Transcript
Elbe Day
April 25, 1945
April 25, 1945 Torgau, Germany · on the Elbe River
Adolf Hitler had five days to live. Two armies were closing on what was left of his Germany, one from the west, one from the east.
Lieutenant William Robertson painted a flag on a bedsheet so the Soviets would know who he was. They shot at it anyway. Then they worked it out.
Then soldiers from both armies climbed out along the wrecked bridge and met.
Hardly anyone shared a language. So they traded.
The famous photo of the handshake came the next day. They shook hands again for the cameras.
Just over three years later, these two armies were squared off over Berlin.
Then Korea.
In 1962, their leaders came closer to nuclear war than anyone ever has.
How did a handshake turn into a standoff? Stranger still, that standoff never became the war people feared.
Top of the World
1945
In 1945, the United States was the only great power whose cities hadn't been bombed.
It made close to half of everything the world's factories produced. And for four years, it would be the only country with an atomic bomb.
About twelve million Americans were in uniform, and nearly all of them wanted to come home. The GI Bill paid for their schooling and backed their mortgages.
Black veterans came home to the same Jim Crow laws they had left. Many decided they would not live under them much longer.
Economists warned that without war spending, the Depression might come back. Instead, the economy grew for most of the next twenty-five years.
The Soviet Union had won too, at a cost of about twenty-seven million lives. Its western cities were rubble. Its army stood across half of Europe.
At Yalta, Stalin had promised free elections in Poland. What 'free' meant was left for later.
Washington's plan for the peace was built on institutions.
At Bretton Woods, 44 nations designed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. American planners believed open trade would keep the peace, and keep American factories busy.
For the next 35 years, the contest with the Soviet Union shaped nearly everything else. Where Americans lived. What their schools taught. It even handed the civil rights movement an argument: the world was watching. And it started a long fight over how much power Washington should have.
On V-E Day, thousands of Muscovites cheered outside the American embassy. The friendship had about a year left.
The Long Telegram
1945–1946
The winners were already arguing about the peace.
Twice in thirty years, Germany had invaded Russia through Poland. So Stalin wanted a ring of friendly governments in between.
In January 1947, the Communists and the secret police rigged Poland's election.
Harry Truman had stopped trusting Stalin. Truman later said he read Secretary of State James Byrnes a letter saying:
Harry S. Truman I'm tired of babying the Soviets.
Soviet troops stayed in northern Iran past their March 1946 deadline. They left by May, after Iran took its complaint to the new United Nations and Washington backed it.
Sick in bed in Moscow, George Kennan was asked to explain the Soviets. As he remembered it, the Treasury's question was why they wouldn't join the World Bank. He answered with more than five thousand words.
They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it.
George F. Kennan They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it.
George F. Kennan Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force.
Resist firmly, he argued, and Soviet power backs off.
Eleven days later, in Truman's home state, Winston Churchill named the divide.
Winston Churchill From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace objected: America had no more business in Eastern Europe than Russia had in Latin America. Truman forced him out eight days later.
That September, the Soviet ambassador in Washington wrote Moscow his own long telegram.
Nikolai Novikov The foreign policy of the United States, which reflects the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital, is characterized in the postwar period by a striving for world supremacy.
Two diplomats, seven months apart. Each was sure the other side wanted the world.
Kennan's telegram circulated through official Washington. Molotov requested Novikov's, then underlined his copy. Each gave his government a reason to stop trusting the other.
Containment
1947–1948
In 1947, Britain told Washington it could no longer afford to help Greece fight Communist-led rebels. Or to back Turkey against Soviet pressure.
On March 12, Truman asked Congress for $400 million. A Republican senator, Arthur Vandenberg, reportedly told him to “scare hell out of the country.”
Harry S. Truman I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
Congress voted the money.
That summer, a magazine article signed only “X” gave the policy its name.
George F. Kennan …a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.
X was Kennan.
Western Europe was hungry, cold and broke. Communist parties were winning votes in France and Italy.
Secretary of State George Marshall had already offered a different weapon.
George C. Marshall Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.
About $13 billion rebuilt Western Europe’s factories. Much of it was spent on American goods.
The offer was open to the Soviets and Eastern Europe too. Stalin refused, and made Poland and Czechoslovakia refuse.
In February 1948, the Communists took full control of Czechoslovakia.
March 10, 1948 Prague
Two weeks later, its foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, was found dead beneath his window. Whether he fell, jumped or was pushed is still under investigation.
In 1947, atomic scientists put a clock on their magazine’s cover, set at seven minutes to midnight.
Stalin’s answer to the Marshall Plan came in Berlin.
Operation Vittles
1948–1950
The Allies split Germany into four zones, and Berlin the same way. But Berlin sat more than a hundred miles inside the Soviet zone.
In June 1948, the Western powers issued a new currency, even in West Berlin. Stalin closed every road, railway and canal into the city.
Truman had three choices. Give up Berlin. Send an armed convoy and risk a war.
Or fly.
American and British planes began flying food into a city of two million. Then coal.
Every pilot flew three minutes behind the last, and got one try at landing.
One pilot, Gail Halvorsen, dropped candy on handkerchief parachutes. He wiggled his wings so the children would know it was him.
The airlift wasn't free. About seventy American and British airmen died flying it. Some German ground workers died too.
In May 1949, Stalin reopened the roads. The airlift had beaten the blockade without firing a shot.
In April, the United States had signed its first peacetime military alliance outside the Americas.
An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.
George Washington had warned against permanent alliances. This was one.
In September 1949, an American weather plane over the Pacific picked up radiation. The Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb.
The Doomsday Clock moved to three minutes to midnight.
That October, Mao Zedong's Communists won China's civil war. Republicans asked who had lost China.
In April 1950, a secret report called NSC-68 urged a huge military buildup. Two months later, North Korea invaded the South.
The Accordion
1950–1953
In August 1945, two American colonels divided Korea in one late-night session. Their line, the 38th parallel, put Seoul on the American side.
By 1950, each half had a strongman who wanted the whole country.
Before dawn on June 25, 1950, North Korean tanks crossed the line. Stalin had approved the plan. Seoul fell in three days.
The Soviets could have vetoed any UN action. They weren't there. They were boycotting the Security Council over China's seat.
Congress never declared war. A reporter offered a name: police action.
Harry S. Truman Yes. That is exactly what it amounts to.
The North Koreans drove the South's army and the Americans into a corner around Pusan.
In September, MacArthur landed an army behind them at Inchon. UN forces raced north toward China's border.
At Wake Island, Truman asked MacArthur if China would come in.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur Very little. … We are no longer fearful of their intervention.
Within weeks, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers attacked.
In the mountains that winter, it reached thirty below.
MacArthur wanted to take the war into China, and said so in public.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur There is no substitute for victory.
That day, Truman fired MacArthur.
Harry S. Truman In the simplest terms, what we are doing in Korea is this: We are trying to prevent a third world war.
MacArthur came home to a hero's welcome, and many Americans agreed with him.
General Bradley told the Senate why widening the war was a mistake.
Gen. Omar N. Bradley …the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.
Over the Yalu, American pilots fought MiGs flown in secret by Soviet pilots. Both governments knew and kept quiet, so neither would be pushed to go further.
For two years the line barely moved, while negotiators argued, mostly about prisoners. Stalin died in March 1953. In July, both sides signed an armistice, not a peace treaty.
More than 36,500 Americans died. So did two to three million Koreans, most of them civilians, and about 200,000 Chinese soldiers by China's own count.
Containment had held the line. It had also left America with a large peacetime army.
Thaw and Freeze
1953–1961
In 1952, the United States tested a hydrogen bomb. It erased an island. The Soviets built one within three years.
The atomic scientists’ clock read two minutes to midnight.
Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, threatened “massive retaliation.”
John Foster Dulles …a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing.
At Geneva in 1955, the two sides smiled for the cameras, and agreed on almost nothing.
The same year, West Germany joined NATO, and Moscow answered with the Warsaw Pact.
In 1956, Hungarians rose against their Soviet-backed government. Soviet tanks crushed the revolt. Thousands died.
American-funded Radio Free Europe had hinted that help was coming. None came.
In 1957, a Soviet rocket put the first satellite into orbit. Americans took it as a warning.
In 1959, Khrushchev toured the United States, from Hollywood to an Iowa farm.
Nikita Khrushchev Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something? Or have gangsters taken over the place that can destroy me?
In 1960, the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane. Washington said a NASA weather plane was missing over Turkey.
Then Khrushchev produced the pilot, alive. Nine days later, the Paris summit collapsed.
In 1961, a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles failed at the Bay of Pigs. Castro turned to Moscow.
Millions of East Germans had fled west through Berlin. In August 1961, East German troops strung barbed wire across the city overnight. The concrete came next.
Kennedy, an aide later wrote, said a wall was a lot better than a war.
In October, American and Soviet tanks faced each other at Checkpoint Charlie. They sat a hundred yards apart for sixteen hours.
Then the Soviet tanks pulled back, and the Americans followed.
WASHINGTON 16 OCT 62
A year later, the tanks were the least of it.
Thirteen Days
October 1962
By 1962, the United States had about eight times as many nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union. It also had missiles in Turkey, on the Soviet border.
Khrushchev decided to protect Castro and even the odds. He reportedly talked of throwing a hedgehog down Uncle Sam's pants. That summer, Soviet ships carried missiles and about 42,000 soldiers to Cuba, in secret.
On October 14, a U-2 spy plane photographed western Cuba.
The film went to a secret CIA office above a car dealership in Washington.
For a week, a small group of advisers argued in secret. Kennedy was taping them.
To keep the secret, Kennedy kept campaigning. Then his press secretary told reporters the president had "a minor upper respiratory ailment."
On October 22, Kennedy told the country what was in Cuba.
John F. Kennedy It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.
He gave the blockade a softer name: quarantine. Ships carrying offensive weapons would be turned back at a line drawn on the sea.
On October 26, Khrushchev offered a deal: the missiles out, if America promised not to invade Cuba.
Nikita Khrushchev We and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war.
Messages took hours. The Soviet ambassador later said his cables went by Western Union, collected by a bicycle messenger.
October 27 was the worst day. A Soviet missile in Cuba shot down a U-2 and killed its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson. Another U-2 strayed over the Soviet Union.
American destroyers dropped small depth charges to force a Soviet submarine to surface. According to one officer aboard, the captain wanted to fire a nuclear torpedo. After talking with his officers, including Vasili Arkhipov, he surfaced instead.
That night, Robert Kennedy met the Soviet ambassador. America would promise not to invade Cuba. And, secretly, it would take its missiles out of Turkey within months.
The next morning, Khrushchev accepted, in a broadcast on Radio Moscow.
The Turkey deal stayed secret for years, even in Robert Kennedy's memoir. In 1989, its editor, Ted Sorensen, admitted he had cut it.
The Wire
1963–1980
Both sides had looked over the edge.
John F. Kennedy We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
Two weeks later, in West Berlin, the rivalry was back.
John F. Kennedy Let them come to Berlin.
John F. Kennedy Ich bin ein Berliner.
And no, he did not call himself a jelly doughnut.
That August, Washington, London and Moscow agreed to stop testing bombs in the air, in space and under water.
The atomic scientists moved their clock away from midnight, to twelve minutes.
They also opened a direct line between Washington and Moscow. It was never a red telephone. It was a teletype.
The line ran through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki.
The first message was a typing test. Moscow answered in Russian.
In 1972, the most famous anti-Communist in American politics went to China. He and his adviser Henry Kissinger meant to use China's quarrel with Moscow.
Richard Nixon I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall and that it had to be built by a great people.
In Moscow that May, Nixon and Brezhnev signed the first treaties to put a ceiling on missiles.
Henry Kissinger As far as the American public was concerned, we felt it imperative to demonstrate a commitment to peace.
Critics on the right said it rewarded a dictatorship. Critics on the left said it ignored human rights.
In July 1975, an American and a Soviet spacecraft docked in orbit.
Thomas Stafford and Alexei Leonov shook hands through the hatch. Thirty years after the Elbe.
It didn't last. In the last week of 1979, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan.
Washington feared the Persian Gulf, and its oil, might be next.
Jimmy Carter …such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
Carter cut off grain sales to the Soviets and kept American athletes home from the Moscow Olympics.
The scientists moved their clock to seven minutes to midnight. Where it had started in 1947.
But the wire stayed open. Every hour, each side still sent the other a test message.
What Didn't Happen
1945–1980
Each side read the other's defense as a threat. Historians still argue about who started it.
Some blame Stalin. Some blame Truman. Many blame both.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis argues that the most important thing about the Cold War is what didn't happen. No nuclear war. Again and again, someone stepped back.
It was only cold between the two of them.
For Koreans, Hungarians and Afghans, it was a hot war.
Private Joseph Polowsky, who was at the Elbe, died in 1983. He is buried at Torgau, where the soldiers met. He asked to be.