The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  The CIA’s first covert operation involved subverting Italy’s 1948 election, thus ensuring a Christian Democratic victory over the Communists. In that case, as in many throughout the post–World War II era, the U.S. commitment to “democracy” went only so far. Kennan told Marshall that a Communist victory would undermine “our whole position in the Mediterranean.” He preferred to see the Italian government outlaw the Communist Party and precipitate a violent civil war, giving the United States an excuse to intervene militarily.97

  Nor was democracy a major consideration when the CIA took over responsibility for running the Gehlen Organization in Germany from the U.S. Army. General Reinhard Gehlen, a former Nazi who had run intelligence in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union for Hitler, recruited a network of Nazi war criminals drawn in part from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Gestapo, and Waffen-SS. The Gehlen Org, as it was known, provided extensive intelligence on Eastern Europe, always painting the worst possible picture of Soviet actions and threats. A retired CIA official acknowledged, “The agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear. We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everybody else: the Pentagon; the White House; the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped up Russian boogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country.”98

  At war’s end, U.S. policy makers decided not to allow their booming military industrial machine to erode. In 1948, 62 percent of all federal research and development was military-related. The air force claimed a large share. General Carl Spaatz testified before Congress that “the next war will be preponderantly an air war.”99 The United States began missile research, employing many of the hundreds of scientists it had secreted out of Germany, including almost the entirety of Wernher von Braun’s rocket staff at Peenemünde. Some of the scientists had been involved in human experimentation and Nazi slave-labor programs. Equally disturbing, during the Tokyo war criminal trials, U.S. authorities secretly granted blanket immunity to Japanese officers and researchers involved with the notorious Unit 731 in exchange for sharing the results of lethal experiments conducted on three thousand prisoners in Manchuria. Meanwhile, the air force, competing with the army and the navy over funding and prestige, employed its own in-house think tank to design strategies that would promote the air force’s primacy. In 1948, this division transformed itself into the independent RAND Corporation. During these years, U.S. war plans became increasingly reliant on atomic weapons and air warfare, which were determined to be far cheaper than conventional military forces. By the middle of the next decade, the air force would consume nearly as much of the defense budget as the army and navy combined.

  The evolution of U.S. military strategy enhanced the strategic importance of the Middle East. By 1947, U.S. war plans called for U.S. air attacks on Soviet targets from bases in the Middle East, Okinawa, and Britain. Of particular importance was the base at Cairo-Suez, from which U.S. bombers could reach 84 percent of Soviet oil refining capacity. As part of this strategy, the United States bolstered its military capabilities in Turkey, enhancing that country’s ability to impede a Soviet offensive in the region.100

  Nineteen forty-eight was also the year that the Israeli-Palestinian issue came to a head in a way that would plague U.S. policy for the next six decades plus. The situation was complicated by the fact that despite the procrustean efforts of U.S. policy makers, Middle East issues never fit neatly into the Cold War paradigm. U.S. policy makers tried to navigate among a number of constituencies with fundamentally different interests: reactionary Arab leaders who controlled vast oil resources as well as strategic bases and routes in the region; nationalist Arab masses, often living in squalid conditions; Palestinian victims of Israeli policy; Jewish victims of the Holocaust who had been desperate for a homeland; Jewish and later conservative voters in the United States, including Christian evangelicals, who staunchly defended Israeli actions; and a united Islamic world that opposed Israeli policy and sometimes the very existence of a Jewish state in their midst. The problem had already taken form while the region was under British control.

  In 1915, using their usual divide-and-conquer strategy, the British promised the Arabs an independent state in order to foment an Arab rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Then, in 1917, Arthur Balfour, Britain’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, pledged support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which was home to 750,000 Arabs and 65,000 Jews. Arthur Koestler described this as one nation promising another nation the land of a third nation.101

  At Versailles, in 1919, the delegates ratified the Balfour Declaration, giving Great Britain a mandate over Palestine. In 1922, the U.S. Congress also ratified the declaration. In the early years of the century, European Jews looking to relocate typically chose the United States, not Palestine, to which only 3 percent of European Jews emigrated prior to the 1930s. Sixty-eight percent went to the United States. But Jewish emigration to the United States was sharply curtailed by the restrictive immigration acts of 1921 and 1924. During the 1930s, Jews fleeing Nazi persecution raised the number of Jewish émigrés to Palestine substantially, angering the Arab inhabitants. Arab attacks on Jewish settlers increased as the Jewish population climbed to half a million, or 30 percent of the total population. Jews retaliated in kind.

  Roosevelt vacillated in his support for a Jewish homeland. Not wanting to alienate the Saudis, whom the United States was courting for their oil, and wishing to gain a foothold in the Middle East to compete with Great Britain, he made contradictory commitments to Jews and Arabs. On his way back from Yalta, he met with Saudi King Ibn Saud and was surprised by the depths of his opposition to a Jewish homeland. Saud told him to establish a Jewish homeland in Germany: “Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander.” Roosevelt reversed his earlier commitments and promised Saud that he would “do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and . . . make no move hostile to the Arab people.”102 He also did little to help Jews escape from Nazi persecution. He was hindered by a State Department that was insensitive to the tragic plight of Jewish victims, even after early 1942, when word began to filter out about the Nazi extermination policies. The United States admitted only 160,000 European Jews between 1933 and 1942, increasing the Jewish population only from 3.6 to 3.7 percent of the overall U.S. population.103

  At war’s end, the British still dominated the area, with 200,000 troops at their Suez Canal base, air bases in Iraq and Sudan and air installations at Lydda in Palestine, naval bases in Bahrain and Aden and a naval presence in Haifa, and command of the eight thousand–strong Arab League in Transjordan. Determined to do nothing that would further antagonize the Arabs and jeopardize British interests, including oil from Iraq and Iran, they continued Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 policy of restricting and then halting Jewish immigration. That did not, however, staunch the flow of Holocaust survivors and other Jewish émigrés streaming “illegally” into Palestine after the war. When the British cracked down, arresting more than two thousand Jews, the Jewish terrorist organization Irgun retaliated by bombing the British secretariat and military headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, leaving ninety-one people dead.

  In mid-1946, Truman decided to back a plan that would allow 100,000 European refugees to emigrate to Palestine but, instead of creating a separate Jewish state, would establish a single state with separate Jewish and Arab provinces. Jewish leaders were adamantly opposed to the plan. Truman devoted a cabinet lunch to discussing the Palestine problem. Acheson and Forrestal urged Truman to go forward with the plan. Henry Wallace was opposed. Wallace’s diary entry sheds light on the discussion and Truman’s attitude: “President Truman expressed himself as being very much ‘put out’ with the Jews. He said that ‘Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?’ Truman said he had no use for them and didn’t care what happened to them.” Wallace reminded him, “You must remember that it is easy for them to get into quite a state of mind because
nearly all the Jews in the country have relatives in Europe and they know that about 5 million out of the 6 million Jews have been killed and that no other people have suffered in this way.” Wallace wrote, “Jim Forrestal had previously undertaken to say that the Poles had suffered more than the Jews. Forrestal brought up the question of the oil in Saudi Arabia and said if another war came along we would need the oil in Saudi Arabia. President Truman said he wanted to handle this problem not from the standpoint of bringing in oil but from the standpoint of what is right.”104

  In early 1947, Great Britain announced that along with its retrenchment in Greece and Turkey, it would terminate its mandate over Palestine and refer the problem to the United Nations without recommending a solution. In May, the Soviets surprised U.S. officials when Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko unfurled the Soviet position before the UN General Assembly. Citing the horrors of the Holocaust, the fact that both Jews and Arabs had historical claims to the land, and the ways in which British malfeasance had exacerbated tensions between them, Gromyko said, the Soviets preferred a binational or federal state. However, if that weren’t possible, they would support a two-state solution, which the Jewish militants greatly preferred and the Arabs adamantly opposed. In late 1947, the United Nations, despite fierce Arab opposition, endorsed the partition of Palestine into two independent states. The Soviets supported this solution; the British and the Arabs opposed it; and the United States equivocated but finally came on board. Arab violence flared in Palestine as soon as the partition vote was announced.

  On May 14, 1948, the state of Israel proclaimed its existence. Eleven minutes later, the United States offered diplomatic recognition. Hours later, the Arab nations launched a full-scale war, hoping to eliminate the new nation before it got off the ground. Relying heavily on Soviet and Czech weapons, the badly outnumbered Israelis defeated the Arabs in the initial six-month war. In recognizing Israel, Truman defied the advice of Marshall, Forrestal, and Lovett, who feared a break with U.S. oil-producing friends in the region. They also feared losing U.S. and British access to Middle Eastern bases from which to attack the Soviet Union if war broke out. During a meeting in the Oval Office on May 12, Clifford had laid out the moral and strategic case for recognition. He envisioned Israel as an invaluable U.S. ally in a volatile region. Marshall vehemently countered Clifford’s arguments and insisted that they were based on domestic political considerations: Truman’s hope of winning the Jewish vote. Marshall bluntly told Truman that if Truman recognized Israel, he would not vote for him in the 1948 presidential election.

  There was some truth to Marshall’s contention. Truman was certainly aware of the domestic political implications of his actions. “In all of my political experience,” he told a friend, “I don’t ever recall the Arab vote swinging a close election.”105 And Truman was in a very close election in 1948, one in which every vote counted. But Truman, despite his frequent anti-Semitic comments and contempt for Jewish activists, was also motivated by a sincere concern for Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust.

  Marshall had advocated a trusteeship over Palestine under UN auspices that would keep Jews and Arabs in the same country. He and the others also worried about the close ties between Israel and the Soviet Union, whose legal recognition of Israel had followed closely behind that of the United States on May 15. U.S. intelligence reported Soviet influence with the Irgun and the Stern Gang and took note of the influx of Jewish Communists into the region. The United States and Great Britain, trying not to antagonize the Arabs completely, placed an embargo on arms shipments to both sides and the United States maneuvered to preempt UN resolutions condemning Arab aggression. U.S. policy makers, fearing Soviet military intervention either unilaterally or as part of an international peacekeeping force, pushed for a quick resolution.

  Despite Ibn Saud’s threats to cancel the concession to Aramco, which Texaco and Standard Oil of California had established in Saudi Arabia, the United States was not overly concerned about Arab retaliation. An early-July State Department report found that, excluding Iran, the Middle East supplied only 6 percent of Western oil supplies and that the loss could be absorbed “without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.”106

  Although Israel signed armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria in 1949, the Arabs’ bitterness over the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East persists to this day and the issues that caused the 1948 war remain unresolved. The situation was exacerbated by a massive refugee problem, as many Arabs fled from what would become Israel—some following the advice of Arab leaders and some driven out by the Israelis. The refugee problem, after more than sixty years, remains a constant source of tension in the region.

  While Arabs and Israelis fought in the Middle East, the United States and the Soviet Union almost came to blows over Germany. In spring 1948, the United States and Britain took preliminary steps toward carving out a separate West German government, overcoming the reluctance of France and other Western European nations that feared a powerful, potentially remilitarized nation. Many German politicians in the western zones were also resistant to this development, fearing the severance of economic, political, and personal ties to eastern Germany.

  In late June, the United States boldly and provocatively instituted currency reform in the three western sectors of occupied Berlin, which was a hundred miles inside the Soviet zone. Seeing this as not only a major step in establishing an independent, remilitarized West German state only three years after the defeat of Hitler but as a betrayal of the U.S. promise to provide desperately needed reparations from the more prosperous western zones, the Soviets cut off rail and road access to Berlin. Stalin maintained that western access had been based on wartime agreements establishing a quadripartite Allied Control Commission as the supreme authority for a unified Germany. Because the Western powers were now shattering that framework, he reasoned, they had forfeited access rights. Western observers decried the savage cruelty of the Soviets’ “Berlin blockade.” The commandant of the American sector of Berlin, Fran Howley, described it as a “comprehensive criminal plan to shut off the Eastern Zone of Germany from the West and to isolate completely the three Western Sectors of Berlin.” It was, Howley charged, “a wicked decision, the most barbarous in history since Genghis Khan.” The Soviets, Western leaders screamed, were trying to starve West Berliners into submission. Images of Soviet cruelty would be seared into global consciousness—a perception of the crisis that still persists today.

  But, contrary to this widely held view, the Soviets, for all their faults, attempted nothing of the sort. They had, in fact, gone out of their way to guarantee West Berliners’ access to food and coal from the eastern zone or from direct Soviet provisions. In October 1948, U.S. military government intelligence analysts reported, the “road, rail and water blockade of Berlin by no means constitutes a complete economic blockade either by intent or in fact.”107

  What people do remember, however, is that over the next eleven months, the United States airlifted 1.6 million tons of food and fuel into West Berlin to feed 2.2 million people. Truman also sent sixty presumably atomic-capable B-29s to British and German bases. He assured Forrestal that if conditions warranted it, he would approve the use of atomic weapons. “We are very close to war,” he wrote in September.108 When Forrestal asked Kennan for his analysis of the Soviet blockade, Kennan offered the most alarming assessment: “Communist ideology and Soviet behavior clearly demonstrate that the ultimate objective of the leaders of the USSR is the domination of the world.”109 And despite knowing the risks, the United States prolonged the crisis until it achieved both a basic law outlining the West German state and the creation in April 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which committed the United States, for the first time in its history, to a peacetime military alliance with Western Europe. In May 1949, having won its objectives, the United States agreed to talks over the future of Germany, and it was only then that the Soviet Union lifted the blockade,
ending the most dangerous postwar confrontation to date. The United States had gambled that its atomic monopoly would enable it to achieve its goals without having to go to war, and it won.

  Once out of office, Henry Wallace assumed the editorship of the liberal New Republic and continued to criticize Truman’s policies. On December 29, 1947, he announced that he was going to take his fight for peace one step farther and challenge Truman in the 1948 presidential elections. “Thousands of people all over the United States have asked me to engage in this great fight,” he declared. “The people are on the march. We have assembled a Gideon’s Army, small in number, powerful in conviction, ready for action . . . the people’s peace will usher in the century of the common man.” “The bigger the peace vote in 1948, the more definitely the world will know that the United States is not behind the bipartisan reactionary war policy which is dividing the world into two armed camps and making inevitable the day when American soldiers will be lying in their arctic suits in the Russian snow.”110

  To deal with the Wallace challenge, Clifford suggested that Truman adopt a progressive strategy on social and economic issues, ignore left-wing attacks on his foreign policy, and let others handle the job of discrediting Wallace. Clifford wrote, “Every effort must be made . . . to identify and isolate him in the public mind with the Communists. . . . [The] Administration must persuade prominent liberals and progressives—and no one else—to move publicly into the fray. They must point out that the core of the Wallace backing is made up of Communists and fellow-travellers” (italics in original). Red-baiting began almost immediately and was almost entirely conducted by people clearly identified with the liberal camp. They accused Wallace and the Progressive Party of being tools of Moscow. Truman could not refrain from joining the chorus: “I do not want and I will not accept the support of Henry Wallace and his Communists,” he told those attending a St. Patrick’s Day dinner.111