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.