Cold warriors were often pragmatic men, able to calculate their nations' interests and if necessary to negotiate with their adversaries in order to protect those interests. They were serious men, disinclined to joke about their work and for the most part innocent even of a sense of irony about it with the exception perhaps of their hubris, they masked their emotions, though they could never fully erase them. Cold warriors were frequently messianic in their convictions, believing they represented the one best political, economic, and social system. The most prominent cold warriors were men of power -commanders of great armies, of the masses, of economic might, of words and ideas. In revolutionary societies and communist countries, high class standing was no asset for a leader, so cold warriors either came from humble stock or claimed that they did. In the West, the so-called free world, cold warriors were usually well-born and well educated. They built the Cold War's institutions, forged its diplomacy, oversaw its military flare-ups and its diplomatic stand-downs, and supplied its fierce rhetoric and its silent espionage.
Architects of the conflict that gripped the world for nearly fifty years, cold warriors were the men, and few women, who gave shape to the ongoing conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1989.
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