Peace and prosperity
An iron curtain has descended across the continent
the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities led by Communists
Have you ever been a member of the Communist party?
I shall continue to fight for peace
How much time do we have?
This is the atomic age
Lavishing in peace with 67 million people gainfully employed -the most in our history-
the United States today represents an achievement in good government
unsurpassed in the history of man,
while at the throttle controlling the wheels of our destiny is a spirit
encouraging ever greater progress efforts on farming, industry,
in science and business that ensure the great majority
a way of life that is physically gratifying and spiritually uplifting.
The seed of our good fortune had root here.
...preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States
so help me God
Republican Dwight David Eisenhower was elected president in 1952
in a landslide win carrying 39 states.
A hero of WW2, gentle yet tough, labeling the ongoing Korean war as useless
Eisenhower, the general, would end it and restore American confidence and optimism:
Now we look forward to the future with faith in ourselves, in our country
and in the creator who is father of us all.
And with faith in the most powerful arsenal ever assembled
just 3 days before his election, the US tested its first hydrogen bomb
on what had been the island of Elugelab.
The 65 ton device was too big to drop by plane.
Elugelab burned for 6 hours under a mushroom cloud 100 miles across
and then disappeared forever.
Who was this new American president with a grandfather's face?
At Potsdam he had opposed the atomic bombings of Japan
he'd pushed hard for a second front to help the Soviets
and developed a friendly relationship with Soviet General Zhukov.
Stalin held him in high regard.
He was the first foreigner to ever witness a parade in Red Square
from the platform atop Lenin's tomb
and 6 weeks after his inauguration in March 1953
a fresh opportunity presented itself
Americans woke to the news that Joseph Stalin was dead.
Despite his extraordinary brutality
most Russians revered him for leading the nation to victory over the Nazis
and turning a backward Russia into a modern industrial state.
While the public mourned, the new somewhat uncertain Soviet leaders
created the onerous ghost of a man who'd ruled their lifes like an ancient czar
for 30 years, decided to ease tensions with the capitalist west.
They wanted above all to focus on improving their quality of life at home
and called for coexistence and peaceful competition.
How would America's new leadership respond?
Winston Churchill was re-elected a 2nd time to office in 1951
announcing 50 years of international diplomacy from the golden age of
the European empires to the horrifying rise of fascism.
But this new nuclear age held a special terror for the old man.
He urged Washington to seize this unprecedented opportunity
and pressed for an international summit with the new Soviet leaders.
He had hopes for Eisenhower
6 weeks went by
silence
and then, Eisenhower eloquently spoke of peace:
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense
under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
The Soviets, inspired, reprinted the speech widely
but then, 2 days later, an answer came back to Moscow
from Eisenhower's secretary of state John Foster Dulles:
the peace offensive, was a peace defensive, taken in response to US's strength
and the Communists were endlessly conspiring to overthrow from within
every genuinely free government in the world.
It was insulting and the Soviets were perplexed, wondering
whether it was the moderate Eisenhower or hard lined Dulles
who spoke for this new administration.
The son of a presbyterian minister, Dulles had made a career on Wall St.
in 1920s and 30s as a lawyer for the corporate powerhouse Sullivan&Cromwell
Dulles never waivered in his commitment to protecting US business interests
or in his hatred for Communism.
Despite his later vehement denials of any dealings with the Nazis
he worked for banker clients and helped secure
more than a billion dollars in German bond sales in the US.
He also dealt extensively with IG Farben corporation,
a significant contributor to the Hitler regime.
Dulles was set on the idea of an aggresive liberation of citizens under Soviet control:
Everywhere I look around the world, the question is,
what -maybe- we gonna lose next, y'know? We seem to be on the defensive
and they're on the offensive.
By this time the Korean police action had become a 2.5 year nightmare
and endless maneuvers for useless hill sides as elusive as
the jungles of south Vietnam 15 years later.
Battling Soviet trained and equipped North Koreans, WW2 hero general Douglas MacArthur
had pushed north towards the Chinese border, despite repeated warnings from Beijing
ensuring Truman that the Chinese would never enter the war.
In the late fall of 1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops
streamed across the Yalu river, sending US and allied forces reeling backwards
in a frantic retreat. The marines who spearheaded the breakout did not
consider it a retreat. "Retreat, hell!" said their commander.
"We're just advancing in a different direction".
Time magazine called it the worst defeat the US had ever suffered.
Truman wrote in his diary: WW3 is here.
MacArthur repeatedly and Truman separately threatened to use the bomb.
General Curtis Lemay volunteered to direct the attacks
and, unknown to the public, American and Soviet pilots were engaging in direct
air warfare, the only extended combat between the two sides during the Cold War.
The drama of Truman firing MacArthur for insubordination:
General MacArthur is one of our greatest military commanders
but the cause of world peace is much more important than any individual.
And the shock of seeing their all powerful military failing to defeat
ill equipped Chinese peasants drew Truman's popularity to a record low
with the public of 22%. No victory in sight, the UN forces pounded
month after month the North and the South with massive unrelenting
conventional air bombing, similar to the campaign visited upon Japan
5 years earlier. Weapon of choice was napalm.
Almost every major city in North Korea was burned to the ground,
a little was left standing in the South.
Although Mao Zedong was imagining a world wide conflict, Stalin in the
summer of 1951 pushed the North Koreans to the bargaining table.
But negotiations dragged on for 2 more years.
What are talking about? What are we arguing about?
You know that this insignificant little hill is of no importance to you
and no importance to us. So how can it be worth any man's life?
Don't you feel some responsibility towards thousands of
Despite some progress at the negotiations and the Soviet peace initiative
after the death of Stalin, Eisenhower now threatened to widen the war.
He suggested to his commanders that the Kaesong area in North Korea
might be a good place to showcase America's new tactical atomic bombs.
The Joint Chiefs and National Security Council endorsed atomic attacks on China.
Eisenhower and Dulles made sure the communist leaders knew of these threats.
The US also began bombing the dams near Pyongyang, North Korea,
causing enormous floods and destroying the rice crop.
The Nuremberg Tribunal had condemned similar actions by Nazis in Holland
in 1944 as a war crime.
With causalties skyrocketing on both sides, an armistice was finally signed in
July of 1953, dividing the country exactly where the war had begun 3 years earlier.
The US, despite claims of stopping communism, was perceived as having lost.
Because, it had not won.
Vice president Richard Nixon would later insist that Eisenhower's nuclear threats
had worked brilliantly, teaching him the value of unpredictability and
inspired Nixon's own Mad Man thesis which he applied to Vietnam less than 20 years later.
What was clear was the message to Asians who tried to challenge US interests.
Some 3-4 million Koreans lay dead out of a population of 30 million, 10%,
as well as over a million Chinese and 36,000 Americans.
China had stood up proudly to the Americans, as the Vietnamese later would,
enhancing their international prestige.
But America would block Chinese entry to the UN until 1971.
The Soviets by comparison looked weak widening their gulf with China.
As for the US, it was Churchill who grasped the real meaning:
Korea does not really matter now. I'd never heard of the bloody place until I was 74.
Its importance lies in the fact that it has led to the re-arming of America.
The defense budget had grown 4 times to almost $50 billion,
and military spending would hover it more than 50% of the US budget
for the rest of the 1950s.
Under Eisenhower a permanent war economy was to be achieved.
Put it another way, it was not just General Motors that was good for America,
anti-communism was good for business.
Hang out the banners, beat the drums, we'll take Ike to Washington.
During his campaign, Eisenhower had in fact on little to lower the cold war
temperature, fanning the flames of anti-Sovietism with calls to move beyond
the democrats' containment to a republican liberation of the Eastern Block.
Although he despised the venomous anti-communist Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy
and privately deplored his tactics, he backed down during the campaign from
defending his mentor general George Marshall who McCarthy had accused of
virtual treason for losing China as secretary of State.
Even if there were only one communist in the state department,
that'd still be one communist too many.
Marshall refused to respond and told Truman at the time, that
if at this point in his life he had to explain that he was not a traitor
it was hardly worth the effort.
But it wasn't long before he resigned as secretary of defense.
From 1950 on, McCarthy made headlines:
I have here in my hand a list of 205, a list of names who I've made known
to the secretary of State as being members of the Communist party who,
nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.
Senator, senator Iselin, I'd like to verify that number sir,
how many communists did you say?
Oh I, major I said there're exactly,
105 card carrying communists in the defense department at this time
How many sir?
Ahem, 275, and that's absolutely all I have to say on the subject
at this time. Come babe.
How many did he say?
I'd be a lot happier if we could just settle on the number of
communists I know there are in the Defense Department.
The next day in another state he lowered his number to 57.
Although he'd stayed silent when it mattered, Truman in one of his
finest speeches deplored the mood and hysteria that he had done
so much to create:
Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism.
We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police.
That is what some people would like to do.
We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think.
We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian
country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.
In short, we are not going to end democracy.
We are going to keep the Bill of Rights on the books.
But throughout the 1950s, political debate essentially continued to vanish
in the US, as Eisenhower never publicly attacked the extremist tactics of
either the Red Scare or the Lavender Scare that targeted gays and lesbians.
Behind the scenes, the real power was being exercised by director J. Edgar Hoover,
who had Eisenhower's full support tapping telephones, opening mail,
installing bugs, breaking into offices and safes.
Hoover often played up the phony threat of a surprise Soviet attack on the US,
and in 1956 briefed Eisenhower on the specter of a dirty bomb unleashed in
Manhattan, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
What's in the box?
Curiosity killed the cat, and it certainly would have you if you followed
your impulse to open it.
Hoover was totally convinced Communism was behind the black civil rights movement
from WW1 on and had spied on every single black leader since.
His FBI was busy on a number of other fronts leaking information to its
high level assets in the press and launching, in 1956, a program called
Cointelpro of dirty tricks designed to disrupt
ultimately some 2300 left-wing organizations.
By 1960, the FBI had begun investigations at more than
400,000 individuals and groups, all with Eisenhower's support.
Patriotic pageants and... pockmarked the landscape. Paranoia was rampant:
Communism in reality is not a political party, it is a way of life,
an evil, a malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease
that spreads like an epidemic. And like an epidemic, its quarantine is necessary
to keep it from infecting this nation.
A second, more damaging, set of Hollywood hearings began.
Artists and citizens were hauled before committees in order to name names.
To writer Mary McCarthy the purpose of the hearings was not to combat subversion,
but to convince Americans to accept the principle of betrayal as a norm of
good citizenship. It worked.
Renowned... journalist I.F.Stone had earlier denounced the attempt to turn
a whole generation of Americans into stool pigeons.
The perception of our heroic WW2 ally was now deeply tarnished in the US
by the Berlin airlift, the spies, the Korean war and the
further revelations of the brutalities of the Stalin purges.
But the Red Scare itself was far more damaging to America.
It certainly decimated the legal communist party USA
whose membership had dropped from 80,000 in 1944
to below 10,000 by the mid 1950s, with probably 1500 of them FBI informants.
9 years putting on an act I hate being hated for doing it.
Something happened at HQ?
No, HQ, they still think I'm a low soul who'd sell out on his own people
Y'know you guys have a home and a family, when your day's work is done
you go home where they're glad to see you
I've got nothing but a bunch of slimy commies who'd cut my throat
and throw me in the river when they're through with me
Look, Ken, you've got to get me out of this thing, you've got to wipe
this red smear of me, i can't take it any longer.
More importantly, the Red Scare eviscerated the US left, the labor unions,
and political and cultural organizations which had spurred
the reforms of the New Deal of 1930s and 40s.
With the exception of the civil rights and anti-nuclear movements,
left-wing'd descend and progressive reform throughout the 1950s would remain silent,
and the labor movement would never recover.
To this day, the Eisenhower 50s are remembered as an era of the lonely, sad,
capitalist corporation man and his gray flannel conformity.
Fearing defense spending would bankrupt the country, Eisenhower and Dulles
called for a new look defense policy that would cut the size of the army
and rely on cheaper nuclear weapons to be used as would other munitions,
based on the assumption that any war with the Soviets would become
a full scale nuclear one.
Though he had once abhorred atomic weaponry, Eisenhower told the British ambassador:
As he set out to convince a weary public, there was no difference between
conventional and nuclear weapons.
He told a reporter in 1955 that he considered nuclear weapons to be as
available for use as other munitions. Churchill was shocked,
so was Pulitzer prize winning NY Times columnist James Reston, who
wondered why no single congressman questioned Eisenhower's commitment
to sudden atomic retaliation without congressional approval.
In August of 1953, the Soviets exploded a 400 Kton proto-hydrogen bomb
in Kazakhistan, shocking the world.
They seemed to have closed the gap, and were now only 10 months behind
the American H-bomb effort.
In december of 54 Eisenhower ordered 42% of atomic 36% of hydrogen bombs
deployed overseas closer to the Soviet union.
Meanwhile he and Dulles intensified their efforts to vanquish the taboos
surrounding the use of nuclear weapons.
As early as december 1953 Eisenhower had unveiled his atoms for peace program
in a speech at the UN, mesmerizing the 3500 delegates:
If the peoples of the world are to conduct an intelligent search for peace,
they must be armed with the significant facts of today's existence.
He promised energy too cheap to meter at home and abroad, ignoring
scientists' warnings about the dangers of proliferation.
Over the years the administration would propose initiatives to use
nuclear bombs for planetary excavation or creating harbors in Alaska
freeing inaccessible oil deposits, creating underground reservoirs
producing steam desalinizing water.
There were schemes to blast a bigger and better Panama canal, and
to alter weather patterns, and even melt the polar ice caps.
Hamburgers from an atomic electric skillet are tasty testimonials of
things to come in the atomic age.
But when a massive hydrogen bomb test in the Marshall Islands in March of 54
went awry and contaminated islanders and Japanese fishermen,
international outrage ensued.
The word fallout entered the lexicon, and opposition to nuclear testing grew globally
new organizations were spun, people marched in the streets once more.
The respected non-aligned Indian prime minister Nehru publicly denounced
US leaders as dangerous self-centered lunatics who would blow up any people
or country who came in the way of their policy.
Eisenhower told his national security council: everybody seems to think that
we're skunks, saber rattlers and war mongers.
Dulles worried: comparisons are now being made between ours and
Hitler's military machine.
But Eisenhower could still speak eloquently and be believed:
I come here representing a nation that wants not an acre of another people's land,
that seeks no control of another people's government,
that pursues no program of expansion in commerce or politics or power of any sort
at another people's expense.
There were other reasons besides the nuclear buildup
for Nehru's denunciation of US leadership in the world
Nehru knew more than the American public knew.
He knew that Eisenhower was not telling the truth.
In Iran, Britain suffered another reverse with the nationalization
of its huge oil industry, and confiscation of the properties
amidst scenes of violence.
The British turn for help to the CIA with tales of mideast oil
coming under Soviet control, this oil rich region from the Caspian to
the Persian Gulf, unlike Korea, was critical to western interests.
Democraticly elected, immensely popular, prime minister Mohammed Mosaddegh was
the first Iranian to earn a doctor of laws degree from a European university.
Time magazine named him 1951's Man of the Year.
He inspired the Arab masses throughout the region
who pulsated with nationalist fever, ready to take over their own affairs.
Dulles and his brother Allen who was now head of the CIA knew Mosaddegh
was not a communist, but feared a takeover by the small communist party.
And with Eisenhower's full approval deployed the CIA to get rid of the
madman Mosaddegh, buying up journalists, military officials, members of parliament
and ominiously the services of the extremist warriors of Islam, a terrorist gang.
In August of 53, organized mobs caused chaos in Tehran spreading rumours
that Mosaddegh was Jewish and communist.
The CIA and British intelligence paid street thugs to destroy mosques.
Among the rioters was Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's future leader.
Mosaddegh and thousands of his supporters were arrested for treason, some executed.
Former premier Mosaddegh's ruined house is a mute testimony to 3 days of bloody rioting
culminating in a military coup from which the one time dictator of Iran fled for his life.
The Shah who had fled to Rome comes home. Iranian oil may again flow westward.
Reinstating the Shah on the throne, the US turned on the financial spigots for the next
25 years, creating its strongest military ally in the middle east.
Cutting down the British share, 5 US oil companies now received
40% ownership of a new consortium.
Those celebrate it in the western media as a great victory, the downside would be enormous.
Instead of seeing a change of attitude at Stalin's death,
the Soviets would perceive the US imposing another puppet government
on a nation with which it shared a 2000 km border
along with the Nato alliance, and now saw a western strategy of encirclement.
Blowback is an espionage term for the violent unintended consequences of
a covert operation on the civilian population of the aggressor nation.
And in this case the US, despite temporary success and a new supply of oil,
had outraged the citizens of a proud nation.
It may have taken 25 more years for blowback to manifest, but in 1979, it did.
Fed up with fixed elections and the repressions of Savak,
the despised intelligence agency given to torture, people revolted
embracing the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, and forced out the Shah.
The Iranian coup would poison the US relations with the Iranian people for
another 30 years into the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
The CIA had now come into its own, and the next year organized the overthrow of
Guatamala's popular leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman who challenged the giant
US commercial interests in his impoverished central American nation.
Dulles believed Arbenz was secretly a communist and, if not stopped,
would invite Soviet infiltration into the region.
In reality, communist influence was minimally a party of approximately
4000 members.
Future of Guatemala lies at the disposal of leaders loyal to Guatemala
who have not treasonably become the agents of an alien despotism which sought
to use Guatamala for its own evil ends.
From bases in Honduras and Nicaragua in June 54, CIA trained mercenaries attacked.
And Arbenz surrendered to a military junta.
The events of recent months and days add a new and glorious chapter to
already great tradition of the American states.
Arbenz's replacement, anti-communist strong man Castillo Armas
set up a brutal military dictatorship employing death squads
and was assasinated 3 years later. The democratically elected Arbenz
warned that 20 years of fascist bloody tyranny was coming.
He was wrong.
The tyranny that followed actually lasted 40 years, and
took up the lives of some 200,000 people.
The word communism was now being used as a description of not only
the Soviet system, but for anyone, any place, any time
who wanted change in their way in their country.
Be it a labor leader, a reformer, a peasant activist,
a human rights worker, or even a priest reading the gospel and
organizing self help groups based on radical or pacifist messages.
Events of even greater significance were unfolding simultaneously
in Vietnam.
The British had yielded much of their empire, but the French
who had been humiliated by the German invasion of WW2 were still
fighting for their enormous colonies in Indo China, and Africa.
As the British in Iran had done in order to receive American aid
the French daemonized their enemy, Ho Chi Minh, as a communist fanatic
although they knew that he represented the same rebellion
they had been fighting since the late 1800s.
For the Vietnamese people, it had always been a struggle for their
independence, well before the Russian revolution and
the concept of communism had taken root.
But in this time period, it was naturally assumed that
Asian communism was directed from Moscow.
The truth was that Stalin had always shown caution in Asia,
denying significant aid to Mao, as he would for Ho Chi Minh,
seeing little to gain by inflaming the French.
Ho, who'd received US assistance when he led the resistance
to the Japanese during WW2, had asked president Truman for help
in setting up an independent Vietnamese state.
He received no response.
In 1950 he found out why: Truman was back in the other side.
By april of 1954 Ho Chi Minh's peasant army had finished hauling
extremely heavy anti-aircraft guns and howitzers through
almost impassable jungle and mountain terrain,
to lay siege to an encircled French army at Dien Bien Phu.
A battle to the death is joined in Dien Bien Phu, an isolated French
union stronghold deep in communist held territory of Indo China.
The battle is at its height as French forces repulse repeated
fanatical charges by 40,000 reds.
Supplied by airlift reinforcements, a garrison outnumbered 4 to 1,
kills or wounds 10,000 of the attackers while sustained severe losses
of its own in the first single battle of the 8 year war.
Incredibly the US was paying 80% of the French war costs.
Eisenhower justified it by describing the countries in the region
falling like dominoes, ultimately leading from Thailand, Indonesia and
Malaysia to Japan itself.
Though Eisenhower ruled out sending US ground forces, the Joint Chiefs'
drop plans for operation Vulture, an air campaign against Viet positions
which included the possibility of using 3 small tactical a-bombs.
Nonetheless the French alongside the British rejected this option,
and on may 7th after 56 grueling days the French garrison fell.
And France's days of colonial conquest in Asia were over.
Despite the fact that his forces controlled most of the country
Ho gave in to pressure from Soviets and the Chinese who feared
US intervention and at Geneva accepted a proposal that would
temporarily divide Vietnam at the 17th parallel with Ho's forces
withdrawing to the north and French backed forces retreating to the south.
A national election was scheduled for 1956 to unify the country.
The US promised not to interfere. But it did,
installing a conservative, corrupt, catholic in a Buddhist country.
Ngo Dinh Diem wasted no time in crushing rivals and jailing communists,
thousands of whom were executed.
With US backing, Diem then subverted the most important provision of
the Geneva agreement: cancelling the 1956 election.
Eisenhower later explained that, had the elections been held
As a result the insurgency was soon rekindled, and within
a few short years the French war would become the American.
Across the globe in Africa, the Vietnamese struggle became an inspiration
for the Algerian revolutionaries who would outlast the French
in a brutal 8 year war from 1954 to 62.
This finally gutted the French empire in Africa.
In 1953, Eisenhower symbolically went to Madrid to offer a huge loan
to feared fascist dictator Francisco Franco in return for the
establishment of nuclear bases.
Spain was then admitted to the UN in 1955,
although communist China was still denied membership.
The US also supported Portugal, which clung to an enormous
ramshackle plantation and apartheid empire in southern Africa
as well as neighboring south Africa where minority whites
strictly suppressed the black majority.
By the mid 1950s the reputation of the US in the third world
reached rock bottom, as it allied itself with some of the world's
most reactionary regimes.
America's capacity for massive retaliation might keep the balance of
power with the Soviets, but it would prove useless in preventing
the revolutionary upsurge in the developing world, which wished
to steer non-aligned course between capitalist and socialist blocks
and... seeing to spend billions of dollars on arms when
money for survival was in short supply.
To the non-aligned point of view, the American cold war on
Eisenhower's watch was not really a war against communism
as much as it was a war against the poor peoples of the earth
for the resources of the earth.
29 Asian and African leaders met for the first time in 1955 at
Bandung in Indonesia. The host was Indonesia's Achmed Sukarno who
had led the fight against Dutch colonialism.
The stars were Yugoslavia's renegade leader marshall Tito
who had, despite several assasination attempts,
freed himself from Stalin's Soviet grip
along with Nasser of Egypt who had taken on the British empire
Nehru, independent India's first leader
and Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh.
Israel, perceived as a US ally, was not invited
to avoid an Arab boycott. Communist China was.
They met on the beautiful island of Java in the world's 4th
largest nation which combined the world's largest muslim community
and the 3rd largest communist party.
This conference is not to oppose each other,
it is a conference of brotherhood.
Dulles proclaimed neutrality an obsolete conception,
immoral and short-sighted.
In one the strangest and little known episodes of this time period,
the prime minister of China, Zhou Enlai, was targeted
by Jiang Jieshi's nationalist government in Taiwan.
Secretly embedded by the CIA, a detonator and bomb were placed on his plane.
But Zhou survived when he changed planes,
although the 16 people aboard were blown
out of the sky under mysterious circumstances.
Zhou maintained an enigmatic silence and
the conference was considered a great success.
But many of these independent leaders would in time be toppled by the US.
The Soviet union, which had first ignored the neutral block,
was beginning to confront its own past.
Premier Nikita Khrushchev who, like Eisenhower, had come from
humble origins and seen the worst of WW2 up close as a political
organizer at the battle of Stalingrad shocked the communist world
in February 1956, emotionally giving voice to what noone had ever
publicly said without being punished.
He detailed Stalin's murderous terror which had left his society
frightened into a conformity even greater than that in the US
which had not suffered the physical terrors.
He decried Stalin's cult of personality and initiated a much
needed policy of de-Stalinization.
The reaction across the communist world was incendiary.
Hard liners were stunned. Mao in China infuriated.
Unrest swept much of eastern Europe.
Crowds gathered outside the parliament in Hungary and
toppled the enormous statue of Stalin, even lynching secret
police officers in the streets.
Kruschev allowed the revolt to take its course, but when the
moderate Hungarian prime minister announced free elections and
said that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw pact of 1955
which was a new parallel organization to the west's Nato,
Kruschev felt he had no other choice or he would be removed
by his hard liners.
Russian tanks rolled into the old city and the resistance
ended with the death of around 2500 Hungarians.
Although this number pales in comparison to the total casualties
from America's interventions in 3rd world countries, Hungary
became one of the biggest stories of cold war, clearly pointing
to Soviet evil and domination.
This is battered Budapest under the brutal Russian boot.
Communist secret police hunt down heroic freedom fighters.
Time magazine called the Hungarian freedom fighter
the man of the year.
At the same time, unknown to the American public, the USA's
hard power continued to manifest globally.
We were not very happy with Mr. Sukarno in, what was that
year? 1958, and I don't thin k we're happy with him in 1965.
Sukarno in Indonesia became a major target.
the CIA plans to unseat him were sometimes ludicrous involving
porno films and beautiful Russian blondes, and supporting
a military coup in 1957 in which CIA pilots bombed targets.
When Eisenhower denied US involvement, he was embarassed when
one such pilot, Al Pope, was shot down in a B-26 and presented
there in a news conference.
The results of these efforts pushed Sukarno towards accepting
more and more Soviet aid. It would take the US another 8 years
to change the power structure in Indonesia in one of the
bloodiest massacres of the century.
An extreme situation has been created in Little Rock.
Projecting a negative international image of the US, federal
troops were sent in the fall of 1957 to Arkansas to protect
newly enrolled black high school students from violent
hateful moms,
whereas the progressive Soviet union was seen by all to be
launching the satellite Sputnik into the night sky.
We had bombs, but suddenly the Soviets had space.
They had rockets and missiles.
Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson said that the Soviets
would soon be dropping bombs on us from space like kids
dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.
Eisenhower's response was lackadaisical:
they put one small ball into the air, he said
then to drive his point home, he reportedly played 5 rounds of golf that week.
The reason was he knew the truth and could not reveal it, that
US technology had developed hightly secret U2 reconaissance planes
which had for over a year flown 70,000 feet above Soviet
airspace photographing how far the Russians really lagged
behind in the arms race.
CIA director Allen Dulles later gloated: I was able to
get a look at every blade of grass in the Soviet union.
A month later the Soviets launched the massive 6 ton Sputnik 2.
Nonetheless, Kruschev reached out to Eisenhower calling for
a peaceful space competition and an end to the cold war.
But Ike, feeling enourmous political pressure, gloated publicly
about America's vast and growing military superiority.
We're well ahead the Soviets both in quality and in quantity.
We intend to stay ahead.
Pointing to its submarines and huge aircraft carriers
now supplied with nuclear weapons.
Nonetheless, the democrats seized the initiative.
Respected house leader John McCormack declared that
US faced national extinction. Among those who jumped
enthusiastically on this missile gap bandwagon was the
junior senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy
Eisenhower dismissed these critics as sanctimonious
hypocritical bastards. but gloom
He now commissioned a secret security review that was
authored essentially by Paul Nitze, a furiously anti-communist
Wall St. protege of James Forrestal.
His report, the Gaither report, was devastating. And it was leaked
apparently by Nitze himself to the Washington Post which wrote
that it portrays a US in gravest danger in its history.
In the best tradition of yellow press, the newspaper pictured the
nation moving to the status of a second class power and
urgently called for enormous increase in military spending
from now through 1970.
The publication of Nevil Schute's On The Beach in 1957,
followed by an internationally popular movie, chillingly
showed a handful of survivors of nuclear war waiting in
Melbourne, Australia, the world's southern-most city for the
fallout that had already wiped out the rest of humanity.
Winston Churchill, now in retirement, was attending a party
when asked if he would send a copy of the novel to Eisenhower.
A one time ferocious cold war hero responded with despair:
It would be a waste of money. He's so muddle-headed now I think
the earth will soon be destroyed. And if I were the almighty
I would not re-create it in case they destroyed him too the next time.
After 2 heart attacks, Eisenhower still seemed a decent well meaning
man but lost out of touch.
Right under his nose in America's backyard in early 1959, Fidel Castro
and his revolutionaries finally toppled Cuba's Batista dictatorship
under which American business interests controlled over 80% of
Cuba's resources. Castro said about redistributing land and
reforming the education system. He seized large Cuban land
holdings, and over a million acres from United Fruit and two
other companies, offering compensation, which was rejected.
Like many non-aligned 3rd world leaders, Castro accepted offers of
Soviet aid. In april of 59, he visited the US and met briefly with
vice-president Nixon who dismissed Castro as naive about communism and
later supported his elimination. And when US and British oil
companies refused to process Russian crude at their Cuban refineries
Castro nationalized them and threatened to expropriate all American
property on the island. Eisenhower announced a punishing trade
embargo denying the Cuban people, among other things, markets for
their sugar which the Soviets and Chinese offered to buy.
The embargo would take a terrible toll, though it would be eased
by US at the turn of the century, it would last for more than
50 years and 10 administrations.
Condemned repeatedly by a huge majority of the General Assembly
in 2011, 186 nations were against it, 2 nations supported it:
the US and Israel.
In march 1960, Eisenhower approved a CIA plan to organize
a paramilitary force of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro.
This plan included the possibility of assasination.
As a symbol to the rest of the world, Castro could not be allowed
to succeed.
The Belgian Congo had been infamously portrayed in Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness in the early part of the century.
Nothing much had changed.
When the Belgians left in 1960, new socialist premier Patrice Lumumba
desperate for help, flew to Washington. But Eisenhower refused
to see him. CIA chief Allen Dulles told Ike that Lumumba was
an African Fidel Castro and persuaded him to authorize a plan
to assasinate him. It was bungled.
But as Congo descended into an anarchic civil war Lumumba was
removed in January of 61 by army mutineers in the presence of
Belgian officers. He was tortured and murdered. And quickly
became a martyred nationalist hero to the 3rd world.
The US was blamed by many.
The CIA, abandoning the UN peace plan, backed Joseph Mobutu.
Stealing billions of dollars in natural resources from the land
as well as from his US supporters and slaughtering multitudes
to preserve his power, Mobutu ruled for 3 decades as a
billionaire dictator, and as the CIA's most trusted ally in Africa.
In his remarkable farewell address of January 1961, Eisenhower
seemed to understand the monstrosity he had created and seemed
almost to be asking for absolution.
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of
vast proportions. 3.5 million men and women are directly engaged
in the defense establishment.
The total influence -economic, political, even spiritual- is
felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of
the Federal government. In the councils of government,
we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger
our liberties or democratic processes.
Privately he told Allen Dulles: I leave a legacy of ashes
to my successor. He was close to the truth.
Aside from overthrowing foreign governments and intervening
freely around the globe, it was Eisenhower who did more than
anyone else to create the very military industrial complex
he warned of. Under Ike, the US arsenal expanded from a little
more than 1000 to over 22,000 nuclear weapons.
And continuing into the 1960s he authorized more than
30,000 weapons. Nuclear bombs were now the foundation of
America's empire, and provided the new emperor, its president,
with a mystical power that required more and more
suffocating secrecy, even if those powers went far beyond
the original limits of executive power
defined in the constitution.
And, although the bombs themselves were not expensive, the
huge infrastructure was, requiring bases in the US and abroad
and enormous delivery systems by bomber missile,
aircraft carrier and submarine.
Eisenhower additionally made it acceptable US policy
to threaten nuclear attack.
In a Life magazine interview in 1956 Dulles defending
his policy of brinksmanship pointed to 3 different
occasions where the administration had walked to the
brink of nuclear war and forced the communists to back down:
In Korea, Vietnam and the Formosa Straits.
The US would actually do so again against the Soviets
who also threatened to use their nuclear weapons during
the Suez crisis of 1956, and once more in the crisis
with China over the small islands Quemoy and Matsu in 1958.
Eisenhower's successors in the white house have all
followed his example in threatening America's perceived
enemies if they didn't recede to its demands.
Additionally, what is little known is that Eisenhower had
delegated to theater commanders and other specified
commanders the authority to launch a nuclear attack, if
they believed it were mandated by circumstances, and
were out of communication with the president.
And with Eisenhower's approval, some of these commanders
had in turn delegated the same authority to lower level
officers. Thus, there were now dozens of fingers on
the trigger at a time when there were no locking devices
on nuclear weapons.
General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand.
I was under the impression that I was the only one in
the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.
Ah, that's right sir.
You are the only person authorized to do so, and although
I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's
beginning to look like general Ripper exceeded his
authority.
It certainly does, far beyond the point I would've
imagined possible.
Perhaps you're forgetting the provisions of Plan R, sir.
Plan R?
Plan R is an emergency war plan in which a lower echelon
commander may order nuclear retaliation after a sneak attack
if the normal chain of command has been disrupted.
You approved it sir, you must remember.
In august of 1960 Eisenhower approved an operational plan
to launch a nuclear attack simultaneously on USSR and China
within the first 24 hours of a war.
The conservative estimate on the number of deads from US
bombs and fallout was 600 million people, more than
100 holocausts, much less the possibility of a nuclear
winter across the globe that would have ended all life.
In hindsight, Eisenhower presiding over the world's most
powerful nation during perhaps the tensest extended period
in its history, could have with bold action put the world
on a different path.
Signs eminating from Moscow indicated Kremlin was ready
to change course.
But because of ideology, political calculations,
the exigencies of a militarized state and a limited
imagination, Eisenhower repeatedly failed to seize
the opportunities that emerged.
Fathers make mistakes too, y'know, lots of them.
In fact, it's easy for us to make mistakes because
we're trying so hard to live up to the perfect picture
you paint of us.
You're just going to have learn that I'm just an
ordinary human being, with a reasonable amount of
intelligence, capable of handling most situations,
but I'm not a superman. I can't bring about miracles.
Just because I'm your father doesn't mean that I'm
infallible.
It's interesting to think that in 1953 when Eisenhower
was becoming more of a cold war hero, his mentor
general George Marshall became the only career military
officer to be awarded the Nobel peace prize.
Emphasizing the need for a better understanding of history
and the causes of war, he said:
A cost of war is constantly spread before me
written neatly in many ledgers,
whose columns are gravestones.
Marshall, a conservative man who had lived through
two world wars and a depression who, unlike many
generals, rarely wore his medals in public and
reportedly refused a large sum of money for his
memoirs, stood till he died in 1959
in a sort of respected but lonely grandeur
still ostracized by many on the right for
moderation in a time of zealotry, and a tolerance
he was truly the embodiment of.
There's no question the Eisenhower years are remembered
as peaceful and prosperous.
At a time when war with the Soviet union seemed
quite possible, he certainly deserves credit for
avoiding it. But, the inescapable truth is that
the beloved Dwight Eisenhower put the world on a
glide path towards annihilation by the most
gargantuan expansion of military power in history
and left the world a far more dangerous place than
when he first took office.
We stand ready to engage with any and all others
in joint effort to remove the causes of mutual fear
and distrust among nations, so as to make possible
drastic reduction of armaments.