History is usually presented as a set of facts and dates,
of victories and defeats,
of monarchs and presidents...
So, come on in to the launch control centre.
..consigned to an unchangeable past.
But it's not like that at all.
History is the knitting together of rival interpretations,
deliberate manipulations of the truth
and, sometimes, alternative facts.
In this series, I'll be lifting the lid
on three of American history's national legends.
The Revolutionary War Of Independence -
is the story of the Founding Fathers full of fibs?
The Civil War -
was it really a battle to reunite the nation
and liberate the slaves in the southern states?
And, in this programme,
the American Dream
and the tall tales told by the world's greatest superpower.
We blotted out the real story, even after we heard what it was.
America's supremacy over other nations,
whether that's military, economic, cultural,
is often taken for granted...
..and the idea that America is a special country,
destined for greatness,
is a powerful part of the American Dream...
..but history's always a murky business,
and the story of how the United States
came to be a superpower
is full of some of American history's biggest fibs.
You have lift-off.
Lift-off has happened. It's gone.
If ever an American era was idolised,
it's the 1950s and early 1960s.
The years after the Second World War
are often remembered as a peaceful and harmonious time -
a world where mums made apple pie
and dads made go-carts.
Marriages were sweeter, colours richer.
Doors could be left unlocked without fear.
The poverty of the 1930s and the austerity of war
were left far behind as the United States soared.
America truly was supreme.
It was the American Dream brought to life.
This was the world of Happy Days,
and I Love Lucy - obviously -
and America was a beacon of freedom and democracy.
It was helping humanity all around the globe,
but this perfect world was constructed on fibs -
some of them dangerous ones.
The United States was emerging as a superpower in 1945,
but its leader was no Superman.
He wasn't a war hero, or a film star,
and he certainly wasn't a property tycoon.
One reporter said that he was just like an ordinary man
plucked at random off the street -
but this man was going to be President of the United States.
This is the rather ordinary-looking apartment block
that was the home of the very ordinary Harry S Truman.
Truman himself said he came to power by accident
because he was vice president
when the popular Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt died in office
on April the 12th 1945.
He suddenly found himself shoulder to shoulder with wartime allies
Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin
as the conflict in Europe was coming to an end...
..but a brutal war with Japan
was still raging in the East.
Americans were still fighting in battles to the death...
..and this ordinary man's extraordinary response
announced America's arrival as a superpower.
Truman made a decision that I think you could describe
as THE most controversial presidential decision in history.
He unleashed what he himself described
as the most terrible bomb in the history of the world.
The target was the city of Hiroshima.
70,000 people were instantly killed.
The city was destroyed.
A few days later, Nagasaki shared the same fate.
Jubilant crowds poured into Times Square in New York
to celebrate the great American victory over Japan...
..but the victory wasn't quite what it seemed.
Traditionally, the story goes like this -
6th of August, Hiroshima bombed.
9th of August, Nagasaki bombed.
15th of August, Japan surrenders.
A plus B leads to C,
and in this version of events,
the atom bomb is a terrible thing, but it ends the war,
saving the lives of millions of Americans...
..but, in this official version, there are so many evasions and fibs.
The traditional story makes the two atomic bombs the critical factor...
..but Japan's leaders were already discussing surrender
when Nagasaki was bombed.
It can't have been the cause.
The first bomb on Hiroshima would go down in history,
but it wasn't as decisive as it seems.
In fact, the decision to surrender
was triggered by something else, as well.
The usual account ignores the other big player -
Stalin.
An ally against the Nazis,
the Soviet Union had remained neutral in the war in the East...
..but on August the 8th, 1.5 million Russian troops
launched a surprise assault against the Japanese army in Manchuria.
Russia formally declared war on the 9th of August.
Now, Japan could deal with one superpower,
but two was just too much.
Japan surrendered - but, of course, nobody in America wanted to admit
that Russia had played this role in ending the war,
so the story was sold that the atom bomb had done the trick.
And that story really stuck.
Just as the Cold War got started,
this belief that the atom bomb alone had won the war
would mould America's superpower psyche.
The United States had fought the war to preserve four freedoms.
Artist Norman Rockwell made four paintings
to celebrate this American Dream.
Freedom From Want...
..Freedom Of Worship...
..Freedom From Fear...
..and Freedom Of Speech.
Rockwell captured the values
that inspired confidence in the new supremacy.
The American Dream could now become a reality.
Professor Sarah Churchwell has studied the history
of this powerful idea.
So, the American Dream didn't become a national catchphrase,
the way that we now know it, until 1931.
It was used by an American historian called James Truslow Adams
in a book called The Epic Of America,
and Adams' point was that the American Dream of higher ideals,
the American Dream which he saw as a spiritual dream
of self-fulfilment,
of becoming the best person that you could be,
living the best life that you could live,
creating the best country that you could create,
was by no means going to be measured by materialism
and he wanted to return America to thinking about values,
and about things that mattered more than merely making money.
And when did it start to flip over?
When did it start to mean having a car and a house
and a nice little wife and a lawn
and a swimming pool and all that kind of thing?
Around the time that the post-war boom began
and that American ideas about prosperity were starting to shift.
went hand-in-hand with new aspirations and desires.
This would be an era of peace, prosperity,
and homes fit for heroes.
There was a housing boom.
First up, a new town in Long Island, named after its builder,
William Levitt.
Welcome to Levittown.
Inspired by Henry Ford, Levitt broke down the process
of building a house into 27 separate tasks.
Now, most builders aimed to produce three or four houses a year,
but Levitt's target was 30-40 houses a day.
1,000 acres of potato fields on Long Island sprouted a new crop.
In March 1949, 1,400 homes sold in just three hours.
It looked like a perfect world
where anyone could live the American Dream.
Were I lucky enough to have a GI husband,
the government would reward his service with a generous loan.
Other buyers rushed here to escape the city
with an affordable house in the suburbs.
Long Island's success led to seven replica Levittowns,
from Philadelphia to Maryland.
The homes were particularly popular with newlyweds.
In fact, if you got pregnant,
it became known as having "the Levittown look."
Levittown came to stand for everything
that was great about the suburbs -
higher standards of living, and very, very affordable.
As a child, Pat Heegan experienced the move to Levittown.
You'd been living in an apartment in Brooklyn, is that right?
Yeah, yes, a two-family house.
We lived on the second floor,
and we were really confined.
We were just looking forward to coming out to the country
and getting a brand-new house.
And now you had your own front door...
Yes. ..television.
What else was exciting about it?
Also a washing machine for my mother.
She was very excited about the washing machine.
Your mum, was she happier?
Oh, yes, much happier.
She didn't have to worry about us.
She didn't have to look out the window constantly,
you know, to see where we were.
We had bicycles to ride, something which we didn't have in Brooklyn.
You've made it sound like it was a golden age living here.
Is that what it was like?
Yes, it really was.
It was like coming into the rainbow.
Mr Levitt made it possible for people to buy a house,
to have the American Dream come true.
In this new American Dream,
the chance to own your own home was open to all -
but there was a problem with that word "all".
In almost all respects, the Myers family is close
to the Levittown norm, except in one respect.
William Myers Jr and his family are Negroes
in an all-white community.
Daisy and William Myers were the first black family
to try to buy into the Levittown dream.
The Myers didn't get much of a welcome.
Protesters clashed with police.
Rocks were hurled through their windows
and a burning cross appeared outside their home.
An anonymous caller warned Daisy Myers that they would,
"Shoot William down on sight."
Residents didn't try to hide their prejudice.
The whole trouble with this integration business
is that, in the end, it probably will end up with mixing socially,
and you'll have, well, I think their aim is mixed marriages
and becoming equal with the whites.
I moved here...
One of the main reasons was because it was a white community,
and that's the only place I intend to live.
If I have to leave Levittown, I will do so.
The Levittowns across America hadn't remained all-white by chance.
It was the result of a clause in the sales documents.
The terms and conditions included something called a racial covenant.
This was a legal clause - and it was also a euphemism.
It really meant racial segregation.
The covenant stated the premises could not be used
by anyone other than members of the Caucasian race.
It didn't apply when houses were sold on
to families like the Myers...
..but these racist clauses weren't outlawed until 1968.
As the American Dream was taking hold in the suburbs,
Truman's atomic supremacy seemed secure...
..but in 1950 that changed.
A secret National Security Council report, codenamed NSC-68,
claimed that America's new superpower status
was already under threat.
"The issues that face us are momentous,
"involving the fulfilment or destruction
"not only of this Republic,
"but of civilisation itself."
Peter Kuznick has studied the report.
Peter, what is NSC-68?
NSC-68 is a top-secret memo
that was drafted in early 1950,
in order to set America's new defence strategy.
What the report says
is that America's period of maximum vulnerability
is going to come in 1954,
because the Soviets are out for world conquest, world domination,
and it poses it in these stark, Manichaean, black and white terms.
It's the US versus the Soviets in this battle to the death -
but we had this idea that we need an enemy
to justify America's defence spending,
enemies with the capability of doing you in, and conquering you.
What, in your opinion, was the reality of the Soviet capability?
Soviet capability was pretty limited.
You have to realise that the Soviet economy
was destroyed in World War II.
John Kennedy said it was as if the entire United States
east of Chicago had been wiped out, was what the Soviets suffered.
The Soviets lost 27 million people in World War II.
They were always on the defensive, in that sense. I'm not surprised!
They knew how much stronger the US was than they were,
and they knew that the US was building up its capabilities,
so they were seeing themselves as the victims.
What effect do you think that NSC-68 had
on the next 10, 15 years of American politics?
It's going to put us in a permanent war economy,
a permanent alert, and we're going to build up a nuclear arsenal
as part of this that can end life on the planet.
"The proposed programme hangs ultimately on recognition
"by this government, the American people and all free peoples
"in which the survival of the free world is at stake."
So, NSC-68 made it seem like the President only had three options.
First, pre-emptive strike on Russia,
second, do nothing - isolationism -
or third, rapid arms build-up.
Now, the first two options didn't really work -
nobody wanted to go to war,
and isolationism was thought to have led to the rise of the Nazis.
That left just option three, rapid arms build-up.
The report somehow made it seem
like that was the only sensible thing to do.
NSC-68 hit President Truman's desk in April 1950,
seven months after Russia's first atom bomb test.
The report's distortions scared Truman
into tripling defence spending...
..from $14 billion to $47 billion.
The military now swallowed nearly 15%
of America's gross national product.
The Cold War nuclear arms race suddenly lurched forward.
The drive for better nuclear weapons led to a new test site in Nevada.
It was described as "relatively uninhabited" desert -
but the test site was just 65 miles away from Las Vegas.
Where the military saw cheap land...
..Vegas hoteliers saw an opportunity.
Atomic tourism began.
Every mushroom cloud had a golden lining.
Casinos even offered an explosive new drink.
This is the must-have drink of 1953,
vodka, brandy, sherry!
Oh, yeah!
And...
..all topped up with champagne.
Then you drive into the desert,
you stay up all night drinking your atomic cocktail
and you watch the nuclear testing.
It's the greatest light show on Earth.
LUCY CHOKES AND SPLUTTERS
Cheers.
# It's the drink that you don't pour
# Now when you take one sip you won't need any more
# You're small as a beetle or big as a whale
# Boom! Atomic cocktail. #
People came to Las Vegas to feel the ground shake beneath their feet.
Tourists could stay at the Atomic View Motel...
..see the annual crowning of Miss Atomic Bomb...
..or enjoy an atomic ballet.
ON TANNOY: Put on your goggles.
Five, four...
..three, two, one...
..zero.
Tourists sat on hotel balconies
waiting for a mini Armageddon on the horizon.
This was what being a superpower was all about.
As they say, the Earth moved.
# Atomic Cocktail. #
The message was, don't worry.
Soldiers waiting for their own nuclear test
were reassured by the army chaplain.
There's no need to be worried,
as the Army has taken all of the necessary precautions
to see that we're perfectly safe here.
What's it like, chaplain?
It contains all of the rich colours of the rainbow
and then, as it rises up into the atmosphere,
it turns a beautiful pale yellow.
It's a wonderful sight to behold.
One of the things that's missing
from our nostalgic, glamorous image of 1950s America
is...the fear.
The sirens going off.
Drills at schools.
100 million people going to fallout shelters.
The knowledge that, within a matter of hours,
humanity could be wiped off the face of the Earth.
SIREN WAILS
That signal means to stop whatever you are doing
and get to the nearest safe place fast.
The Nevada tests were seen as vital for staying ahead of the Russians.
America was honing its weapons,
but also learning what impact enemy bombs could have.
In the race to outwit the Soviets, safety took a back seat.
Mushroom clouds frequently filled the sky.
For the town of St George, tests became routine.
RADIO: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this programme
to bring you important news.
Due to a change in wind direction,
the residue from this morning's atomic detonation
is drifting in the direction of St George.
It is suggested that everyone remain indoors
for one hour. or until further notice.
There is no danger.
Locals became known as "downwinders".
They began to see their livestock dying.
Cancer and leukaemia rates soared.
Officials denied any link to the tests.
In 1957, a Congressional hearing justified the decision
to expose the downwinders to nuclear fallout,
citing the greater risk
of the Soviets annihilating the United States.
So, the government did know that the fallout was dangerous,
but it was more important to them to stay ahead in the arms race.
The downwinders believed that the government had been lying to them -
and they were right.
This was one of American history's cruellest fibs.
Years after the tests,
the downwinders were paid over $1 billion in compensation
for their "sacrifices".
Health officials estimate nuclear fallout has resulted in the deaths
of at least 11,000 Americans.
MUSIC: Yankee Doodle
One part of the American Dream is the idea that America is unique.
That no other nation was formed in quite the same way.
Travelling across the States,
you can't miss the nation's self-belief.
It seems to me, as a British person,
that America is incredibly well-branded as a country.
Well, I think it probably is, you know?
It kind of had to be, right?
America is a nation that imagined itself into existence.
It is an experiment that is built around ideas,
so how do you hold all of these people from all over the world
with absolutely no common ground?
No common religion, no common language,
no common cultural background.
All we have that holds us together is this set of ideas.
MUSIC: The Star-Spangled Banner
Today, we might see that the American Dream is flawed,
but back in the '50s it seemed that these ideals
could lead the free world...
..and, for some,
self-belief extended the nation's influence beyond planet Earth.
There were reports of UFOs, unidentified flying objects.
Arizona appeared to be in the thick of the action.
Well, I have heard that this is the place
to be on the lookout for them.
Stop, stop, stop!
What the aliens wanted wasn't clear,
but many Americans were certain of one thing...
..if there are UFOs out there,
then, obviously, America is going to be the first country in the world
they want to visit.
It's got to be America first.
This self-belief has a long history.
In the 19th-century, the idea began to take root
that the USA had a God-given mission to spread Christianity
and democracy across America.
In 1845, a New York newspaper named it manifest destiny.
Deep in its heart, America knows that it's a special country,
a chosen nation...
..and, obviously, aliens appreciate that, too.
In 1997, one visitation in Arizona became known as the Phoenix Lights.
It was witnessed by thousands - including the state governor.
He described it as "otherworldly".
He's not the only person to think that the truth is out there.
Former FBI agent John DeSouza investigates UFOs.
The thing wanted to be seen by as many people as possible
and it was not...it had no propulsion, no human propulsion.
There was no thrust, we don't know how it was floating,
we don't know what physical methods that were used
to make it travel so slowly -
so, this was not a terrestrial vehicle,
and there were thousands of people that witnessed
it and saw what it was.
I'm a historian, and for many centuries
people have seen comets, or shooting stars, or ghosts,
and I see UFOs of being kind of an extension to that.
Do you think there's a basic human need
to believe in something bigger than us?
Instinctually, people know that there's something out there
that is greater than physical,
that leads into greater realities of what life is really all about,
and that's why people want to believe in these things.
I mean, we're right here in Tucson, Arizona,
which is a major hot spot for UFOs
and we have these experiences here all the time.
I think it's because the aliens all want a green card,
they want to be here, in this country!
Yes! I think they do.
The question is, is that good?
Is that a good way for them to go?
And we'll find out very soon.
That's ominous. Yes.
Yes, because they will be revealing themselves very soon.
UFOs may choose America first,
but they might also be a barometer for a nation's paranoia.
Sightings soared in the 1950s,
just as fears about the decline of the nation gripped America.
Innumerable psychologists attribute the moral decay among our people
to the obscene and pornographic literature
so prevalent in our society.
This moral decay weakens our resistance
to the onslaught of the Communist masters of deceit.
Some believed that Communist infiltration
was the biggest threat to America.
One senator did more than anyone else to hype the fear.
Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror began with a little piece of paper
and a great big whopper of a fib.
At a political meeting, he produced what he claimed
was a list of 205 names,
that had been made known to the Secretary of State,
of members of the Communist Party -
but all of them were still involved in shaping State Department policy.
There was a sensation!
But the next day, a funny thing happened.
The list had been downgraded.
Now, there were just 57 names on it.
The numbers fluctuated, but America was hooked.
Government workers lived in fear of McCarthy's accusations.
A letter arrives at your house.
It tells you to report here to the offices of the Senate.
You have to appear in an investigation room -
this one's very often used.
The people in here are going to ask you a simple question,
but on your answer may depend your job,
your place in society, possibly even your life -
and the question is...
..are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?
McCarthy's team would grill subjects for hours,
hoping they'd crack under pressure.
Senate historian Katherine Scott has studied McCarthy's impact.
When attorneys to some of the witnesses
would be allowed to read the transcripts
of their clients' testimony in the closed-door session,
they would find, to their horror,
that the transcripts had been altered.
That they had literally been changed and typed up
to say things so that the client had made confessions,
had named names - none of which had transpired
in the course of the closed-door hearing -
and in the era of McCarthyism, a claim or an inference
that you were sympathetic or had been sympathetic to communism
was enough to ruin your life forever.
McCarthy is most famous for his Communist witch hunts,
but he had another target, too.
Homosexuals.
One of the people who was picked up in one of these arrest efforts
was the son of a United States Senator named Lester Hunt.
They blackmailed Lester Hunt.
They tried to get him to not seek re-election.
Lester Hunt decided to take his own life. And he actually did that?
He actually committed suicide here in this office building.
That's horrific.
I consider him to be one of the victims of the McCarthy era.
Americans were absolutely consumed by fear and paranoia
and I think it made people desperately cautious
about their own behaviour.
There were staff members who were on Senate staff at the time
who recalled, walking through the halls, how quiet it was.
People wouldn't talk, they wouldn't talk to each other,
they wouldn't talk to their colleagues...
Literally, they had been silenced by McCarthy and his tactics.
How many people would you say - is it possible to say? -
were affected by this witch hunt?
I would say tens of thousands of people,
people who...believed that their secrets would come out
and so chose to quietly resign from their positions,
people who were identified through loyalty security programmes
as homosexuals and were fired.
I don't think we'll ever know the exact number of people
whose lives were ruined by these types of policies.
In 1953, a new Republican president was inaugurated,
Dwight Eisenhower.
Eisenhower wanted to save taxpayers' money.
He spoke of the futility of Cold War military spending.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this...
..a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
A large standing army cost a fortune.
Eisenhower was advised that conventional warfare
would quickly escalate to nuclear war,
so he cut the army and pushed nuclear weapons instead.
Here in Arizona, you can get a taste
of this monstrous new superpower force.
This is the B-52 Stratofortress.
It's really quite monstrously big -
but, to Eisenhower, this represented a bargain.
Because one of these could travel 9,000 miles, all by itself.
It eliminated the need for having expensive air force bases in Europe.
One of these could get all the way to Russia -
and it could carry 35 tonnes of nuclear bombs.
This is how America would rule supreme.
The Soviet Union would be deterred from attacking
as it would risk its own annihilation.
This was the Cold War's ever more heavily armed front line.
At the start of Eisenhower's presidency,
the US had 1,000 nuclear bombs.
By the end of it, though, there were 22,000 of them.
Yet still, many in the military talked up the Soviet threat
and campaigned for even more defence spending.
Eisenhower knew the Soviet threat was being exaggerated
by a shadowy alliance of arms companies and generals.
He would dub this the Military Industrial Complex.
Eisenhower could see that this Military Industrial Complex
could become a danger to democracy
because the whole thing was based on fear,
it was circular, threats to America would be exaggerated,
America's response would be to get more arms -
and this enormous defence industry that was the result
was based largely on paranoia
and on some fibs as big as the B-52 bomber itself...
..and something of that attitude persists to this day.
According to the United Nations, America spends more on defence
than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India,
Britain, France and Japan combined.
A new, long-range weapon system, Titan II, was also swallowing cash.
This bunker is now a museum.
Yvonne Morris was once its commander.
So, you see, we're going to enter the launch duct now,
and you're going to be standing just a few feet away
from Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile.
It's such a huge, evil-looking thing.
It's 103 feet tall, from the top of the warhead
to the bottom, where the engines are mounted.
So, it's the height of a skyscraper building, nearly.
Yes.
What can this missile actually do?
Well, it has a nine-megaton warhead on it,
that's the explosive equivalent of 9 million tonnes of TNT.
It'll actually decimate an area of 900 square miles.
And when you say decimate,
does that mean kill all the people within that area?
A very large percentage of them,
and then radiation will pretty much, over the next few weeks,
kill off a large portion of the rest of the population.
Titan II can be up and out of the silo in less than a minute
after receipt of launch command,
hurling its payload at speeds of 15,000 mph
nearly halfway around the world.
Should Russia attack, America could destroy Russia
in just 30 minutes.
It was called mutually assured destruction.
You have to be visible in order to be perceived as a credible threat
and that's what deterrence is based on,
the projection of a credible threat
and so the assumption is that each of these missile sites
were targeted with multiple incoming missiles.
So, the expectation for the crew
is hopefully we're going to live long enough to launch our missile,
but we are on the other end of that 30 minutes,
where target two from here is going to be a smoking hole,
eventually, this site is going to be a smoking hole.
So, let me get this right -
the Russians knew that this site was here, that was the point?
You wanted them to know that this site was here...
Yes, that is exactly true.
..and if you ever had to launch in anger,
then you would be pretty sure
that they were going to send one straight back here
and you would be dead. Yes.
And we would be dead.
ALARM BELL RINGS
COUNTDOWN BEGINS
If the President hit the nuclear red button,
over 50 Titan silos like this one would spring into action.
As commander, Yvonne would fire her missile.
She was never told what it would destroy -
to her it was just target two.
All right, so, to launch the missile,
we're going to act together, you and I.
We would insert the launch keys,
the deputy crew commanders would go over here, underneath this clock.
Yours would go right there -
and you'll notice, Lucy, that the keys are too far apart
to be turned by one person.
Are you ready?
I suppose so.
Three, two, one, turn.
Four, three, two, one, release. Ooh!
The lights are going on.
Do you have launch enable?
Launch enabled.
So, very shortly, you're going to hear a loud bell.
BELL RINGS Oh!
Things are happening.
The lights are going on. Things are happening.
Guidance go. Guidance go -
and then you're going to get fire in the engine...
..as soon as the stage one engine fires. Fire, fire!
You and I have now started something that we can't stop.
Only a malfunction will stop the launch sequence
from this point on.
And you have lift-off.
Lift-off. Lift-off has happened. It's gone.
And in about 30 minutes from now, target two
is going to cease to exist.
The entire Titan programme was built on the premise that Communist Russia
was roaring ahead.
The American public were persuaded
millions of dollars must be spent to keep up.
In 1960, the air force predicted
the Soviets would have 185 long-range missiles
within 18 months.
The CIA said 200.
One newspaper cited an official forecast of 500.
All of them were wild exaggerations.
Years later, declassified Russian documents revealed the truth.
The Soviets didn't have thousands of weapons,
or even hundreds,
or even tens.
They had four.
While the risks from long-range missiles were overblown,
the next President would discover
how threatening even medium-range missiles could be.
The Eisenhower era came to an end in November, 1960.
The new President, John F Kennedy,
appeared to be a youthful, vibrant leader,
with a beautiful wife and young children...
..but the Kennedy administration was built upon deception.
Kennedy's image of perfect health was an illusion.
Chronic illnesses made him dependent
on a cocktail of steroids and painkillers...
..and his family man image concealed insatiable promiscuity.
He was even linked with Marilyn Monroe.
Most of the cover-ups were only revealed long after his death...
..but one Kennedy legend remains remarkably intact.
The time when the President's bravado saved America
from nuclear war.
It's one of the biggest myths of the 20th century.
I'm just off K Street in Washington, DC.
It's a quiet, low-key neighbourhood -
and that was the point,
because standing near here, in a boring looking building,
hidden in plain sight, if you like,
was the National Photographic Interpretation Centre.
In 1962, armed couriers came to this building
with some footage that a spy plane had shot over Cuba -
and this is the photo that shocked the analysts,
because here are missiles.
The Cuban Missile Crisis had begun.
Cuba was just 100 miles from US soil.
The photos proved this Communist island
had medium-range nuclear missiles, able to strike America.
Kennedy's generals plotted an invasion of Cuba,
close in size to D-Day.
Experts used spy planes to estimate enemy troops on the ground.
The CIA told Kennedy 6,000-8,000 Russian troops
protecting 32 missiles.
The reality was even more chilling.
On Cuba were 40,000 Russians and over 90 nuclear warheads.
This included over 50 battlefield nuclear missiles,
each with the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Had the US invaded, it could have triggered nuclear war...
..but Kennedy overruled his generals.
Rejecting invasion,
he went for the softer option of a blockade instead.
The legend says JFK strong-armed Khrushchev
into removing his missiles.
He stood tall, eyeball to eyeball, and Khrushchev blinked first.
Under powerful pressure, Russia turned its ships around
and pulled out the missiles.
After serving three presidents, elder statesman Doctor Leslie Gelb
knows when a story is just too good to be true.
Les, what was the official Kennedy line
on how the crisis came to an end?
He faced Khrushchev down.
They were at the gunfight at OK Corral,
Khrushchev dropped his guns.
And what really happened?
The real story was quite different.
In the secret negotiations that were taking place,
there were two things agreed upon.
One was that the Soviets would take their missiles out of Cuba.
The other, the one that got hidden for years and years,
was that we agreed that we would take our Jupiter missiles,
our nuclear Jupiter missiles out of Turkey,
which was on the border of the Soviet Union -
and it was almost ten years later
that the story, the true story, began to come out.
Why did Americans want to believe this story?
Because it was a story about American toughness,
and American toughness is at the very heart of American folklore,
of how you win in politics, how you win in foreign policy -
and Kennedy proved it, and we liked to believe it was true,
so we blotted out the real story,
even after we heard what it was.
And you yourself, Les, you were taken in by this, is that right?
No question about it.
All of your experience in digging down and discovering secrets
and you thought that they were telling the truth, too?
Yes, I sure was.
I didn't know the truth and I didn't find it out privately -
and when it was revealed, I was both shocked and...
..felt, "Of course, that's what must have happened.
"How else could he have made the deal?"
Do you think that the Cuban Missile Crisis had consequences
for American foreign policy?
It became a myth that affected decisions almost forever thereafter.
That the way to end these crises was by threatening to go to war,
not by trying to negotiate
where you'd have to, heaven forbid, compromise,
which was an awful word in American foreign policy -
but toughness? That's the best word,
and the Cuban Missile Crisis proved it.
After Cuba, American supremacy was restored.
This idea that military strength would bring the Soviets to heel
was stronger than ever...
..but the fissures buried in the American Dream
were rising to the surface.
The racial conflict seen in Levittown
was spreading across the nation...
..and now the world began to see the ugly reality of segregation.
White America was refusing to share schools with African-Americans.
Black parents demanded change.
White parents dug in.
In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges claimed her right to a place
at the local Louisiana school.
Risking attack, she was protected by US marshals.
Norman Rockwell, who had brought the country together
with his popular images of the four freedoms,
now showed a country tearing itself apart.
Less an American Dream, more a nightmare.
Civil rights leaders sent out a call to march on Washington.
Their leader, Martin Luther King, would speak to the crowd.
Broadcast live, he'd be talking directly to the American people
about the cracks beneath the surface of their national story.
King fretted here, in the Willard hotel,
about how to meet this challenge.
Hm...
Should he preach in this speech?
Or should he taunt the audience?
Someone said, you know, you have to make it challenging to America...
..but then again, perhaps the most important thing
is that it would be inspirational -
and so, in this hotel, in this pressure cooker,
last-minute atmosphere, he put the words together
to create a new vision of America.
It was a new version of the American Dream.
King would do this by pointing out the harsh reality
of life in the USA.
The continued exclusion of African-Americans.
On August 28, 1963, marchers began to arrive.
Over 200,000 Americans heard the call.
This square, here, was totally full of people,
they were all coming from the station
and they were rushing up to where the march was going to be.
I have the pleasure now to present the moral leader of our nation,
in the Southern area of the nation against the citadel of racism,
Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
That day, many speakers called out America
for its racist policies and job market...
Let's hear you! Freedom, freedom, freedom, now!
..but it's King's I Have A Dream speech that endures.
Nathan Connolly explains why it became part
of America's national mythology.
So, the march had this very clear economic agenda,
but what we actually remember
is the speech about the dream, isn't it?
Yeah, that's right.
The I Have A Dream speech takes up all the air.
It was much more about the moral charge of the march itself
and whether it was going to be possible to, in fact, make
the country's stated ideals a reality
in ways that had not yet happened at that point.
So, we look back on the I Have A Dream speech
as, in some ways, tapping into the best ideals of the country,
because it was very effective in speaking in those idyllic terms.
Martin Luther King emerged as a national hero,
an icon of equality -
but his own dream had its limits and exclusions.
Going back to the march on Washington,
no women were allowed to speak.
It could easily have been Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King -
and King was not going to, in some ways, break from the male norm
of that political moment.
Also, Coretta Scott King had accompanied Martin Luther King
to the White House after JFK's invitation
and King basically left her on the doorstep of the White House.
So, it becomes, I think, one of the lesser markers of King's greatness
to think about his gender politics.
What do you think the difference is
between who Martin Luther King really was
and this sort of saint-like figure that we remember today?
Well, King's politics are very inconvenient
to the political mainstream.
Redistributing private property
in ways that will make it more equitable -
these are things that are considered beyond the pale
in most mainstream political conversations.
King as an image, however, is considered essential
to how anybody is going to think and frame civil rights -
and so, immediately upon King's assassination,
you see people begin to recast his image
and his message and his meaning.
People who fled from him
found themselves in the pews at the funeral,
so there's a very strange, I think, meeting of the agendas
in terms of conservative and liberal positions,
because King was a problem for both of those camps in life.
But Martin Luther King had drawn attention
to those who were excluded from the American Dream -
and now, the floodgates opened.
Once you start to make that argument about equality
and about the exclusion of other communities and groups,
it becomes very, very, infectious, right?
Everybody's going to start realising
that there are other groups that have been excluded.
Access to opportunity,
which, of course, is so intrinsic to the idea of the American Dream,
was limited to a very small group of people who all happen to be male.
So, a writer called Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique
and she was talking about the fact that women were miserable,
that it was repressive and conformist,
that women were drugging themselves to get through it.
A poet called it the tranquillised '50s, right?
That people were...
You had to take Valium to get through this life, right?
The failure of the American Dream very much extends to the fact
that it was only ever available - if it existed at all -
it was only ever available to a very small proportion of the population.
In the late '60s and the '70s, American self-confidence was shaken
by an economic crisis...
..the Vietnam War...
..and Soviet determination to win the arms race.
Was the dream finally over?
Not quite.
In 1967, to encourage musical diversity,
America's AM and FM radio stations
were banned from airing identical content to the top 40.
FM radio sought cheap alternatives -
'50s records fitted the bill.
Older - and richer - listeners suited advertisers, too.
Golden oldie stations blossomed.
So, America's fondness for 1950s music
had as much to do with economics as it did to nostalgia
and where music led,
movies followed - films like Grease or Back To The Future -
and there was one politician who seemed particularly well-suited
to this '50s revival.
Ronald Reagan.
Reagan loved the era - the movies, some of which he'd starred in,
and the homely family values.
His mentor was none other than 1950s icon
Dwight Eisenhower.
Reagan's rhetoric harked back to a lost world.
Every promise, every opportunity is still golden in this land
and through that golden door our children can walk into tomorrow,
with the knowledge that no-one can be denied the promise
that is America.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.
Reagan's rise to power coincided with a broader Republican strategy
to present America as a country yearning for lost greatness.
Ready for a return to form.
It seemed that Reagan and his supporters
wanted to recreate the 1950s version of the American Dream.
Reagan's aim was to wipe away the decades when it all went wrong.
Michael, what didn't he like about the 1960s and '70s?
Certainly, Reagan's speeches and rhetoric consistently
would present the 1960s as a space where America lost the plot.
The substance of that, which goes unsaid in the speeches,
is about civil rights, it's about feminism,
it's about Vietnam and Watergate,
but instead of sort of conjuring the negative feelings
and the contentious feelings of the '60s,
he invokes a sort of idyllic vision of the '50s.
So, it was unspoken, but in the 1950s,
we didn't have civil rights, we didn't have feminism,
we weren't having all these protests about Vietnam -
surely it must have been better.
Well, you've just said the quiet part out loud!
In a lot of ways, it's a television version of the 1950s
or it's a Hollywood version of small-town America
that leaves out all of the conflict and complexity
that we know that real life and real history has.
There are two 1950s.
One real, with paranoia, racial hatred and nuclear terror...
..and then there's the reinvented Hollywood 1950s,
a cosy, confident country.
In this series, we've seen that since its first steps
as a nation, America's had its history twisted,
exaggerated and misrepresented.
Fibs have been passed down the centuries,
from the American Revolution to the Civil War to the Cold War.
Now that I've travelled all over America,
I think that I can still detect the fibs and the half-truths
of the Cold War era
affecting Americans today.
It seems to me that a lot of them are distrustful of the government,
think that it's lying to them - and, in the later 20th-century,
it very often was...
..but lying and mythmaking
are really just two sides to the same coin, aren't they?
And you can't deny that America's national mythology
is one of the most powerful in the history of the world.