America's Century; No. 3; Familiar Enemies

You You Let the word go born from this time and place To friend and for like that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans born in this century

tempered by war Disciplined by a hard and bitter piece proud of our ancient heritage and Unwilling to witness or permit The slow undoing Of those human rights To which this nation has always been committed and To which we are committed today at home and around the world A America's century is made possible by the financial support of viewers like you and

By a grant from DHL worldwide express to keep pace with the ever-increasing speed of American business DHL provides express service to more than 180 countries worldwide The Cuban Missile Crisis brought with it the specter of nuclear war and forced President Kennedy to test the belief that America Enjoyed the privilege of absolute power I call upon Chairman crucial the hall and eliminate this plan to shine reckless and provocative threat to world And a stable relation between our two nations I call upon him fairly to abandon this course of world domination and a join in an historic effort To end the perilous armed race and a transform the history of man Well, there's a great paradox in the Kennedy administration that's Somewhat troubling to people like myself who loved an admire Jack Kennedy

And that is that that he was something up a hawk At a time when that particular approach to the world was about to prove wanting It shall be the policy of this nation To regard any nuclear missile Launch from Cuba against any nation in the West and hemisphere as an attack By the Soviet Union on the United States Requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing The presidency of John F. Kennedy was sweet with the illusion of musical comedy romance And adoring press translated the meanness of his politics into the legend of Camelot Government was supposed to be another name for a triumphant good time But in the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy discovered a world of ambiguity stalemate and mutually assured destruction

In the long history of the world Only a few generations Have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger I do not shrink from this responsibility. I welcome it I The first Puritans in the Massachusetts wilderness assumed that they belonged to a company of the elect That God had specifically commissioned them to set a perfect moral example for the decadent Europeans who were too Easily seduced by the pleasures of the world of flesh and the devil the simplicity of the New England small town expressed the Seriousness with which the Americans accepted what they called their special appointment

The sentiment was also President Wilson's at the end of the First World War He believed that if only America could export American values then all would be safe Then the whole scheme of salvation the laws of God and the rigging of human thought wouldn't come loose and blow away in an alien wind In 1945 America put an end to another world war for the second time in the 20th century the European powers nearly managed to commit suicide It's very sad The modern imagination is so gripped with nuclear devastation We cannot think of Anything short of total devastation is being devastation at all But I do remember taking one of the last milk runs as they call them bummer milk runs over Germany

Saying with this country will never get back on this week never The war in Asia ended in the nuclear fires in Hiroshima and Nagasaki United States had won a great victory and much to its surprise and inherited the semblance of empires It was as if at the end of one of Shakespeare's plays the handsome but minor prince had stumbled onto the laws battle The field defined that all the other noble lords were dead The surviving captains invested America with whatever symbols of power they could salvage from the rubble of war dressed up in the flags and badges of its newfound glory Holding him monopoly not only on the atomic bomb, but also on the world's finances America believed itself armed with a mandate of heaven

You Because the Americans had escaped the scourge of battle on their own soil They could believe that they had received the victory of World War II as a reward for their virtue Were they not the strongest the richest the most generous people ever to inherit the earth Was it not true that they had come to the rescue not only of their friends, but also of strangers? War was a crime committed by corrupt foreigners Peace like jazz music and free trade was a good work for which the Americans had a natural talent The victorious Americans were welcomed with joyous Thanksgiving

My president Wilson in the earlier years of this century. They were seen as saviors and friends Inspiring the hope of a new world order based on freedom and justice times have suddenly changed around Tokyo because GI Joe is getting serious about his occupation duties and right in front of the emperor's powers too Sometimes it's called fraternization, but Joe looks upon it as research The pleasures of victory concealed the fact that profound and violent changes had altered the balance of power in the post-World The question was who was going to pick up the pieces and secondly how was that going to be integrated into A free world conception so-called in the free world conception was one which assumed that the United States would be First not really of equal that it would be first and that it would through its military power

It's a cultural Excitement and its political astuteness be able to guide the world to do somewhat better place Within a year of the war's hand eight million American troops returned to the United States They were glad to be home like the American people as a whole. They had precious little interest in guiding anybody anywhere The majority of you wasn't the United States should return to its pre-war role that it should leave to United Nations and to the UK The task of dealing with grand policy That we should not deal with that It was more or less large measure of distrust about Getting involved in world politics as such We wanted to be away from it. We want to return to our American role. That was the majority of you

The world politics wouldn't go away. Most Americans might have preferred the circus, but at least some of them had learned to like the game of grand policy World War II changed, I think changed the United States We've always been an isolation insular inward-looking society, and I think we remain so we do all of our resources in World War II to the war We elevated a group of people who would otherwise have been selling cars or or writing insurance policies or selling real estate to kernels and generals and leaders of air, air, wings, and And they liked it. They liked the power and they stuck around People from Wall Street from the legal profession all sorts of people economists

Everyone came to town to help the war effort and many of them found they liked doing this There was have I think no clear pattern of the future that wasn't we had not thought through American post-war policy And There was under the UN had been oversold the world was going to be easy We were disarming that we're going to be no conflicts everything was going to be easy But there is a has been an American foreign policy establishment No question Certainly there is That was the group that became fascinated with foreign policy It's time of Versailles came back and organized the Council on Foreign Relations and a club Developed of people who had had experience with foreign policy in Washington The happiest times of their lives particularly during and after World War II Who would come back to dull soil and law offices in New York

wanted to go back Professors putting some at Harvard They and The professional community of foreign service officers All These people knew each other called each other by their first names and met to Praise each other's views very often Harry Truman the first post-war American president knew little or nothing of foreign affairs Truman succeeded office on the death of Franklin Roosevelt and was inducted into the mysteries of diplomacy by the Washington foreign policy establishment for his principal tutor. He chose Dean Atchison The last two people in the world you would ever expect To get along the route the elegant Dean Atchison the very earthy very simple middle mid-western Man the president Truman was found in each other something that each admired

Truman was an exemplary small-town politician clan-handing and diligent but not imaginative enough to cause trouble for the party bosses He was going to be a farmer a member's mother saying very proudly one time Harry could plow the straightest furrow in Jackson County. That was the ultimate accolade at that time He came from good solid English Scotch stock Truman told me one time we were away on vacation I said I marveled at your remarkable understanding of American history. How could it have happened? He said when I was a boy He said my eyesight was so poor. I couldn't take part in games But he said I had access to the encyclopedia Britannica Said I've read every article in the Britannica on history Reslesons in European history and his studies on the theory of the American world order

Truman relied on the urbane and sometimes cynical advice of Dean Atchison I always thought that the best way to understand Atchison is to know one fact which is that when he was a young man growing up in Connecticut his mother used to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday every year He looked on America's the success of the British. He thought a country that had a small farm policy was a small country He saw the world through the eyes of Europe in large measure You saw Europe-resire of main relationship and particularly the British But also the French and he was a proponent of bringing West Germany back into the Western fold and a strong belief with it This was had to be accomplished in time. He was not at that point interested terribly and Certainly not in the Far East which became a major force in his administration with the Korean War and the China problem and all that He wasn't at all interested in the Middle East nor in Latin America nor in Africa

Except in so far as they Affected the power balance of the world and the relationship of the and strength of the allies That we had particularly Western European allies that he considered absolutely basic to us There is I think a text which applies to my situation One the Secretary Stimson was fond of quoting it is from the second book of Kings It reads let not him that buckle it on the highness Both himself as he that put it it off The top executive positions in the government are drawn quite from a very narrow sector either One or another element of the corporate elite So corporations investment banks Typically law firms is about half a dozen law firms that cater primarily to corporate interests And that's where you get the the people from the law firms have a kind of a broad view of

the interests of the investing Classes, it's not a parochial view of one sector of them. So they're perfect. That's the nachisms and the John Foster Delosism so on And that's basically it. There's a few academic people who are occasionally brought in if they Are sufficiently subservient to external power like Henry Kissinger and war us down and so on But they have no independent power base. They are allowed in just as long as they serve as effective managers Because the American idea assumes the ceaseless conflict between the hopes of the many and the wishes of the few America has never been well-suited to the conduct of a foreign policy based on the design of an elite In the minds of the founding fathers democracy was a dangerous business and the delegates to the constitutional Convention thought the common people Unfit to retain in their own hands the exercise of power The question was one of how a government by the judicious few

Could control and improve the instincts of the foolish many The same question presented itself to the custodians of the American state in the aftermath of the second World War For the most part they belonged like the founding fathers to the property classes and they believed themselves Marily and intellectually superior to the democratic rabble which in the opinion of Avril Harriman Wanted nothing better than to go to the movies and drink cup The movies were fun and Americans content with their civilian pleasures could see nothing foolish in their enjoyment of the national good fortune The foreign policy leads however soon discovered a new cause for fear and alarm The Russians lost more than seven million soldiers in the war But Stalin's brutal actions in Eastern Europe convinced America's statesmen that their former ally had become their present and future enemy He's seen it on was the spirit of wartime unity that reached its peak on that historic afternoon in April 45 at the Elbe River in Germany

Here two worlds actually matter, but this coalition was to be torn asunder The Soviet military machine was enormously powerful even after losing all those men We'd had a great deal to do with making it powerful We sent mountains of material of war to the Soviet Union as a matter of fact There was nothing to keep the Soviet army from marching directly to the English Channel had they so decided Now Soviet power is menacing Anything within its reach its rule to reach happens to be much shorter than we pretend But the Soviet Union has is an internal empire first of all which is maintained by force It's a it has around its periphery It has regions particularly in Eastern Europe only in Eastern Europe until Afghanistan Which it controlled by force and its brutal within that domain and it's a menacing power

You know big army and missiles and nuclear weapons and so on So you can understand it's not hard to get people to be afraid of the Soviet Union You have to exaggerate a little bit the threat you have to talk about it as planning to conquer the world You know, that's not hard any I mean any state is capable of that throughout history The monuments commemorating the victories over Germany and Japan cast America as the strength and light of the world Marines on the heights of Iwo Jima raised a flag under which all the nations of the earth among them the Soviet Union We're supposed to rest in peace The effort expressed in the action conveyed a sense of finality and an absence of further enemies Very few Americans in 1945 would have guessed that within a very few years They would need a new iconography Representing the sacrifices demanded by a new kind of war It turned out that the Soviet Union also believed itself to being the light and strength of the world Also thought that it was destined to rescue a corrupt and defeated Europe

As the two great nations engaged the struggle of the Cold War a war that did not lend itself to sculpture They translated one another in a grim and hideous icon Both Russia and America presented the other side of the world as the dark background against which each could see more clearly The shape of its own safety and happiness Everyone understood immediately who mattered understood that the American people are not going to support a world leadership policy Unless that policy could be put forward not as with solely an idealism, but as the brutal necessary Effort to meet some kind of danger or threat You Yes, this could happen leaving our people Graphing in the rubble of their homes when the bankrupt British Empire gave up trying to keep the peace Greece and Turkey

Atches and Truman welcomed the chance to show that America stood ready to defend the ideal of freedom Liberty a mighty force heard round the world Given the isolationist sentiment of the American people Truman also had to enlist Congress in the cause of anti-communism Well, I'm at the rapid expansion of totalitarian interest in Europe and Asia President Truman addresses a joint session of Congress on our Changing foreign policy We've got to hear all the time came after consideration working it out with their Republicans and Democrats on the Hill But he went up to a joint session of the Congress in the middle of March 1947 and in the course of that speech he said it must be the policy of the United States to come to the aid of those countries That are being beset Perhaps from within or from without by the forces of communism We shall not realize our objectives however Unless we are willing to help free people to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity

Against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regime The Truman doctrine was drafted by Atcheson and later excused its Exaggerations by saying that ignorant congressmen needed to be spoken to in language clearer than a truth If we favor in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world And we show surely and danger the welfare of this nation The National Security people supplied rather than the pursuit of happiness a set of national goals A set of national purposes which had to do with the idea that the United States carried the burden and the responsibility for the rest of the world In order to both maintain the peace and in order to be the guardian at the gate Against the tartar hordes from the east or some enemy other that others may find it impossible to deal with But there is one stark fact in the world today

Some seem to know argument requiring no proof it is that without the United States Civilization as we know it will carry Two weeks after proclaiming his new doctrine Truman ordered a federal loyalty program meant to root out possible communists and government When Harry Truman introduced a loyalty program that is introduced the concept that there are two kinds of Americans loyal Americans and disloyal Americans He was already establishing you might call a kind of a new kind of priority in America Instead of the American people testing whether the governors are loyal to them the government now Ask whether the the people are loyal to their to the governors. I You saw me swear For a firm That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States

Against all enemies foreign and domestic Are you a member of the communist part or have you ever been a member of the communist part? It's unfortunate and tragic, but I have to teach this committee of the banks of all of them The question is have you ever been a member of the communist party? I'm framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen the scared tactics deployed in a Truman doctrine Succeeded so well that they prompted many Americans to fear one another. It soon became disloyal not to declare oneself and any Excuse with the American public and they will know where I stand as they do from what I have Stand away from this name of for Americanism for many years, and I stand away from the stand This problem in any democratic system this goes back to the 17th century Let me get back to the English revolution in 17th century and it was recognized right off

That if you're going to lose the capacity to control the population by force You've got to control them some other way and the same problem arises right to the present I mean when it's and it's recognized there's a big major strain of intellectual opinion and even academic social science Which we deal with the fact that if you cannot control the people by force you've got to control what they think So you must have an effective ideological system more necessary in a democracy than in a dictatorship Because they're you can just control what people do you got a club in your hand And this the United States is advanced in this respect So there's a public the public relations industry is a major industry goes back to the early part of this century Concerned as its leaders put it to controlling the public mind Mosanay, Wisconsin to former communist show how a highly organized minority using the seizure techniques taught in Moscow can take over a city First the mayor is hustled off the jail and then the chief of police

The National Security Act of 1947 assumed a permanent crisis and gave to a once provincial republic the apparatus of a global nation state The Act created the CIA enlarged the powers of the president and joined the military forces in a unified command I believe that the United States is living up to its responsibility We must realize that these responsibilities are Continuous Even the emergency aspects of the job are not yet behind us The United States is the chief exponent in the world of this democratic Method of life It therefore behooves us to stand before the world as a strong Feral example of the blessings of democracy As the reasons of state gradually superseded the wishes and interests of the people the post war governments increasingly came to rely on The CIA the doctrines of covert action and the uses of secrecy

They may not have wanted to do so and perhaps they had a little choice in the matter The larger a nation's sway and embit in the world the more likely it will be forced to abandon its principles Troubled officials sometimes referred to what they called the paradox Implicit in the waging of secret war under the jurisdiction of a free open and democratic society Their embarrassment didn't prevent the substitution of palace intrigue for candid debate Or the preference at least in official circles for the virtue of loyalty as opposed to the spirit of liberty They're developed a consensus consensus that the United States had a system that was worthy of Adoption in the rest of the world This is the ancient era of imperialism sometimes valid is in the case of Rome. Maybe Britain also that there was

a bilateral Competition with the Soviet Union and that Two systems could emerge either free enterprise capitalism socialism or communism and that there was a very delicate Process as to which was influential You have to keep remembering that it dealing with a tremendously radical Transformation of everything Americans hold dear and everything that Americans in their little school boy school book Maxins were taught were the objects and purposes of the country. I no longer heard anymore every no one really understands Why this is going on? They see that it's carrying them away day after day week after year after year far away from old precepts and old pathways The doctrines of the Cold War didn't lend themselves to the traditional American habits of mind or to the customary forms of worship During the first 300 years of the American settlement

It was the sermon that served as the principal form of literary address among the people who enjoyed the favor of Providence The times were always going from bad to worse the congregation always in need of purifying words and hymns But because the Americans take for granted their own state of perfect innocence They choose to believe that the world's evil doesn't reside in men But exists like the air in the space between them the fault is never one of character or motive Weakiness is a pollutant of one kind or another Something deadly and contagious that arrives inexplicably from the sea or the atmosphere or the slums So also in a realm of international affairs nothing is ever America's fault Because the innocent nation invariably finds itself betrayed It always can justify the use of unpleasant or uncrystion means to defend itself against the world's treachery

Communism in reality is not a political party. It is a way of life an evil and malignant way of life It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic and like an epidemic It foreign teen is necessary to keep it from infecting this nation The Soviet Union and East agents have destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in eastern and central Europe It is this ruthless course of action and the clear design to extend it to the remaining nations of Europe And have brought about the critical situation in Europe The disease of communism believed to breed in the filth of poverty in the ruin of war threatened to infect the Traditionally capitalist nations of Western Europe

England today England caught in the cold grip of economic crisis the sea frozen for the first time since 1929 is symbolic of England's ever present bloom In the biddly cold winter of 1947 it was thought that the hungry Europeans would be more likely to fall victim to political contagion I see your plates as clean as a whistle. That's a way to leave it I'll tell it. I don't think there's anything worse than waste these days. It's too bad everybody doesn't feel that way And if they could see that news we'll I just saw them. I'm sure they would. I can't help comparing these children with our own healthy Well fed happy American kids Thank God here in America. We can give our kids the food they need If we send food to those starved children They'll be helping in the greatest struggle of all the struggle for lasting peace The American government joined the struggle by organizing a program for the recovery of Europe The United States and food money goods a machinery under the edges of the Marshall Plan

I do not have to tell you that this barn economic program of the United States Six no special advantage And pursues no sinister purpose It is a program of construction production And recovery There is a phrase it probably is English and it's Called enlightened self-interest Obviously nobody undertakes a multi billion dollar plan Which taxpayer has to fork up for unless he thinks it is in the end to their interests and There were those who had learned the hard way That it was not to our interests to leave The battlefield

Leave our allies even our enemies in the lurch because in doing so economically in the lurch in doing so we lost our own markets The Marshall Plan awakened the generosity of the American spirit I think it tested the American public in a way They had never been tested before It was a very sense of something that they were involved with it was spending a lot of money for purposes that they Had not indulged in before it was a total departure from the era of isolation It was their self-interest. Yes It increased new horizons for trade new economic relationships and all that sort of thing But it was basically a well-motivated Plan which wasn't clear when it started but became some Over a period of four years the Marshall Plan provided the Europeans with 13 billion dollars a

Comparable act of American generosity today would cost 180 billion dollars You had empires from Rome to Britain In which Rome then Britain took responsibility for situations and many parts of the world But here was the United States accepting a responsibility For the economic welfare and subsequently for the defensive Europe that continues to this day Without the slightest suggestion Of an imperial connection between the United States and Europe That seems to me to be novel in a very profound sense I may say that at the time My favorite the Marshall Plan Not because I thought it was going to be an important factor in the reconstruction of Europe. I didn't It was clear to me that Europe was going to Be reconstructed very rapidly regardless of the Marshall Plan Because there was intact in Europe The knowledge

The understanding the human capital which is the most important part of any country And what needed to be rebuilt was just a physical capital, but all the blueprints were there However, at the time I recognize that the United States was going to get a great deal of credit for the Marshall Plan That I knew Europe was going to develop Crapily and I thought that if the United States gave them some Marshall Plan aid We'd get a lot of credit for it and that would be good for the United States Well, I was right. We did get a lot of credit for it, but I have now decided I was I made a fundamental error I did not realize how much that Credit in that sense was going to cost us in the way of pure hard cash in the form of foreign aid During the period since then spread around the rest of the world and looking in retrospect I think from that point of view the United States made a mistake Stalin perceived the rebuilding of Europe as the revival of Germany

The Russian fear of another war with a German enemy prompted Stalin to blockade Berlin in June 1948 The Americans responded with a Berlin airlift over flying the Russian army to feed two million citizens of a Belleaguered city The quasi military nature of the operation committed the United States to defend Europe with American troops in American weapons Stalin lifted the blockade after 320 days In Washington the United States makes a 170-year-old tradition as it joined the elimination in the signing of the Atlantic Defense city the United States signed the NATO treaty in a spirit of confident triumph The treaty confirmed America's military and economic supremacy in Europe and recognized America's place as the leader and protector of what had come to be known as the free world Well, it wasn't an empire in the old sets, but recognizing that there was there was certainly a feeling

Yes, that There was that the world was divided as between countries under Soviet influence under the subject to Soviet imperial ambition and countries that were subject to American influence which some people might be so impolite as to call American imperial interest. It wasn't economic It was cultural, social, and political. The American foreign policy has in the main been responsive to perceive challenges. That's what the Marshall Plan was about. That's what NATO is about That's what our relations with the countries in the Western Pacific are about successful and unsuccessful There certainly is not an American imperial dream Nor did the Americans invent the Cold War. That's Stalin's contribution

The baseball part is the great good American place as green as the grass of childhood as safe as mother and home If only the game could be made to last forever and everything would still be possible and nobody would ever die For a brief moment after World War II, it seemed to the Americans that never again But they have to confront the specters of death and time on the other side of the left field wall Holding so possession of the atomic bomb They assumed that their power was as absolute as Joe DiMaggio's bat or Bob feller's fastball But in the autumn of 1949 The Russians acquired an atomic bomb of their own and the fans seated in the stands in Yankee Stadium Know that the perfect season was almost over They'd never again, but they live in the land of a journal summit

While Russia has cracked the secret of the bomb the United States is taking no chances that further secrets and know how will he come? They kept on their toes by constant target like this and they have orders to shoot to kill at any suspicious things It's perfectly clear that the American Development of the first atomic weapons was a great shot to Stalin an equally clear that Stalin's development of nuclear strength and The rapidity of it was a great shot to the west and perhaps especially to the United States And the fact that this competition Carried with it the the awful possibility that there could be a nuclear war certainly intensified Fear on on both sides The theory of what would be necessary when the Soviets had a nuclear capability at the moment looked at

But it we'd thought that it probably wouldn't take place for another five years or so And we had five years more before one would have to face a Soviet nuclear capability So it was a surprise to most of us in the policy business In October amounts a tongues communist forces seized China and America suddenly numbered its enemies in the hundreds of millions Less than a year later American soldiers were at war in Korea 33,000 of them condemned to die in a campaign they never had a chance to win Within the United States angry and frightened voices asked how and why the world could have gone so wrong In Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 the local clergy announced that all that was needed to set matters right

Was the hang as many witches as could be proven guilty of conspiring with Satan Roughly 250 years later senator Joseph McCarthy. It was constant announced that all that was needed to set matters right in this instance America's loss of atomic secrets to Russians fires was to eliminate as many communists could be found in the state department Like the magistrates who presided at their Salem trials The senator accepted rumors as evidence and announced anybody and everybody who could be placed at the scene of a subversive thought He directed his hysterical accusations against intellectuals in the eastern establishment against funny-looking people with foreign names The magistrates at the Salem trials examined emotionally distraught young girls for the presence of witch marks The senator from Wisconsin examined nervous government officials for proofs of treason Both interrogations relied on the testimony of fear

I just think we'd guess for the evening as the honorable Joseph McArthur United States senator from Wisconsin McCarthy's attacks on the foreign policy establishment appealed to the mood of popular American discontent Now senator, I had a you to find a copy of some say the daily worker originated the phrase But the first paper that used it's their prayers. We let them be planted Now in the time it means the first fighting communism We're putting it the way one columnist did the other day said apparently McCarthyism Means calling a man a communist who is later proven to be one Now that it do you think that you have been guilty of any un-Americanism yourself in In your efforts to combat, but you define his un-Americanism You fighting communists and getting a bit of rope with one of them is your way is un-American Then I must please be on the mirror That's how you're too rough

They say we don't like your methods and exposing what is going on Oh my friends I don't think our boys up in Korea like the methods of the communists when they tie in their hands behind their backs And shot their brains up with machine guns The increasing loss of American life in Korea made more credible McCarthy's allegations of treachery in the state department I Truman's troubles were compounded by General Douglas MacArthur's wish to invade China Truman felt compelled to relieve him of his command it is of the deepest pressure regret that I found myself Compels to take this action So MacArthur is one of our greatest military commanders But the cause of world peace is much more important than any individual MacArthur was a military icon emblematic of the country's heroic past and the American people yearned for a safe return to a world Unstained by the ambiguities of the Cold War

The American hero is by definition man against the system A maverick figuring variably at odds with the rules of the established order General MacArthur's defiance of President Truman conformed to the preferred image But the patriotic spectacle that greeted him in New York was not one that indicated a nation assured of its strength The veils of ticker tape conceal the fact that America had not won the war But even if people proclaimed a glorious victory Then maybe the event could be magically transformed But not by God and by popular vote Maybe if everybody cheered loudly enough America could be restored to its natural state of invincible innocence In 1952 the Americans entrusted the country did white eyes an hour the likable smiling a popular eye Eyes an hour may peace in Korea and restore to America a sense of prosperity and ease

But his good nature of the smile didn't help him out of the maze of the Cold War We are trying to help build a world of freedom and justice among sovereign people The masters of international communism are working constantly to tear down that kind of world Communism according to all its own leaders Must be a system of international control and conformity Thus at its very heart it is a complete opposite and enemy of any kind of nationalism It's a bowed program is to destroy totally The religions governments institutions and traditions of the Christian world the Buddhist world The Islamic world the Judaic world and the world of every religion and culture You European's came to America wondered why we were so paranoid about the Soviet threat

We were paranoid about the Soviet trip because that's all you ever heard with the Soviet threat The very structure of new stories Made it apparent that every place in the world matters you could not In America even in through the 60s conceived Of a world in which a sparrow could fall out of the United States would not be harmed He we were imagine the madness of the most powerful country in the world is so frail that if there's an uprising in Burma We have to tremble American and Soviet fears expressed in their doctrines of mutually assured destruction held a whole world hostage to the theory of the Cold War Given a bipolar system there's essentially no alternative but a deterrent strategy of mutually assured destruction What alternative could one construct the other alternative would be disarmament But neither of the two great powers was ready to for that at the time once A doctrine is as accepted once a policy is accepted

Then it tends to have a life of its own And particularly in foreign policy it becomes not only the official thought but the fashionable thought And foreign policy people flows are concerned with foreign policy Our prestigious people in the community they talk to each other and they love to tell each other what they Already believe and that becomes that has a life in the test of its own Despite the expense and shilliness of the country's new war technology The official Washington in the 1950s worried whether the United States could ever have enough weapons Or whether the country had the right kind of weapons or more simply whether the weapons did what they were supposed to do And you can't wear it

The Soviet launching of Sputnik instilled in the American public a feeling of sudden panic The panic was exacerbated when America failed to launch a satellite of its own and when Democratic politicians eager for election Cried up the fear of a dangerous missile gap favoring the Russians in the likelihood of a nuclear war We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous That's why these children are practicing to duck and cover just as you do in your schools Remember what to do things now. Tell me right out loud. What are you supposed to do when you see the place? In September 1959, Khrushchev came to the United States to discuss the familiar problem of Berlin Even his Eisenhower greeted Khrushchev the United States was busy spying on the Soviet Union

Since 1956 the U2 and American reconnaissance plane had been photographing Russian missile sites Reliding on intelligence acquired by the U2 Eisenhower discounted the talk of a missile cap because he knew that the balance of nuclear weapons favored the Americans And it not been for Gary Powers a U2 pilot employed by the CIA Eisenhower and Khrushchev might have reached the settlement on Berlin and eased the burden of the Cold War But in May 1960 powers were shot down in a secret mission over the Soviet Union Eisenhower at first made light of the incident believing powers dead in the plane destroyed He confidently told the world that the U2 was a weatherman Khrushchev caught Eisenhower in the lie

He displayed the wreckage of the plane and put powers on trial for espionage When we admitted publicly that the U2 belonged to us and as well as on a reconnaissance mission We were doing something that in a modern world that was the only way we could find out that any information on a closed out about a closed society And the society is constantly threatening us to buy every buy their strength, boasting about what they could do to the world and all the rest of it Now we've said not that the United States on trial whatsoever If they want to say that they're putting me on trial at the In the study were you not bringing you can use powers was sentenced to 15 years in prison And in the sour aftermath of Eisenhower's humiliation, the Cold War regained its ideological fervor

It was a U2 reconnaissance plane that provided Eisenhower's successor President John F. Kennedy with photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba Kennedy and his advisors prided themselves on their tough-minded realism And they accepted the crisis as a chance to prove their talents were Cold War politics It's taken for granted that we have a right to ring them with missiles but they don't have a right to put missiles in Cuba that's obvious that's the nature of a world dominant

power you're the one who has the right nobody else has any rights On a question of whether a few missiles should be placed on a not very important tropical island The United States had staked the life of the human race The risk was taken without the knowledge or consent of the American people and it expressed the arrogance of power The game of grand policy would have been inconceivable only a few years before And it attested to the price it had been paid to equip a democracy with the reasons of state Our goal is not the victory of light but the vindication of right Not peace if the expense of freedom but both peace and freedom Here in this hemisphere and we hope around the world God willing that goal will be achieved The threat of nuclear war and the death of President John Kennedy revised the limits of the American supremacy America's century is produced by Channel 4 Great Britain and presented by KQED which are solely responsible for its content

America's century is made possible by the financial support of viewers like you And by a grant from DHL worldwide express to keep pace with the ever increasing speed of American business DHL provides express service to more than 180 countries worldwide Call the toll-free number on your screen for the printed transcripts of America's century This book contains complete transcripts of all six programs. The price is $9.95 plus handling call 1-800-441-3000 now to order your copy This is PBS Next time America's century examines the concealed foreign policy a look at America's secret wars and covert actions you

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