THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1897-1960
1949-1950
1949
- A
Middle East unrest
CIA-supported coup in Syria replaces the government with one more friendly towards Western interests. (ZNet) - Korean
US intervention in Southeast Asia
opposition leader Kim Koo is assassinated with the assistance of US agents. (ZMag) - While 60% of American military forces stationed overseas are posted somewhere in the Pacific Rim,
US nuclear program
including half the Navy and most of the Air Force, the huge cost of maintaining such a military presence is giving way to a reliance on nuclear deterrence -- the American people, though supportive of the country's anti-Communist foreign policy, balks at increasingly higher taxes, and Truman refuses to indulge in deficit spending. Conventional wisdom in Washington has the country writing off Korea to Soviet control. The small peninsula is seen as of limited strategic value, and by June 1949, impelled by the advice of General MacArthur, the US had withdrawn completely from South Korea. The South receives a paltry $10 million in military aid, mostly for the maintenance of its outmoded artillery, small arms, and strictly rationed ammunition. Instead, as Pacific neighbors Australia and New Zealand uneasily observe, the US seems bent on rebuilding Japan as an industrial dynamo. US officials such as George Kennan fought against MacArthur's 1947 attempts to dissolve Japan's traditional zaibatsu (money cliques), saying that such forced "socialization" of Japan's business community would open that country up to Communist influence. MacArthur then shelved much of his programs to democratize Japan in favor of building it up as an anti-Communist bastion -- "a step," Leebaert writes, "that helped perpetuate an arrogant bureaucracy at the price of more autonomy for the ordinary Japanese, and one for which Japan is still paying." (Derek Leebaert) - Former Nazi Walter Schrieber, who had authorized horrific experiments on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps,
US government's collusion with former Nazis
and who had testified to such during the Nuremberg trials, surfaces in the West, claiming to have escaped Soviet captivity, and is promptly brought to the US to work in America's defense industry. Democratic congressman Jacob Javits threatens an investigation, but the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JOIA) advises the State Department that "allegations by minority groups" of Schrieber's human experiments could not be proven, and the US government quietly relocates Schrieber to South America. During the same year, a Jewish immigrant living in New York encounters Theodore Dussik, a Nazi neurologist, in the Alamac Hotel, where new Nazi recruits are being housed while their contracts are being written. Democratic senator Herman Lehman, told by the shocked immigrant of Dussik's presence, is told, falsely, by government officials that Dussik is not in the country. - In Europe, Klaus Barbie, the notorious "Butcher of Lyon," is aided by US Army counterintelligence officials in return for his help in accessing anti-Communist agents; the US government then helps Barbie escape to Bolivia. Nazi scientist Otto Ambrose, who had helped develop poison gases for use in Auschwitz, works in Maryland's Edgewood Arsenal developing nerve gas and aerosols for spreading anthrax; Ambrose requests, and receives, a number of his former Nazi colleagues to work alongside him. The Defense Department will later justify America's embrace of former Nazis as saving the country untold billions in replicating research and development already begun by the Nazis. The rehabilitation of Nazis, and the country's unwillingness to vilify their former enemies, even spreads to Hollywood, where director Billy Wilder is ordered by Paramount Studios officials (under pressure from government agents) to make the villain of his World War II film Stalag 17 a Pole rather than a German. Author Dwight Macdonald later observes that Germans were being "transmuted from cowardly accomplices of one kind of totalitarianism into heroic resisters of another kind."
- Neither would the Americans help in returning funds, jewelry, goods, and gold stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners. When Swiss bankers return only $58 million of some $400 million in Nazi gold, and when they refuse outright to liquidate billions of dollars' worth of stolen Third Reich assets, the US refuses to take any action against Switzerland in order not to appear that the country was bullying a smaller ally. Portugal also refuses to turn over any more than a tenth of its ill-gotten Nazi gains, without US reprisal; Turkey makes no restitution at all, though it holds nearly $50 million in stolen Nazi assets. Under US auspices, Argentina's Central Bank will serve as a laundry for Nazi treasure. "In the Cold War," recalls diplomat Richard Holbrooke, "the rule was that you didn't rattle the cage."
- And many Japanese war criminals receive the same treatment. Major General Shiro Ishii, who had overseen biological experiments on Chinese captives and killed at least 850 of them with anthrax and a hemorrhagic fever similar to the Ebola virus, was given immunity by the US in return for 15,000 slides of specimens from human test subjects. Even Emperor Hirohito, who had helped plan the Pearl Harbor bombing, blocked democratic reforms, and was responsible for the deaths of millions, was kept in power by General Douglas MacArthur after war's end. "Thereafter this culprit is best seen as 'a cold war template,'" writes Derek Leebaert, "among the first of many unsavory figures Washington befriended in the name of democracy." The US never even forced Japan to pay reparations to its innumerable wartime victims; companies like Mitsui, who had overseen the deaths of thousands of American, Australian, and other slave laborers in its mines, were never held accountable.
- American agencies were not immune. The Atomic Energy Commission admitted that its experiments on human beings employed "a little of the Buchenwald touch" as it routinely violated the Nuremberg Codes in forcibly selecting human victims for radiation experiments, ranging from, in Leebaert's words, "marching soldiers, unwarned of the attendant risks, through nuclear explosion sites to irradiating individuals' entire bodies." The AEC, with Truman's approval, would later defend its actions as necessary to determine what levels of radioactivity became "dangerous" in order to avoid "an ultimate harvest of defective individuals." The AEC worked rigorously to keep its experiments secret and avoid public outrage; it would be a quarter-century before the Oak Ridge National Laboratory would ask its test subjects' consent. It would be even longer for even the most superficial of investigations to reveal what the AEC had done in the name of science, defense, and national security. (Derek Leebaert)
- Columbia University president Dwight Eisenhower and Harvard president James Conant
Attack on civil liberties
join to have a National Education Association panel demand that any suspected Communists be barred from teaching in America's public schools. Left-leaning academics, virtually all of whom have no Communist ties or sympathies, find themselves increasingly on the defensive, as their universities become more and more beholden to CIA and Defense Department monies, and trustees and administrators become more and more fawning towards the government in their willingness to comb their faculties for supposed Commies. (Derek Leebaert) - Archibald MacLeish, the playwright and poet who was the director of government propaganda during World War II and will later become the librarian of Congress,
Cold War
writes in his essay "The Conquest of America," "Never in the history of the world was one people as completely dominated, intellectually and morally, by another as the people of the United States were by the people of Russia in the four years from 1946 through 1949. American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy; whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it. American political controversy was controversy sung to the Russian tune.... All this took place at a time not of national weakness or decay but precisely at the moment when the United States, having engineered a tremendous triumph and fought its way to a brilliant victory in the greatest of all wars, had reached the highest point of world power ever achieved by a single state." (Lewis Lapham)
Fairness Doctrine adopted by FCC
- The Federal Communications Commission adopts the Fairness Doctrine, a policy ensuring that when political viewpoints were discussed or editorialized by broadcasters, equal access to all major points of view were given.
Freedom of the press
The doctrine requires stations to broadcast opinions about political and social issues, and requires that contrasting views be aired. Stations are given wide latitude about how "equal access" may be provided. The overarching view is that broadcast stations, both radio and television, are "public trustees" and must behave as such. In 1967, two corollaries were added to the doctrine: if a station editorializes either for or against a candidate, it must offer equal time for the opposing candidate(s) within 24 hours; the second, if a person or group's character or integrity is impugned, they must be offered equal time for rebuttal within a week. The doctrine will be unsuccessfully challenged in the Supreme Court in 1969; the FCC will call the doctrine "the single most important requirement of operation in the public interest -- the sine qua non for grant of a renewal of license." The doctrine will be used by politicians of both parties to intimidate opposing broadcasters, and many broadcasters feel the doctrine impedes their efforts to bring strong editorial comment to their audiences. - The Fairness Doctrine will be repealed in 1987 by Reagan's pro-broadcaster, pro-deregulation FCC as part of the effort to lessen the perceived "liberal bias" of news outlets, leading to the heavily right-wing slant of American media in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Certainly, media outlets would not have been free to host hours and hours of right-wing talk radio by hosts such as Rush Limbaugh without equal representation by more liberal commentators if the doctrine had been in place. Limbaugh and his colleagues will repeatedly claim that right-wing commentary was muzzled before the doctrine was repealed, a claim that is demonstrably not true; in most large cities, right-wing talk show hosts dominated the airwaves before 1987, and none were ever muzzled by the FCC. The doctrine has been supported by groups from across the political spectrum, from the ACLU to the NRA and the right-wing Accuracy in Media. Repeated efforts to restore the Fairness Doctrine have been rebuffed, mostly by conservative lawmakers. Democrat Luther Johnson said in 1927, "American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people." (PBS, FAIR, Wikipedia)
- Pacifist Lew Hill, who was placed in a detention camp by US government authorities for refusing to fight in World War II,
Freedom of the press
founds Pacifica Radio, a media news outlet not owned by the same corporations that profited from the war. The first Pacifica station, KPFA-FM, is the first listener-sponsored radio station in the country, creating a model later followed by National Public Radio and public television. Pacifica eventually grows to five independent, non-corporate-owned FM radio stations, including KPFK in Los Angeles, WBAI in New York City, WPFW in Washington, and KPFT in Houston. It is one of the only independently owned media outlets in the United States, and is proudly described by journalist Amy Goodman as "a sanctuary of dissent." The network will feature, among other groundbreaking coverage, blacklisted actor Paul Robeson discussing the McCarthy witch hunts, debates between James Baldwin and Malcolm X about the effectiveness of nonviolent sit-ins during the civil rights protests, and presentations about African liberation movements by Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, and Julius Nyerere. Goodman writes, "On any given day you can listen to the news on CNN or National Public Radio, then tune in to a Pacifica station. You would think you were hearing reports from different planets." (Amy and David Goodman) - January: Israel forms a government under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, who is named Prime Minister.
Israel
Ezer Weizmann becomes President, a largely ceremonial position. The opposition is led by, among others, former Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin. Ben-Gurion's government launches a program of economic austerity and military development that helps Israel survive the Arab embargo of Israel (along with heavy contributions from the US and various Western European countries). (Dan Cohn-Sherbok) - February 24: Israel signs an armistice with Egypt after intensive negotiations by the UN.
Middle East unrest
Armistices with Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria soon follow. The armistices inflame Arab sentiment throughout the Middle East, and lead to a wave of assassinations and government upheavals. Egypt's President Nokrashy is assassinated in December; King Farouk, who replaces Nokrashy, is never on firm ground, and is removed in a coup by Gamal Abdul Nasser four years later; Syria suffers a series of coups; Jordan's King Abdullah is assassinated. (Dan Cohn-Sherbok) - March: The fledgling Communist regime of Kim Il Sung's North Korea, whose constitution was drafted in Moscow, approaches Stalin for modest industrial help, coastal defense capabilities, and a relatively small request for military aid.
Cold War
Kim is bemused by the massive infusion of military equipment that follows his meeting with Stalin. While most historians believe that the wily North Koreans maneuvered a reluctant Soviet Union into backing the North's invasion of South Korea in 1950, historian Derek Leebaert believes that the idea of an invasion originated with Stalin, who gave Kim the "overwhelming military superiority" necessary to a quick conquest. Soviet officers thereafter help Pyongyang in creating "wish lists" of military equipment, everything from armored divisions to medicines and lubricants, that will flood the North with, among other items, eight full divisions led by Red Army officers, 258 tanks, 178 planes, and over 1600 artillery pieces. In addition, 70,000 soldiers of Korean extraction have been sent from the Chinese Army. South Korea, on the other hand, has eight divisions so poorly trained and equipped that the US refuses to call it an army, but instead terms it a "constabulary." The South Koreans have no tanks nor antitank guns. The State Department's John Foster Dulles assures South Korea a week before the 1950 invasion that the US would help it create a solid, self-sustaining economy that would dissolve Soviet communism in the North and eventually see the North begging for unification. On June 25, 1950, Stalin answers Dulles's reassurances by sending 150 tanks and 90,000 men pouring over the border into South Korea. (Derek Leebaert) - March 8: After
Vietnam War
over two years of warfare in Vietnam, France installs former puppet emperor Bao Dai as head of state in South Vietnam. Bao and the French move to establish the (South) Vietnamese National Army. (Vietnam War Timeline)
NATO formed
- April 4: The North Atlantic Treaty is signed in Washington as a counter to Soviet expansionism.
NATO
The founding members of NATO include the US, Canada, Great Britain, France, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, Belguim, Luxembourg, and Denmark. (CBS News, NATO and UN History) - August 29: The USSR tests its first atomic bomb, code-named "First Lightning" or "Joe 1," at a test site in Kazakhstan.
Soviet nuclear program
At Lavrenti Beria's insistence, the design is identical to the US's "Fat Man" design of the Nagasaki bomb, largely obtained through the efforts of such spies as Klaus Fuchs, though Soviet weapons designers have by now made a number of improvements and advances. The first test is the result of a crash program to get a bomb test done as quickly as possible in order to intimidate the West; the Soviet nuclear program will not be ready to test another bomb until two years later. Quite predictably, the Soviet test explosion sends America and Britain into a collective tizzy, with dire predictions of Soviet-led annihilation of the West coming from one government agency after another. (Nuclear Weapons Archives) - September 1: The National Security Council issues NSC policy directive 75, a policy document only declassified after the Cold War that determined it would be cost-prohibitive for the US to "replace" the foundering British Empire by taking on much of Britain's globe-girdling commitments.
Cold War
The question is whether London's latest financial crisis would "mean a new Greece somewhere in the world where vital US interests have heretofore been protected by the UK." Instead, the US decides to prop up Britain's slumping economy. "If Britain goes bankrupt," warns American journalist Charles Collingwood, the whole military position of the Western powers would change. "[T]otalitarianism will have won an important victory" if Britain goes bust, echoes Democratic senator Hubert Humphrey. Such a stance is opposed by, among others, conservative Democratic senator Pat McCarran, who has no qualms about airing his "anti-British, anti-socialist, anti-Russian, anti-Communist, [and] anti-Jewish" opinions. McCarran is so far to the right as to be an embarrassment to most of his Democratic colleagues, but that didn't stop him wielding undue influence as chairman of the Joint Committee on Economic Cooperation. The State Department's George Kennan does his bit to confuse the issue, assuring British officials that he is pressing for some sort of Anglo-American union, denying any such efforts to his Foreign Service friend Chip Bohlen, then telling the British that they could discount State Department and White House insistence that Britain needs to integrate itself with other Western European nations becoming more unified at the behest of the US. US nudges towards more devaluation of the British pound and more economic credits would begin to patch together a postwar order, but would soon be shaken by the USSR's test of an atomic weapon in Kazakhstan. Kennan would then declare America's nuclear arsenal "superfluous," and serious discussion about unilateral nuclear disarmament would leave American military advisors at sea as to what exactly would constitute America's deterrent force against the USSR. (Derek Leebaert)
Mao Zedong establishes Communist government in China
- October: Mao Zedong's Communist forces defeat Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army in the Chinese civil war,
China under Communist rule
igniting American anti-Communist sentiment regarding Southeast Asia and resulting in a White House foreign policy goal of "containment" of Communist expansion in the region. Months later, both Communist China and the Soviet Union will recognize Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam. (Vietnam War Timeline) - December 22: Investigative journalists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson publish a story showing that General Douglas MacArthur is locked in a powerful disagreement with President Truman over the Nationalist Chinese forces led by corrupt warlord Chiang Kai-shek,
China under Communist rule
and that MacArthur is urging Truman to send US troops to occupy the island of Formosa (Taiwan). The reporters argue that MacArthur is "trying to dictate US foreign policy in the Far East." - The allegations are true. While Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson tell MacArthur to limit the upcoming war to the Korean peninsula, MacArthur is eager to attack Communist Chinese forces; rebuffed by Truman and Acheson, MacArthur begins to make inflammatory statements indicating his disagreements with the United States government. Conservatives such as Joseph McCarthy join MacArthur in attacking Truman, with McCarthy making the famous statement: "With half a million Communists in Korea killing American men, Acheson says, 'Now let's be calm, let's do nothing.' It is like advising a man whose family is being killed not to take hasty action for fear he might alienate the affection of the murders." Partially because of pressure from MacArthur and his supporters, on October 7, 1950, MacArthur launches an invasion into North Korea, driving towards the Yalu River and China. In March 1951, after the North Koreans and Chinese overrun the South Korean capital of Seoul, MacArthur will be relieved of his command. (Spartacus Educational)
1950
- Historian Derek Leebaert quotes Yale historian Michael Sherry
Cold War
in saying that "Essentially nothing 'that emerged by 1950 had been planned, desired, or foreseen in 1945' -- contrary to today's common belief that so much of what followed after V-E Day had already been set in place by the grasping proponents of the American Century. Absolutely no one was thinking of forty more years of struggle in every corner of the globe and through so many facets of human behavior. Each side believed that the other would fall by its own hand: Moscow saw the inevitability of a capitalist crash; the West, less certain that inexorable social forces guaranteed victory, nonetheless hoped that the Soviet system was too irrational to endure, although the isolation and ruthlessness of its leaders might make this end violent." Many Western leaders draw little distinction between Nazi fascism and Communism. "In fighting the Axis, Americans -- perhaps more so than others -- had believed that the predators in Nazi Germany and Dai Nippon could be 'taught a lesson' and that, once defeated, they could quickly be separated from their peoples. The taxing frustration of the Cold War was slowly becoming apparent; recent allies-turned-enemies in the Soviet Union and China could not be taught any final lesson without a terminally disastrous war. ...The Cold War's first four years were filled with starts and stops rather than any considered policy or long-range goals (other than not having the world fall apart again). But trends and patterns were emerging and would be reflected in the sacrifices ahead. Crises real and imagined intruded. Big government of the emergency years of the Depression and World War II was getting bigger. The secrecy that accompanied it grew darker. Unaccountability followed, and moral compromises became even easier. America appeared a veritable aircraft carrier against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, as its officials preoccupied themselves with Europe and as the nation dropped what had so recently been its fervent anticolonialism. It also found itself upholding more than a few brutal regimes, though none as bad as the Soviet one that it had sustained during the war." (Derek Leebaert) - A secret study for the US government paints a grim picture of Soviet military capability and the inability of the US to gain information about its capabilities or of the intentions of the Soviets to use it,
Cold War
particularly regarding nuclear strikes via bombers: "The problem of defense of the United States against air attack is characterized above all by lack of knowledge of what we have to defend against. The enemy has the initiative. Our intelligence tells us essentially nothing about his plans, informs us only partially about his present capabilities, and, as to his future capabilities, leaves us essentially dependent on assumptions that he can, if he chooses, do about as well in any aspect as we expect to do for ourselves." - As part of the Cold War nuclear hysteria, dozens of films telling Americans how to survive a nuclear holocaust are made and shown at theaters, community gatherings, and in schools, featuring such memorable titles as Pattern for Survival, You Can Survive the A-Bomb, Survival Under Atomic Attack, and the infamous Duck and Cover. (Philip Taubman, Derek Leebaert)
- As part of the US's biological warfare experiments,
Cold War
"certain bacterial strains" are released over San Francisco. A number of people complain of flu-like symptoms; years later, several people die, apparently as a result of the bacteria. A lawsuit filed on behalf of the dead is dismissed, because of lack of evidence that they died as a result of the biological saturation. (Gentlemen's Quarterly/Frank Olson Project) - US
US actions in Latin America
military forces crush a rebellion in Puerto Rico. (ZMag) - Radical young Kikuyu split from the relatively centrist leadership of the Kenyan African Union (KAU) and form what will become the Mau Mau resistance to British colonial rule.
Kikuyu, or Mau Mau, uprising
Though the colonial officials see Mau Mau as a unified force threatening their authority, in reality Mau Mau is a disparate, barely cohesive number of different, loosely organized coalitions and groups, some of which are far more radical than others. Some Mau Mau groups begin violent resistance to British colonials, ignoring the advice of leaders such as the KAU's Jomo Kenyatta, who advocate legalistic, constitutionally based forms of resistance. (Caroline Elkins) - The 26-year old George H.W. Bush helps to establish his first oil company, Bush-Overbey Oil Development Corp.,
George H.W. Bush
with the assistance of his uncle Herbert Walker's Wall Street connections. Along with associate John Overbey, Bush starts the company in Midland, Texas. The company receives $350,000 in startup money from Walker's connections, including $50,000 from Prescott Bush. Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Washington Post, contributes over $50,000, some of which he puts up in the name of his son-in-law, Phil Graham, who had married his daughter Katherine Graham, who served for years as the chairman of the executive board at the Washington Post Co. The younger Bush is building his own network of influential connections. Bush-Overbey is a modestly successful company, through both the hard work of Bush and his associates and plenty of infusions of cash from Walker's Wall Street friends. (Consortium News) - January: After the Maoist government of China recognizes North Vietnam as a nation,
Vietnam War
it begins sending military advisors and modern weapons to the Viet Minh, including automatic weapons, mortars, howitzers, and trucks. Much of the equipment is American-made and had belonged to the Chinese Nationalists before their defeat by Mao. With the influx of new equipment and Chinese advisors, General Giap transforms his guerrilla fighters into conventional army units. (Vietnam War Timeline) - January 27: Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, a refugee German physicist who worked on both the British and American nuclear weapons projects, and was a critical part of the US's Manhattan Project, confesses his espionage to Britain's MI5.
Cold War
Fuchs, known as the "Atom Spy," delivered most of the secret material he collected, including highly classified material on the US's early research on the hydrogen bomb, to the USSR through fellow agents Harry Gold and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. As a result of Fuchs's information, the USSR knew that the US was unready to wage a full-scale nuclear war through the 1940s and even into the 1950s. The Soviet Union knew the United States did not have enough nuclear weapons to deal with both the Berlin blockade and the fall of the Kuomintang to the Communist Party of China at the same time. After the war Fuchs enjoyed a prominent role in Britain's nuclear weapons development project, until in late 1949 the FBI learned of his connection to the Soviet Union through the decoded wartime Soviet transmissions known as the Venona Project. After Fuchs's arrest and confession, Truman accelerates the US hydrogen bomb program, announced only days before. Fuchs will serve nine years in a British prison before being released to East Germany, where he becomes a lecturer in nuclear physics until his death in 1988. His testimony is key in the convictions of Gold and the Rosenbergs. Some of his work is still used in nuclear physics today. (Nuclear Weapons Archive, Wikipedia) - February: In response to the recognition of Ho Chi Minh's recognition by Red China and the Soviet Union,
Vietnam War
the United States and Britain recognize Bao Dai's French-controlled South Vietnam government. (The British also recognize the Chinese regime of Mao Zedong with virtually no comment from the Americans.) The Viet Minh begin an offensive against French outposts in North Vietnam near the Chinese border. As war flares between North and South Vietnam, American policymakers, unwilling to appear "soft" on communism, call for more intervention against the Communist North. (Vietnam War Timeline, Derek Leebaert) - February 9: Senator Joe McCarthy tells an audience in Wheeling, West Virginia that he has a list of 205 Americans who are either "card-carrying members" of the Communist Party or who are "certainly loyal" to that organization.
Attack on civil liberties
McCarthy has no such list. He also says he has a list of 57 State Department employees who are Communists, and calls their boss, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, "a pompous diplomat in striped pants." McCarthy accuses some of those on the State Department list of passing secrets to the USSR, saying: "The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer -- the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in government we can give." Interestingly enough, this list is real, but not what McCarthy purports it to be: it is a list of people with various "problems," including affiliations with Communist or Fascist organizations, alcoholism, and sexual deviance. Had McCarthy been screened, his own drinking problems and sexual preferences would have gotten him on the list as well. Investigative reporter Drew Pearson attacks McCarthy, noting that only 3 people on the list were actual State Department employees, and of those three, two resigned in 1946 and the third, John Service, had been cleared of any wrongdoing or "suspicious" affiliations. He also notes that no one on the list is a member of the American Communist Party. Pearson is asked by his associate Jack Anderson to lay off McCarthy, saying that the senator is a prime source of Capital Hill information; Pearson replies famously, "He may be a good source, Jack, but he's a bad man." - On February 20, he will harangue the Senate for six hours, claiming that he now has a list of 81 "loyalty risks" -- not card-carrying Communists, since that claim had been disproven by Pearson. Anderson is horrified when McCarthy claims that one of Truman's speechwriters is a Communist; though McCarthy does not name the "Commie," Anderson knows that he is referring to David Demarest Lloyd, that the charges are false, and that Anderson had supplied information about Lloyd to McCarthy. Truman not only refuses to fire Lloyd, but promotes him. Anderson later recalls, "At my instigation, then, Lloyd had been done an injustice that was saved from being grevious only by Truman's steadfastness."
- McCarthy will give numerous variants of his speech in the months to come, with the number of supposed Communists changing with every utterance. On March 26, Pearson identifies university professor Owen Lattimore as McCarthy's "Mr. X," supposedly the top Soviet spy in the country, and defends Lattimore to the point where McCarthy admits that he may have "placed too much stress on the question of whether he is a paid espionage agent." But instead of backing away, McCarthy finds a source, Louis Budenz, the former editor of the American Communist Party publication The Daily Worker, who also claims Lattimore to be a Communist, but Pearson proves that Budenz is a "serial liar" whose allegations have no basis in reality; he proves that, in fact, Budenz has never met Lattimore. McCarthy is so angered and humiliated over this and other Pearson columns that he vows to bring Pearson down, even telling Pearson's associate Jack Anderson while in his cups that he wanted to have Pearson killed. McCarthy then attacks Pearson as "the voice of international Communism" and "a Moscow-directed character assassin." He adds that Pearson is "a prostitute of journalism" and that Pearson "and the Communist Party murdered [discredited former Secretary of Defense] James Forrestal in just as cold blood as though they had machine-gunned him." Months of speechifying and character assassination from McCarthy take their toll; Pearson loses key sponsors for his radio show, and 12 major newspapers stop publishing his columns. (McCarthy also helps fund two efforts to sue Pearson for libel, neither one of which bear any fruit.) In a rare media defense of Pearson, the St. Louis Star-Times writes, "If Joseph McCarthy can silence a critic named Drew Pearson, simply by smearing him with the brush of Communist association, he can silence any other critic." (Spartacus Educational, HUAC Timeline, Lewis Lapham)
"Liberals were so busy proving they were not communists that they became totally ineffective." -- comedian Mort Sahl
- February 14: Stalin and Mao Zedong sign a Treaty of Friendship.
Cold War
The USSR loans China $300 million, promises the new Maoist regime tens of thousands of Soviet technical advisors, as well as promises the transfer of entire industries to China as well as its recognition of Ho Chi Minh's regime in North Vietnam. While some American foreign analysts understand that the hatreds and tensions between the two countries will make any Sino-Soviet alliance a short-lived one, most Americans as well as their British counterparts see such an alliance as the prelude to a third world war that will result in the potential destruction of Western democracy. Policy specialist Paul Nitze tells Secretary of State Dean Acheson that the US needs a quick and dramatic victory over Communism somewhere, preferably somewhere in Southeast Asia, and urges a massive increase in US foreign aid and defense spending. (Derek Leebaert) - February 24: The British government of Clement Attlee is narrowly re-elected for a second term, weathering a fierce challenge from Winston Churchill's Tories. Attlee's nationalization programs, including British Rail, the nationalization of the mines, and other industries, are relatively popular and effective in reducing debt and bringing some prosperity back to the isles, though many on the right shout down nationalization as "socialism." It is not long before Attlee's government is threatened by a party crisis and a call for new elections. (BBC)
- April: State Department official Paul Nitze writes NSC 68, a speculative document that is now seen as one of the founding documents of the Cold War.
Cold War
Historian Derek Leebaert calls his arguments for an immediate and massive defense buildup "a polemic, even a fantasy since there was no chance that Congress would adopt them." Still, Truman is amenable to a more cautious increase. More to the point, Nitze asserts that the US must help Britain, and by extension France, retain its colonial sway over key areas of Southeast Asia, and the US must find "additional proxies of some sort" to aid in its foreign policy goals. Actual allies might be too constraining, particularly as the US military presence in the Far East is less than impressive. However, as many point out, the US arsenal includes 298 atomic bombs. (Derek Leebaert)
"It was the Korean War and not World War II that made us a world political-military power." -- Foreign Service officer Charles Bohlen
Korean War
- June 25: After the shelling of South Korean military positions by North Korean artillery and the occupation of the capital city of Seoul by North Korean troops three days later,
Korean War
the US embarks on a three-year military intervention popularly known as the Korean War; though war was never officially declared by the US, the two Koreas did declare war on one another. The war officially starts with 150 Soviet-provided tanks and 90,000 troops cascading over the border into South Korea, following battle plans drawn up by the Soviet General Staff. Historian Derek Leebaert writes, "The Korean War was the detonator that blew US power around the world. ...The Cold War as a planetary struggle began taking shape." In his message to the American people, Truman, who privately fears that the war is the precursor to World War III, describes the invasion as a Moscow-backed attack by "monolithic world Communism." When Congress learns that Truman has sent troops into Korea, nearly every member leaps to his or her feet and cheers. The UN authorizes military opposition to the North Korean incursion, and Truman sends air, naval, and ground troops. He also sends 35 U.S. troops to Vietnam as "military advisors." A month later, Truman will authorize $15 million in military aid to the French in Vietnam. Communist China aids North Korea; this is the only time in history where Chinese and American troops will fight one another in battle. Almost 30,000 US troops die in the war, which will be concluded in July 1953 but does not permanently settle the dispute between the two countries. Large contingents of US forces remain in South Korea to this day. - Some historians still insist that, somehow, South Korea "suckered" North Korea into invading, or that Stalin reluctantly agreed to assist his "over-ambitious ally." Stalin's successor Nikita Khruschev torpedoed this viewpoint when he told Stalin's deputy Vyacheslav Molotov, "We started it." Leebaert writes, "It is vital to be clear on this issue of blame. Washington's assumptions about its origins, after all, became the catalyst for US commitments to a large peacetime military establishments, to deeper involvements in Europe and Southeast Asia, to the belief of a Sino-Soviet monolith, and to much of the effect that eventually defeated the Soviet Union itself." In reality, the Soviet role was much larger than was understood at the time, as verified by Russian sources made available after the fall of the USSR. The invasion of South Korea has been in the works in Moscow for at least three years. Mao's China reluctantly backs North Korea's incursion at Soviet insistence.
- General Matthew Ridgway later wrote, "The Korean conflict marked the end...of the Fortress America era. Before then, Ridgway observed, the idea of "limited warfare" had never been discussed; Eisenhower thought the term to be meaningless. Hereafter, though, the only question was not whether to fight such a limited war, but how to avoid fighting any other kind. The purpose of US intervention was unclear from the start: whether to restore South Korea along the 38th Parallel, or to crush North Korea and forcibly unify the two countries under an American-designed democracy. But intervention is seen as unavoidable, as the North Korean incursion is widely seen as a feint to cover an imminent Soviet expansion into Western Europe. Even more problematic is the US's support of a South Korean regime that, under its aged ruler Synghman Rhee, bears little resemblance to a democracy. Rhee's secret police round up and execute thousands of political prisoners in the first weeks of the war. Along with Rhee, the US supports the equally corrupt and undemocratic regimes in Taiwan, Thailand, and South Vietnam. "Korea is the Greece of the Far East," insists Truman, and is right in more ways than he realizes.
- But Leebaert believes that US intervention in Korea did a great service in preventing Stalin from moving forward in both Europe and Asia. "stalin had expected South Korea to be quickly, if noisily, consumed," writes Leebaert. "He had not anticipated US intervention, let alone in such force. Had the Americans remained aloof, he most likely would have been emboldened to crack down on Yugoslavia, the only independent Communist state in Europe throughout the Cold War. ...His eventual forbearance, in Yugoslavia probably had at least as much to do with fear of another US riposte as it did with Tito's renown as a mountain fighter. For Japan, the consequences of South Korea's fall would have been equally stark. If America had permitted an armed and united Communist Korea to come into being, or it it had initiated a wider war, it is unlikely Japan would have seen a fruitful destiny in remaining so lightly armed and quietly prosperous, even if the latter were possible." (Korean War, Vietnam War Timeline, Philip Taubman, Derek Leebaert)
- Almost immediately, the United Nations -- free to act owing to the absence of the Soviet delegate and his veto in the Security Council -- calls on its members to join the US-led intervention force in Korea.
Korean War
Turkey, an ancient enemy of Russia, is first to answer the call, as is Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, and 11 other countries. The UN forces are critical in bolstering the outmanned and poorly performing South Korean troops. The North Korean troops, highly trained by their Soviet officers and armed with sophisticated weaponry, annihilate the first waves of US troops sealifted in from Japan. Inexperienced National Guardsmen suffer the same fate. A panic-stricken group of GIs massacres hundreds of innocent Koreans near the village of No Gun Ri. As for the US's closest ally Great Britain, this would not be the first or last time London had urged the US to action, then hung back in providing tangible assistance. Yet Britain was deemed critical to any American resistance to the Soviet Union; since the Americans thought mistakenly that the USSR had a viable nuclear arsenal, the only airbases that could deliver a Western nuclear assault on Soviet territory are located in Britain. (Derek Leebaert) - July: The CIA's covert air carrier, Air America, is formed from the remnants of General Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers and the Civil Air Transport organization.
"Air America"
Air America takes up where CAT left off in helping the CIA supply covert military and economic aid to Laos and imperialist, pro-French forces in Vietnam. The air carrier will play a key role in supporting US and South Vietnamese forces as well as pro-US forces in Laos, and will run opium and heroin all over Southeast Asia, with the profits plowed into the war effort. Air America will be disbanded after the Vietnam War, though other CIA aircraft running drugs in and out of Latin America for the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s will sometimes be given the same moniker. (The CIA's Airlines, The Real Drug Lords, Larry Kolb) - August: British colonial officials in Kenya officially ban all membership in the Mau Mau resistance organizations.
Kikuyu, or Mau Mau, rebellion
The ban has virtually no effect, and violent, sometimes bloody resistance is continually mounted against British authority. Britain is on the verge of one of the bloodiest and most repressive wars of decolonization in its long history of imperialism and empire. Kenya's colonial governor, Sir Philip Mitchell, and the colonial secretary in London, Oliver Lyttelton, begin by downplaying the scope of the Mau Mau resistance to the Home Office, though the Mau Mau resistance continues to stiffen. (Caroline Elkins)
McCarran Act
- September: The McCarran Act, or the "Internal Security Act," is passed by the Senate, which overrides Truman's veto.
Attack on civil liberties
The act authorizes the government to set up concentration camps "for emergency situations," and provides for the fingerprinting and registration of all "subversives." The act was named for Senator Pat McCarran, but commandeered from earlier legislation written by congressmen Karl Mundt and Richard Nixon. Truman vetoed the act, saying it "would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights [and] would actually weaken our internal security measures," but the Senate overrides his veto by a vote of 89-11. The act sets up the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which will work closely with Hoover's FBI and conduct hearings and investigations for the next 27 years. (McCarran Act, HUAC Timeline) - Mid-September: US forces land at Inchon, a North Korean port, as part of Douglas MacArthur's audacious plan to strike behind North Korean lines.
Korean War
The strategy works, and Seoul is liberated, reversing an initially calamitous pattern of North Korean invasion and South Korean-UN retreat. Unfortunately, MacArthur continues to operate within North Korea, and in November, China responds by sending more than 260,000 troops to aid its North Korean allies. US ground forces, augmented by reluctantly deployed British and French forces, retreat behind the 38th parallel, the prewar division between the two countries, and a stalemate ensues. Though Stalin has encouraged China to send its troops into combat, he refuses to send Soviet troops into battle. The single French battalion sent to Korea battles bravely against overwhelming Chinese forces until withdrawn to Indochina. (Philip Taubman, Derek Leebaert) - September 27:
Vietnam War
The US establishes a Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Saigon to aid the French Army. The Military Assistance Advisory Group/Indochina is formed. (Vietnam War Timeline) - October: Senator Joe McCarthy endorses Richard Nixon's candidacy for the Senate,
Richard Nixon
and announces a showdown "between the American people and the administration Commiecrat party of betrayal." Nixon earns the nickname of "Tricky Dick" for his successful sliming of his Democratic opponent and anti-Communist Helen Gahagan Douglas as a "fellow traveler" whom he nicknames "the Pink Lady." Nixon rides his slanderous campaign strategy to success, and will represent California in the US Senate. (Joe Conason) - October 1: An overconfident Douglas MacArthur demands the "unconditional surrender" of North Korea.
Korean War
When the North Koreans refuse, he rams US forces closer to the Chinese-Korean border (the Yalu River) than the Chinese were willing to tolerate; defying MacArthur's predictions that the Chinese would stay on their side of the border, in late November thousands of Chinese troops slam into North Korea. US and South Korean troops retreat in disorder back beyond the 38th Parallel in the longest retreat in American military history. Talk of "nuking" North Korea, and perhaps even China, runs rampant through Washington, horrifying US allies. (Derek Leebaert) - Late October:
US military interventions in Southeast Asia
Chinese troops invade its mountainous neighbor Tibet, prompting Harry Truman and Dean Acheson to approve sending small amounts of military aid funds to the beleagured Tibetans. (Derek Leebaert) - December: Seeking to emphasize the nature of the Communist threat without actually declaring war,
Cold War
Truman declares a state of emergency. His declaration gives him extraordinary powers over industry, the economy, and the US media. He will call for the doubling of the size of the Air Force, and the Defense Production Act will, after its passage, ensure the rapid buildup of America's military. (Derek Leebaert)
1950 - 1954
US steps up military assistance to South Vietnam
- American military advisors will accompany
Vietnam War
the flow of US tanks, planes, artillery and other supplies to Vietnam. Over these four years, the US will spend $3 billion on the French war and by 1954 will provide 80 percent of all war supplies used by the French. (Vietnam War Timeline) - The CIA is both alarmed by, and inspired by,
Attack on civil liberties
the North Korean mind-control experiments performed on 900 American POWs during the Korean War (the prisoners are executed after the experiments are concluded; rumors of these experiments inspire author Richard Condon to write The Manchurian Candidate). In response, the CIA conducts its own mind-control and brainwashing experiments, at least 149 of them, according to documents declassified in 1996. Drugs such as marijuana, morphine, Benzedrine and mescaline are used, along with hypnosis and electroshock treatments. Test subjects were often, but not always, those whose objections would not be heard -- prisoners, mental patients, and members of minority groups. (Gentlemen's Quarterly/Frank Olson Project)
