THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ---- Episode 35

   THE UNITED STATES OVERTHROWS REGIME IN 
  GUATEMALA IN THE MID--1950s

Truman took heed of the alleged Communist threat emanating from Guatemala. In April 1952, he hosted a state dinner for Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who had long been persona non grata in Washington. Somoza assured State department officials that if the United States would provide the arms, he and exiled Guatemalan colonel Carlos Castillo Armas would get rid of Arbenz. The Truman administration decided to overthrow Arben in September 1952 but reversed course when US involvement was exposed. 

Eisenhower had no such compunctions. He appointed Jack Peurifoy as his ambassador to Guatemala. Peurifoy, who spoke no Spanish, had been serving in Greece, where his role in helping restore the monarchy to power had earned him the sobriquet "the butcher of Athens." A photo of the Greek royal family still adorned his desk. His penchant for wearing a gun in his belt led to his wife to nickname him "pistol packing Peurifoy." Before Greece, he had helped purge the State Department of liberals and leftists. Arbenz invited the new U.S. ambassador and his wife to dinner. They clashed for six hours over Communist influence in the Guatemalan government, land reform, and treatment of United Fruit. Peurifoy sent Secretary of State Dulles a long cable detailing their discussion that concluded,"I am definitely convinced that if the President is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along." 

In Peurifoy's mind, that equated to being a tool of Moscow :"Communism is directed by the Kremlin all over the world, and anyone who thinks differently doesn't know what he is talking about." In reality, Guatemalan communism was indigenous and the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo was independent of the Soviet Union. The Communists held only four of the fifty-six seats in Congress and no cabinet posts. The party had approximately 4,000 members in a population of 3.5 million. 

To suggest that United Fruit had friends among the high and mighty in the Eisenhower administration would be an understatement. The Dulles brothers ' law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had written United Fruit's 1930 and 1936 agreements with Guatemala. Allen Dulles's predecessor at the CIA, Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, would become vice president of the company in 1955. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, John Moors Cabot was a major shareholder. His brother, Thomas Dudley Cabot, the director of international security affairs in the State Department, had been president of United Fruit. NSC head Robert Cutler had been chairman of the board. John J. McCloy was a former board member. And U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica Robert Hill would later join the board. 

Concerns about the United Fruit interests reinforced the Eisenhower administration's deep-seated anticommunism. In August 1953, administration officials decided to take Arbenz down through covert action. One U.S. official cautioned, "Were it to become known that the United States had tried a Czechoslovakia in Guatemala, the effect on our relations in this hemisphere, and probably in the world. . . could be . . . disastrous." Undeterred, Allen Dulles asked Iran coup instigator Kim Roosevelt to lead "Operation Success," but Roosevelt declined, not trusting that the operation's title reflected the prospects on the ground. Dulles then chose Colonel Albert Haney, a former South Korea station chief, as field commander with Tracy Barnes as chief of political warfare.  As Tim Weiner points out in his history of the CIA, Barnes had the classic CIA resume' of that era. Raised on Long Island's Whitney estate, replete with its own private golf course, he matriculated at Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law. Serving with the OSS in World War II, he captured a garrison, earning him a Silver Star. But because Barnes had a reputation as a bumbler, former CIA director Walter Bedell Smith, a Dulles' protege', was tasked with overseeing the operation.

In January 1954, word leaked out that the United States was collaborating with Colonel Castillo Armas to train the invading force. The Guatemalan government then turned to Czechoslovakia for a shipload of arms. The United States loudly decried Soviet penetration of the hemisphere. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Alexander Wiley, described the allegedly "massive" shipment as "part of the master plan of world communism." The Speaker of the House deemed it an atom bomb in America's backyard. 

In a surprising reversal, New York Times correspondent Sydney Gruson began providing coverage of the unfolding Guatemalan crisis that accurately captured that Nation's outrage over U.S bullying and accusations. Gruson had just been allowed back into the country after having been expelled by the government as "undesirable" in February. On May 21, he wrote that U.S. pressure had "boomeranged," inspiring "a greater degree of national unity than Guatemala has experienced in a long time." Even Guatemalan newspapers "that normally are in constant opposition," he reported, "have rallied to defend the Government's action." "Both newspapers, he noted, had "assailed what they termed the United States willingness to provide arms to right-wing dictators in the hemisphere while refusing to fulfill Guatemala's legitimate needs." In another front- page article the following day, Gruson recounted the Guatemalan foreign minister's charge that the U.S. State Department was aiding exiles abroad and domestic dissidents who were trying to overthrow the government. He reported that the State Department had pressured Guatemala to raise its compensation to United Fruit to $16 million and quoted the foreign minister's assertion that "Guatemala is not a colony of the United States nor an associated state that requires permission of the United States Government to acquire the things indispensable for its defense and security, and it repudiates the pretension of the United States to supervise the legitimate acts of a sovereign government." On the twenty-fourth, Gruson insisted that the United States had chosen the wrong issue to make a stand on and had only sparked a "great upsurge of nationalism" and anti-Americanism. GRUSON'S DAYS As A TIMES REPORTER IN GUATEMALA WERE NUMBERED.  Over dinner, Allen Dulles spoke to his friend Times business manager Julius Adler, who conveyed the administrations's complaints to publisher Sulzberger. GRUSON WAS SENT PACKING TO MEXICO CITY. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 34

THE CIA OVERTHREW THE IRANIAN REGIME OF MOSSADEQ IN 1953 AND AMERICA WAS OFF AND 
RUNNING IN ITS QUEST TO BULLY EVERYBODY 

The American were also grateful. Previously frozen out of Iranian oil production, five U.S, oil companies now received 40 percent ownership of the new consortium established to develop Iranian oil. [ Market economics works even better when the CIA is helping. ] And the United States opened its coffers to the shah. Within two weeks of the coup, the United States granted Iran $68 million in emergency aid, with more than $100 million more soon to follow. The United States had gained an ally and access to an enormous supply of oil but in the process had outraged the citizens of a proud nation whose resentment at the overthrow of their popular prime minister and imposition of a repressive regime would later come back to haunt it. The shah continued to rule for more than twenty-five years, with strong U.S. backing, by fixing elections and relying on the repressive power of SAVAK, his newly created intelligence service.

The CIA, having toppled its first government, now saw itself as capable of replicating the feat elsewhere and would attempt to do so repeatedly in succeeding years. The Soviets, therefore, instead of seeing a softening of U.S. policy in the aftermath of Stalin's death, saw the United States impose another puppet government in a nation with which the Soviet Union shared a thousand-kilometer border as part of an ongoing strategy of enrichment. 

On the heels of this "success" in Iran, the Eisenhower administration targeted the small, impoverished Central American nation of Guatemala. Guatemalan had suffered under a brutal U.S.-backed dictator, Jorge Ubico, whom they overthrew in 1944. Before the reform government took power, 2 percent of the population owned 60 percent of the land, while 50 percent of the people eked out a living on only 3 percent of the land. The Indian half of Guatemala's population barely survived on less than 50 cents per day. In 1950, Guatemalans elected the handsome, charismatic thirty-eight-year-old Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman president in an election remarkable for its fairness. At his March 1951 inauguration, he declared his commitment to social justice and reform.

     All the riches of Guatemala are not as important as the life, the freedom, the dignity, the health and the happiness of the most humble of its people . . . we must distribute these riches so that those who have less ---and they are the immense majority ---- benefit more, while those who have more --- and they are few --- also benefit, but to a lesser extent. How could it be otherwise, given the poverty, the poor health, and the lack of education of our people. 

The U.S. media wasted little time in denouncing Guatemala's Communist "tyranny," beginning its assault long before Arbenz had time to start implementing his reform agendum. In June, the New York Times decried "The Guatemalan Cancer," registering "a sense of deep disappointment and disillusionment over the trend of Guatemalan politics in the two months since Colonel Arbenz became President." The editors took particular umbrage at the growth of Communist influence, complaining that "the Government's policy is either running parallel to,  or is a front for, Russian imperialism in Central America." The Washington Post carried an editorial a few months later titled "Red Cell in Guatemala" that branded the new president of Guatemala's Congress a "straight party liner" and denounced Arbenz as little more than a tool. 

Ignoring his critics, Arbenz set out to modernize Guatemala's industry and agriculture and develop its mineral resources. To do so meant challenging the power of the UNITED FRUIT COMPANY, which dominated the Guatemalan economy. Called "the octopus" by Guatemalans, United Fruit reached its tentacle-like arms deep into railroads, ports, shipping, and especially banana plantations. Arbenz announced plans for a massive land reform program beginning with the nationalization of 234,000 acres of United Fruit Company land, more than 90 percent of which the company as not using. In all, the company's 550,000 acres represented approximately one-fifth of Guatemala's arable land. Arbenz offered to compensate United Fruit in the amount of $600,000, based on the company's own greatly underpriced assessment of the land's value in previous tax returns. The company demanded more.  Arbenz took steps to appropriate another 173,000 acres. The public relations pioneer and master propagandist Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, had already launched a campaign to brand Arbenz a Communist. He found willing allies at the New York Times . Bernays paid a visit to Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Dutifully, the Times soon began publishing articles about the Communist threat in Guatemala. Leading congressmen, including Henry Cabot Lodge, WHOSE FAMILY HAD GORGED ON UNITED FRUIT FOR DECADES, decried this growing Communist menace. 



   

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ----- Episode 33

   IN MARCH 1953, IKE ASKED MEMBERS OF THE 
  NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL 

   The United States' role in the Iranian conflict should have provided all the answer Eisenhower needed. Upon taking office, Eisenhower confronted a crisis in Iran , where the government of Mohammad Mossadeq was challenging the monopoly held by Britain's Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the forerunner of British Petroleum {BP } and the world's third largest crude-oil producer. The company, which was 51 percent owned by the British government, had developed cozy relations with Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had seized power after World War I and become Shah in1925, and with his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who replaced his father in 1941, when the elder's Nazi sympathies had provoked a joint occupation of Iran by Britain and the Soviet Union. 

Anglo-Iranian kept 84 percent of the revenue for itself, leaving at most a paltry 16 percent for the Iranians. It paid taxes in Britain rather than Iran. In fact, its British taxes were more than double the amount the Iranians received in royalties. While the British got rich off the Iranian oil, the Iranians lived in poverty. Oil-field workers earned less than 50 cents per day and received no benefits or vacations. The Iranians' outrage was ignited in 1950 when the U.S. oil ARAMCO signed a contract giving Saudi Arabia 50 percent of the profits from Saudi oil. Under pressure, Anglo-Iranian offered improved terms. But Mossadeq so hated British colonialism that he refused to consider the company's offer. The Iranian parliament, reflecting Iranians' near-uiversal antipathy toward Anglo-Iranian, voted unanimously to nationalize the oil industry and compensate the British for their investment. Britain's government seemed hardly in a position to object, having nationalized Britain's coal and electricity companies and railroads. 

A former finance and foreign minister, Mossadeq, despite his legendary eccentricities, was an enormously popular figure inside Iran and a well-respected one internationally. He was the first Iranian to earn a doctor of law degree from a European university. He had attended the Versailles Conference in a futile attempt to block the assertion of British control and had led the decolonization fight in succeeding decades. Time magazine named him Man of the Year for 1951. The U.S. ambassador reported that Mossadeq "has the backing of 95 to 98 percent of the people of his country." His defiance of the colonial masters thrilled the Arab masses throughout the region. 

With Iran producing 40 percent of the Middle Eastern oil, the United States understood the importance of easing the tension. It had been pushing the British to improve their offer and avoid the crisis since 1948. Truman derided Sir William Fraser, the head of Anglo-Iranian, as a "typical nineteenth century colonial exploiter." 

Members of the British cabinet responded in the fashion typical of twentieth-century exploiters and debated the pros and cons of invading. It became clear that an invasion would prove costly and might not succeed. But, capitulating to the Iranians, some felt, could put the final nail in the empire's coffin. "If Persia were allowed to get away with it, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries would be encouraged to think they could try things on," Defense Minister Emanuel Shinwell feared. "The next thing might be an attempt to nationalize the Suez Canal. " Opposition leader Winston Churchill told Prime Minister Clement Attlee that he was "rather shocked at the attitude of the United States, who did not seem to appreciate fully the importance of the great area extending from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf : it was more important than Korea." Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison also deplored the policy of "scuttle and surrender." 

Acheson attempted to mediate, fearing that military action by Great Britain in the south might provoke a Soviet Union incursion in the north. Though frustrated  by Mossadeq's intransigence, Acheson sympathized with the Iranians' position. He convinced Averell Harriman to go to Tehran to defuse the situation. Harriman reported that the "situation that has developed here is a tragic example of absentee management combined with world-wide growth of nationalism in underdeveloped countries." The British put the invasion on hold, initiating economic warfare in its stead. They embargoed oil oil coming out of Iran and goods going in. With the approval of the United States, the Bank of England halted the finance of and trade with Iran. The Iranian economy slowly ground to a halt. 

Winston Churchill and his Conservative Party returned to power in October 1951, increasing the pressure for military intervention. Churchill had earlier written to Truman that "Mussy Duck" was an elderly lunatic bent on wrecking his country and turning it over to communism." When Mossadeq got wind of British plans to launch a coup, he shut the British Embassy and expelled its employees. 

When Eisenhower took office, the Dulles brothers met with Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's grandson and the CIA's top Middle East expert, to discuss eliminating "that madman Mossadeq." John Foster Dulles acknowledged that Mossadeq wasn't a Communist, but he feared a takeover by the Communist Tudeh party that would deliver Iran's oil to Moscow. Soon, he argued, the rest of the Middle east oil would come under Soviet control. Mossadeq had moved closer to Tudeh as the crisis unfolded. The new administration portrayed Mossadeq as an unstable extremist ----"not quite sane," according to U.S. Ambassador Loy Henderson. 

Behind the scenes, the CIA went to work, launching "Operation Ajax" headed by Roosevelt.  British intelligence, M16, provided support. But things did not go as planned. When the CIA's Tehran station chief opposed the tawdry operation as being inimical to the United Staes' long-term interests, Allen Dulles fired him. Mossadeq uncovered the shah's collaboration with the coup attempt, forcing the shah to flee the country. 

The CIA, meanwhile, had been buying up Iranian journalists, preachers, army and police officers, and members of parliament, who were instructed to foment opposition to the government. The CIA also purchased the services of the extremist Warriors of Islam, a "terrorist gang," according to a CIA history of the coup. In August, Roosevelt began setting mobs loose to create chaos in the capital, Tehran. Roosevelt spread rumors that Mossadeq was a Communist AND A JEW. His street thugs, pretending to be members of the Tudeh party, attacked mullahs and destroyed a mosque. Among the rioters was Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, Iran's future leader. On August 19, 1953, in the midst of the anarchy, Roosevelt brought General Fazlollah Zahedi out of his CIA hiding place. Zahedi announced that the shah, then in Italy, had appointed him the new prime minister. After an armed battle, coup plotters arrested Mossadeq and thousands of his supporters. Some were executed. Mossadeq was convicted of treason and imprisoned. The shah returned to Tehran. At a final meeting with Roosevelt, the shah offered a toast : "I owe my throne to God, my people, my army ---- AND TO YOU." 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ---- Episode 32

THE UNITED STATES INSISTED ON INTIMIDATING THE
WORLD WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN THE 1950s

Soviet leaders were particularly irked by the dangers of proliferation. Five top scientists, including nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov asserted that "the development of the industrial use of atomic energy by itself does not only exclude, but leads directly, to an increase of military atomic potential." Foreign Minister Molotov reiterated this point in meetings with Dulles and in a note stating that it was "possible for the very application of atomic energy for peaceful purposes to be utilized for increasing the production of atomic weapons." When Molotov again raised the proliferation risk at their May 1 meeting, Dulles couldn't grasp the concept and and replied that he "would seek out a scientist to educate him more fully." 

If Eisenhower's UN address raised hopes for an easing of international tensions, Dulles's January 12 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations dashed them thoroughly. He warned that local defenses against communism would be backed by "massive retaliatory power" deployed "at places and with means of our own choosing." 

Reliance on nuclear weapons represented a fundamental departure from previous policy. Whereas Truman, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had had viewed atomic bombs as weapons that would be used only in the most desperate circumstances, Eisenhower made them the foundation of U. S. defense strategy. The Wall Street Journal reported, "There was a wide assumption that here was a reckless policy of turning every minor clash into an atomic Armageddon." The New York Times' James Reston was stunned that Eisenhower and Dulles were enacting a " 'new strategy', potentially graver than anything ever proposed by any United States Government," and not a single congressman even questioned this commitment to "sudden atomic retaliation." He worried about the constitutional implications of such expanded presidential powers. If the Chinese moved into Indochina or the Soviets into Iran, who, he asked, would give the order to deploy "massive retaliatory power" against Beijing or Moscow ? How, he wondered, could the president "seek the consent of the Congress without alerting the Kremlin and risking a sudden atomic blow upon the United States?"

RAND analyst Joseph Loftus became concerned that the new SAC Emergency War Plan was targeting Soviet cities and civilian populations. While Loftus was visiting SAC headquarters in Omaha, General James Walsh, the director of SAC intelligence, invited him over to his house for cocktails and began lecturing him on the need to maximize destruction. Walsh suddenly exploded. "Goddammit, Loftus, there's only one way to attack the Russians, and that's to hit them hard with everything we have and" ---he shouted, pounding his fist on the enormous Bible on the table --- "knock their balls off ! "

By the spring of 1954, SAC's war plan called for attacking the Soviet Union with 600 to 750 bombs and turning it into "a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours." The plan involved killing 80 percent of the population in 118 major cities, or 60 million people. Later that year, the United States began deploying nuclear weapons on the soil of its European allies. By 1958, almost three thousand had been placed in Western Europe. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. arsenal continued to grow at a dizzying pace, expanding from slightly over 1,000 when Eisenhower took office to over 22,000 bombs when he left office eight years later. 

Massive retaliation might frighten the Soviets, but it would do little to thwart the revolutionary upsurge in the developing world, where the Soviet Union was poised to take advantage of widespread discontent. The most important third-world leaders ---Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, and Jawaharlal Nehru of India ---- steered a neutral course between the capitalist and socialist blocs and thought it obscene to spend billions of dollars and rubles on arms when money for economic development was in short supply. On his first trip abroad, in May 1953, Dulles learned of hostility toward the United States in Asia, where the Soviet system had real appeal, and the Middle East. During his trip, he wrote to Eisenhower about "bitterness" in the Arab world, where "the United States suffered from being linked with British and French imperialism" and from its blind support for Israel.

Dulles wasn't sure that the United States could ever win the allegiance of third-world peoples. He noted that asking underdeveloped countries to embrace capitalism was like asking people who were undernourished and suffering from rickets to play rugby : " You say to them, 'Have a free competitive system.' And they say, 'Good God, there must be a better way of doing things!' " Eisenhower was also troubled by the depth of animosity toward the United States among the world's impoverished masses. He raised the issue at a March 1953 NSC meeting, wondering why it wasn't possible "to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us." 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ----- Episode 31

        IKE SUPPORTED USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS 
        BECAUSE THEY ARE LESS EXPENSIVE 

   Eisenhower felt constrained by the fact that neither the U.S. public nor his British allies were as sanguine as he and Dulles about the use of nuclear weapons. He set about to ease the line between conventional and nuclear weapons. According to the minutes of a late March 1953 NSC discussion of using nuclear weapons in Korea, "the President and Secretary Dulles were in complete agreement that somehow or the other the tabu which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed."

Dulles called for breaking "down this false distinction" between conventional and nuclear weapons, which he attributed to a Soviet propaganda campaign. Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Arthur Radford explained to listeners at the Naval War College in May 1954 that "atomic forces are now our primary forces . . . actions by forces, on land, sea or air are relegated to a secondary role. . . nuclear weapons, fission and fusion, will be used in the next major war." 

In meetings in Bermuda with Britain's Churchill and French Premier Joseph Laniel in December 1953, Eisenhower sought his allies' support for using atomic bombs if fighting started in Korea again. Churchill sent his private secretary Jock Colville to Eisenhower to express his concerns. Colville was taken aback by Eisenhower's response : "whereas Winston looked on the atomic bomb as something new and terrible, he looked upon it as just the latest improvement in military weapons. He implied that there was no distinction between 'conventional' weapons and atomic weapons : all weapons in due course become conventional." Colville later wrote, "I could hardly believe my ears." Eisenhower similarly told Anthony Eden, "The development of smaller atomic weapons and the use of atomic artillery makes the distinction [ between atomic and conventional weapons ] impossible to sustain." 

In 1955, Eisenhower responded to a reporter's question about using tactical atomic weapons : "yes of course they would be used. In any combat where these things can be used in strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn't be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else." 

The very next day, Nixon reinforced the point : "tactical atomic explosives are now conventional and will be used against the targets of any aggressive force." A few weeks later, Ike told Congress that "a wide variety" of tactical atomic weapons "have today achieved conventional status in the arsenals of our armed forces." 

Eisenhower prepared for their use by transferring control of the atomic stockpile from the AEC to the military. Truman had transferred nine weapons to Guam in 1951 but had otherwise insisted on retaining civilian control. He said he did not want "to have some dashing lieutenant colonel decide when would be the proper time to drop one." Eisenhower had no such compunctions. In June 1953, he began transferring atomic bombs from the AEC to the Defense Department to enhance operational readiness and protect them from surprise Soviet attack. In December 1954, he ordered 42 percent of atomic bombs and 36 percent of hydrogen bombs deployed overseas, many menacingly close to the Soviet Union. By 1959, the military had custody of more than 80 percent of U.S. nuclear weapons. [ Just in time for the election of JFK. ] 

The United States' European allies were scared shitless that the United States would start a nuclear war, and they pressured Eisenhower to lower the tensions. He responded on December 8, 1953, mesmerizing the 3,500 delegates at the United Nations with his "Atoms for Peace" speech declaring that the United States would devote "its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous invention of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life" by spreading the benefits of peaceful atomic power at home and abroad.

The U.S.media rang out with praise. New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin wrote that Eisenhower's "eloquent" and "moving argument for peace . . . represented an earnest attempt to halt the atomic arms race." However, Baldwin regretted that the prospects for success remained bleak because "the Soviet Union's whole concept is built upon world struggle and ultimate world domination." 

Eisenhower was so desperate to put a smiling face on the atom that he ignored numerous warnings about the danger of proliferation. The AEC's only nuclear physicist Henry Smyth, dismissed Atoms for Peace as a "thoroughly dishonest proposal" that ignored proliferation risks and exaggerated the prospects of nuclear power. Others echoed his dissent. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ---- Episode 30

IKE'S IN OFFICE AND THE ARMS RACE IS UNDERWAY 

The New York Times took "comfort in the fact that"the United States still possessed a lead in atomic and hydrogen bomb production but recognized that "these advantages are bound to diminish with time." The Times noted that even Secretary of State Dulles had declared that "the central problem now is to save the human race from extinction." 

Dulles and his relatives had helped design the American Empire. John Foster Dulles's maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, and his uncle Robert lansing had both served as secretary of state. John W. painstakingly tutored his eldest grandson throughout his childhood, instilling a firm belief in the United States' global role. John Foster Dulles's paternal grandfather and his father had both been Presbyterian ministers, his grandfather serving as a missionary in India. His younger brother, Allen, became Director of the CIA. When his uncle Lansing served as Wilson's secretary of state during and after the First World War, Dulles was secretary-treasurer of the government's new Russian Bureau, whose main function was to assist anti-Bolshevik forces challenging the Russian Revolution. Financier Bernard Baruch, an old family friend, next tapped the young lawyer to serve as legal advisor to the U.S. delegation to the Inter-Allied Reparations Commission at Versailles, after which he returned to practice law at Sullivan and Cromwell, overseeing the accounts of some of the pillars of the emerging empire : J.P. Morgan & Company ; Brown Brothers Harriman ; Dillon, Read ; Goldman Sachs ; United Fruit Company ; International Nickel Company ; United Railways of Central America ; and the Overseas Securities Corporation. 

Though journalistic accounts of Dulles's unabashed affection for Hitler in the early years of the Nazi dictatorship are hard to verify, there is no doubt that he maintained some involvement in German business activities. He participated actively in the vast interwar cartelization, which afforded a means to stabilize the shaky U.S. economy, reduce competition, and guarantee profits. Dulles dealt extensively with I.G. Farben through the nickel and chemical cartels. Despite his later vehement denials of any dealings with the Nazi regime, he is known to have visited Berlin in 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1939. In assessing Dulles's involvement, award-winning New York Times and Boston Globe foreign correspondent Steven Kinzer, citing Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius's "exhaustive study" of Sullivan and Cromwell, writes that "the firm 'thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime', and Dulles spent much of 1934 'publicly supporting Hitler', leaving his partners 'shocked that he could so easily disregard law and international treaties to justify Nazi repression'." 

Dulles never wavered in his commitment to maintaining U.S.hegemony and protecting U.S. business interests orin his hatred of communism. Despite outward appearances, the rigid, sometimes belligerent secretary of state and the affable president differed little on substantive policy issues. Eisenhower understood that even with income tax rates topping 90 percent for the wealthiest Americans, the nation's bloated military budget would prove impossible to sustain, ultimately bankrupting the country.  He worried, "This country can choke itself to death piling up military expenditures." He decided to curb ballooning defense spending by relying on nuclear arms, which were cheaper than maintaining a large standing army. In late October 1953, he approved a new Basic National Security Policy, NSC 162/2, the core of his "New Look" defense policy, which stated, "in the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions." Based on the assumption that any war with the Soviet Union would quickly evolve into a full-scale nuclear war, the New Look downplayed conventional military capabilities and relied upon massive nuclear retaliation by the fortified Strategic Air Command. Thus the savings made by reducing the size of the army were offset, in large part, by increased spending on the air force and navy. EISENHOWER ENDED UP CUTTING TRUMAN'S 1954 DEFENSE BUDGET FROM $41.3 BILLION TO $36 BILLION. 

BUT EVERYBODY WAS ALL THAT KEEN ON USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS. MORE ON THIS TO COME. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR------Episode 29

                    THE KOREAN WAR ENDED IN A DRAW BUT
              THERE WERE DEFINITELY LOSERS 

One casualty of the Korean War was American manhood. One postwar study found that 70 percent of U.S. POWs had "collapsed" and collaborated with their captors. Some attributed this cowardice to Communist brainwashing. Others pointed to something more troubling. One army doctor who traveled about the camps to treat U.S. prisoners reported, "the strong regularly took food from the weak. . . Many men were sick, and these men, instead of being helped and nursed by the others, were ignored, or worse . . . On winter nights, helpless men with dysentery were rolled outside the huts by their comrades and left to die in the cold." An astounding 38 percent of U.S. prisoners died. Most withdrew into themselves and made little effort to find food or keep clean. The doctor attributed this to "some new failure in the childhood and adolescent training of our young men ---- a new softness."

If American men were getting soft, American technology would compensate. Just three days before Eisenhower's election, the United States tested its first prototype hydrogen bomb on the island of Elugelab in the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The island burned for six hours under a mushroom cloud a hundred miles across and then disappeared. A sailor commented, "You would swear the whole world was on fire." Physicist Harold Agnew was aboard ship twenty-five miles away. He observed, "something I'll never forget was the heat. Not the blast . . . the heat just kept coming on and on and on. And it was really scary." Eisenhower acknowledged the new reality in his inaugural address. "Science," he warned, "seems ready to confer upon us . . . the power to erase human life from the planet." Yet his policies over the next eight years propelled us ever more disastrously toward realizing that threat. It was as if Lewis Mumford's brilliant 1946 essay about the madness of American leaders had been written with the future Eisenhower in mind. 

As with his anticommunism, Eisenhower's embrace of nuclearism came later in life. He had opposed the atomic bombing of Japan on both military and moral grounds. He was actually in Moscow when he learned about Hiroshima. He told a journalist, "Before the atom bomb was used, . . . I was sure we could keep the peace with Russia. Now, I don't know. I had hoped the bomb wouldn't figure in this war. Until now I would have said that we three, Britain . . . , America . . . , and Russia . . . could have guaranteed the peace of the world for a long time to come. But now, I don't know. People are frightened and disturbed all over. Everyone feels insecure again."

After the war, he supported efforts at international control, wanting atomic bombs to be turned over to the United Nations and destroyed. He spoke out consistently for civilian rather than military control of the bomb. And he continued to raise moral concerns about the use of such a weapon. In 1947, he told a luncheon, "I decry loose and sometimes gloating talk about the degree of security implicit in a weapon that might destroy millions overnight." 

As David Rosenberg notes, "Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the presidency in January 1953 with more thorough knowledge of nuclear weapons than any President before or since." As army chief of staff, temporary chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NATO supreme commander, he had been intimately involved in early nuclear-war planning. During those years, his abhorrence of nuclear weapons abated considerably, but it had not disappeared. In March 1953, he warned his cabinet not to think of the bomb as "a cheap way to solve things." He reminded them, "It is cold comfort for any citizen of Western Europe to be assured that --- after his country is overrun and he is pushing up daisies ---someone still alive will drop a bomb on the Kremlin." 

He was determined to build on the United States' lead in the nuclear arms race. In summer 1953, the CIA reported reassuringly that there was no evidence that the Soviets were working on a hydrogen bomb. On August 12, 1953, much to the CIA's chagrin, the Soviets exploded what was believed to have been a 400-kiloton hydrogen bomb in Kazakhstan. Though far less powerful than the U.S. model, the Soviet bomb was not only deliverable, it was "dry," needing no refrigeration. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight. It had stood at three since the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. The Soviets were closing the gap at a stunning pace. 

THE RACE TO DOOMSDAY CONTINUES.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR--- Episode 28

             IKE WASN'T AS KEEN ON WARS AS MANY OF 

        HIS REPUBLICAN BUSINESSMEN COHORTS 

In what seemed a dramatic departure, Eisenhower, in 1953, called for peace, disarmament, and third-world development. But in equally fundamental ways, he remained an orthodox Cold Warrior, blaming the Soviets for the troubled state of the world. 

The New York Times called Ike's "cross of iron" speech "magnificent and deeply moving." The Washington Post hoped that it signaled a rejection of Truman's "provocative words," "belligerent gesturings," "militarization of policy," and "aid . . . to everybody who would turn anti-Communist." Eisenhower, the Post felt, still needed to repudiate "the theory that a crack of the whip from Moscow produces automatic obedience in the far corners of the satellite states and throughout Red China and Communist--infected Asia. "

The Soviets reprinted Ike's "cross of iron" speech widely and offered some hopeful measures of their own. But the optimism proved short-lived. Two days after the speech, John Foster Dulles, the evil Secretary of State, dismissed Malenkov's "peace offensive" as a "peace defensive" taken in response to U.S. strength. he accused the Communists of "endlessly conspiring to overthrow from within, every genuinely free government in the world." 

Perplexed, the Soviets wondered whether Eisenhower or Dulles spoke for the administration. They applauded Eisenhower for detailing the costs of U.S. militarism but chided but chided him for leaving out the astronomical cost of accumulating a vast nuclear arsenal and constructing hundreds of military bases around the world. 

Nor did the steps taken to end the fighting in Korea necessarily augur well for future relations. Despite making progress in the negotiations, Eisenhower threatened to widen the war and considered using tactical atomic weapons, whic the United States first tested in January. At an NSC meeting in February, Eisenhower identified the Kaesong area in North Korea as a good place to use the new weapon. In May, when Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton Collins said that he was "very skeptical about the value of using atomic weapons tactically in Korea," Eisenhower callously replied,"it might be cheaper, dollar-wise, to use atomic weapons in Korea than to continue to use conventional weapons." That month, the Joint Chiefs recommended and the NSC endorsed atomic attacks on China. Eisenhower and Dulles made sure the Communist leaders knew of those threats. 

The United States also began bombing the dams near Pyongyang, causing enormous floods and destroying the rice crop. The Nuremberg tribunal had condemned similar Nazi actions in Holland in 1944 as a war crime. Finally, in June, the two sides signed agreements settling the POW issue and agreeing on a truce demarcation line, but fighting intensified and casualties skyrocketed on both sides. The morale of the UN forces plummeted. Desertions increased. Self-inflicted wounds reached epidemic proportions. On July 7, 1953, an armistice was finally signed by North Korea, China, and the United States, two years and seventeen days after talks began. South Korea has still not signed. In August, Eisenhower kept up pressure, instructing LeMay to dispatch twenty nuclear-armed B-36 bombers to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa as part of Operation "Big Stick." LeMay invited the press to observe their arrival. 

Eisenhower used atomic bombs repeatedly throughout his presidency in the same sense, as Daniel Ellsberg has argued, that someone holding a gun to someone else's head uses the gun whether or not he pulls the trigger. Among those who learned the lesson that nuclear threats could frighten an enemy into capitulating was Richard Nixon. In 1968, Nixon explained his strategy for for dealing with North Vietnam to Bob Halderman : "I call it the madman theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can't restrain him when he's angry ---and he has his hand on the nuclear button' --- and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace." 

Haldeman explained that Nixon "saw a parallel in the action President Eisenhower had taken . . . When Eisenhower arrived in the White House, the Korean War was stalemated. . . He secretly got word to the Chinese that he would drop nuclear bombs. . . In a few weeks, the Chinese called for a truce and the Korean War ended." 

"It worked," Nixon insisted. "It was the bomb that did it." He credited Eisenhower with teaching him the value of unpredictability. "If the adversary feels that you are unpredictable, even rash." he wrote, "he will be deterred from pressing you too far. The odds that he will fold increase greatly and the unpredictable president will win another hand." Eisenhower was certainly not a "madman," but he paid little heed to how someone like Nixon might mimic his actions. 

The Korean War had its winners and losers. Rhee's and Jiang's shaky regimes survived. Japan profited. China stood up to the Americans, enhancing its international prestige, but the Soviets had not, accelerating the Sino--Soviet split. And Churchill grasped the real meaning for the United States : "Korea does not really matter now. I'd never heard of the bloody place until I was 74. Its importance lies in the fact that it has led to the re-arming of America." 

THE BIG CASUALTY OF THE KOREAN WAR WAS AMERICAN MANHOOD. THIS IS WHERE I'LL TAKE UP PRESENTLY. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ----Episode 27

   THE PRESIDENCY OF DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER 

Given the hypermilitarization of American life, it was only fitting that one of the nation's top military men run for president after Truman's term ended in 1952. The 1952 election pitted Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson against General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower chose anti-Communist hatchet man California Senator Richard Nixon as his running mate. During the campaign, Nixon did Ike's dirty work, denouncing "Adlai the appeaser" who "carries a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson's cowardly college of Communist containment." Senator Joseph McCarthy struck a similar theme, referring to the Democratic candidate as "Alger," a reference to Alger Hiss. McCarthy had a particular vendetta against General George Marshall, whom he blamed for "losing"China during his tenure as Truman's secretary of state. Eisenhower was set to defend his friend and mentor against such scurrilous attacks while campaigning in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin. But Eisenhower backed off from a confrontation with the ant-Communist demagogue, pusillanimously dropping a passage defending Marshall from his speech. He was apparently aware of the fact that an astounding 185 of the 221 Republican members of the House had requested appointment to the House Un-American Activities Committee. 

The Eisenhower campaign, which had inveighed against Democratic corruption, reached its nadir in September, when it was rocked by the news that conservative businessmen had given Nixon a secret donation of $18,000. Eisenhower's advisors echoed the public in demanding Nixon's ouster. In a last-ditch effort to rescue his candidacy, Nixon delivered his famous "Checkers speech" to 55 million television viewers. 

That bit of sentimentality saved the day for Nixon. But Eisenhower let Nixon twist in the wind a bit longer. he told Nixon to meet him in West Virginia. Nixon composed a letter of resignation and barked at an aide, "What more does he want? I'm not going to crawl on my hands and knees to him." The next day Eisenhower met him at the airport and said, "Dick, you're my boy." Nixon broke down and cried. 

Eisenhower won the election handily, carrying 39 states. U.S.--Soviet relations were extremely tense when he took office in January 1953. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, his new secretary of state, had done little to lower the temperature during the campaign, fanning the flames of anti-Sovietism with their calls to move beyond Democratic "containment" to Republican "liberation." 

But Eisenhower had not always been such an impassioned anti-Communist. He had pushed hard for opening a second front in 1942 and later developed a friendly relationship with Soviet Marshall Georgi Zhukov. After the war, he remained confident that U.S.--Soviet friendship would endure. Stalin who held him in high regard told U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman , "General Eisenhower is a very great man, not only because of his military accomplishments but because of his human, friendly, kind, and frank nature." Eisenhower visited Moscow in 1945 and received a hero's welcome from the Soviet people. Stalin accorded him the special honor of being the first foreigner to witness a parade in Red Square from atop Lenin's tomb. Later, in his farewell report as army chief of staff, he rejected the facile equation of military strength and national strength. 

During his time in office, Eisenhower would be confronted with repeated opportunities to roll back the Cold War and arms race. Presiding over the world's most powerful nation during perhaps the tensest extended period in history, he could have taken bold action that could have put the world on a different path. Signs emanating from Moscow indicated that the Kremlin might be ready to change course. But because of ideology, political calculations, the exigencies of a militarized state, and limited imagination, he repeatedly failed to seize the opportunities that emerged. And although he deserves credit for avoiding war with the Soviet Union at a time when such a war seemed quite possible, he left the world a far more dangerous place than when he first took office. 

Eisenhower didn't have to wait long for an extraordinary opportunity to reverse the course of the Cold War. On March 5, 1953, barely a month into Eisenhower's presidency, Josef Stalin died. Some of Eisenhower's close advisors urged him to take advantage of the chaotic situation in Moscow and "scare the daylights out of the enemy." The National Security Council [ NSC] called for "psychological exploitation of this event," and C.D. Jackson, Eisenhower's advisor on psychological warfare, proposed "a general political warfare offensive." But the new Soviet leaders moved quickly to ease tensions with the United States, instructing China and North Korea to compromise on an armistice agreement. On March 15, Georgi Malenkov publicly declared, "there is no dispute or unresolved question that cannot be settled peacefully." The new CIA director, Allen Dulles, reported that Soviet leaders seriously desired to "lessen the dangers of global war." They even took preliminary steps toward liberalization within the Soviet Union. Churchill, the British Tory, who had been reelected prime minister in 1951, had grown wary of the nuclear threat. He urged Washington to seize this unprecedented opportunity to end the Cold War conflict. He pressed for a summit with Soviet leaders. Eisenhower held hid tongue for six weeks while his advisors crafted a response. He finally broke his silence, offering one of the most lucid statements ever made by a U.S. president on the toll the Cold War was taking on the nation : Ike delivered his famous speech about military buildup robbing the ordinary American citizen of food, shelter, and adequate educational facilities. Specifically addressing the Cold War, Ike said  : "This is not a way of life at all. . . Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." 

BLESS DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER, BUT WE'LL SEE THAT HE WAS OVERRULED BY GREEDY AMERICAN INDUSTRIALISTS WHO PROFIT FROM WAR. STAY TUNED. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ---Episode 26

                        MacArthur Was Fired On April 11, 1951

MacArthur was replaced by General Matthew Ridgeway, who requested thirty-eight atomic bombs in May 1951. But that spring and summer, with Stalin's help, the UnitedStates, China, and the two Koreas started negotiations, which dragged on for two years.  The U.S. air war continued unabated, unleashing a firebombing campaign similar to the one the United States had visited upon Japan five years earlier. Now the weapon of choice was napalm. New York Times reporter George Barrett described the effect of a napalm attack on a hamlet of two hundred people north of Anyang, which he characterized as "a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war " : 

     The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they had held when the napalm struck --- a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hands a page from a Sears--Roebuck catalogue crayoned at mail order number 3,811,294 for a $2.98 "bewitching bed jacket --- coral." 

Almost every city in North Korea was burned to the ground. Survivors sought shelter in caves. South Koreans fared little better. The British armed forces yearbook reported for 1951, "The war was fought without regard for the South Koreans, and their unfortunate country was regarded as an arena rather than a country to be liberated. As a consequence, fighting was quite ruthless, and it is no exaggeration to state that South Korea no longer exists as a country. Its towns have been destroyed, much of its means of livelihood eradicated, and its people reduced to a sullen mass dependent upon charity. The South Korean, unfortunately, was regarded as a 'gook', like his cousins north of the 38th parallel." Casualty estimates vary widely, but approximately 3 to 4 million Koreans died, out of a total population of 30 million, as did more than a million Chinese and 37,000 Americans. 

By February 1951, only 39 percent of Americans still supported the war. It ended in a stalemate. Americans wondered how their powerful, modern military could fail to defeat an ill-equipped army of Korean and Chinese peasants. 

Korea was only one piece of a rapidly unraveling situation in Asia. In Indochina, the United States had decided to bolster its support for the French, making $10 million available for the French puppet Emperor Bao Dai in Vietnam. Trouble was also brewing in the Philippines, where the U.S.-backed president Manuel Roxas and his successor Elpidio Quirino had been battling the Huk peasant insurgency. After collaborating with the Japanese during the war, Roxas aligned himself with the large landowners and the Catholic Church. The United States built up the Philippine army and began a successful counterinsurgency campaign spearheaded by Major Edward Lansdale and fortified by U.S. airpower. A flamboyant advertising executive who served in the OSS and CIA and was immortalized in two famous novels, Lansdale would later lead  similar counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam and Cuba but with decidedly less success. And even in the Philippines, primary credit for undercutting the Huks should not go to Lansdale but to President Ramon Magsaysay, who instituted land reform and welcomed the Huks back into the political system. 

MORE TO COME

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 25

                  THE TRUMAN YEARS : A CONTINUATION 

MacArthur's eagerness to use atomic weapons did not factor into the decision by Truman to fire the popular general. Just the week before, the Joint Chiefs had ordered atomic attacks on Manchurian bases if the Chinese sent in another large contingent of forces. On April 6, Truman approved that order and authorized the transfer of nine atomic weapons from AEC to military custody on Guam and Okinawa. 

Firing MacArthur proved calamitous for Truman, whose approval rating sank below 30 percent. "Seldom has a more unpopular man fired a more popular one," TIME magazine noted. 

Republican leaders in the House and Senate met to discuss impeachment. Senator William Jenner  accused the administration of treason : "this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. Our only choice is to impeach President Truman." Jseph McCarthy also wanted to impeach the "son of a bitch" for firing MacArthur and said that Truman must have been drunk at the time on "bourbon and benedictine." He accused Truman of signing "the death warrant of western civilization." 

The public sided with MacArthur. Seven and a half million spectators cheered him at a New York parade. He received a hero's welcome in Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago. MacArthur emotionally defended his conduct of the war before a joint session of Congress and bade farewell in a final farewell :

   It has been said . . . that I was a warmonger. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes . . . The world has turned over many times since I took the oath . . . at West Point, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed proudly that "old soldiers never die ; they just fade away." And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good bye.

The address was broadcast live on national radio. "We saw a great hunk of God in the flesh and we heard the voice of God," gushed Congressman Dewey Short of Missouri. Truman, however, chided the "damn fool Congressmen crying like a bunch of women" over "nothing but a bunch of bullshit." 

Congressional hearings on MacArthur's firing and Asia policy went on for two months. Congressional Democrats and top military brass effectively rebutted MacArthur's General Bradley rejected MacArthur's proposed war with China as "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." After that, MacArthur's luster faded [like the old soldier???] rapidly. Truman's popularity never recovered. His approval rating sank to a record low of 22 percent. Acheson said that the war "was an incalculable defeat to U.S. foreign policy and destroyed the Truman administration." 

MORE TO COME.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ---- Episode 24

                 CONTINUING ON WITH THE KOREAN AFFAIR

  At the start of the war, MacArthur and others had advocated using atomic bombs in support of combat operations. "I see here a unique use for the atomic bomb---to strike a blocking blow ---  which would require a six months repair job. Sweeten up my B-29 force," he enthused. General Charles Bolte figured that ten to twenty atomic bombs from the U.S. arsenal could be spared. In July, Truman sent nuclear-configured bombers to Great Britain and Guam. The Joint Chiefs decided, however, that, given the small size of most Korean cities, conventional bombing would suffice. They also expressed concern about Soviet retaliation and public revulsion at such acts. But now, following the entry of the Chinese into the conflict, the United States was desperate and the Chinese offered more suitable targets. Truman stunned the press corps in late November 1950 by announcing that all options, explicitly including atomic devastation, were on the table. 

On the day Truman made his statement, Air Force General George Stratemeyer ordered SAC commander General Hoyt Vandenberg to dispatch atomic-capable bomb groups to the Far East. LeMay volunteered to direct the attacks. Representative Mendel Rivers of South Carolina declared, "If there ever was a time to use the A-bomb, it is now." Senator Owen Brewster from Maine proposed using it against the Chinese. Representative Tom Steed of Oklahoma preferred "the Kremlin." Representative Joseph Bryson of South Carolina just wanted to make sure it was dropped on somebody :"The hour is at hand when every known force, including the atomic bomb, should be promptly utilized." Representative Lloyd Bentsen of Texas proposed that the president "advise the commander of the North Korean troops to withdraw. . . beyond the 38th parallel within one week or use that week to evacuate civilians from a specified list of North Korean cities that will be subjected to atomic attack by the United States Air Force. " 

Gallup found that, by 52 to 38 percent, the public supported using atomic bombs, reversing earlier poll results. UN delegates warned that the Asian people would be "horrified" by such use. Attlee rushed across teh Atlantic to tell Truman that the Europeans shared that horror. Following Attlee's visit, Truman told a group of congressmen that it would be wrong to hit Moscow's surrogates when the Kremlin was the real culprit, but that using atomic bombs against the Soviet Union would provoke retaliation against London, Berlin, and Paris. 

On December 9, 1950, MacArthur requested authorization to use atomic bombs at his discretion. On December 24, he submitted a list of twenty-six targets. He also requested four bombs to drop on invading forces and four more for "critical concentrations of enemy air power." He calculated that dropping thirty to fifty atomic bombs "across the neck of Manchuria" could produce "a belt of radioactive cobalt" that would win the war in ten days. But that was just the short-term effect. The belt of radioactive cobalt would spread "from the Sea of Japan to the YellowSea." Therefore, he figured, "For ay least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North." 

While MacArthur was conjuring up visions of atomic Armageddon, others were bemoaning the tremendous setback to the United States' international prestige caused by the debacle in Korea. New York Times correspondents in capitals across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East reported on the "loss of confidence in the United States." In France, "The decline in American prestige has been little short of disastrous." In India, where U.S "prestige has suffered immensely," many people were "secretly pleased to see the Westerners trounced by Asians." Some questioned U.S. ability to halt a Soviet occupation of Europe, given how poorly U.S. forces had performed against China. 

With U.S. and South Korean casualties mounting rapidly, MacArthur began issuing statements from Tokyo blaming others for the military debacle and pushing for all-out war against China. On March 10, 1951, MacArthur requested a "D Day atomic capability" in response to the Soviet bolstering of air capabilities in Korea and Manchuria and a buildup of Chinese forces near the Korean border. "Finletter and Lovett alerted on atomic discussions. Believe everything is set," Vandenberg wrote on March 14. On March 24, 1951, knowing that Truman was pressing for a cease-fire, MacArthur broadcast his own ultimatum to China. Truman bristled, "I'll show that son-of-a-bitch who's boss," but let the incident slide. But when Republican Congressman read to the entire House a letter that MacArthur had written in which he stated that "if we lose this war to Communism in Asia, the fall of Europe is inevitable," the Joint Chiefs unanimously recommended that MacArthur be relieved of his command. On April 11, 1951, the White House announced MacArthur's firing. 

MORE TO COME ABOUT THE TRAGEDY OF KOREA AND AMERICAN IMPERIALISM. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 23

        KOREA : THE AMERICAN EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 

The Communist victory in China had raised the stakes in Korea. Having lost the China market, Japan now looked to Korea and Southeast Asia, where conditions were also volatile. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh's Communist-led forces were challenging French rule. A powerful insurgent movement was competing for power in the Philippines. British colonial interests were under attack in Malaya. Acheson explained, "It became apparent in Washington that the U.S. [had to] adopt a very firm stance in the Far East," especially since "the governments of many Western European nations appeared to be in a state of near-panic, as they watched to see whether the United States would act or not." 

More than 100,000 Soviet-trained and-equipped North Korean troops overwhelmed U.S. and South Korean forces, pinning them down around Pusan. MacArthur had turned a blind eye toward CIA warnings and other evidence that the attack was coming. 

Facing defeat, MacArthur requested and received permission to push past the 38th parallel and liberate the North. He staged a surprise amphibious landing of 17,000 men at Inchon in September. Truman lauded MacArthur's "brilliant maneuver" and described his Korean campaign as being rivaled by "few operations in military history." Truman bent over backward to placate the prickly MacArthur. Republicans seized on any hint that Truman might hesitate to send U.S. troops across the border as a sign of "appeasement." 

MacArthur assured Truman that the Chinese would not enter the fight but agreed to use only Korean troops as he moved toward the Chinese border. Acheson had also dismissed the possibility of Chinese involvement as "sheer madness." MacArthur even spoke about the fighting ending by Thanksgiving and having the troops out by Christmas. He dismissed repeated warnings by Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai that the Chinese would enter the war if the United States persisted in its advance northward. The Chinese were also incensed over the U.S.-led campaign to deny them UN representation and the United States' decision to defend Formosa with the Seventh Fleet. Mao wanted to send troops, but the Chinese Politburo remained divided. Stalin sent encouragement. He assured Mao that the Soviets and the Chinese were stronger than the United States, Great Britain, and their European allies, especially now, before Germany and Japan had been rearmed. Stalin had earlier told Kim that launching the war was a way to get back at "the dishonest, perfidious, and arrogant behavior of the United States in Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and especially its decision to form NATO. 

MacArthur blithely disregarded his agreement to use only Korean troops and ordered the air force to bomb near the Chinese border. When the Joint Chiefs demanded that he not bomb within five miles of the border,he responded, "I cannot overemphasize the disastrous effect, both physical and psychological, that will result from the restrictions which you are imposing." 

Chinese forces attacked UN forces in Unsan on October 25. On November 8, the Joint Chiefs cabled MacArthur to suggest his mission might need to be reconsidered. MacArthur replied that the pressure from British, French, and many Americans to stop at the 38th parallel found its "historic precedence in the action taken at Munich." "To give up any part of North Korea to the aggression of the Chinese Communists," he blustered, "would be the greatest defeat of the free world in recent times." 

Truman and the Joint Chiefs acceded to MacArthur's demands. On November 24, MacArthur launched the major offensive that he believed would end the war. But suddenly hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops streamed across the Yalu River, sending U.S. and Allied troops into a frantic retreat. The setback was devastating. MacArthur solemnly announced that "we face an entirely new war." Acheson told Congress that the United States was on the brink of World War III. Truman agreed. "It looks like World War III is here," he wrote in his diary. General Omar Bradley called it :the greatest military disaster in the history of theUnited States." Time reported that it was the "worst defeat the U.S. had ever suffered." 

China's UN Security Council spokesman heralded the resurgence of liberation movements throughout the region : Regardless of the savagery and cruelty of the American imperialist aggressors, the hard struggling people of Japan, the victoriously advancing people of Vietnam, the heroically resisting people of Korea, the people of the Philippines who have never laid down their arms, and all the oppressed nations and people of the East will certainly unite in close solidarity . . . They will fight dauntlessly on to win the final victory in their struggle for national independence." The British government favored ending the war as quickly as possible, believing, according to the Chicago Tribune, that it was "being conducted in near-hysteria and with prodigal waste." BUT U.S. LEADERS DECIDED TO FIRST LAY WASTE TO NORTH KOREA.  

MUCH MORE TO COME. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ----- Episode 22

    HARRY S. TRUMAN MADE THE DECISION TO SEND 
    MILITARY FORCES TO KOREA IN 1950

In a memo he wrote a month before the attack on Korea, John Foster Dulles pessimistically surveyed the U.S. strategic position. "The situation in Japan may become untenable," he wrote, "and possibly  that in the Philippines. Indonesia, with its vast natural resources, may be lost and the oil in the Middle East will be in jeopardy. None of these places provide holding grounds once the people feel that Communism is the wave of the future." But he offered a glimmer of hope : "This series of disasters can probably be prevented if at some doubtful point we quickly take a dramatic and strong stand that shows our confidence and resolution. Probably this series of disasters cannot be prevented any other way."

The United States would take that stand in Korea. Truman told congressional leaders, "If we let Korea down, the Soviet will keep right on going and swallowing up one piece of Asia after another. We had to make a stand some time, or else let all of Asia go by the board. If we were to et Asia go, the Near East would collapse and no telling what would happen in Europe. Therefore. . . I have ordered our forces to support Korea. . . and it . . . is equally necessary for us to draw the line at Indo-China, the Philippines, and Formosa." 

Truman particularly feared a Soviet incursion into Iran. On June 26, 1950, he called Korea "the Greece of the Far East." Spinning a globe and pointing to Iran, he told staffers, "Here is where they will start trouble if we aren't careful. . . If we are tough enough now, if we stand up to them like we did in Greece three years ago, the won't take any next steps. But if we just stand by, they'll move into Iran and they'll take over the whole Middle East." 

MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR -----Episode 21

                                   THE KOREAN CIVIL WAR 

   On June 24, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea nd the Cold War suddenly turned red hot. Nestled between Japan, China, and the Soviet Union, Korea had long been a point of contention among those three Asian powers. Japan had occupied and ruled Korea from 1910 to 1945, when it was divided into a Soviet zone north of the 38th parallel and a U.S. zone to the south. Drawn up hastily by Colonel Dean Rusk the day after Nagasaki was bombed, the arrangement was meant as a temporary one until unification and independence could be restored. In the north, the Soviets installed General Kim II Sung, who had led guerrilla forces against the Japanese in Manchuria during the war ; the Americans installed Syngman Rhee in the south. Border skirmishes occurred frequently. The Joint Chiefs had warned repeatedly against getting drawn into a war in Korea----a place of little strategic importance bordering on the Soviet Union and China --- and recommended that it be excluded from the United States' defense perimeter. Acheson also excluded Korea in an important speech in January 1950, leading some critics to charge that he had deliberately invited the attack. 

The Soviet watched nervously a the United States strengthened Japan economically and militarily, stationed troops on Japanese territory and inched toward a peace treaty without Soviet participation. The chiefs cautioned that excluding the Soviets from the peace treaty might provoke a Soviet attack on Japan. The Soviets struck instead in Korea. 

Rhee's repressive policies and economic blunders made him a very unpopular figure in South Korea. Under U.S.  pressure, he allowed elections to proceed in 1950. His supporters received a thrashing at the polls. Despite the setback, he continued to discuss plans to militarily unify Korea under his own command in the coming months. Kim, too, spoke of reunification, but under Communist control. Rhee's electoral setback and overall unpopularity gave Kim the opening he was looking for. 

In spring 1950, Stalin, after repeated entreaties from the North Korean leader, gave Kim the green light to invade the South. Believing that a South Korean attack on the North was coming, Stalin decided to act first. He was feeling a new burst of confidence. He now had the atomic bomb and had just concluded a formal alliance with Mao. Kim promised a swift victory. 

Truman was in Missouri when word of the North Korean invasion reached him. Immediately concluding that the attack represented a new stage of Communist aggression, he decided the United States must respond militarily. The New York Times urged Truman to act decisively or risk "losing half a world." Acting decisively would also silence the Republicans, who blamed Truman for losing China. He quickly pushed a resolution through the UN Security Council, which the Soviets had been boycotting over its refusal to seat Communist China. Despite deploying tens of thousands of troops, Truman refused to call the intervention a "war," instead latching on to the terminology of a reporter who asked if it would "be possible to call this a police actin under the United Nations." Although it was nominally a UN effort, the United States provided half the ground forces and almost all of the naval and air power. Most of the other ground forces came from South Korea. TRUMAN ALSO OPTED TO BYPASS CONGRESSIONAL AUTHORIZATION, SETTING THE PRECEDENT FOR FUTURE MILITARY CONFLICTS. 

SO NOW THE U.S. HAS ITS WAR AND THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY IS TICKLED SHITLESS. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR----Episode 20

THE UNITED STATES BEGAN TO BUILD UP ARMAMENTS IN THE YEARS AFTER WW II

On January 31, 1950, Truman announced his decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb. Two weeks later, Einstein appeared on the Eleanor Roosevelt television show to warn, " If these efforts should prove successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and, hence, annihilation of all  life on earth will have been brought within the range of what is technically possible." Physicist Leo Szilard soon delivered more terrifying news when he told a radio audience that the fusion of five hundred tons of deuterium in a hydrogen-cobalt bomb would be enough to "kill everybody on earth." 

Such warnings took a tremendous toll on the human psyche. As writer William Faulkner observed in his December 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question : When will I be blown up?" 

Kennan's [ He was our Soviet expert] replacement, Forrestal's protege' Paul Nitze, had been a vice president of the powerful Wall Street investment banking firm Dillon, Read when Forrestal was the firm's president. Nitze immediately took the lead in preparing NSC 68, a document that would fundamentally revamp the nation's posture. NSC 68 posited that the Soviet Union, armed with atomic bombs and "a fanatic faith faith," was seeking "to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." [ Now, where in the fxzk is the evidence to even suggest this ???] Faced with an existential threat, the United States had to base its response not on what the Soviet Union was likely to do but on what, in its most malign moments, it was capable of doing : "a. To overrun Western Europe. . . ; to drive toward the oil-bearing areas of the Near and Middle East ; and to consolidate Communist gains in the Far East; b. To launch air attacks against the British Isles and air and sea attacks against the lines of communications of the Western Powers in the Atlantic and the Pacific ; c. To attack selected targets with atomic weapons, now including . . targets in Alaska, Canada, and the U.S." No area was outside the U.S defense perimeter because, as the document stated, "The assault on free institutions [??] is world-wide now, and . . . a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere." National security and global security were now one and the same. If the Soviet Union "calculates that it has sufficient atomic capability to make a surprise attack on us, nullifying our atomic superiority and creating a military situation decisively in its favor, the Kremlin might be tempted to strike swiftly and with stealth." 

Facing such a dangerous foe, Nitze concluded, U.S. survival depended on vastly increasing its nuclear and conventional arsenals, strengthening its armed forces,  bolstering its military alliances, and expanding its covert operations and psychological warfare capabilities. Over the next five years, military spending would have to quadruple to $50 billion, or 20 percent of GNP. Truman agreed with the NSC 68's assessment of the overall strategic situation and endorsed its conclusions but blanched at the cost, having announced plans to cut defense spending in the next fiscal year. Acheson and Nitze countered that quadrupling military spending would stimulate the economy and safeguard against another depression. The State Department's leading Soviet experts, George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, opposed such a buildup, contending that Stalin had neither the will NOR THE MEANS to pursue the kind of world conquest Acheson and Nitze envisioned. Much to Acheson and Nitze's disappointment, such a stupendous increase in military spending seemed dead in the water in early 1950. 

THIS SAD STORY WILL CONTINUE.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 19

           AMERICA BEGAN BUILDING ITS MILITARY 
       SO IT COULD BECOME THE RULER OF THE 
       UNIVERSE IN THE POSTWAR YEARS IN 1940s

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Among those vehemently opposed to building the hydrogen bomb was State Department Soviet expert George Kennan, who believed that the USSR might be ready for a comprehensive nuclear arms control agreement and urged Secretary of State Dean Acheson to ursue that course instead. Acheson contemptuously suggested that Kennan "resign from the Foreign Service, assume a monk's habit, carry a tin cup and stand on the street corner and say, 'The end of the world is nigh'." Disgusted by the increasingly militaristic bent of U.S. policy, Kennan resigned as State Department director of policy planning on December 31, 1949. 

IF YOU DON'T LIKE WAR, YOU CAN'T BE A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN, SO JOIN A PRIORY OR MONASTERY AND KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 16

      SEEDS OF THE GREAT COLD WAR WERE PLANTED IN
      THE 1940s 

While Arabs and Israelis fought in the Middle East, the United States and the Soviet Union almost came to blows over Germany. In spring 1948, the United States and Britain took preliminary steps toward carving out a separate West German government, overcoming the reluctance of France and other Western European nations that feared a powerful, potentially remilitarized nation. Many German politicians in the western zones were also resistant to this development, fearing the severance of economic, political, and personal ties to eastern Germany. 

In late June, the United States boldly and provocatively instituted currency reform in the three western sectors  of occupied Berlin, which was a hundred miles inside the Soviet zone. Seeing this as not only a major step in establishing an independent, remilitarized West German state only three years after the defeat of Hitler but as a portrayal of the U.S promise to provide desperately needed reparations from the more prosperous western zones, the Soviets cut off rail and road access to Berlin. Stalin maintained that western access had been based on wartime agreements establishing a quadripartite Allied Control Commission as the supreme authority for a unified Germany. Because the Western powers were now shattering that framework, he reasoned, they had forfeited access rights.  Western observers decried the savage cruelty of the Soviets' "Berlin blockade." The commandant of the American sector of Berlin, Fran Howley, described it as a "comprehensive criminal plan to shut off the Eastern Zone of Germany from the West and to isolate completely the three Western Sectors of Berlin." It was, Howley charged, a wicked decision, the most barbarous in history since Genghis Khan." The Soviets, Western leaders screamed, were trying to starve West Berliners into submission. Images of Soviet cruelty would be seared into global consciousness --- a perception of the crisis that still persists today. 

But, contrary to this widely held view, the Soviets, for all their faults, attempted nothing of the sort. They had, in fact, gone out of their way to guarantee West Berliners access to food and coal from the eastern zone or from direct Soviet provisions. In October 1948, U.S. military government intelligence analysts reported, the "road, rail and water blockade of Berlin by no means constitutes a complete economic blockade either by intent or in fact." 

What people do remember, however, is that over the next eleven months, the United States airlifted 1.6 million tons of food and fuel into West Berlin to feed 2.2 million people. Truman also sent sixty presumably atomic-capable B-29s to British and German bases. He assured Forrestal that if conditions warranted it, he would approve the use of atomic weapons. "We are very close to war," he wrote in September. When Forrestal asked Kennan for his analysis of the Soviet blockade, Kennan offered the most alarming assessment : "Communist ideology and Soviet behavior clearly demonstrate that the ultimate objective of the leaders of the USSR is the domination of the world." And despite knowing the risks, the United States prolonged the crisis until it achieved both a basic law outlining the West German state and the creation in April 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [ NATO ], which committed the United States, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ITS HISTORY to a peacetime military alliance with Western Europe. In May 1949, having won its objectives, the United States agreed to talks over the future of Germany, and it was only then that the Soviet Union lifted the blockade, ending the most dangerous postwar confrontation to date. The United States had gambled that its atomic monopoly would enable it to achieve its goals without having to go to war, and it won.