The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Wallace repeatedly denied any involvement with the Communist Party USA and warned that charges of anticommunism were being used to undermine American freedoms. This proved to be of little avail. Mobs broke up Wallace rallies. Wallace groups were banned from campuses. Universities denied Wallace the right to speak on campus, and his supporters were sometimes fired from their jobs. The Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses, and places of employment of more than a thousand people in the western part of the state who had signed Wallace nominating petitions. Wallace’s running mate, Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho, was arrested and beaten up by police in Birmingham, Alabama, for defying a municipal ordinance banning integrated meetings and adding insult to injury by entering the gathering of the Southern Negro Youth Congress through a door marked “Colored.” Wallace wired Taylor, “This dramatizes the hypocrisy of spending billions for arms in the name of defending freedom abroad, while freedom is trampled on here at home.”112

  The Red-baiting, the dismissive treatment of Wallace by the major newspapers, Truman’s move to the left on domestic issues, and a last-minute rush to Truman by Democratic voters who feared a victory by Republican Thomas Dewey resulted in an electoral disaster for the Wallace campaign. Gallup showed Wallace polling at 7 percent in early 1948. Some observers predicted that he would win more than 10 million voters. Wallace predicted 3 to 5 million. In October, he was polling at 4 percent. The final tally had him coming in fourth with 1,157,063 votes, almost 12,000 votes behind Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. In the end, he totaled only 2.38 percent of the national vote. The Wall Street Journal put an interesting spin on the impact of the campaign, editorializing, “It is said by political commentators that Mr. Wallace made a bad showing because he got few votes. What they neglect is that Mr. Wallace succeeded in having his ideas adopted, except in the field of foreign affairs. From the time that Mr. Wallace announced he would run for President, Mr. Truman began to suck the wind from Mr. Wallace’s sails by coming out for more and more of the Wallace domestic program.”113 But on the issues most central to the Wallace campaign, which would change the way the United States operated in the world, American voters backed the candidate who had driven the nation down the path of empire, nuclear arms race, and global confrontation. It was a sad final chapter to a storied political career by a man who never fit the mold of U.S. politicians but who espoused a moral vision of the role an enlightened United States could play in the world.

  In a top secret 1948 memo, George Kennan outlined the dilemma facing U.S. policy makers, making clear why Wallace’s alternatives were dismissed with such contempt:

  We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population . . . we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. . . . To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreamings. . . . We should cease to talk about vague and . . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization . . . we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.114

  Successful resolution of the Berlin crisis and the establishment of NATO in 1949 temporarily raised Westerners’ spirits, but two colossal setbacks reversed that momentum. First, the Chinese Communist Party, under Mao Zedong, routed Jiang Jieshi’s Guomindang and seized power in the world’s largest and most populous nation. The New York Times described the Communist victory as “a vast tragedy of unforeseeable consequences for the Western World.”115 And by the end of the year the Times concluded, “the developments in China represent a startling defeat for the traditional Far-Eastern policy of the United States and an equally startling victory for Soviet Russia.”116

  Losing the world’s most populous nation to communism represented such a reversal of fortune that some saw it as the beginning of the end for U.S. efforts in Asia. Major General Claire Chennault, the former head of the Flying Tigers, predicted a “third and more horrible world war . . . if the United States permits Communism to conquer China.” “We will make a billion enemies.”117 Chinese leaders feared U.S. military action. Republicans blamed Truman for “losing” China and demanded stronger support for Jiang.

  Though the American public was caught off guard, top U.S. officials had long anticipated a Communist victory due more to Jiang’s incompetence and corruption than to Mao’s brilliance. As Truman noted, “We picked a bad horse.” Jiang’s administration, he said, “was one of the most corrupt and inefficient that ever made an attempt to govern a country.” 118 Jiang was sent scurrying to set up shop in Taiwan, where U.S. officials expected a Communist takeover within a year. More concerned about their own immediate security than world revolution, the Soviets had provided little assistance and less encouragement to the Chinese Communists. Even though Mao and Stalin formed an alliance in February 1950, the Soviets urged Chinese Communist leaders to maintain cordial relations with the United States, and trade between the two nations continued for several months. But China’s commitment to revolutionary change and U.S. refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the new government doomed any efforts at rapprochement.

  On September 23, 1949, President Truman shocked the nation: “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.”119 Most scientists had anticipated this and took the news in stride. In early 1946, the Los Angeles Times cited testimony from the chemist Harold Urey and other scientists that the Soviets would have a bomb within five years to discredit Groves’s assertion that it would take the Soviets another twenty. Experts had long recognized that the challenge was an engineering, not a scientific, one. The Times accused Groves of “consign[ing] the American people to a fool’s paradise” by promoting the fanciful notion that the United States had a “secret” worth preserving and wisely urged U.S. authorities to use “their five years of grace—not for piling up atom bombs and behaving like a dog in the manger, but for constructive statesmanship,” a view widely shared by the scientists.120 In 1948, J. Robert Oppenheimer told Time magazine, “Our atomic monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun.”121 The air force had also just predicted that the Soviets would not test for years. Truman, who had earlier told Oppenheimer that the Soviets would never develop a bomb, initially disbelieved the reports of the Soviet test and then credited German scientists working in the Soviet Union.

  Soviet scientists breathed a huge sigh of relief. Physicist Yuli Khariton commented, “In possessing such a weapon, we had removed the possibility of its being used against the USSR with impunity.” The bomb, he felt, allowed “Our country . . . to defend itself from really threatening mortal danger.” Physicist Igor Golovin wrote that their sleepless nights and herculean efforts had been worth it because “they had knocked the trump card from the hands of the American atomic diplomats.”122

  Americans felt more vulnerable than ever. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock from seven minutes to midnight to three minutes.123 Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas feared that “we may be in the last stage of a great civilization, the final stage before the colossal war and the disintegration of society as we have known it in our lifetime.”124 The New York Times wondered if “anyone [was] rash enough today to say who is winning the cold war?”125

  On the other hand, some people saw a silver lining. Journalist William Laurence thought it reasonable to assume that the Soviets could produce a bomb per week and would, in one year, have fifty bombs capable of destroying fifty U.S. cities containing 40 million people. But he also thought that the Soviet Union’s possessing the bomb might yield the long-awaited agreement for international control because bargaining between equals was much more productive than bargaining between two decidedly unequal powers.126 Once again, hotter heads prevailed. Additional money poured into nuclear research and expanding the U.S. arsenal. Senator Brien McMahon, chair of the Jo
int Committee on Atomic Energy, told David Lilienthal that the United States now had to “blow [the Soviets] off the face of the earth” and quickly.127

  James Forrestal did not live to see what for him would have been a thoroughly nightmarish development. The details of his death are still murky. For years, Forrestal had been as fierce an anti-Communist as strode the corridors of the nation’s capital. His views had helped shape the poisonous climate in Washington in which the Truman administration repeatedly attributed the most damning motives to Soviet actions. Yet he had been on the losing end of several policy battles with Truman, including recognition of Israel, military versus civilian control of atomic bombs, defense spending, strengthening the German cartels, and arming Latin American countries. In October 1948, when Truman’s prospects for reelection looked bleak, newspapers reported that Forrestal had reached out to Dewey, expressing his interest in remaining in the cabinet when Dewey became president.128

  All of that boded poorly for his relationship with Truman. On March 1, Truman asked for his resignation, leaving him “shattered.” He officially retired on March 28, 1949. The following day, an aide found him sitting at his desk, staring at the wall. He was sent to Hobe Sound, Florida, to be with his wife, who was visiting recently retired Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett. “Bob, they’re after me,” he told Lovett upon his arrival. Whether “they” referred to the Jews and “Zionist agents” he believed were trailing him or the Communists was never specified. On April 2, the navy flew Forrestal from Florida to the District of Columbia, where he was admitted into the Bethesda Naval Hospital, reportedly suffering from a “nervous breakdown.” Drew Pearson informed his radio audience that Forrestal was “out of his mind” after Forrestal was discovered in the street wearing his pajamas and shouting “The Russians are coming!” He believed that the Russians had invaded the United States. Pearson later reported that during his brief stay in Florida, Forrestal had attempted suicide four times by hanging, slashing his wrists, and taking sleeping pills.129

  The first U.S. secretary of defense, James Forrestal, suffered a nervous breakdown and, tormented by his own anti-Communist paranoia, committed suicide, jumping from his sixteenth-floor room at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  Communist countries milked the story of the Soviet-phobic Forrestal’s mental travails for all it was worth. Washington Post columnist Marquis Childs described a five-column-wide May Day cartoon in Pravda “with the caption ‘Club Aggressors.’ The cartoon showed Forrestal in a strait-jacket lecturing to Winston Churchill, John Foster Dulles, and others . . . a hospital orderly restrains Forrestal who crouches on all four on a pedestal. An accompanying verse says that not the strait-jacket but the will of those who do not want war is preventing Forrestal’s freedom of action.” The Polish Communist paper Tryhbuna Ludu reported, “Insanity. Diagnosis: persecution mania. Patient: James Forrestal, Minister of War of the United States, who resigned his post two weeks ago. Symptoms: a few days ago upon hearing the siren of a fire truck passing his house, the patient rushed in to the street in his underwear shouting, ‘The Russians are invading the city!’ The doctors declared that the patient had long been suffering from psychic disturbances, even when he was still fulfilling his official functions.” The Polish paper cited Pearson’s revelation that Truman had ordered a review of all of Forrestal’s recent reports, recommendations, and decisions, wanting to ascertain “whether Mr. Forrestal went mad under the pressure of cold-war propaganda, which he himself had carried on for years, or . . . whether all that propaganda was the consequence of the insanity which had seized Mr. Forrestal a long time ago.”130

  Trying to downplay the seriousness of his condition, hospital officials placed him on the sixteenth floor instead of in the first-floor mental ward to avoid suspicion. Alone in his room, he suffered constant nightmares. He thought he would suffer the same fate as Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk—to be pushed out of a window. But his condition began to improve, and on the night of May 22, 1949, he stayed up late copying Sophocles’ “The Chorus from Ajax,” in which the hero ponders his fate far from home. At the word “nightingale” he put his pen down and jumped.

  And in a bizarre, though oddly revealing, turn of events, the man who oversaw contact with Nightingale as well as a plethora of other covert operations, Frank Wisner, would himself become infected with paranoia and psychosis. In 1965, after repeated institutionalizations and sustained electroshock therapy, Wisner blasted his own head off with a shotgun.

  On January 1, 1950, the world happily bade farewell to the 1940s. For the United States, the decade ended on a bitter note with the Communist triumph in China and the first Soviet atomic bomb test. Despite the immensity of U.S. power, the United States felt besieged by enemies at home and abroad. The optimism that had reigned just years earlier with the end of the war had given way to a new sense of fear and anxiety.

  Chapter 6

  EISENHOWER:

  A Not So Pretty Picture

  On March 4, 1953, Americans woke to the news that Soviet Premier Josef Stalin had been paralyzed by a cerebral hemorrhage. The seventy-four-year-old dictator died the following day. Americans held their breath. The Soviets were in shock. Despite Stalin’s extraordinary brutality, most of them revered him for having led the nation to victory over the Nazis and having turned the Soviet Union into a modern industrial state. While the public mourned, Soviet leaders secretly decided to ease tensions with the capitalist West so they could focus on improving conditions at home. Georgi Malenkov, Stalin’s successor, speaking at Stalin’s funeral, called for “international cooperation” and economic relations with all countries—a peace based on “prolonged coexistence and peaceful competition” between capitalism and socialism.1 The new Soviet leaders held out an olive branch. Would the United States’ newly elected president, Dwight David Eisenhower, and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, accept it?

  Following the end of World War II, the United States slowly built its stockpile of atom bombs from thirteen in mid-1947, only one of which could have been operational within two weeks, to three hundred by mid-1950. At the same time, it enhanced its ability to deliver those bombs. The advent of the atomic age revolutionized strategic thinking. Airpower would now reign supreme. The United States Air Force (USAF) became an independent service in 1947. One of the USAF’s three units, the Strategic Air Command (SAC), assumed primary responsibility for delivering the new weapons. In 1948, Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay, the mastermind of the United States’ terror bombing of Japan, took charge of SAC and set out to turn it into a first-rate fighting force—one that would be ready to do battle against the Soviets at a moment’s notice. “We are at war now!” he declared. When fighting began, he intended to simply overwhelm Soviet defenses, dropping 133 atomic bombs on seventy cities, knocking out 40 percent of Soviet industry, and killing 2.7 million people. The SAC Emergency War Plan he designed called for delivery of the entire stockpile “in a single massive attack.”2

  Mourners commemorate Stalin’s death in Dresden, East Germany.

  The army and navy both challenged the ethics of deliberately targeting civilians in this way, finding it antithetical to U.S. moral principles. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff sided with the air force and approved the plan in late 1948. Despite some misgivings, Truman went along with this decision, motivated, in part, by budgetary concerns. Reliance on atomic weapons was less costly than maintaining the level of conventional forces needed to defend the United States and Western Europe from potential Soviet aggression.

  A report commissioned by Secretary of Defense James Forrestal cast serious doubt upon U.S. prospects of defeating the Soviet Union based upon atomic warfare alone. The destruction caused would pale in comparison to the horrific levels of suffering the Soviets had sustained in the recent war. In fact, the committee warned, atomic bombardment “would validate Soviet propaganda . . . stimulate resentment against the United States, unify these people and increase their will to fight.” It would also set the
dangerous pattern for future use of “any weapons of mass destruction.” But by the time the study arrived, Forrestal was long gone, and his successor, Louis Johnson, withheld the report from Truman.3

  In 1948, Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay, the mastermind behind the wartime firebombing of Japanese cities, took charge of the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) and set out to turn it into a first-rate fighting force that was ready to do battle against the Soviets at a moment’s notice.

  In August 1949, the USSR successfully tested an atomic bomb, delivering a crushing blow to the United States’ sense of military superiority and invulnerability. The stunning news caught most U.S. war planners by surprise. Truman flatly disbelieved the evidence. Once convinced, he quickly approved plans to expand U.S. inventory of atomic bombs.

  The Joint Chiefs, supported by physicists Edward Teller, Ernest Lawrence, and Luis Alvarez, demanded development of a hydrogen, or “super,” bomb. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) head David Lilienthal described scientific proponents as “drooling with the prospect and ‘bloodthirsty.’ ”4 In secret session, General James McCormack, director of the AEC’s Division of Military Application, told members of Congress that the bomb would be “infinite. You can have it any size up to the sun.”5

  Lilienthal and many of the leading scientists were appalled at the prospect. In October, the eight scientists on the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, unanimously opposed building the hydrogen bomb because its primary effect would be “exterminating civilian populations.” The majority considered it to be “in a totally different category from an atomic bomb” and “might become a weapon of genocide.” With its unlimited destructive capability, it would represent “a threat to the future of the human race.” Committee members Enrico Fermi and I. I. Rabi declared it to be “a danger to humanity as a whole . . . an evil thing considered in any light.”6