars versus assassins in the streets.
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