by Oliver Stone
Among those vehemently opposed to building the hydrogen bomb was State Department Soviet expert George Kennan, who believed that the USSR might be ready for a comprehensive nuclear arms control agreement and urged Secretary of State Dean Acheson to pursue that course instead. Acheson contemptuously suggested that Kennan “resign from the Foreign Service, assume a monk’s habit, carry a tin cup and stand on the street corner and say, ‘The end of the world is nigh.’ ”7 Disgusted by the increasingly militaristic bent of U.S. policy, Kennan resigned as State Department director of policy planning on December 31, 1949.
On January 31, 1950, Truman announced his decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb. Two weeks later, Albert Einstein appeared on Eleanor Roosevelt’s television show to warn, “If these efforts should prove successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and, hence, annihilation of all life on earth will have been brought within the range of what is technically possible.”8 Physicist Leo Szilard soon delivered more terrifying news when he told a national radio audience that the fusion of five hundred tons of deuterium in a hydrogen-cobalt bomb would be enough to “kill everybody on earth.”9
Such warnings took a tremendous toll on the human psyche. As writer William Faulkner observed in his December 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?”10
Kennan’s replacement, Forrestal’s protégé Paul Nitze, had been a vice president of the powerful Wall Street investment banking firm Dillon, Read when Forrestal was the firm’s president. Nitze immediately took the lead in preparing NSC 68, a document that would fundamentally revamp the nation’s defense posture. NSC 68 posited that the Soviet Union, armed with atomic bombs and “a new fanatic faith,” was seeking “to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Faced with an existential threat, the United States had to base its response not on what the Soviet Union was likely to do but on what, in its most malign moments, it was capable of doing: “a. To overrun Western Europe . . . ; to drive toward the oil-bearing areas of the Near and Middle East; and to consolidate Communist gains in the Far East; b. To launch air attacks against the British Isles and air and sea attacks against the lines of communications of the Western Powers in the Atlantic and the Pacific; c. To attack selected targets with atomic weapons, now including . . . targets in Alaska, Canada, and the U.S.” No area was outside the U.S. defense perimeter because, as the document stated, “The assault on free institutions is world-wide now, and . . . a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” National security and global security were now one and the same. If the Soviet Union “calculates that it has a sufficient atomic capability to make a surprise attack on us, nullifying our atomic superiority and creating a military situation decisively in its favor, the Kremlin might be tempted to strike swiftly and with stealth.”11
Facing such a dangerous foe, Nitze concluded, U.S. survival depended on vastly increasing its nuclear and conventional arsenals, strengthening its armed forces, bolstering its military alliances, and expanding its covert operations and psychological warfare capabilities. Over the next five years, military spending would have to quadruple to $50 billion, or 20 percent of GNP. Truman agreed with NSC 68’s assessment of the overall strategic situation and endorsed its conclusions but blanched at the cost, having already announced plans to cut defense spending in the next fiscal year. Acheson and Nitze countered that quadrupling military spending would stimulate the economy and safeguard against another depression. The State Department’s leading Soviet experts, George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, opposed such a buildup, contending that Stalin had neither the will nor the means to pursue the kind of world conquest Acheson and Nitze envisioned. Much to Acheson and Nitze’s disappointment, such a stupendous increase in military spending seemed dead in the water in early 1950.
The previously little-known Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy became the ugly face of midcentury anticommunism.
Escalating tensions abroad triggered a new onslaught of Red-baiting at home. Truman’s loyalty-security program in 1947 had opened the door. Highly publicized charges of espionage and treason fed the hysteria. In January 1950, former State Department official Alger Hiss, who had been relentlessly pursued by Congressman Richard Nixon, was convicted of perjury. Later that month, physicist Klaus Fuchs was apprehended for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Fuchs divulged the existence of a wider spy ring, which led to the arrests in July of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
In February 1950, little-known Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy gained notoriety by telling members of the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”12 The next day, in Salt Lake City, he lowered the number to 57. Though his numbers continued to fluctuate, he garnered headlines with outlandish accusations that provoked a new round of high-profile hearings. His victims included State Department Asia experts accused of assisting Mao’s victory in China. Their ouster would cripple U.S. understanding of Asia for decades to come.
Though the shamelessly self-promoting Wisconsin senator, known mockingly as “tail gunner Joe” for his fabricated war exploits, became the ugly face of this repression, the real power was exercised by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who kept a file of incriminating evidence on members of Congress, which he trotted out when it was necessary to keep someone in line. One of Hoover’s top aides described how this worked: “The other night we picked up a situation where this senator was seen drunk, in a hit-and-run accident, and some good-looking broad was with him. By noon of the next day the good senator was aware that we had the information and we never had any trouble with him on appropriations since.”13
Officials and the media cautioned Americans that vicious, fanatical Communists bent on destroying the American way of life lurked around every corner. Truman’s attorney general warned, “There are today many Communists in America. They are everywhere—in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private business.”14 And, indeed, scientists, writers, actors, directors, artists, teachers, and people from all walks of life were persecuted for their political beliefs as a climate of fear descended upon the nation. A few hundred people served time in prison, and as many as twelve thousand may have lost their jobs. After they failed political screenings administered by the Coast Guard, almost three thousand longshoremen and seamen alone were dismissed under a port-security program allegedly implemented to defend the nation’s waterfronts from saboteurs during the Korean War but actually designed to wipe out the Communist-led maritime unions.15
Many suspects were hauled before congressional committees, where investigators demanded they finger other Communists and fellow travelers. Writer Mary McCarthy observed that the purpose of these hearings was not to combat subversion but to convince Americans to accept “the principle of betrayal as a norm of good citizenship.”16 Journalist I. F. Stone condemned the “tendency to turn a whole generation of Americans into stool pigeons.”17 Many refused to testify and were blacklisted, fired, or jailed. More than a hundred college and university teachers were fired for refusing to cooperate with anti-Communist investigations. Dashiell Hammett, one of Hollywood’s leading writers, was incarcerated for refusing to name contributors to the Civil Rights Congress’s bail bond fund, of which he was an honorary trustee. Writer Lillian Hellman later disclosed that Hammett “did not know the name of a single contributor” but would not say so in court because he denied the government’s right to demand such information.18
In 1947, the so-called Hollywood Ten were charged with contempt of Congress and, despite a series of appeals to both the judicial system and the public, were sentenced to a year in prison. Along with
another nine Hollywood radicals who had also been subpoenaed by HUAC in 1947 but never called to the stand, the ten became the first victims of a film industry blacklist. Other high-profile Hollywood progressives joined those nineteen on the blacklist. HUAC returned to investigating the film industry in 1951, and by 1954 the blacklist had increased to include 212 men and women who had refused to cooperate with the committee. No studio would hire blacklisted screen artists or studio workers. Many were left jobless. Only 10 percent of the people driven out of the film industry ever found work there again. A number of individuals, however, escaped that fate by informing on their colleagues. Fifty-eight of the 110 men and women called before HUAC in the spring of 1951 “named names.”19
Officials and the media cautioned Americans that dangerous Communists bent on destroying the American way of life lurked around every corner. The right-wing journal Counterattack published “Red Channels,” alleging Communist domination of the entertainment industry.
By the time all was said and done, McCarthyism had decimated the U.S. Left. The Communist movement was destroyed. The party itself endured, but many of the groups in and around it simply vanished. The Red Scare eviscerated the labor unions, political organizations, and cultural associations that had spurred the reforms of the 1930s and 1940s. With the exception of the civil rights and antinuclear movements, left-wing dissent and progressive reform would remain quiescent for more than a decade but would reemerge with new vigor and fresh approaches in the 1960s. The labor movement, however, would never recover, leaving American workers weaker and less well off in many respects than their European counterparts.20
The African-American civil rights movement suffered as well. Under the intense antiradical pressure of the era, organizations ousted leftist members, some of whom had long been leaders in the fight for racial justice. In 1948, the NAACP went so far as to expel civil rights pioneer W. E. B. Du Bois for actively supporting Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign and calling for the United Nations to address racism in the United States. Paul Robeson was similarly marginalized. Many of the left-wing organizations eliminated by McCarthyite attacks were those that had linked the issues of class-based inequality and U.S. foreign policy with domestic racism. Red baiting also dissolved alliances between civil rights organizations and labor unions, diminishing the calls for racial equality on the part of the unions and isolating the civil rights organizations from battles over wages and workplace rights. In the wake of McCarthyism, the movement’s most influential leaders departed from past broad-based agendas to focus on achieving narrower legal reforms, abandoning the drive for deeper structural reforms of the economy or attacks on the ravages of imperialism abroad. It is important to remember, though, that throughout the period, African Americans played a leading role in efforts to halt the nuclear arms race and make sure that Americans never lost sight of the dangers of nuclear war.21
Nine of the Hollywood Ten, who in 1947 were charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to finger fellow radicals and were subsequently blacklisted from the film industry.
Individual radicals and movements for social, economic, and racial justice were not the only victims of the mid-twentieth-century scourge of political repression. Concomitant with the Red Scare was a “Lavender Scare,” in which homosexuals were purged from the federal government. Under the guise of national security—ostensibly because “sexual perverts” were particularly susceptible to blackmail by foreign and domestic subversives—government agencies fired gays and lesbians or forced them to resign. Historian David Johnson estimates that as many as five thousand federal employees might have lost their jobs in the early Cold War. In 1953, Undersecretary of State Donald B. Lourie told a congressional committee that in his department alone, dismissals of homosexuals were proceeding at an average rate of “about one every day.” Those numbers account only for a portion of the jobs lost to the Lavender Scare. The reason for dismissals was sometimes not recorded, supposedly to save the employee from embarrassment. Others chose to resign before their sexual orientation was uncovered. Additionally, thousands of people applying for federal jobs were rejected on the basis of their sexual orientation. As with the Red Scare, the anti-homosexual purge extended to the private sector. Some businesses even hired professional investigators to ferret out “undesirables,” including gays and lesbians.22
Though Joseph McCarthy’s name became synonymous with the Red Scare, it was FBI head J. Edgar Hoover who exercised the real power. By 1960, the FBI had begun investigations of more than 430,000 individuals and groups. Hoover also used his contacts in the media to fan the flames of anti-Communist hysteria.
Throughout those years, the FBI was busy on a number of fronts. It fanned the flames of anti-Communist hysteria by leaking information to its “assets” in the press, including the likes of Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, Westbrook Pegler, Fulton Lewis, Jr., and the Washington bureau chiefs of the United Press and Chicago Tribune. Its program to alert employers as to the political affiliations of their employees costs hundreds of people their jobs. People with dissenting views were subjected to surveillance on a massive scale. By 1960, the FBI had begun investigations of more than 430,000 individuals and groups. The 26,000 considered the greatest risks in 1954, predominantly members of the Communist Party, made it onto Hoover’s Security Index, which designated them for detention in the event of an emergency. And in 1956, the FBI launched its Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, a panoply of dirty tricks designed to disrupt left-wing organizations engaged in completely legal and constitutionally protected activities.23
On June 24, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea and the Cold War suddenly turned red hot. Nestled between Japan, China, and the Soviet Union, Korea had long been a point of contention among those three Asian powers. Japan had occupied and ruled Korea from 1910 to 1945, when it was divided into a Soviet zone north of the 38th parallel and a U.S. zone to the south. Drawn up hastily by Colonel Dean Rusk the day after Nagasaki was bombed, the arrangement was meant as a temporary one until unification and independence could be restored. In the north, the Soviets installed General Kim Il Sung, who had led guerrilla forces against the Japanese in Manchuria during the war; the Americans installed Syngman Rhee in the south. Border skirmishes occurred frequently. The Joint Chiefs had warned repeatedly against getting drawn into a war in Korea—a place of little strategic importance bordering on the Soviet Union and China—and recommended that it be excluded from the United States’ defense perimeter. Acheson also excluded Korea in an important speech in January 1950, leading some critics to charge that he had deliberately invited the attack.
The Soviets watched nervously as the United States strengthened Japan economically and militarily, stationed troops on Japanese territory, and inched toward a peace treaty without Soviet participation. The chiefs cautioned that excluding the Soviets from the peace treaty might provoke a Soviet attack on Japan. The Soviets struck instead in Korea.
Rhee’s repressive policies and economic blunders made him a very unpopular figure in South Korea. Under U.S. pressure, he allowed elections to proceed in 1950. His supporters received a thrashing at the polls. Despite the setback, he continued to discuss plans to militarily unify Korea under his own command in the coming months. Kim, too, spoke of reunification, but under Communist control. Rhee’s electoral setback and overall unpopularity gave Kim the opening he was looking for.24
In spring 1950, Stalin, after repeated entreaties from the North Korean leader, gave Kim the green light to invade the South. Believing that a South Korean attack on the North was coming, Stalin decided to act first. He was feeling a new burst of confidence. He now had the atomic bomb and had just concluded a formal alliance with Mao. Kim promised a swift victory.
Truman was in Missouri when word of the North Korean invasion reached him. Immediately concluding that the attack represented a new stage of Communist aggression, he decided that the United States must respond militarily. The New York Times urged Truman to act decisively
or risk “los[ing] half a world.”25 Acting decisively would also silence the Republicans, who blamed Truman for losing China. He quickly pushed a resolution through the UN Security Council, which the Soviets had been boycotting over its refusal to seat Communist China. Despite deploying tens of thousands of troops, Truman refused to call the intervention a “war,” instead latching on to the terminology of a reporter who asked if it would “be possible to call this a police action under the United Nations.”26 Although it was nominally a UN effort, the United States provided half the ground forces and almost all of the naval and air power. Most of the other ground forces came from South Korea. Truman also opted to bypass congressional authorization, setting the precedent for future wars.
(From left to right): Truman with Secretary of State Dean Acheson, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and Secretary of Defense George Marshall discussing the Korean crisis.
In a memo he wrote a month before the attack, John Foster Dulles pessimistically surveyed the declining U.S. strategic position. “The situation in Japan may become untenable,” he wrote, “and possibly that in the Philippines. Indonesia, with its vast natural resources, may be lost and the oil of the Middle East will be in jeopardy. None of these places provide holding grounds once the people feel that Communism is the wave of the future.” But he offered a glimmer of hope: “This series of disasters can probably be prevented if at some doubtful point we quickly take a dramatic and strong stand that shows our confidence and resolution. Probably this series of disasters cannot be prevented any other way.”27
