The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  108 Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 440.

  109 James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 148.

  110 John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (W. W. Norton, 2000), 456–457.

  111 Ibid., 466–467.

  112 Ibid., 464–470.

  113 Ibid., 502.

  114 PPS/23, “Review of Current Trends: U.S. Foreign Policy,” February 24, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. 1, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 524–525.

  115 “The Tragedy of China,” New York Times, January 24, 1949.

  116 “Duel for Asia,” New York Times, December 18, 1949.

  117 “Chennault Sees War in Loss of China,” Washington Post, June 26, 1949.

  118 Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 412.

  119 Harry Truman, “Statement by the President on Announcing the First Atomic Explosion in the U.S.S.R., September 23, 1949,” Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1945–1953, Truman Library.

  120 “Groves of Illusion,” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1946.

  121 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 417.

  122 Gerard J. DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 145–147.

  123 “Public Was Deluded on Bomb, Dewey Says,” New York Times, September 24, 1949.

  124 “Lucas Blasts Gutter Politics over Red Atom,” Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1949.

  125 “Who Is Winning?,” New York Times, October 9, 1949.

  126 “Russ Bomb Heralds New Atom Era—as Predicted,” William Laurence, Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1949.

  127 Lilienthal, The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950, vol. 2, 584–585.

  128 “Forrestal Hopes to Keep His Job,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1948; Drew Pearson, “Pearson Replies,” Washington Post, May 30, 1949.

  129 “Four Forrestal Suicide Bids, Says Pearson,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1949; Carroll, House of War, 151.

  130 Marquis Childs, “Washington Calling: Food for Propaganda,” Washington Post, May 5, 1949.

  CHAPTER 6: EISENHOWER: A NOT SO PRETTY PICTURE

  1 Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 91.

  2 Gerard J. DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 153.

  3 Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 279, 293–297.

  4 David E. Lilienthal, The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950, vol. 2: The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, ed. Helen M. Lilienthal (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 582.

  5 Priscilla J. McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (New York: Viking, 2005), 24.

  6 “USAEC General Advisory Committee Report on the ‘Super,’ October 30, 1949,” in The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present, 1939–1984, ed. Robert C. Williams and Philip L. Cantelon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 124–127.

  7 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 427.

  8 Albert Einstein, Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb, ed. David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 404.

  9 Leo Szilard, Toward a Livable World, ed. Helen S. Hawkins, G. Allen Greb, and Gertrud Weiss Szilard (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 84.

  10 William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, December 10, 1950, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html.

  11 “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950),” in American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68, ed. Ernest R. May (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 25, 28, 38, 55.

  12 Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 49.

  13 Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 206.

  14 Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 174.

  15 Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, xiii, 267–268.

  16 Mary McCarthy, “Naming Names: The Arthur Miller Case,” in Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1961), 154.

  17 I. F. Stone, “Must Americans Become Informers?,” in I. F. Stone, The Truman Era (1953; reprint, New York: Random House, 1972), 99.

  18 Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 322.

  19 Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980), 386–388, 403–407, 418–422.

  20 Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 369–370.

  21 Vincent Joseph Intondi, “From Harlem to Hiroshima: African Americans and the Bomb, 1945–1968,” PhD dissertation, American University, 2009.

  22 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 166–168.

  23 Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 208, 212, 216, 227.

  24 Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 365.

  25 “War in Korea,” New York Times, June 26, 1950.

  26 David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 2.

  27 Lloyd C. Gardner, “The Dulles Years: 1953–1959,” in From Colony to Empire: Essays on the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. William Appleman Williams (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1972), 375–376.

  28 Ibid., 371–372.

  29 Halberstam, The Coldest Winter, 92–93.

  30 Deborah Welch Larson, “Bandwagon Images in American Foreign Policy: Myth or Reality?” in Dominoes and Bandwagons, ed. Robert Jervis and Jack Snyder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 96.

  31 “Truman Lauds ‘Brilliant’ Victory by MacArthur,” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1950.

  32 Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 404.

  33 Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 78.

  34 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 375.

  35 Halberstam, The Coldest Winter, 14–16, 386, 390–391.

  36 “Statement by Gen. MacArthur,” New York Times, November 29, 1950.

  37 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 272; Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 288; Drew Pearson, “Korea Briefing Startled British,” Washington Post, December 8, 1950.

  38 Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 365.

  39 “Speeches by Warren Austin of U.S. and Wu Hsiu-chuan of Red China in Security Council,” New York Times, November 29, 1950.

  40 Arthur Veysey, “Attlee to Tell Truman: Don’t Use Atom Bomb,” Chicago Tribune, December 2, 1950.

  41 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 272; Gerson, Empire and the Bomb, 81; Bruce Cumings, Th
e Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 749–750.

  42 Michael H. Hunt, Crises in U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 217–218.

  43 “Rivers Urges A-Bomb Against Reds,” Miami Daily News, November 28, 1950.

  44 “Congressmen Split on Use of Atom Bomb,” Chicago Tribune, December 1, 1950.

  45 Richard Lee Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing (The Woodlands, TX: Two Sixty Press, 1991), 101.

  46 A. M. Rosenthal, “U.N. Circles Wary on Atom Bomb Use,” New York Times, December 1, 1950.

  47 Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 750.

  48 C. L. Sulzberger, “U.S. Prestige Ebbs on Korea, Europe-Asia Survey Shows,” New York Times, December 7, 1950.

  49 Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2010), 156.

  50 Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 402.

  51 Max Hastings, The Korean War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 201.

  52 Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 750–751.

  53 Halberstam, The Coldest Winter, 607.

  54 “McCarthy Charges Treason with Bourbon,” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1951.

  55 Richard H. Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., General MacArthur and President Truman: The Struggle for Control of American Foreign Policy (1951; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992), 276–277.

  56 Halberstam, The Coldest Winter, 609.

  57 Beisner, Dean Acheson, 432.

  58 Ibid., 433, 446.

  59 George Barrett, “Radio Hams in U.S. Discuss Girls, So Shelling of Seoul Is Held Up,” New York Times, February 9, 1951.

  60 I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 313.

  61 Bruce Cumings, “American Airpower and Nuclear Strategy in Northeast Asia Since 1945,” in War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Selden and Alvin Y. So (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 76.

  62 Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 340–341.

  63 John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, The Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 212.

  64 Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (1982; reprint, Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997), 451.

  65 Ibid., 436.

  66 Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President, vol. 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 55.

  67 Samuel Shaffer, “Behind Nixon’s Speech,” Newsweek, October 6, 1952, 25.

  68 Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 218.

  69 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Long Pull for Peace: Extracts from the Final Report of the Chief of Staff General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower,” The Army Information Digest, April 1948, 41.

  70 Ira Chernus, Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 30–31.

  71 Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2006 (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 147.

  72 Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 104.

  73 Klaus Larres, Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 189–193.

  74 “Text of Speech by Eisenhower Outlining Proposals for Peace in World,” New York Times, April 17, 1953.

  75 “Highway of Peace,” New York Times, April 17, 1953, 24.

  76 “Eisenhower’s Peace Program,” Washington Post, April 17, 1953, 26.

  77 Lloyd Gardner, “Poisoned Apples: John Foster Dulles and the ‘Peace Offensive,’ ” in The Cold War After Stalin’s Death, ed. Klaus Larres and Kenneth Osgood (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 85.

  78 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 399.

  79 H. R. Haldeman with Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power (New York: Dell, 1978), 121–122; Richard Nixon, The Real War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 255.

  80 Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York: Penguin, 1990), 203.

  81 Ibid., 204.

  82 Dwight MacDonald, “America! America!,” in 50 Years of Dissent, ed. Nicolaus Mills and Michael Walzer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 50.

  83 McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 142.

  84 DeGroot, The Bomb, 179.

  85 “Text of Eisenhower Inaugural Address Pledging Search for Peace,” New York Times, January 21, 1953.

  86 Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning (New York: Random House, 1958), 360–361.

  87 “Ike Scouts Bomb as Full Defense,” Baltimore Sun, February 25, 1947.

  88 David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy 1945–1960,” International Security 7 (Spring 1983), 27.

  89 Peter J. Kuznick, “Prophets of Doom or Voices of Sanity? The Evolving Discourse of Annihilation in the First Decade and a Half of the Nuclear Age,” Journal of Genocide Research 9 (2007), 424.

  90 “The Central Problem,” New York Times, September 19, 1953.

  91 Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 164–172.

  92 Ronald W. Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York: Free Press, 1982), 123–132.

  93 Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006), 114.

  94 Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 364.

  95 John Prados, The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing Mission in Indochina, 1954 (New York: Dial Press, 1983), 30.

  96 Memorandum of Discussion at a Special Meeting of the National Security Council on Tuesday, March 31, 1953, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954: Korea, vol. 15 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 827.

  97 Appu K. Soman, Double-edged Sword: Nuclear Diplomacy in Unequal Conflicts: The United States and China, 1950–1958 (New York: Praeger, 2000), 88.

  98 Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (1983; reprint, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 183–184.

  99 Schlesinger, Cycles of History, 401.

  100 Chernus, Apocalypse Management, 96.

  101 Edward T. Folliard, “U.S. to Use A-Weapons in Any War,” Washington Post, March 17, 1955; “President Says Atom Bomb Would Be Used like ‘Bullet,’ ” New York Times, March 17, 1955.

  102 “Record Shows U.S. Stands Ready to Use Its Nuclear Weapons Against Aggressor,” New York Times, January 2, 1956.

  103 Chernus, Apocalypse Management, 78–79.

  104 William Lanouette, “Looking Back: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons,” Arms Control Today, May 2009, 45.

  105 “Text of Eisenhower’s Address to the U.N. Assembly,” New York Times, December 9, 1953.

  106 Hanson W. Baldwin, “Eisenhower’s Bid Hailed,” New York Times, December 10, 1953.

  107 Shane J. Maddock, Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 91.

  108 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 349–350.

  109 John Foster Dulles, “The Evolution of Foreign Policy,” Department of State Bulletin 30, no. 761 (January 25, 1954), 108.

  110 William Henry Chamberlin, “The New Strategy,” Wall Street Journal, March 22, 1954.

  111 James Reston, “Washington: ‘Massive Atomic Retaliation’ and the Constitution,” New Yor
k Times, January 17, 1954.

  112 Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 212.

  113 DeGroot, The Bomb, 190.

  114 Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 112.

  115 Gardner, “The Dulles Years,” 391.

  116 Kinzer, Overthrow, 122.

  117 Beisner, Dean Acheson, 538; Kinzer, 117–118.

  118 The Ambassador in Iran (Grady) to the Department of State, July 1, 1951, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 10 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), 80.

  119 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 457.

  120 Ibid., 458.

  121 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 121.

  122 Beisner, Dean Acheson, 546.

  123 Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 203.

  124 The Ambassador in Iran (Henderson) to the Department of State, July 28, 1952, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 10 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), 417.

  125 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 86.

  126 LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2006, 162.

  127 Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 150.

  128 “The Guatemalan Cancer,” New York Times, June 8, 1951.

  129 “Red Cell in Guatemala,” Washington Post, March 4, 1952.

  130 Kinzer, Overthrow, 134–135.

  131 Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala 1952–1954 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 28.

  132 Peter Chapman, Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (New York: Canongate, 2007), 131–132.

  133 Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 181; Stephen C. Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 137–138.