Transcript
Two Sets
January 17–20, 1961
January 1961
In January 1961, two presidents went on television three days apart. On Tuesday night, the old general said goodbye.
Dwight D. Eisenhower In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
On Friday, the young one said hello.
John F. Kennedy …we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe…
Put the same three questions to both men.
Both men wanted to stop Communism. They disagreed about what that should cost. And the one who warned about the military was the general.
Most of the bill came due far from Main Street.
What did any price mean? And who paid it?
The Cheap Way
1953–1954
Eight years earlier, the new president had a price list.
Dwight D. Eisenhower The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
He wanted to contain Communism for decades without going broke. Bombs cost less than soldiers. So he bought bombs.
Secret operations were cheaper still, and voters never saw the bill.
In 1951, Iran's parliament took over the British-owned oil company.
The prime minister behind it, Mohammad Mosaddegh, became a national hero.
Mohammad Mosaddegh Our greatest natural asset is oil. This should be the source of work and of food for the population of Iran.
Britain asked Washington to help remove him. Truman said no. Eisenhower said yes. He feared Iran's Communist party would take over. His own intelligence analysts doubted they could.
In August 1953, the CIA and British intelligence organized a coup.
He spent three years in solitary confinement, then the rest of his life under house arrest. The Shah ruled until 1979.
In Guatemala, voters had elected Jacobo Árbenz. He gave unused land from big estates to landless farmers.
The biggest landowner was an American company, United Fruit. Guatemala offered to pay what the company had declared the land was worth for its taxes.
Árbenz had Communist allies, and bought Czech weapons. Washington saw a Soviet beachhead.
In June 1954, a few hundred CIA-backed rebels crossed from Honduras. A rebel radio station claimed to broadcast from deep in the jungle. It was recording in Miami.
Guatemala's army wouldn't fight. Árbenz resigned.
Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us.
Generals ran Guatemala for most of the next thirty years. A civil war killed or disappeared more than 200,000 people. Most of the victims who could be named were Maya.
Beep
1957–1961
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite. Radio amateurs could hear it. Within days, people were out at dusk, looking for it.
Sputnik circled the Earth every 96 minutes. A rocket that could put a ball in orbit could put a hydrogen bomb on an American city.
Senate leader Lyndon Johnson later wrote that the sky seemed “almost alien.”
America's answer went up in December. It rose about four feet and blew up. Its little satellite was thrown clear, still beeping.
Congress created NASA, and paid schools to teach more science, math and foreign languages. Even homework became national defense.
Eisenhower stayed calm. His secret U-2 spy flights showed few Soviet long-range missiles. He couldn't tell anyone how he knew.
In 1960, Kennedy campaigned on a “missile gap.” There was a gap. It ran the other way.
Seventeen days after the inauguration, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told reporters, off the record, there was no missile gap. Kennedy said it was too early to judge.
Dwight D. Eisenhower This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
He had spent eight years holding down the Pentagon's budget. On his way out, he named the problem.
Neither Side
1955–1961
Europe’s empires were coming apart. Washington and Moscow went looking for friends among the new nations.
Sukarno This is the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind!
Twenty-nine countries met at Bandung. Many wanted no part of the Cold War.
Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser bought Soviet-bloc arms. Washington then dropped its offer to fund his dam on the Nile.
A week later, he took the Suez Canal.
Britain, France and Israel invaded to take it back. Eisenhower hadn’t been told.
At the United Nations, the United States voted with the Soviet Union against its own allies. The invaders left.
Then Eisenhower promised aid, and troops if asked, to Middle Eastern nations threatened by Communism.
In July 1958, Iraq’s monarchy fell in a revolution. Lebanon, already close to civil war, asked Eisenhower for help.
The Marines came ashore south of Beirut, ready for a fight. They found sunbathers.
Next day, the American ambassador led the Marines into town himself.
In 1960, seventeen African nations won independence. In the Congo, the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, faced a Belgian-backed breakaway province.
He asked the United Nations for help, and then Moscow. Soviet aid arrived in August.
The CIA’s director cabled his station in the Congo. A CIA scientist brought poison to kill Lumumba. It was never used.
His Congolese enemies handed him to Katanga’s leaders, who had him shot on January 17, 1961. The day Eisenhower said goodbye.
Patrice Lumumba History will one day have its say; it will not be the history taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris, or Brussels…
Ninety Miles
1959–1965
Ernesto Guevara, a young Argentine doctor, had watched the Guatemala coup. In Mexico, he joined Fidel Castro. On New Year’s Day 1959, their rebels drove out Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, Washington’s friend.
Castro and Washington traded blows. He seized American-owned businesses, and Washington cut off trade. Castro turned to Moscow, and banned rival parties.
Eisenhower had the CIA train Cuban exiles to invade. Kennedy inherited the plan and approved it.
About 1,400 exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs. Cubans didn’t rise up. Castro’s army came instead. Kennedy refused to send in American air power openly. In three days it was over.
John F. Kennedy There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.
He took the blame in public. His approval rating went up.
More than a hundred exiles died. Cuba counted 176 of its own soldiers dead.
Nearly 1,200 were captured. At Christmas 1962, Cuba freed the prisoners for $53 million in donated baby food and medicine.
In public, Kennedy offered Latin America an Alliance for Progress.
John F. Kennedy …a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose…
In private, his aides planned a new secret war on Castro. Castro asked Moscow for protection. In 1962, Moscow sent nuclear missiles.
Kennedy’s other hand was the Peace Corps, created in March 1961. That August, about fifty volunteers landed in Ghana. Peace Corps histories say they sang the Ghanaian anthem in Twi.
In Latin America, though, Washington’s first test was whether a government was anti-Communist. Democracy came second.
Washington welcomed a military coup in Brazil in 1964. In 1965, Johnson sent more than 20,000 troops into the Dominican Republic.
How Much Is Enough?
1954–1972
Kennedy wanted choices between nuclear war and backing down. He and McNamara added troops, ships and special forces like the Green Berets.
The arsenal kept growing anyway. In 1967 it peaked at 31,255 warheads.
Robert S. McNamara There is a kind of mad momentum intrinsic to the development of all new nuclear weaponry.
The speech called missile defense against the Soviets pointless. Then it announced one, aimed at China.
His argument was deterrence: each side could destroy the other, so neither would attack.
In 1954, fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test fell on the Marshall Islanders of Rongelap. Children played in it. They weren’t taken off the island for two days.
In St. Louis, families mailed scientists hundreds of thousands of baby teeth. They showed strontium-90 from the bomb tests, rising year by year. In 1963, the superpowers stopped testing in the open air.
Supporters had a strong answer: no nuclear weapon had been used in war since 1945. The arsenal also meant jobs: around Los Angeles, about two in five factory jobs.
In 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev signed SALT I, the first limit on nuclear missiles.
SALT I capped launchers, not warheads. By 1978, the Soviet stockpile passed America’s.
The Files
1970–1975
In 1970, Chileans elected a Marxist president, Salvador Allende. He won just over a third of the vote.
Eleven days later, Nixon met his CIA director. The director’s notes survive. One line reads: “make the economy scream.”
The CIA’s plot to keep Allende out failed. He nationalized the American-owned copper mines. Washington squeezed Chile’s economy and quietly paid his opponents.
Salvador Allende Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail.
That morning, Chile’s army attacked the palace. Allende died inside.
General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship killed or disappeared over 3,000 people. About 38,000 more were imprisoned or tortured.
The CIA knew about the plotting and didn’t discourage it. Senate investigators found no evidence it was directly involved.
In 1975, after Vietnam and Watergate, a Senate committee under Frank Church opened the CIA’s files.
The committee saw some of these papers. Others stayed secret for decades.
In 1975, Portugal left Angola. Three armed movements fought over it.
Moscow and Cuba backed one. The CIA backed the other two, alongside Zaire and South Africa.
Gerald R. Ford The Senate decision to cut off additional funds for Angola is a deep tragedy for all countries whose security depends upon the United States.
The Senate had voted 54 to 22 to cut off the CIA’s money for Angola. After Vietnam, Congress had stopped writing blank checks.
Angola’s war lasted twenty-seven years.
Any Price
1977–1979
Jimmy Carter Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.
Carter made human rights part of foreign policy. Five weeks into his term, he cut military aid to Argentina and Uruguay.
In 1978, Carter kept Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin at Camp David for thirteen days.
On the last day, Begin's eight grandchildren each got a signed photograph, with their names written on them.
Egypt and Israel made peace the next spring. It still holds.
In 1979, Iranians overthrew the Shah. Students seized the U.S. embassy, saying they feared another 1953.
Kennedy promised any price. Americans paid in taxes, in fear, and later in trust.
Most of it was paid by people with no say in Washington. In Tehran, Guatemala City, the Congo, Santiago and Luanda.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.