Photo Courtesy of Whitehouse.gov

A Few Final Thoughts on the Last 70 Years

It may seem difficult to sum seventy years of American History in a blog entry, but there are a few broad lessons to be learned and rules to apply going forward to the next 70 years. America has gone through a colossal transformation since World War II. The entire world has changed several times over it seems and America has been at the forefront in shaping some of these changes. Our country has been the most dominant powerful policy making force in the world and has driven much of the political and economic forces in this time period as well. While this is my first history class in a long time and I am no expert on pre-WWII history, this study of post WWII history has opened my eyes to many things. The one misconception I had and I assume others do too, is that the President do much. This means that Congress does the law making and the President is not as powerful as his name implies. After this semester I have found the true power that lies in the Presidents hand. The other glaring lesson is that we are not always the maker of change and that America as a country and as a people has to be ready and willing to adapt to the changing domestic and global society we are living in.

Perhaps it was naive of me to underestimate the President’s power and authority. I mean he’s vastly outnumbered by Congress (535 to 1!) and as far as I was concerned, only had the power to veto bills and laws, but used that power less than often. Boy was I wrong! What I failed to look at was that the President gets to appoint his Cabinet, sometimes Supreme Court Judges and the head of the FBI. Perhaps the largest part of his power lies not domestically but abroad in his foreign policy. Don’t make any mistakes though, foreign policy is very much domestic policy, especially now as our world gets closer and closer together. There are numerous times in post WWII history that the President has made decisions that impacted thousands if not millions of lives and changed the course of history. The best example of this lies in the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan during WWII. Congress, let alone the American public, had no knowledge that the atomic bomb was being tested and was about to be used. These tests were kept highly secret and the decision to use them was not voted on by hundreds of elected officials, it was the decision of Truman and he took full responsibility for this action. (Army) It was a closed door decision that left no room for outside opinions or even knowledge. But we were all left with the effects.

                I’ll place many of the nefarious activities of the Central Intelligence Agency in the President’s hands as well. While it seems sometimes the President reports to the CIA, it has to be assumed that he has some kind of power over them. While Truman created the CIA with the National Security Act in 1949, President Eisenhower helped build (figuratively of course) the CIA headquarter building, in doing so said “On this spot will rise a beautiful and useful structure. May it long endure, to serve the cause of America and of peace." (CIA.gov) In the 1940's and 1950’s the CIA ran roughshod across the world with covert operations such as Operation Success (to overthrow Guatemalan leader Arbenz and Operation Ajax (to overthrow Iranian leader Mosaddeq).  President Kennedy and the CIA had a shaky relationship at best starting with the Bay of Pigs invasion. An invasion that was planned during the Eisenhower administration, failed due to poor intelligence and perhaps a leak of CIA information within the CIA.  When Kennedy was asked to send in ground support for the invasion, he declined, leaving over 100 dead and over 1000 prisoners to the Cubans. This was marked as a failure for Kennedy, even in the eyes of his adoring fans Oliver Stone and Peter Kusnick (Untold History of the United States) but I am a believer that he did the right thing in standing up to the CIA. He may have paid the price later in his presidency as he was assassinated in 1963, by whom some believe may have actually been the CIA….but that’s for another topic!  Lyndon Johnson used the CIA heavily in his Vietnam War campaign as did Nixon, and Ronald Reagan was no stranger to covert CIA operations either, including operations to sell arms to Iran and use money to support contras in Central America and Operation Urgent Fury which was basically an invasion of the tiny island of Grenada. These were all acts non known or supported by anyone other than a circle of people which included the President.  I believe it is paramount that we control this unbridled power of more or less one elected official as we have seen over and over in history that such a small circle usually cannot made decisions that will benefit a nation of hundreds of millions.

                The other lesson I think that is important is one that I learned in this class and I think our country as a whole needs to learn in general.  As powerful as America is and as much influence we have and have had over the world in the last almost century, we must realize that our country and our world is constantly changing and a lot of it is out of our control. There are almost too many examples of this to talk about in one writing. Globally, the world was changed after WWII, breaking up a lot of the empires of the French, British and German and leaving many countries fighting for their freedoms. Communism was spreading less developed nations wanted autonomy and freedom from oppression. As time went on many nations saw themselves change to real players in the world community like China and Brazil. Domestically our country was rapidly changing. As whites moved out of the cities and into the suburbs cities were left figuring out how to survive. Women, African Americans and Gays alike all fought to have their voices heard and sex and consumerism brought the Sexual Revolutions and its eventual conservative backlash. How the people and government of America reacted to these changes are important to learn about why they happened and how to help us react to future changes.

                The Cold War was probably the biggest reaction to change that I can think of. To me, the Cold War and its effects were can be blamed mostly on America’s inability to understand the change going on in the world. The Cold War was not started by the Soviet Union, but by the United States. President Truman, in his Truman Doctrine, so much as declared the Cold War against the Soviet Union by offering aid to Greece and Turkey in hopes to stop the spread of the Soviet Union. Sure, the Soviets were expanding their “empire” but it’s nothing we weren't doing ourselves. I think we have made many mistakes in history that go back to this Cold War mentality. Vietnam is probably one of the biggest ones. Was Ho Chi Min communist? Did he quote our declaration of Independence in his own? Had we not unilaterally decided that communism was all bad would we have gone to fight a war in that country? The world was changing for sure, a lot of countries had been oppressed by imperialistic countries and wanted freedom. The US fought against that change and in some cases used very poor judgment, sometimes brute force and occasionally, such as the case of Vietnam, made very big mistakes.

                As for domestic change, The United States was going through quite a change after WWII. After years of war and a depression, America was thriving perhaps more than ever. The economy was doing well and families were popping up at every corner. But there were still a lot of things Americans had to learn about themselves.  While America touted itself to the world as the defenders of freedom and liberty, there was much inequality right here on our soil. Women were treated like second citizens to their male counterparts, African Americans, while no longer enslaved had still not been fully accepted as traditional US citizens, and forget about being gay, that was just wrong! In the 1950's and 1960's the civil rights movement was taking shape with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., setting the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act. Later, the women’s liberation campaign started in earnest with the creation of the National Organization for Women in 1966. Homosexuality came out of the closet more than ever in the 1960’s but has had a much longer road to success as only as recently as the 1990’s were gays allowed in the military and only now are states getting around to repealing same sex marriage bans.

                As we've seen in our own country and abroad, change is something you can always count on, just when, where and how it will change is almost impossible to determine. What we can determine is how to react to that change. The United States has shown that despite being one of the greatest nations ever to exist in the world, there are some very poignant things that need to change about the way we conduct ourselves, both at home and abroad. The Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick book was one of the best books I have read in a while and my favorite line may be in the Forward when it is written that the popular US History taught to Americans; “It not only renders Americans incapable of understanding much of the rest of the world looks at the United States, it leaves them unable to act effectively to change the world for the better.”  (Untold History of the United States) I look forward to continuing my research inside US and World History to see how others view these and other topics. You can view history from many different perspectives and it is from the sum of those perspectives that we can arrive at a good solid conclusion on how knowledge of the past leads us into the future.

               The video below is Part 1 of a series of videos by a peace activist named Frank Dorrel. These videos are not now but also not widely publicized, though I found the few I watched to be interesting and worth sharing.  

Photo Courtesy of Wired

Resolution 678: Can I Buy A Yes?

         

          The United Nations, a noble international organization who tirelessly promote international law, economic aid and development and human rights causes. Established in 1945, it has gone from 51 to almost 200 member nations. The organization has touted many successes over the last 70 years, as stated on its website page 60 Ways the United Nations Makes A DIfference. Everything from health, to peace and security, human rights, social development to international law and humanitarian affairs is listed as the UN accomplishments. But sometimes the UN has to come down on non-member and even member nations with sanctions when they get out of line. Sometimes its fair, and sometimes its not. UN Security Council Resolution 678 was an instance where it may have been very unfair.

                Resolution 678 was the final UN Resolution regarding the Iraq invasion and occupation of neighboring country Kuwait. It was issued in November of 1990, and was preceded by 15 other resolutions dating back to August that year. Many of these resolutions demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait (Resolution 664), condemned the invasion and occupation (Reolution 662) and eventually began cutting humanitarian aid and other sanctions on Iraq (Resolutions 665, 666, 670). Most, if not all of these resolutions were swiftly voted and approved by almost all member nations. Cuba and Yemen were the only two objectors to any of these. It was clear that Iraq was acting in aggression and the UN was trying to halt this. Finally as Iraq failed to heed any warnings by the US or UN, the United States decided they were going to invade, but they needed a UN approval to do so.  Getting other members to vote for sanctions and demand Iraq to leave Kuwait was easy, gaining support for an all out attack, not so much. The US and President George H.W. Bush were determined to pass this resolution, though.

                So how did the United States get its almost unilateral support for its Iraq war campaign? Money of course! Now, the UNSC is only comprised of 15 nations so the US didn’t need to get support from over 100, just enough to pass. While permanent members France and the United Kingdom were easy sells, members such as Colombia and Malaysia were not. In fact, they were quite opposed to it. In debating the draft Colombian Foreign Minister said “We wish, above all to appeal for peace and reflection…concerned as we are that any military confrontation would be a tragedy which we would regret for the rest of our lives.” To combat this, US Secretary of State James Baker pleaded with the Colombian President stating the Foreign Minister was “going crazy with these peace initiatives, and must be stopped.” (GlobalResearch.ca)  They also promised financial help and attention to nations such as Colombia, Ivory Coast and Ethiopia.(cite) For ailing Russia, the US negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia to give them $1 billion in aid and for China, a White House reception! (NY Times)

                For those countries who remained steadfast in opposing the resolution? Well the United States claimed that “That will be the most expensive vote you ever cast,”  and immediately cut millions of dollars of aid to Yemen, Meanwhile Saudi Arabia expelled 800,000 Yemeni workers. (Stone & Kuznick)  Cuba was the only other to veto the resolution but since the US was in no relations with Cuba there was no further sanctions or embargoes.

                So if we have 15 members and 12 voted yes and 2 said no, with China abstaining from voting, that means that without the promise of aid, Colombia, Malaysia, Ethiopia, Zaire, Ivory Coast and Russia may have vetoed this. We know for sure Colombia and Malaysia would have. That takes it down to 10-4 and quite easily if aid had not been promised this bill may have only been passed but 6 or 7 nations, NOT enough for passage into effect. This could have changed history as the United States would have had to go against the UN and public opinion to attack Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis. Would the US have done so anyway?  It wouldn't have been the first time they went to was without the UN’s blessings. This represents what a terrible joke the UN can be with its almost 200 member nations yet only a few have any real power. UNSC Resolution is just another point in history that one wonders how things would have been different had the right thing been done.

Jimmy Carter: The Original Barack Obama?

                As I have been reading and absorbing much of our Nation’s history from World War II on, I have been flooded with a thousand things to write about in this blog. Most of my reading comes from Oliver Stone and Peter Kusnick’s “The Untold History of the United States” and Robert Griffith and Paula Baker’s “Major Problems in American History Since 1945”.  I have read everything from Truman and the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. I have read about Eisenhower’s “Military Industrial Complex” and Kennedy’s assassination. I have read about Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s debacle in Vietnam. I have even read of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement and even the conservative movement up to and including the Reagan years. Then it hit me, we had President’s in between all of this, right? Ford? Carter? Stone and Kusnick’s book barely seem to mention these men and Griffith and Baker barely lend it part of a Chapter. Were these men not important? I wanted to understand so I did a bit of searching for some reading material on President Carter and I was shocked at what I found.  I found Barack Obama!

                Well, kind of. While it may be stretching it and I suppose if I took an entire class on the two, I may find more differences than similarities, I thought it would be an interesting topic to cover and one I could do more research than just my approved readings. After watching a magnificent almost 3-hour PBS DVD on the life of Jimmy Carter, I began to greatly sympathize with him, much like, and only like I have any other politician, and that is President Obama. Some similarities such as his relatively sudden rise to popularity and almost surprise victory as the party’s nominee and eventual president struck me first. Obama had come onto the national scene 4 years before but as a junior Senator, to anyone who did not follow politics daily (most of us) he was unknown until 2007. Carter was never in Washington until 1976 but did serve as Governor of Georgia for a term. Both men ran on platforms of honest, transparent government that would not only cut wasteful federal spending but also help out even the poorest of American families. In 1976 and in 2008 the country was fed up with Congress and the recent leaders of our nation.  Before Carter came Watergate and Vietnam and before Obama was 8 years of lies and terror under George W Bush. At both junctures the country needed a change; they needed a man with charisma and honest trusting character to believe in. They wanted change. Both men were elected by a very narrow margin.

                Once elected, both men inherited many problems. A bad economy and energy concerns along with foreign affairs complications gave both Presidents a daunting to do list from day one. The task of getting elected was the easy part. Both Carter and Obama had to deal with a much divided Congress that they failed to see eye to eye with. Sure, they had their programs and plans but neither was very capable of getting Congress on their side to get anything major accomplished. Our country was much divided both in the 1970s and in 2008 (and now!)  As Carter went deep into his first (and only) term, the endearing qualities that got him to Washington were turned against him and he was labeled weak and ineffective. Even the media jumped on the bandwagon. In August of 1980 the Washington Post made fun of Carter allegedly being attacked by a rabbit to claim he was weak and ineffective (Today In Georgia History).  In 2012, Florida Rep. Allen West said "President Obama has clearly surpassed former President Jimmy Carter and his actions during the Iranian Embassy crisis as the weakest and most ineffective person to ever occupy the White House." (USNews)

                Finally, the greatest foreign affair achievements of these two men may be overshadowed by domestic failures. The Camp David Accords were a monumental achievement that Americans were seemingly indifferent to and Obama’s hunting and killing of Osama Bin Laden was hardly the achievement it would have been had Bush done it years before. Both  men found themselves trying to do the best they could, at odds with Congress for the most part and trying to live up to the promise of a divided American people. Obama, however, got to serve a second term and it is believed by me to be largely more successful than the first.  As for Carter, I think in time he will be remembered with more positive than negative, especially for his work at the Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity.  In fact, he kind of reminds me of Al Gore in that sense. Perhaps Carter would have been better served losing that election as Gore did to Bush. Maybe then, we could look at Carter for what he really was, a good, honest, humanitarian, not a politician.

Why the New Right Was So Wrong

Why the New Right Was So Wrong

Image Courtesy of New York Times

                The decades of the 60’s and 70’s provided our country with so much positive, progressive change. A new generation of young Americans were demanding their voice be heard and that it be heard equally. Women were gaining privileges they never had before, African Americans and gays were having their voices heard and were uniting for the cause of equality. It seemed that all was right and good again in the greatest nation in the world.  And then, a bunch of whackjobs came in and tried to turn the progressive bus right around and take us back decades, if not centuries! Who were these people and where did they get their crazy ideas?

                According to US History.org, the New Right comprised itself of Christian leaders and other conservatives, mainly from suburban and rural communities. Their claim was that moral decay was ruining our nation and that sex was it’s biggest offender. Christian leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson preached tirelessly about the Moral Majority and the moral decline of America. Celebrities like Anita Bryant also took a moral stand against sex and especially homosexuality. While its understandable that some people could be opposed to some of the new and outrageous ideas some Americans had, a lot of what they had to say was completely ridiculous. Speaking of Miss Bryant, her big stance on homosexuality being wrong was that they were recruiting our children to be gay!  I suppose she thought gay men and women were going around trying to convince children to do the same. 40 years later we know that homosexuality is not a choice and that you cannot recruit for it. Where did she even get such an idea? A good Bryant quote states “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and nailbiters” (Gayrites.net)  Nailbiters? Anita, do you have any idea what you are saying?

                Pat Robertson was no better, he had plenty of distorted views on abortion and feminism. In 1992, he told the Washington Post “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." (Highbeam) Again, it is understandable to have differing views on these issues but to say witchcraft and killing children?  It is no wonder so many people think of religious folks as crazy. There is no basis for this kind of accusation.  Jerry Falwell, though, was the worst of them all.  Falwell founded, in 1979 an organization called the Moral Majority, which at first reminds me of Nixon’s “Silent Majority.”  This “majority” was based on the thought that cultural trends such as as non-marital sex, homosexuality, the absence of prayer in schools and various others were ruining our nation and destroying our young people. Some very special quotes from Falwell include "The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews." and "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being." (SF Gate) I’m not sure about anyone else, but these things are nothing but inflammatory and insane.

                The problem was that enough people believed them and enough people, though they were generally the folks least exposed to things such as pornography and homosexuality, went along with these New Right leaders in passing laws restricting homosexual practices, teachings in sex education and trying to eliminate pornography. It is scary to think what the New Right may have been able to accomplish if they had tactfully tried to spread their message in some sort of reasonable voice. It is these pig-headed comments that we can all laugh about that perhaps saved our country from going too far backwards in terms on social freedoms and equalities. I wonder what Falwell would say today, of the legalization of same sex marriage and marijuana in certain states.  He’s probably rolling in his grave.

(Photo by Amazon.com)

JFK: More Than Just A Conspiracy

                It is a film about one of the most important events in the nation’s history.  It is a film about one of the most disputed events in the nation’s history.  There is no shortage of questions surrounding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Director Oliver Stone is not shy of voicing his opinion over the matter and he does so in one of his most important films, and maybe one of the most important films of the last half of the 20^th Century. One can go online and find countless reviews of Stone’s 1991 film JFK, so I will try to make this slightly original. What stands out most to me is that this movie uncovers a larger problem than JFK, a problem of government secrecy.

                First, I will start my proclaiming my fascination with the films look inside the life of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison and how he became obsessed with finding answers to the mysterious assassination. Garrison did what many people would never dream of doing, and that is to sacrifice his own “life” to uncover and reverse something he felt was ruining the fabric of our country. Garrison obviously didn’t sacrifice his life by means of death, but he sacrificed his family life, his job and reputation in the search of what he thought was justice. The task before him was monumental and perhaps unwinnable from the onset. He never wavered though, as he began uncovering covert CIA operations and a paper trail of evidence supporting something far more elaborate than what the American people were being told. In a broader sense, his search was more for truth in general than it was to find the real story behind that fateful day in Dallas. It is this reason that I feel he succeeded and it is this part of the JFK movie that I wish to expound upon.

                For some, this movie may have been a simple one, the question of who was really behind the assassination. But for me, it was more than that, and I believe for Jim Garrison it was more than that. What seemed to be frustrating Garrison the most was that he was encountering so much resistance in his quest for answers to his questions. While perhaps Garrison never found the truth he was looking for, he most certainly uncovered the fact that the truth had not been fully divulged by the government. His quote “telling the truth can be a scary thing sometimes” sums up his plea to have some basic questions answered. Eyewitness accounts never seemed to match up with the story the American people were told. People were detained and questioned and released, the events of Lee Harvey Oswald’s day did not make sense, nor did he even seem to be capable of pulling off such an act. The parade route being rerouted at the last minute and the fact that Presidential security was much less than it normally would have been, are all reasons to believe that this was an event some, more than just one man, knew was coming. It seemed every time Garrison stumbled upon something that did not make sense, he found another and another.

                The culmination of Garrison’s efforts, the trial of Clay Shaw, seemed a bit anticlimactic to me. It never seemed like Garrison really had a case against Shaw and I never really thought he would get a guilty verdict. I am unsure that Garrison himself even expected one. The most important part of the movie for me was Garrison’s closing arguments where he talked of the erroneous “magic bullet theory” and of how one day, his son could go into the National Archives and see the files of what the CIA and FBI really knew. It was a gripping speech that may have strayed from the objective of convicting Shaw, but hearkened us all to stop and think about whether our government was telling us the truth and if they weren’t, how come? This was more an attack on the US Government as a whole than just on Clay Shaw.

                Was there a conspiracy to kill JFK that included top level government officials or the FBI or CIA? I don’t believe we will ever know that for sure. But Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone made it crystal clear that it is a distinct possibility and I believe the movie was a referendum on government transparency. I believe it did a lot of good too, or at least some. One benefit that came from this film was the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. This act released for public availability a lot of the records and documents pertaining to the assassination of Kennedy. The act itself stated that all records be released, but everyone knows that they were not, in fact the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) has requested that the CIA turn over some 50,000 pages of documents relating to the assassination. (FOIA Blog)  To add to that, and as Stone points to in the film, even now public and most popular Warren Commission documents are possibly filled with erroneous and forged testimony. Can we even believe the documents that have been released, let alone how many have not?

                Perhaps a little bit of trust in the powers that be is in order to avoid going completely crazy, but a bit of questioning is in order here. If Oliver Stone’s movie does nothing else, it begs the question “what is our government not telling us and why.” 

White Lies, White Phosphorous

Photo Courtesy of Montreal Gazette

              

                Chemical warfare; it’s something we hear about when we hear of the Bolsheviks in Russia or the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20^th century. Hitler used plenty of it, and most recently, former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein employed chemical warfare against his own people. Terrorists use chemical warfare all of the time! Remember the anthrax scare just a decade ago? At least the United States does not stoop to that deadly inhuman type of warfare. Or do they?

                Most of us are familiar with the United States’ use of napalm in the Vietnam war. Even though we used it in World War II, controversy over it did not come about until Vietnam. The US used this chemical to “defoliate” the jungles of Vietnam and to flush out opposition hiding in the brush. Unfortunately, defoliation isn’t the only thing that napalm does. According to Vietnamese-American.org napalm has a primary effect of sever burning. These burns are not first degree in nature, they aren’t even second or third degree burns. The majority of napalm burns are fourth degree burns, burns that eat the skin and penetrate to the muscles. Two-thirds of napalm victims will be burned to death and those that aren’t will take months or years of healing and may never fully recover. On top of that, carbon monoxide poisoning, burning of the windpipe, shock, bone structure changes and organ damage.(Vietnamese-American)

                Napalm sounds like a pretty serious weapon when compared to exchanging fire in hand to hand combat. Perhaps another lesser known chemical weapon used was white phosphorous. WP, or its nickname “Willie Pete” can have similar but often worse effects than that of napalm. WP burns much deeper than napalm and as a US serviceperson in Vietnam said “one drop is enough; it’ll keep burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning,” (Third World Traveler)

                Fortunately the US does not engage in chemical warfare. In fact, President Nixon even started the campaign to END the use of all chemical munitions. Well, the United States does adhere to this rule, it just changed the classification of what a chemical weapon is. Just in 2005, the US admitted to using white phosphorous in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the fact that they had denied using napalm and white phosphorous; US Ambassador to London Robert Tuttle said that the US “do not use napalm or white phosphorous as weapons”.  (BBC)  We must read between the lines here, they don’t use these chemicals “as weapons” does not mean they don’t use them.  They have just classified “how” they use them as not weapons.

                However, in an issue of the Army’s Field Artillery Magazine, a captain wrote that “WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition.”  Make no mistake, the US is still very much involved in the use of chemical warfare where it sees fit.  Even if its tell little white lies about it. 

How Communism Spread

Image Courtesy of Vimeo

How Communism Spread

             When we, as Americans, think of Communism, we think of a great oppressive system of beliefs that allows no one to succeed and where powerful dictators rule with a mighty fist. At least that’s how Communists were thought of in the middle of the 20^th Century. Americans were astonished at why dozens of African, Asian, Latin American and Eastern European countries were so susceptible to this horrific style of government. America had a wonderful democracy where everyone prospered and treated each other fairly. So why did Communism spread so freely in the 1950s?

In 1947, harry Truman made the Truman Doctrine where he pleaded with Congress to give aid to Greece and Turkey to stop the spread of Communism as it threatened our national security. He stated of Communism “The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife.” (Major Problems in American History Since 1945). Surely this made Communists (and the leaders of Communism, the Soviet Union) look to be forcing these countries to bow down to them and accept such a horrible governing system. But was this really the case?

In the case of many countries in Asia and Latin America this was not the case. In fact, many countries turned Communist or Socialist because of the Western Europe or American imperialistic and oppressive ways of overseeing these nations. Did the Soviets invade Vietnam and force them to become socialists? Did they do this in Guatemala or Iran or Cuba?  No, they did not. Instead they helped the people of those countries. Under Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev Communism flourished. The Soviets helped many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America with money and projects to build dams, housing and even stadiums. (PBS.org) All the while giving them assistance and backing to fight against democracies when we came for their heads.

But why did we not just help these countries ourselves? Why did we continue to put ruthless dictators into power in these third world countries and do nothing but use their people to exploit their own natural resources.  Perhaps if we would have given an ounce of respect to the people of these nations, they never would have had to turn to Communist Russia for guidance and support. While it may be true that Communism is an unfair and sometimes unjust style of government and that the Soviet Union did rule with an iron fist in Eastern Europe, Americans had a better system. The US had a democracy that anyone in the world would want to live under, yet we withheld that democracy from countries like Guatemala and Cuba and Vietnam.

It is my belief that the Soviets used force to rule because they lacked an adequate system to allow the people it ruled over to be happy and prosperous. We had that system, yet we chose to stoop to the level of the USSR and in turn ended up fighting a long cold war. We could have outsmarted and outclassed the Soviets in no time flat. But our corporate interests and greed stopped us from developing friendly foreign policy and we continued aiding the desperate declining imperial Britain and France. We sat back and wondered why these countries could possibly want to be communist. We only had to look in the mirror.

Photo Courtesy of USA Postage Stamps

Atoms for Peace or for War?

                "Today we have learned in the agony of war that great power involves great responsibility."  - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1945.

            In the 1940’s the United States invented, tested and exploded a new kind of weapon of mass destruction that had never been seen before. The Atomic Bomb. This bomb was so much larger than anything anyone had ever imagined. The United States spent the next 10 years using this weapon to hold over their enemies’ heads and to perhaps boss their way around the world. President Harry Truman and his successor Dwight Eisenhower were both big fans of using this weapon to get their way and as a persuasive tactic (Richard Nixon would later use similar tactics). According to the Oliver Stone, Peter Kusnick book The Untold History of the United States, the U.S.’s stockpile of atomic weapons went from 1,000 to 22,000 during the Eisenhower administration.  But Eisenhower had a greater purpose, perhaps one he didn’t even intend.

            In December of 1953, President Eisenhower delivered a most powerful speech concerning atomic energy. Atomic energy had much been a secret to the public since inception, but the President sort of came clean on the matter in this speech. The President spoke in sincere terms to the General Assembly that night: “I beg you to believe that the facts I shall reveal concerning the atomic power of the United States are not presented boastfully or truculently, or threateningly”. "Eisenhower Archives" He warned the Assembly that the nuclear arms race was completely out of hand and that it threatened the existence of mankind altogether. He called for an agreement between nations possessing nuclear weapons to stop making them and to use the technology for good.

            This speech was perhaps dishonest in its intentions at the time but has since proven to have worked well by allowing nuclear and atomic energy to be used as beneficial for the world instead of for its destruction. In all of the readings that may have shed Eisenhower in a negative light as a cold war proponent and someone willing to drop an atomic bomb on anyone he pleased, I invite them to take a look at one of Eisenhower’s more lasting accomplishments.

            There is a lot to argue on whether the actions President Eisenhower set into motion did more good than bad; perhaps more countries possess nuclear weapons today than would have if not for Eisenhower’s initiatives, but I argue that this was a bold visionary move, risky yes, but one that has done far more good than bad.

            Perhaps the best thing it did was give a name to a band formed by one of my favorite musicians, Thom Yorke.

Not Just A Running Mate

                 When most Americans go to the polls every fourth November to vote for their President, they usually think of how well he will do and whether he will work for them and whether he is honest and decent. They much less often think of how the man he chose to run with him will do should something happen to our elected leader. Sure, John McCain’s vice presidential selection of Sarah Palin may have been the final nail in his coffin, but most people believe there was no stopping the Obama train anyway. But what would have happened should McCain have won and then passed away?  President Palin? I don’t think anyone would have wanted that! But this is precisely what happened four times in the 20^th Century alone and nine times in our nation’s history. In all of these cases the men who were elected as Vice Presidents took over and became our President. Did we think of how this would affect our country? I think that in 2 of the cases in the 20^th century it greatly affected our country and the course of history. Both Harry S Truman and Lyndon B Johnson assumed office upon the death of our President and both made radical decisions to alter history and decide the lives of perhaps millions.

                After reading about the crooked placement of Truman as the Vice President to FDR in Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s book “The Untold History of the United States” and hearing former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara accounts in his movie “The Fog of War” and his book “In Retrospect” it seems that clearly a different course of history would have been taken. The popular man to run with Roosevelt in 1944 was Henry Wallace. While Wallace had an overwhelming majority of the vote from the Democratic National Committee, he was ousted by party bosses, presumably because of his anti-atomic bomb and Soviet sympathies. Had Wallace become president, would we have dropped atomic bombs on Japan and began a cold war against the Soviet Union?  I certainly think not. Wallace, in fact, ended up being fired and defamed by Truman because of his persistence to stop a nuclear arms race and conflict with Stalin and the Soviets.

                Robert McNamara has very telling quotes from President Kennedy in 1963 talking of Kennedy’s plans to withdraw all troops from Vietnam by 1965. It was only after Kennedy was assassinated that full scale war was imminent in Vietnam. McNamara, who was one of the closest to Kennedy during his presidency said this in his book “In Retrospect”; “I think it highly probable that, had President Kennedy lived, he would have pulled out of Vietnam.”

                As always, history can be and will always be debated, but there are at times too many reasons to think that the loss of our Presidents while in office have led to disastrous consequences if not poor leadership in its wake. Perhaps next time we go to vote for our President, we take a closer look at who may be running our nation in the case that something horrible should happen to the man or woman we pick to lead us.

Photos courtesy of University of Houston and Wellesley College