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| 0393305783
| 9780393305784
| 0393305783
| 3.67
| 12
| 1988
| Jun 17, 1989
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really liked it
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I was impressed by Lloyd C. Gardner's work, for he is the first of all authors I have read so far to point out that to begin the story of America's in
I was impressed by Lloyd C. Gardner's work, for he is the first of all authors I have read so far to point out that to begin the story of America's involvement in Vietnam in the Johnson or Kennedy era is like "coming into a darkened theater in the middle of the picture." I have come the same conclusion: it is impossible to find out the whys and hows of the Vietnam disaster without tracing the origins of American involvement there. While Gardner's work revealed to me little I did not know from other studies, it proved to be by far one of the most graspable analyzes of post-WWII American foreign policy in Asia, and would have been a great introduction to the subject, had I read it earlier. The author identifies several major themes and tendencies in US diplomatic policy that prompted the decision-making of American policy-makers. The first of those themes was the Cold War. As early as 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's advisers, including Harry Hopkins, urged him to drop his UN-trusteeship-for-Indochina plan that sent the French government into conniption fits. Recognizing the underlying theme of a potential Soviet-American confrontation in the future, they put the case simply – the United States would need France in any conflict with the USSR. When the Cold War actually dawned and resulted in a preoccupation with "drawing the line [of Communist aggression", especially after the fall of China to Mao Zedong's Communists, other concerns emerged. The American strategy for post-war Europe – containment – proved to be inadequate for the conditions in Asia. Although most difficulties would become apparent later, in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, George Frost Kennan, the author of the famous Long Telegram, warned Truman in a letter that the Soviet Union was going to take advantage of any break-up of colonial ties. Such considerations prompted the President to reconsider his eminent predecessor's anti-colonial aspirations and allocate financial and material aid to ensure the continued existence of colonial governments in Southeast Asia, and especially in Indochina, which had become a vital bulwark between the whole region and Red China. The second main theme was liberation – the 1952 Republican battlecry. Like "drawing the line," liberation was hard to define and impose. Overall, however, it characterized the Eisenhower administration's policy toward Southeast Asia: not liberating Asian peoples from Communist regimes, but attempts to liberate American foreign policy from the bad reputation of colonialism that clung to it, and – the administration worried – ruined its chances of establishing an anti-Communist movement in the region. The problem was that Ike Eisenhower could not think of how to implement united action in Southeast Asia without the French and the British and not look like yet another imperialist foreign force. This confused him and his advisers, and the course of action he eventually stumbled towards further undermined America's standing: he refused to support the French in the critical battle of Dien Bien Phu, but he also did not back the nationalist aspirations of the Vietnamese, which assigned the United States the role of France's substitute. The third main theme is what Gardner calls "holding the center." It explains why American policy-makers did not just get out of Indochina together with the French in 1954. From the beginning, Vietnam figured in the plans of policy-makers to reconstruct the pre-war global order into a Capitalist, liberal one that would ensure stability and peace. Southeast Asia was to play a vital economic role in the plan, for by 1950 it became clear that Japan's recovery depended on it. If Japan was to emerge as a free-world force, it needed an export market, so US policy-makers wanted to provide her with such in Southeast Asian countries. That is why the American government could not give up Vietnam. The trouble with such reasoning was that it was based on the false assumption, which came to be know as "domino theory," that the loss of one Southeast Asian country would inevitably lead to the loss of the whole region. American policy-makers recognized the red flags as early as the 1940s, when France's "cleaning-up" operation in its former colony turned into a prolonged, bitter war. Had they also acknowledged the fall of Vietnam might not mean the fall of Southeast Asia as a whole, they might have not entangled their country in the Vietnam mess. Instead, they, ignorant of Southeast Asia, failed to notice that eache country in the region has its own specifics, and blindly put them all under a single category of what they considered to be colonies whose people were too lazy and inept to govern themselves. APPROACHING VIETNAM is, needless to say, a well-written study. Had I read it an earlier stage, it would have undoubtedly proved useful and engaging to me. Now that I have become familiar with many other works on the subject it seemed to me to be rather repetitive, for the author does not present any novel conclusions. I recommend this book as a graspable, compelling introduction to the origins of American involvement in Southeast Asia. ...more |
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Dec 31, 2021
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Jan 2022
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Dec 31, 2021
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Paperback
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| 0773513264
| 9780773513266
| 0773513264
| 4.17
| 6
| Jan 01, 1995
| Jan 01, 1995
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it was amazing
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In his book, Steven Hugh Lee examines the two best-known Cold War battlegrounds in Asia – Korea and Vietnam. In its first years, the Cold War between C In his book, Steven Hugh Lee examines the two best-known Cold War battlegrounds in Asia – Korea and Vietnam. In its first years, the Cold War between Capitalist America and Communist Russia raged on the European front, where the two superpowers championed different versions of post-war global order. With the Truman Doctrine and the conflicts in Greece and Turkey, the first "shots" of the Soviet-American confrontation were fired. Then Secretary of State George Marshall launched his renowned Marshall Plan, whose unofficial purpose was preventing a Soviet overtake, whether military or ideological, of Western Europe. Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy all lay in ashes in the aftermath of the War to Start All Wars Again, and the Communist parties of the latter two were growing in strength, so American policy-makers had enough matters to deal with in Europe and would not have turned the bulk of its attention to Asia soon if not for the emergence of the Chinese threat. Mao Zedong's triumph in 1949 was a heavy blow for the American government, which had been generously supporting the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek. The fact that the Asian giant went red despite the efforts of the mighty transcontinental superpower, which only two years earlier had pledged to combat evil Communism on all fronts and protect democracy and freedom in the countries of the world, undermined America's standing both at home and abroad. To distract the American public from the debacle in China, the State Department embarked on a search for another noble Cold War cause, and as American policy-makers scanned the map of the world, their eyes fell on a region that had been generally remote from American geostrategic concerns so far – Southeast Asia. Of course, it was not entirely unknown in Washington. Since 1945, American officials had been pestered by their British and French counterparts to extend material support to France's war effort against the nationalist forces in its former colony Indochina. After Truman succeeded the genuinely-or-not-genuinely anti-colonial Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House, the Franco-British wish was granted, albeit for no other reason than the Truman administration's incorporation of France into its grand plan for a recovery of free Europe, which centered on the fastest re-building of European economy that could be achieved. In 1949, however, Southeast Asia acquired a significance in its own right. Its dangerous proximity to Red China justified the American policy-makers worries that it might become the next major Cold War battleground, so they began pumping resources into its countries with the same enthusiasm and generosity they displayed toward Western Europe. China had been lost, yes, but America would not lose another state to Communism. Indochina was on top of the new Southeast Asian agenda, for, increasing amounts of American assistance notwithstanding, the French forces' alleged short, "cleaning-up" operation was steadily turning into a long, frustrating, and not particularly successful struggle against invisible guerrillas, who preferred to bide their time in the jungle rather than fight a conventional war. A careful analysis of Ho Chi Minh's behavior toward the West and his motivations would have revealed that the Viet Minh's all-overshadowing goal was independence for Vietnam, which was to be achieved by any means available, and that the French imperialists, universally hated by the Vietnamese population, simply could not win a war against a movement that was predominantly loved and supported by the locals. Instead, American policy-makers assumed there was no way for the French army, superior in technology and resources thanks to overly generous aid from America, to be losing a war against a bunch of Third World guerrillas unless those guerrillas were backed by the Communist enemy in the face of Red China, and probably also the Soviet Union. Therefore, long-suffering Vietnam's struggle for independence from almost century-long cruel colonial rule was perceived to be yet another Cold War battleground, similar to Greece, where the forces of good (Capitalism) and evil (Communism) were destined to clash once again, and on went the Truman administration to increase its material aid to the French further, sending 11,000 tons of equipment in 1950 only, and on went America down the road toward the Vietnamese quagmire. Then, out of the blue, the war in Korea broke out in June 1950, solidifying the worst fears of American policy-makers about the aggressive expansion of Communism into their new protégé region – Southeast Asia. Kim Il-sung was indeed aided by Red China, or rather, since Mao Zedong could not stand him because of his arrogance and stupidity, Stalin had persuaded Mao, who owed him a considerable debt for the success of his revolution, to help the North Koreans financially and militarily. The Korean War was the first all-out Southeast Asian Cold War conflict, the true first shot of the Cold, and hot, war between American Capitalism and Soviet Communism in the region. What's worse, it became a model according to which the American military and political leaders would build their strategies for Vietnam a decade afterwards, despite the fact that the two conflicts bore few similarities to each other. For instance, unlike the war in Vietnam, the Korean War was a large-scale war fought by conventional armed forces on both sides – the North Koreans had not established a guerrilla movement in South Korea, for the South Koreans were predominantly hostile to the Communists. Furthermore, the relationship between the people of South Korea and their foreign allies was based on a healthy amount of trust. America fought in the war under the aegis of the United Nations, so the South Koreans did not doubt the American motives. They genuinely believed the war was fought and sacrifices were made to allow them to retain their independence. In Vietnam, on the other hand, America came as the ally of the despised French colonialists – basically, one imperialist power succeeding another – so there were grave, and wide-spread doubts, among the South Vietnamese about the authenticity of America's benign intentions. Unlike the South Koreans, they were not so eager to shun the Communists, who were their own compatriots who only a few years ago had fought alongside them to win Vietnam's independence, and cooperate with the foreign superpower. The aforementioned distinctions were, again, not analyzed and interpreted well by American policy-makers in subsequent administrations, so the Korean War was treated as a sort of proof that the United States could, through an all-out intervention, remedy similar conflicts all over Southeast Asia. It is astonishing how readily Cold War assumptions made during Truman's time were embraced by his successors. As we know, those flawed assumptions did not age well in the 1960s. OUTPOSTS OF EMPIRE was so much fun to read. Steven Hugh Lee has written a compelling, well-researched study on a most interesting subject in modern American history. I have developed a special interest in the Cold War in general, but studying the origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia is fascinating on a whole new level. The European theater was a familiar ground because of the Second World War. Southeast Asia was something far-away, murky, unknown. Reading about American policy-makers's stumbling through it, blundering along the way and nevertheless not giving up on their premature assumptions, for they were the only thing they could hold on to, is truly wonderful, especially when the decision-making is as masterfully chronicled as in this book. ...more |
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| 0804722188
| 9780804722186
| 0804722188
| 3.93
| 92
| Jan 01, 1992
| Jul 01, 1993
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it was amazing
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In his book, Melvyn P. Leffler examines the results of the Truman administration's commitment to national security and the struggle against Communist
In his book, Melvyn P. Leffler examines the results of the Truman administration's commitment to national security and the struggle against Communist domination. While this work is a highly comprehensive study, which chronicles everything from the initial ambivalence toward the Soviets Truman demonstrated to the Truman Doctrine to the the Marshall Plan, to the Korean War, the analysis that caught my attention most centers on Truman's decision to support the French war effort in Indochina, making an important Cold War battleground out of it, and on the reason why that far-away corner of the French empire acquired such significance that Americans decided to intervene with economic and military aid. According to the author, there are three main explanations for the Truman's administration decision – geostrategic, economic, and domestic. The first reason why Vietnam came to the forefront of American concerns in the late 1940s is that the situation there increasingly seemed to be part of a global strategy of Communist aggression against the West and its interests. In the early post-war years, America was predominantly concerned with Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Following the Communist victory in China in 1949, though, the Truman administration policy-makers saw the threat was spreading to include Asia. Under these new circumstances, it was only natural that they extended their solution to Communist expansion in Europe — the containment of Soviet power within its existing bounds — to Asia. Because the American government assumed Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Communist, the 1950 decision to support the French war effort in Indochina was just one prong of a global effort to stop Communist expansion. That effort began with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and continued through a long chain of worldwide interventions designed to suppress challenges from the Kremlin and its allies wherever they arose. A second explanation for Vietnam’s emergence as a major U.S. is the region’s economic value. While the American government was not guided by a belief that Vietnam’s natural resources and markets were vital to American prosperity, American business naturally wished for greater access to the French territories, and American officials occasionally worried that a Communist victory in Vietnam would deprive the United States of raw materials potentially useful to the American economy or national security. Those were minor considerations, though, because Vietnam offered little that could not be obtained elsewhere. Indochina’s economic assets were, as the CIA put it in 1950, merely “desirable,” not “absolutely essential.” Nevertheless, economic considerations did drive American policy. Many officials concluded by 1950 that Indochinese resources and markets mattered to the economic health of crucial American allies, especially Britain and Japan. Vietnam’s economic significance lay not in the territory’s contribution to the American economy but in its potential contribution to industrialized nations that American policy-makers regarded as vital to the recovery of the post-war world. In helping to keep Vietnam under French control, Washington sought to gain indirect benefits for America through direct benefits to its allies. A third explanation for Vietnam’s emergence as a major American concern is domestic politics. After losing China to the Communists, the Truman administration fixed its attention on Southeast Asia and began sending American material assistance to the region to fend off critics at home. Harry Truman’s narrow re-election victory in 1948 left a frustrated Republican party looking for an issue it could use against the President. The administration’s failure, despite years of effort and vast expenditures, to prevent a Communist victory in China provided what the president’s enemies sought. As Mao triumphed in 1949, Republicans accused Truman and the Democrats of weak will and demanded vigorous action to prevent the further spread of Communism in Asia. Truman had little choice but to go along. The President not only feared political damage from charges of being soft on Communism but also saw no alternative to bold policies in Asia if he was to secure congressional support for his most cherished objective abroad – the construction of a strong relationship with free Europe. When Congress insisted in December 1949 that the administration spend $75 million to fight Communist insurgency in Asia, the White House accepted the task without opposition as the price of attaining its priorities in Europe. The tragedy of American policymaking in the 1944–1950 period lies in the fact that the Truman administration squandered the considerable leverage it held over France to force a better outcome to the Indochina problem. That leverage was jettisoned by officials who accepted the overriding need to protect French prestige and influence at all costs – the stakes in Europe were high after all. The outbreak of the Korean War on June 25 1950 caused an abrupt intensification of American aid as American officials sought to bolster Western defenses against the possibility of Chinese aggression in Southeast Asia. By the end of the year, the Truman administration had increased its near-term commitments to Indochina to about $133 million. The National Security Council approved a paper insisting that the American government must back the French war effort “by all means practicable short of the actual employment of United States military forces.” Deliveries increased steadily. Washington sent about 11,000 tons of military equipment in 1950, 90,000 tons in 1951, 100,000 tons in 1952, and more than 170,000 tons in 1953. As fighting reached its peak in the spring of 1954, America bore more than 80 percent of the war’s material cost. In all, the United States paid nearly $3 billion over four years. America had begun its journey toward the Vietnamese quagmire. A PREPONDERANCE OF POWER is a truly impressive study. I have never read a more detailed and comprehensive study of the Truman administration's foreign policy. No matter what aspect of it interests you, you will undoubtedly find an informative analysis of it in this book. Since I am focusing on Vietnam right now, I decided to address this topic in my review, for I do not believe I can describe in-depth in one review all topics Leffler's work covers. Another aspect I found interesting is his views on the Truman Doctrine, which he considers to be neither a reactionary policy that opposed the American government to freedom and social, political, and economic reforms, nor a solemn pledge by America to safeguard the world against Communism. Rather, he treats it as a flawed but nevertheless workable foreign policy designed to counter the Communist threat to freedom without resorting to large-scale conflict. The Truman Doctrine demonstrated the Truman administration's willingness to engage in the struggle against Communism on all fronts — social, political, economic, and military. The result was a foreign policy intended to meet all exigencies. The Truman Doctrine authorized American intervention in European affairs during peacetime, but it was also an effective response to Communist guerrilla warfare, in which victory lay in convincing democracy's enemies that they could not win. The problem with the Doctrine was that it tended to lead to military escalation, as in the case of Vietnam. ...more |
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Dec 09, 2021
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Dec 12, 2021
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Dec 09, 2021
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Paperback
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| 0230298214
| 9780230298217
| 0230298214
| 4.14
| 7
| Oct 28, 2011
| Oct 26, 2011
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it was amazing
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In his book, T. O. Smith mentions a curious fact that shaped Anglo-American relations throughout and after the Second World War: the United States had
In his book, T. O. Smith mentions a curious fact that shaped Anglo-American relations throughout and after the Second World War: the United States had never had a more persistent courtier than Winston Churchill. Churchill's interest in America developed slowly, but he sensed the enormity of American power and resources as early as 1895. Both in the First World War and, as a Prime Minister, in the Second World War, he was active in the British effort to bring America into belligerency against Germany and eventually into a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Although he formed a personal bond of sorts with Joseph Stalin during the Second World War and even collaborated with him briefly in a plan to divide post-war Europe, the old hostility remained just beneath the surface. Winston imagined the post-war world as dominated by Great Britain and America only. However, his plans were constantly rebuffed first by both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then by Harry Truman. Roosevelt enthusiastically traded off British interests to the Soviet dictator, repeatedly threatening Britain's status as an equal member of the Big Three, while Truman, inexperienced in foreign policy and burdened by the sudden heavy responsibility of being his brilliant predecessor's successor, initially preferred to follow Roosevelt's policy. Only when America began to shift towards the Cold War in 1946 was Churchill finally successful in winning the American government over. All of the aforementioned demonstrates that during the war period, the British Prime Minister's love for the United States was one-sided. While the two countries were allies with the common goal of vanquishing Nazi Germany, they diverged on virtually everything else. One such major bone of contention that manifested itself in the post-war world, but had existed since earlier, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's embracing of anti-colonialism. He was especially against allowing France to regain its Pearl of the East – the long-suffering colony of Indochina, whose people had suffered under cruel French colonial rule for about a century. Winston Churchill was in dismay, torn between his ever-lasting love for the overseas superpower and the need of his country to back French colonial aspirations. British policy-makers wanted to support the restoration of French colonialism for three reasons. First, they feared a successful American challenge to French control in Indochina might lead Washington to question British rule in other parts of Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma. Those colonies had played important roles in the British economy before the war and would help to reconstruct it now that it was shattered by war. “We’d better look out,” Alexander Cadogan, the Foreign Office’s permanent undersecretary, warned in early 1944 after Roosevelt had complained of the “hopeless” French record in Indochina. “Were the French more ‘hopeless’ than we in Malaya or the Dutch in the E[ast] Indies?” Like him, other British policy-makers believed solidarity with imperialist France was vital for Great Britain to avoid the horrible spectre of anti-colonialism. The second reason for Britain’s support of French imperialism was a belief that France stood a better chance than anyone else to maintain stability in Indochina. This was no small matter given the vital importance that British policy-makers attached to Indochina. Already in 1944, when America viewed that faraway country as distant from its geostrategic concerns, the British government considered it an important barrier between China and several British possessions. The loss of Indochina to a hostile power, British policy-makers believed, might affect the rest of Asia. (It sounds like an earlier version of the domino theory.) Japan's occupation of Indochina and its usage of it as a road towards the invasion of other Asian countries offered an ominous model of how such a scenario might play out. Naturally, Britain had some doubts about the capacity of France, badly weakened by the war, to defend the region, but its policy-makers were confident that if offered foreign assistance, France could once again take things under firm control. Furthermore, they saw no better alternative, and Chinese control, which they saw as the most likely outcome if France withdrew, made them shudder. Of course, it never crossed the minds of British policy-makers that the people of Indochina might be prepared to resist any sort of invasion if granted independence. While some British observers criticized the French for cruel repression, underdevelopment of the economy, and heavy-handed governing that did not allow Indochinese involvement, the majority of Britain's policy-makers stuck to the common stereotypes about Asian societies. They saw the Indochinese population as stunted by centuries of war, poverty, oppression, and the debilitating effects of a tropical climate. If granted self-rule, such people would, in the British view, unleash political and economic chaos, with potentially devastating consequences for the whole region. Furthermore, many policy-makers feared mass starvation across Southeast Asia if Indochina’s rice industry fell under indigenous supervision. The third reason that Britain supported French claims to Indochina was the agreement among British policymakers that they must do everything possible to restore France as a viable partner in European affairs. No matter what happened in the post-war years – German revival, Soviet expansionism, American withdrawal, or social and economic collapse – Britain needed a reliable France. In a 1944 speech, Churchill stated that his government, as well as the entire Commonwealth and empire, wished “to see erected once more, at the earliest moment, a strong, independent, and friendly France.” And while he was not ready to give up his cordial relations with Roosevelt for that goal, the British foreign service was. It knew losing Indochina would be a hard blow for France. It would deprive France of economic advantages in its difficult post-war recovery and destroy its morale. The loss would “cause bitter resentment in France,” asserted one Foreign Office paper, and might provoke it to look more favorably in the Soviet Union that on Britain and the United States. Motivated by all those concerns, the British government provided a good deal of military and diplomatic assistance for French efforts to recover Indochina. Although London was committed under its basic wartime agreement with Free France, the Anglo-French Protocol of Mutual Aid of February 1944, which called for cooperation not only in Europe but also overseas, to offer help anyways, British support in that case went beyond formal commitments. British policy-makers repeatedly took up the French cause in meetings with their American colleagues, hoping to persuade the Roosevelt administration to accept a significant French role in the Pacific War. Although the British Chiefs of Staff were reluctant to give French officers any part in war planning until the liberation of Indochina was certain, they advocated for involving French forces in the Far East as soon as possible. Nevertheless, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stayed rooted to his idea of a post-war UN trusteeship in and eventual independence for Indochina. Winston Churchill, for his part, towed the anti-trusteeship line when it came to British possessions, but was reluctant to back French colonial aspirations in fear of entering into a conflict with Roosevelt and severing the special Anglo-American bond that had been his dream for decades. Thus, he both short-sightedly regarded Roosevelt's trusteeship plan for Indochina as an anathema and persistently rebuffed all France-friendly Foreign Office suggestions. Despite his efforts, Churchill's overseas love, whom he had been courting tirelessly at every meeting, at every Big Three conference, was of no help either. Franklin Delano Roosevelt told his British friend how much he pitied him for having problems with his own Foreign Office, but did not go out of his way to reduce Churchill's suffering. On the contrary, Roosevelt only sought to accelerate his plan for colonial liberation and satisfy his desire to scold the French. "Churchill vainly believed that his Anglo-American pedigree would ensure that a balance could be maintained between American anti-imperialism and Foreign Office support for colonial spheres of influence. But in reality – in Indo-Chinese matters – the Prime Minister became a friendless and remote figure," writes T. O. Smith. Ironically, it was after Clement Attlee succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in the summer of 1945 that the problem of balancing good relations with America and aid for France in Indochina was finally solved. Having found his own footing in foreign policy and entered the Cold War, Truman recognized the vital importance of France for the success of the Marshall Plan in Europe and chose to back its colonial aspirations in Indochina. I loved CHURCHILL, AMERICA, AND VIETNAM. This short but informative study contributes greatly to the understanding of an often overlooked subject – Britain's post-war support for French colonialism in Indochina. Smith portrays Winston Churchill as a tragic figure watching his lifelong dream of Anglo-American cooperation slip away yet again, and his study, while well-researched enough to sound academic and persuasive, stands out with its compelling style. Recommendable for anyone interested in Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's foreign policy, Great Britain's relationship with France in the war and post-war years, or Vietnam history. ...more |
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Dec 03, 2021
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Dec 03, 2021
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Dec 03, 2021
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| 0230610633
| 9780230610637
| 0230610633
| 4.37
| 19
| Dec 15, 2010
| Feb 10, 2011
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it was amazing
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This is my first book about the GULAG, so Jehanne M Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck's introduction to their work, which precedes the oral and epistola
This is my first book about the GULAG, so Jehanne M Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck's introduction to their work, which precedes the oral and epistolary histories they have compiled and gives a brief overview of GULAG history, was especially helpful to me. As a reader with almost no knowledge of the subject discussed, I deeply appreciated their thoughtful decision to include it, for it provided me with the necessary background I needed to understand the GULAG exiles' tragic past. I learned from the informative introduction that the acronym GULAG stood for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (Main Camp Administration), which was officially created in 1929. The Soviet system of penal labor already existed in the earlier 1920s, but during Stalin's years that system of state repression grew in size, scope, and brutality. It now included not only vast networks of prisons, labor camps and colonies, and transit camps, but also places of exile for forced labor, known as special settlements. Stalin’s decision to pursue rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture resulted in a growing demand for forced labor. Prisoners and kulaks, the allegedly wealthy peasants who were thought to be hindering the "Sovietization" of the countryside, were sent to harsh, undeveloped regions of the country in order to extract resources for the Soviet industry. One of the GULAG's purposes was to help industrialize the Soviet Union. The prisoners built cities in severe weather conditions, mined gold and uranium, built railroads and canals, and worked with timber and in many other industries. The Gulag further expanded during the Great Terror of 1937–1938. According to its own documents, the Soviet secret police arrested 1.6 million people in those years. Many were arrested as “counter-revolutionaries” and “enemies of the people,” considered an ideological and political danger to the regime – whatever that meant. As Giuli Fedorovna Tsivirko describes in her interview, the NKVD typically came at night and searched everything in an apartment, looking for incriminating documents or other materials. As Stalin’s suspicion, paranoia, and fear of war increased, he began to target various national groups for deportation to the camps. First ethnic Koreans, Poles, Germans, and Finns were cleared from frontier zones in 1934–1939. After the war broke out, the Soviets deported hundreds of thousands of people from the territories they annexed, including Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, eastern Poland, and northeastern Romania. In 1940–1941, many Soviet Germans were deported, on the assumption that they would betray the Soviet Union in the war against Germany. (That seems to me pretty similar to America's moving of its Japanese citizens to camps after the Pacific War broke out.) During the war itself, several nations, including the Chechens and Crimean Tatars, suffered deportation from their homelands, allegedly for collaboration with the German enemy. And in 1945-1952 several hundred of thousand persons were exiled from territories re-taken from the Nazis: Bessarabia, the Baltic states, and the western parts of Belorussia, Ukraine, and Russia. According to Tatar interviewee and former GULAG victim Giuzel Gumerovna Ibragimova, Tatars and other minorities suffered additional discrimination in the labor camps. The GULAG system culminated in 1953 when an estimated 5 million persons were in the camps or in exile. When Stalin died in March 1953, his successors began dismantling the Soviet nightmare that had resulted in nothing but terror and inefficient economic production. Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "Secret Speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party was a significant turning point. Criticizing Stalin for his “cult of personality,” mass deportations, and persecution of “honest comrades,” Khrushchev launched what became known as the Thaw: a period of liberalization. During the Thaw hundreds of thousands of inmates were released, and slave labor (for that it was) ceased to be an important part of the Soviet economy. Members of the deported nations were released from the special settlements, and some were even allowed to return home. Full rehabilitation became a possibility for many of the prisoners. Although the Main Camp Administration was dissolved in 1957, the GULAG as a phenomenon continued to exist until Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. People were not arrested randomly anymore, though. Common criminals populated and individuals known as "dissidents," who faced political charges for their religious practice, involvement in underground publishing, and human rights activism, were sent to the camps. The dissidents who were not locked in mental asylums were mainly in two political camps located in the Mordovian and Perm regions of Russia. As part of his reforms, Gorbachev released and pardoned political prisoners. Furthermore, Soviet citizens could finally talk openly about the horrors of the GULAG system, which destroyed so many lives. Gheith and Jolluck's book is composed of the tragic memories of those innocent people who had to endure it all. As the interviews and documents in this volume demonstrate, the GULAG, which the authorities originally intended to use as a place not only of punishment but also of redemption of the prisoners through physical labor (Images of Nazi concentration camps and the infamous inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" are the first thing that comes to mind), but degraded into a system of mass terror that included labor camps, prisons, the labor army, exile of various kinds, and psychiatric hospitals. However, its main purpose remained corrective. It was built on the principle that if labor was to make the new Soviet man and create socialism on earth, then the hard labor camps were an indispensable part of that effort. What's even more shocking, some of the GULAG victims embraced that principle and regarded daily forced labor as the meaning of their existence. One such is 92-year-old Sira Stepanovna Balashina. Labeled kulaks in early 1930 despite the fact that they were living barely better than the poorest villagers, Sira's family were exiled to a labor camp when she was seventeen. Sira eventually ended in the Perm region, and her prevailing life memory is of laboring in the woods. As she recalls in the interview, many prisoners, including her parents and sister, died as a result of the lack of food, proper shelter, medicine, or sanitation, combined with exhaustion from hard labor. Nevertheless, Balashina reports working well and proudly. She talks with satisfaction about the valor she demonstrated when felling trees and the medals she earned for her work — they were the only way a kulak could overcome the stigma of the label. Balashina's story also reveals what life was like under the commandant, the main authority in the special settlements, who typically ruled with an iron fist. Far from Moscow and full of hatred for their subjects, the commandants often committed outrageous abuses. Daily life under their cruel rule was filled with harsh labor, supervision, restrictions, and losses. Though not imprisoned, the deported peasants could not leave their assigned settlements or change their living quarters without permission. The GULAG system also sought to keep the peasants in their places of exile as a permanent labor force even after rehabilitation. Many exiles did flee, legally and illegally, but Balashina, who was freed in 1942, remained in the area and continued her work in the forest because after losing her family and young husband she had nothing else to lose. For her and many other prisoners life did not change much after they were given "freedom." As I learned from other interviews, the GULAG camps were truly unbearably cruel. Prisoners were shot for little or no reason and forced to go outside with scant clothing in 40-degree frost. The food apportionment depended on meeting labor goals, which resulted in slow starvation for many because once people began to weaken they could not meet their labor norm and received less and less food. In her heart-wrenching letter to her father, Irena Grzes ́kowiak, a little Polish girl whose family was forcibly "resettled" to Mamliutka, Northern Kazakhstan, where many Poles were exiled in 1940-1941, reveals the inhumane conditions: "When winter comes we will surely die for they give us nothing no aid no clothes in general nothing so it’s surely good-bye for us . . . Dear Dad I sent you a photo I look very bad because of the total lack of bread in general . . . We are in for a horrible death." Yet here it is again, in her letter, the Soviet "socialist" principle: ". . . we are not afraid of work one must work." Torture was common and creative in the camps. As Robert Avgustovich Ianke, an ethnic German who was sent to the settlement of Dolgoe in the Perm region “to work for the front" by cutting timber after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, recalls in his interview, prisoners were stripped naked and tied up outside so that the mosquitoes could feast on them or isolated in small, uncomfortable, often dark and cold punishment cells. Furthermore, many of the interviewees distinguish between "criminal" and "political" prisoners. In theory, criminals were those who had been arrested for non-political crimes, not as "enemies" of the state. They ranked higher than politicals inside the camps and controlled many aspects of daily life there. The commandants looked with greater favor on the common criminals and tolerated their often cruel domination of the political prisoners. According to Gheith and Jolluck, between several and 15 million people perished in the GULAG. Lower estimates are based on archival sources and are limited to the years of Stalin’s rule, while higher estimates use a combination of oral and documentary sources, with a heavy emphasis on eyewitness accounts, and cover the GULAG from the 1920s to the 1980s, explain the authors. The true number of deaths will probably never be known, but mass graves that demonstrate the indifference to human life of the GULAG years are still being discovered. GULAG VOICES is an outstanding work. Jehanne M Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck have done a magnificent job compiling, translating, and interpreting the oral and epistolary histories of GULAG victims. This book will horrify and sadden you, but it will also contribute immensely to your understanding of the nightmarish phenomenon that plagued the Soviet Union and shattered the lives of millions of its inhabitants. As a half-Russian with Polish roots, I connected with it on an even deeper level. ...more |
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really liked it
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In early 1949 New York Times's correspondent in Athens Anne O'Hare McCormick observed that the Truman Doctrine had involved the United States in "a ne
In early 1949 New York Times's correspondent in Athens Anne O'Hare McCormick observed that the Truman Doctrine had involved the United States in "a new kind of war" against communist-led guerrillas in Greece. The conflict eerily foreshadowed the Vietnam quagmire – it was dark and murky, against enemies difficult to define or see, and it victory was not measurable in territorial gains or human and material loss. The guerrillas rarely wore uniforms, often fought with confiscated weapons, usually relied upon non-conventional warfare, and nearly always received aid from neighboring Communist countries. Battlefronts seldom existed, for the guerrillas preferred raiding, killing, and abducting villagers and townspeople. Communist propagandists kept the atmosphere tense by attacking America for pursuing imperial interests and opposing the popular will. In the United Nations and other public forums, the United States sought to defend its actions while blaming a large measure of the turmoil in Greece on outside Communist forces. How to define that new type of conflict was important to the Truman administration because they, believing in Soviet involvement, attached global significance to it. However, if White House spokesmen described the conflict as a civil war, international law would permit other countries to recognize the belligerents and support them, which might lead to World War III. That is why the Truman administration was balancing two tasks: to persuade the world the problems in Greece were mainly domestic and to create an impression that the Greek government was solving them on its own, while sending American aid. As Jones explains, the development of the United Nations and numerous Third World countries made "the power of example" more significant in foreign policy than before. To be successful in ideological warfare, the American government had to protect any part of the world that should and could be preserved for democracy. In Greece anti-Communist groups were in the majority. The country's leaders were receptive to aid and advice, and the Greek people were favorable inclined toward the United States, so Greece became an acceptable testing ground for America's widened foreign-policy goals. Failure to defend Greece, the White House believed, would demoralize other nations and force them either to accept Communism or to buy peace by making concessions to totalitarianism. The American government wanted not only to show its military strength in Greece but also to prove to other nations that it possessed the will to help and the endurance to not let the enemies of democracy win. The Truman administration suspected the Soviets of aiding the Greek guerrillas through the neighboring Communist states of Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. Although there was no proof for that, the guerrillas received enough outside encouragement and assistance to leave the impression that a Soviet-American confrontation was brewing and that Greece had become a battleground of the Cold War. If the Western-supported government collapsed, the world would perceive the outcome as a Communist victory guided by the Soviet Union no matter the truth. In general, the American response to the war in Greece was the predecessor of the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It differed from them in that, fortunately, American policy-makers did not send combat troops. They repeatedly discussed the possibility of sending troops, but the pressing need for American men in Germany and Japan discouraged them. Furthermore, Truman realized that if someone fired on American soldiers and forced an engagement, the Communists would acquire valuable propaganda material accusing the Americans of imperialism, so he avoided large-scale war. The trouble with the war in Greece was that it was the type of conflict that made it possible for an inferior but motivated army to win by simply avoiding defeat. "In a war of wills, these shadowy forces — whether called guerrillas, rebels, insurgents, andartes, partisans, or, as the Greek loyalists and some Americans termed them, bandits — recognized that patience was their best weapon," writes Howard Jones. It could wear down the morale and determination even of disciplined army regulars or break the will of civilians and force an end to the war. As the guerrillas fought and took refuge in northern mountains, leaders of the Greek government realized that to win, their army's pursuit units had to keep on the trail of each guerrilla band until they destroyed it. Victory depended on maintaining the support of the countryside by securing villages through pacification programs while the army encircled and eliminated the guerrillas. Just like a decade later in South Vietnam, Americans found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the Greek government's cruel actions in destroying a movement that allegedly was of the people. A NEW KIND OF WAR is a concise but interesting study that traces the beginning of the American government's series of military interventions into the affairs of other countries to President Harry Truman and his administration. The Greek war bears quite a few similarities to the Vietnam conflict. There was one vital difference that helped Americans win in Greece, though: unlike South Vietnam, Greece was inherently democratic, the only democratic country on the Balkans at the time. The majority of the population supported the current government and understood Western democratic principles. At the time, though, the victory probably planted in the minds of American policy-makers the false belief that their foreign policy was so effective that their country could act as "the volunteer fire department for the world," as President John F. Kennedy characterized American Cold War attitude. Whenever and wherever "fire" breaks out – in Indochina, in the Middle East, in Guatemala etc. – American "firemen" rush in with their heavy equipment and extinguish it by resorting to every known method and then rush off to the next "fire," leaving the shocked native people to clean the mess and rebuild their homes with whatever (if any) resources are available, lamented the President. Exactly that "firemen" mentality eventually dragged the American government into the Vietnam quagmire. And it all started with Truman's decision to interfere in Greece. ...more |
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| Jan 30, 2018
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it was amazing
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Lyndon Johnson was a reluctant Vice President. He had hoped and planned for the presidency, and he despised the second spot. As a VP, he related to th
Lyndon Johnson was a reluctant Vice President. He had hoped and planned for the presidency, and he despised the second spot. As a VP, he related to the observation made by Thomas R. Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's VP, that the Vice President "is like a man in a cataleptic state. He cannot speak. He cannot move. He suffers no pain. And yet he is conscious of all that goes on around him." John F. Kennedy aggravated Johnson's sense of being eclipsed and useless. Harvard-educated, young, handsome, charming, urbane, a northeastern aristocrat, JFK appeared to be everything his Vice President was not. "Every time I came into John Kennedy's presence, I felt like a goddamn raven hovering over his shoulder," LBJ recalled. He looked so sullen and depressed all the time even the President noticed, telling Florida Senator George Smathers he "cannot stand Johnson's damn long face." This is why in November 1963 Johnson wanted to go to Texas with the President. The Kennedy clan kept distancing themselves from him, and the fact that his already tense relatiosnship with Robert Kennedy was deteoriorating even more didn't sooth his fear that JFK might drop him from the ticket the following year. Johnson took special pains to assure the President would be welcomed in his home state. Well, as we know, the visit to Dallas did not go well for Kennedy at all, but it was not his VP's fault. The cruel and shocking act propelled the somber Vice President to the highest post, and during the first days of his presidency LBJ changed drastically. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman commented on seeing “a different Lyndon Johnson than from the past 3 years. Actually the frustration seemed gone, he seemed relaxed, the power, the confidence, the assurance of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson seemed to be there." The new president was famously addicted to the telephone and had already placed myriad calls to congressional leaders, cabinet members, foreign heads of state, and corporate chieftains. “You know, when I went into that office tonight and they [his economic and military advisers] came in and started briefing me on what I have to do,” he told his aides, “do you realize that every issue that is on my desk tonight was on my desk when I came to Congress in 1937?” Civil rights. Health insurance for the elderly and the poor. Federal aid to primary and secondary education. Support for higher education. Antipoverty and nutritional programs. It was twelve hours after Johnson assumed the powers of the presidency that the first cornerstone was laid for the Great Society. "Boundless in his appetite for power and recognition, extreme in his personal habits and style, Lyndon Johnson was both a towering historical figure and a bundle of jarring contradictions," writes Joshua Zeitz. He was both an unscupulous opportunist and a champion of the poor, a progressive hero and a bugbear of the anti-war Left, a crass political operator and a liberal idealist. But while he did use his mastery of the political process to push ambitious liberal legislation through Congress in 1964-65, he could not have done it all alone. Securing the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a huge accomplishment in its own right, but, argues Zeitz, it was another matter entirely to have it mean something — to use the whole influence of the federal government to desegregate public and private institutions peacefully throughout one-third of the United States. Equally remarkable was the Johnson administration’s success in building programs like Medicare and Medicaid, transforming the manner in which American elementary and secondary education was funded, providing food security to tens of millions of impoverished children and adults, inventing public television and radio, and restructuring the federal government’s relationship with ordinary citizens on a scale unseen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration — all in the span of five years, even as the Vietnam War increasingly strained the administration’s credibility and means to advance its domestic agenda. "One man could not and did not do it alone," concludes Zeitz, and his book gives us a vivid portrait of the energetic and talented group of advisers that made LBJ's vision a reality. Some of them, like Jack Valenti, found themselves accidentally in the right place at the right time. Others, like Bill Moyers, made sure to put themselves there. Most, like Joe Califano, were relatively young men in their thirties and early forties, but LBJ, who aspired to exceed FDR’s achievements, also turned regularly for counsel to a small group of New Deal veterans whom he had known since his early days in Congress. Most of LBJ’s staff were Texans: Walter Jenkins, Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti; Horace Busby, Johnson’s "in-house intellectual of long standing"; Harry McPherson and Marvin Watson, who joined in 1965. Yet most were men of broad learning and experience, and it sometimes astonished political observers how well they worked with the “best and brightest” of the Ivy League set who had come to Washington to join John Kennedy’s New Frontier, only to make history in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Though different in temperament and background, each staff member believed that government should support the creation of economic opportunity for its citizens and "[smooth] out the rougher edges of liberal capitalism." Each was also, in his own way, as pragmatic as Johnson himself — attuned to the workings of political power, "skilled in the art of throwing a sharp elbow or building an administrative empire," and hungry for position and prominence. Richard Goodwin, a former Kennedy aide who later joined LBJ’s staff as chief speechwriter, devised the term “Great Society.” Often linked with the “War on Poverty” — a term that Johnson introduced in his first State of the Union address in 1964 — the Great Society included antipoverty programs, but its goal was to maximize the individual citizen’s ability to realize his or her fullest potential; the War on Poverty was just one part of it. The Great Society was criticized as a tool for economic redistribution that led millions of Americans into a state of permanent dependency on the government, "but in truth," argues Zeitz, "LBJ and his aides never seriously contemplated policies that would enforce equality of income, wealth, or condition." Instead of guaranteeing a minimum income, they believed that education, workforce training, access to health care and food security, and full political empowerment would ensure everyone equal opportunity to share in the nation’s prosperity. This idea was born from the confidence inherent to postwar America. The United States had survived the Great Depression and defeated fascism in both Europe and the Pacific, and in the two decades that followed, Americans benefited from seemingly boundless economic growth. John Kennedy challenged his fellow citizens to “explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths . . . encourage the arts and commerce [and] heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah — to ‘undo the heavy burdens . . . and to let the oppressed go free.’” Echoing his predecessor’s ambition, LBJ called on the nation to defeat “ignorance, illiteracy, ill health and disease.” The architects of the Great Society believed that to create a more just and equal society you don't have to cut the pie into smaller pieces so that everyone would get one — you had to bake a bigger pie. The Great Society was latter widely criticized for what it failed to achieve. It did not eliminate poverty. It did not establish a minimum family income. It did not extend quality medical care and educational opportunity to all Americans. It did not alleviate the conditions in urban America or rural areas. According to George Ready, who served as Johnson’s White House press secretary and special assistant, the sweeping promises associated with the Great Society “may have had a negative impact on the willingness of Americans to trust such efforts.” When those measures did not meet the grandiose expectations, many Americans came to agree with LBJ’s conservative critics that government itself was the problem. In a scorching address delivered some two decades later, Ronald Reagan expressed conservative criticism of the Great Society as a bundle of expensive and failed initiatives that contributed to poverty. "Yet if Johnson and his aides overpromised, they also outperformed," disagrees Zeitz. "Few presidents have left in place so sweeping a list of positive domestic accomplishments." Medicare, public television, integrated hotels and restaurants, federal aid to primary and secondary schools, and college loans are all measures that continue to enjoy wide support today. Moreover, argues the author, if LBJ’s Great Society failed in its ambition to eliminate poverty, "it took a sizable bite out of it." With the help of food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies (all products of the Great Society), the poverty rate fell by 26 percent between 1960 and 2010, with two-thirds of the decline occurring before 1980. Some groups, like African Americans and the elderly, experienced an abrupt drop in poverty. Equally underappreciated are Johnson and his aides' efforts to battle Jim Crow. No other administration since Abe Lincoln's had used so much of the government's weight so persistently to disrupt the economic, social and political privilege many white Americans had long been taking for granted. Desegregation was a central theme that ran throughout most of the Great Society's key initiatives, from health care and education to voting rights and urban renewal, argues Zeitz. Moreover, Johnson’s White House knowingly took the fight beyond the South and challenged much of the hidden privilege that white northerners had grown to expect — privilege that came in the form of the seemingly accidental segregation in residential neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Unfortunately, the Vietnam War did much to undermine the President's credibility and standing with the American public. By 1967, it had become clear that the country couldn't have "both guns and butter," and LBJ's intiatives fell into disrepute. For some fifty years, he would be known as a “flawed giant” who, in his own words, “left the woman I love — the Great Society — in order to fight that bitch of a war.” However, as Zeitz demonstrates us in his outstanding work, LBJ was a skilled President who assembled one of the finest White House staffs and showed as much success in establishing and administering programs as he did in securing their passage. Although constantly presented as a "country cousin" who couldn't match his dashing predecessor, in fact he used the talent that resided in American universities and thinktanks much more extensively. A man of great personal ambition, he deliberately comrpomised his political well-being in support of causes that he knew to be controversial at the time, and he encouraged his young staff to appreciate that power is only as meaningful as how — and for what purpose — one uses it. “He felt entitled to every available lever, to help from every person, every branch of government, every business and labor leader,” recalled Joe Califano, one of the brightest Great Society architects. “After all, as he often reminded us, he was the only President we had.” ...more |
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it was amazing
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I've been deeply interested in books about Allen Dulles for some time, although I'm definitely not fascinated by Allen Dulles himself because he is ab
I've been deeply interested in books about Allen Dulles for some time, although I'm definitely not fascinated by Allen Dulles himself because he is about as attractive a personality as Adolf Hitler. When UCLA graduate student in engineering and physics David Lifton came to a student chat session to challenge Dulles' claim that a lone assassin had shot President John F. Kennedy, he immediately felt he was in the presence of “evil”. "It was the way he [Dulles] looked, his eyes," recalled he many years later. "He just emoted guile, and it was very, very scary." While I've never met the notorious CIA director myself, I understand very well what Lifton meant. Even reading about Dulles makes me feel as if I'm tracing the life of the Devil himself. Maybe exactly this draws me to the man's dark biography, maybe it is the satisfaction that comes with the process of unravelling the complex tangle of lies he left after himself to find the truth trampled under them. In any case, I do find the story of his life engrossing, especially when it is as masterfully told as in THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD. I finished reading David Talbot's outstanding work precisely a month ago, but it has been on my mind for three days already, and yesterday I came to an interesting realization: the book reminds me of my all-time favorite novel, The Master and Margarita. As you have surely noticed if you've read Bulgakov's immortal work, The Master and Margarita lacks any positive characters whatsoever. So does THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD. Instead, we are offered a vast array of Nazi criminals turned CIA-supervised scientists or agents, Venezuelan dictators, American mob bosses and killers, and spymasters with wrong ideals, all connected to Allen Dulles and his entourage. Much too lately repentant CIA agent James Jesus Angleton remembered the high eminences of the CIA of those days, "the grand masters": "If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell." Also, in both books the Devil is the central character – called Woland in the novel and Dulles in the historical work. Yes, curiously, Allie did bear a lot of similarities to Messir Woland. First of all, as Talbot demonstrates, Allen Dulles, just like Woland, could be eerily ubiquitous. Whether it was about meeting with the agents of SS leader (monster) Heinrich Himmler or with his other good Nazi friends, or lobbying Justice Jackson in the backrooms of Nuremberg to secure the acquittal (!!!) of none other than Luftwaffe Chief Herman Göring, Hitler's second in command, or crushing the first democratic government Iran had ever had (read The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War), Allen Dulles was always there, at the very core of the action. On top of that, just like his fictional counterpart, he had the ability to effectively disguise his arrival from everyone but the people who needed to know about it. For instance: "On the afternoon of August 18, 1953, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the thirty-three-year-old shah of Iran, and his glamorous twenty-one-year-old wife, Queen Soraya, swept into the gilded lobby of the Hotel Excelsior on Rome’s fashionable Via Veneto" after having escaped from Iran because Iranians were done with their despotic rule and Mohammad Mossadegh had come to power. While the shah's dazzling arrival was noticed, no one wondered, surprisingly, why at the very same moment, Allen Dulles and his wife, Clover, also checked into Hotel Excelsior. On that day, no one paid attention; later, this arrival began to be considered as a curious coincidence, but was it really? No. By the following morning, the Teheran mobs, led and financed by the CIA, were running riot through the streets of the city – the final act in a covert drama aimed at overthrowing the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mossadegh and restoring the Shah’s autocratic rule, which was needed in order to save the British oil monopoly in Iran and protect the interests of Sullivan & Cromwell, the powerful law firm Allen and his older brother, John Foster, worked for. Therefore, Dulles' arrival was conveniently timed: he could immediately reach the cowardly shah, who was an old business partner, and convince him that it was now safe to return to the Peacock Throne; and that's exactly what he did. Still no one, except the Shah, who indeed returned to Iran and ruled with increasing cruelty for many years, paid attention to him. Dulles' victims, on the other hand, rarely were aware who they had had the misfortune to meet – just like Woland, Allie always masterfully managed to efface any trace of himself and any proof that he was behind their undoings. And I don't mean the arch-victim, President John F. Kennedy, only. There were others before him who had suffered because of the CIA chief. On May 1949, for example, Czech authorities arrested Quaker relief worker Noel Field, who was intrigued by the Soviet revolution, although not a Communist himself, and had been lured to Prague with the promise of a university teaching position. Unbeknownst to him, U.S intelligence had taken advantage of him: it purposefully spread the word to Moscow that Field was actually coming to Prague on a secret mission, sent by his old spymaster, the infamous Allen Dulles, and that while in Prague, he would be contacting his extensive network from the war years – the brave Communists, nationalists, and antifascists, whom he had helped to survive when he was a refugee aid worker and who were all part of the top secret Dulles-Field spy network. All of this was a base lie, made up by Dulles to plant the seed of suspicion in Stalin's mind and wreak havoc through the fragile Soviet "empire" (he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations, stimulating an epic wave of terror, arrests, and executions in Eastern Europe), but during the harsh interrogations the dumbfounded Field was subjected to, the interrogators kept asking exactly one question: "How do you know Allen Dulles?" Poor Noel could not at all understand what his knowing Allen had to do with anything, yet, indeed, Field's undoing was exactly the fact that, as a boy, he and his family had met the Devil in Switzerland, unaware of who Dulles really was and of the fact that since the very moment Allen saw his naive idealism about changing the world, Field joined his collection of "assets", "patsies" – yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald would later be in this collection too. Such an Ivanushka "Homeless" Ponyrev situation, isn't it? "Homeless" was another clueless person who met the Devil in what at first seemed like unthreatening circumstances only to end in the mental asylum because of this meeting, still unaware who that mysterious stranger actually was. Ivanushka, though, can be considered relatively fortunate compared to Field – Noel, as well as his family, was dispatched to the GULAG. Just like Messir Woland, Allen Dulles could not perfectly run his high carnival alone, of course: he needed sidekicks, and he got them. "His stubborn insistence on staying in the middle of the postwar action paid off," tells us Talbot. In April 1947, Allen was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to present his ideas for a strong, centralized intelligence agency. His memo would help frame the legislation that gave birth to his most important aide, the CIA, later that year. Under his guidance, the Central Intelligence Agency would be everything but a simple information-gathering service like the one President Harry Truman had envisioned. Instead, it would become for him what Azazello, the killer-demon, was for Woland; it would do his dirty work – the assassinations of leaders abroad and at home, the international sabotage, the rescuing of myriad Nazi scientists (wartime criminals who conducted a brutal human experimentation program) for his mind-control project during which he and Sidney Gottlieb drugged hundreds of people with LSD without their knowledge and killed many others in the name of finding a magical, memory-erasing substance (read Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control). When Dwight Eisenhower succeed Truman in the White House, Allen also got his diplomatic Koroviev – Secretary of State John Foster Dulles – who would handle the President and other trifling governmental matters the CIA chief didn't bother himself with. He was, after all, the cloak-and-dagger genius, the action man. Just like Woland, he preferred to let "Koroviev" handle the "house-managers", "buffet attendants", "investigators" etc. that were trying to infiltrate and investigate his sinister agency, his "apartment no.50." And no need to mention that just as the appearance of Woland and his entourage anywhere always led to calamities, the involvement of the CIA in matters both domestic and foreign brought about only anguish. When it came to private life, Allie was about as caring and loving as a log. He ignored his kids, and was rarely home, travelling all over the world on "business trips" and never informing his long-suffering wife, whom it had taken him exactly three days to court before she had agreed to marry him, where he was going and why. If a family problem arose, the spymaster also immediately vanished into thin air, just as Woland vanished from the Variety Theatre, leaving John Foster, who had become the head of the family after their father's death, to handle everything just as Koroviev handled the black magic show. Clover, a mentally unstable woman, who reminds me of Bulgakov's equally weak and unstable Master, called her domineering husband "the Shark", and developed a sexual interest in his long-lasting mistress, spy Mary Bancroft, "a woman whose morals were conveniently flexible," who befriended Clover and eventually began to serve as a peculiar link between her and Allen, just as Margarita connected the Master to Woland. Some critics of Bulgakov's great novel argue that Satan in The Master and Margarita represents the absolute truth. This, for me, is incomprehensible and ridiculous. How can the Devil be truthful? A good question in its own right. Just as good as "How could Allen Dulles, a man who should have been tried for treason for his helping Nazi, be the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency?" He could, though, he most definitely could. And on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy, the young man who the Dulles brothers had once mentored, hoping to make another fanatical Cold Warrior to add to their ranks out of him, the leader who chose peace and was marked for death by the military-industrial complex, and especially by the CIA that hated him passionately ever since the Bay of Pigs humiliation, was shot in Dallas, Texas, Allen Dulles surely had his Satan's Ball; he surely celebrated what he then thought was a masterfully executed assassination. And afterwards, all giddy, he lobbied for and got himself a position on the Dulles– oh excuse me, on the Warren Commission. And then he lied, and covered up, and destroyed the facts that exposed his Azazello, who had not handled the conspiracy as well as Dulles initially thought, who had made up too many fake Lee Harvey Oswalds and two much conflicting evidence even for the cunning CIA chief to find a plausible explanation for. No wonder, though, that Woland and Dulles were both often regarded as honest. Satan, with his animated geographical globe and his knowledge of all world's affairs, and Allen, with his "all-seeing eye", the CIA, were apt at feigning truthfulness; both were seemingly eager to share the vast knowledge they possessed, Dulles even ordering "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." to be inscribed in the lobby of CIA headquarters. In reality, however, he did not want anyone to know the truth and be free. He more than showed this during the Warren Farce. (Read JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.) What is most disturbing, notes Talbot and I agree with him, is that those who enter the lobby of CIA headquarters are greeted by "the stone likeness of Allen Welsh Dulles," and the inscription "His Monument is Around Us". This words sound like a curse on all who work in the citadel of national security. Because if the Devil is still around them, if his ways are still used as example for the new agents of the intelligence service, then the CIA is still his pawn, in his chess game, on his chessboard. Then the horrible past will repeat itself. THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD is a mind-blowing book. Every word of it is pure gold. Apart from being a meticulously researched and compellingly written biography of Allen Dulles, it also offers fresh insight into the Bay of Pigs invasion, the beginnings of Allen's spymaster career in Switzerland, his relationship with the different presidents he served, the other CIA "grand masters", and many, many other curious details everyone interested in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency would love to know. Ten stars, not just five. ...more |
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Imagine a spring without the cheerful chirping of birds, a spring with cherry blossoms but without bees visiting them, with roadsides but without any
Imagine a spring without the cheerful chirping of birds, a spring with cherry blossoms but without bees visiting them, with roadsides but without any vegetation embellishing them. By the time Rachel Carson wrote her ground-breaking work, many a community in America had witnessed such springs. Carelessly, the government had allowed gargantuan quantities of toxic chemicals to be put into the environment to battle pest insects without considering the chemicals' long term effects. The "elixirs of death" – arsenic, chlorinated hydrocarbons and organic phosphorus insecticides – decimated fish and bird populations and altered the cellular processes of plants, animals, and humans. Where, as Carson reveals, an ounce of a certain chemical would have been enough to harm the animals and plants, pounds and pounds were sprayed. On top of that, instead of helping, the insecticides only increased the insect population by killing off the insects' natural predators or causing the insects, highly adaptable creatures, to mutate. Americans weren't aware of anything of the aforementioned. To maximize the crop production, the government had trusted the Department of Agriculture, chemists "largely or wholly ignorant of their [the insecticides'] potentials for harm", with "poisonous and biologically potent chemicals”, in short, with dangerous poisons, despite the fact that the country was overproducing and farmers were paid to produce less. In her easily graspable, engaging prose, Carson emphasizes the right of every citizen not to be poisoned without his knowledge and underscores the vulnerability of the human body, linking some human cancers to pesticide exposure. Most importantly, she reminds us of a fact we tend to forget: that man is not the master of nature, but a part of it. Our harming the environment ultimately backfires, our health begins to reflect the environment's ills sooner or later. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine not being aware of any of these facts and warnings. Just google "environmental issues", and a myriad of articles, books, and documentaries will pop up. No one doubts the biologists' and environmentalists' evidence that chemicals, discarded plastic etc. are noxious for our planet. However, Carson published SILENT SPRING in 1962, when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was at its peak, and one of the main beneficiaries of postwar technology, the chemical industry, was also one of the main contributors to the nation's prosperity. Chemists, at work in their remote laboratories, were revered by the public, which endowed them with almost divine wisdom, while biologists were deemed unimportant. Rachel Carson, a female biologist without a Ph.D, was labeled "a hysterical woman" by the multimillion-dollar chemical industry, not so eager to lose such a great source of income as insecticides. But they could not undo the effect her work had produced. The silent spring had turned into a noisy summer. The book caught President John F. Kennedy's attention, and federal and state investigations were launched into the validity of Carson's arguments. Communities that had been subjected to aerial spraying against their wishes began to organize on a grass-roots level against the continuation of toxic pollution. Scientists began to admit their ignorance. SILENT SPRING had created an environmental movement. Six years after Carson succumbed to breast cancer in 1964, Americans celebrated the first Earth Day and Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. The domestic production of DDT (the "elixirs of death") was banned. The history of the environmental movement gave me plenty of food for thought. Although global contamination is a fact of modern life, Rachel Carson's daring to speak out for the first time had made a difference. Now we are more aware of the harm mankind is causing to our environment than people were in the sixties. Yet, problems remain and there is one issue, which is currently almost a taboo in health and environmental organizations – the breeding and killing of animals for food. Although more than one documentary has shown the inhumane conditions in which domestic animals are bred and killed for food, although each cow daily releases 250-500 liters of methane in the air, although 22.5 billion animals destined for the food industry are living on our planet right now, although all these animals need more food than the whole human population and the enormous and enormously dirty global apparatus for their maintaining heavily harms the environment, scientists who expose any of these disturbing facts are received with the same incomprehension in the scientific community SILENT SPRING had been received in 1962. Nevertheless, with her book, Rachel Carson gave me hope that what now seems impossible, what some scientists refuse even to discuss, may once happen, that there may come a day when man will understand that animals are not born to satisfy his appetite and eating carcasses undermines his own health. SILENT SPRING is remarkable, both beautiful and poignant, a warning and a promise. It compels us to evaluate our relationship with nature and inspires us to act for the common good of our planet. ...more |
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The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the most dangerous moments in history. In the thirteen days from October 16 to 28, 1962, as the Soviet Union insta
The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the most dangerous moments in history. In the thirteen days from October 16 to 28, 1962, as the Soviet Union installed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy demanded publicly that Nikita Khrushchev dismantle and withdraw the missiles immediately. JFK also set up a naval "quarantine" that blockaded Soviet ships proceeding to the island. Ignoring the existence of U.S. missiles in Turkey, almost under the USSR's nose, Kennedy declared that the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba was "a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country." The crisis occurred because, as Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the Soviets were quite certain that the Bay of Pigs invasion was only the beginning and that the States would not leave Cuba alone. To defend his ally, the Soviet Premier had the idea to secretly install nuclear missiles in Cuba, so that the USA would find out only when it's too late. His strategy was twofold: ". . . the installation of our missiles in Cuba would . . . restrain the United States from precipitous military action against Castro's government. . . . [In addition,] our missiles would have equalized what the West likes to call 'the balance of power.' The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you." There was, however, a big problem. Khrushchev's logic overlooked the frenzied mind of Cold War America. As Trappist monk Thomas Merton insightfully noted in a 1962 letter, "the first and greatest of all commandments is that America shall not and must not be beaten in the Cold War, and the second is like unto this, that if a hot war is necessary to prevent defeat in the Cold War, then a hot war must be fought even if civilization is to be destroyed." Thus, the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba placed President Kennedy in what Merton described as "a position so impossible as to be absurd." In a struggle between good and evil involving world-destructive weapons, the installation of Soviet missiles ninety miles from Florida filled Washington with the temptation to strike first. As the construction of missile sites accelerated, the pressures on President Kennedy for a U.S. air strike on Cuba became overwhelming. However, JFK resisted his advisers' push toward a nuclear war that he told them would obviously be "the final failure." Interestingly, he secretly taped the White House meetings during the crisis, and the tapes reveal how isolated the President was in choosing to blockade Soviet missile shipments rather than bomb a country much smaller and weaker than the States. In the October 19, 1962, meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who regarded their young Commander in Chief with great disdain, for example, Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay challenged the President, "This [blockade and political action] is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich . . . I just don't see any other solution except direct military intervention right now." In a characteristically Cold-War way of thinking, LeMay considered everything short of an all-out nuclear attack on the USSR to be appeasement. Thankfully, Kennedy did not take the bait. LeMay's words were met with silence. The tapes further show Kennedy questioning and resisting the mounting pressure to bomb Cuba coming from both the Joint Chiefs and the Executive Committee (ExComm) of the National Security Council, especially convened to help JFK handle the crisis. One statement by Robert Kennedy that strengthened the President's resolve against a "prophylactic" strike is unheard on the tapes, but mentioned in RFK's memoir of the missile crisis, Thirteen Days: while listening to the proposals for attack, Bobby passed a note to the President – "I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor." One of the most terrible moments of the crisis was Wednesday, October 24, when a report came in that a Soviet submarine was about to be intercepted by U.S. helicopters, unless by some miracle, the two Soviet ships it was accompanying turned back from the U.S. "quarantine" line. The President feared he had lost all control of the situation and that nuclear war was imminent. Yet, the miracle happened – through the enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, who ordered the Soviet ships to stop dead in the water rather than challenge the U.S. quarantine. At that moment he saved John Kennedy and everyone else. What moved Khrushchev to his decision? One reason, unmentioned in his memoirs, might be his secret correspondence with JFK. His first private letter to Kennedy was twenty-six pages long, and dealt passionately with politics, in particular Berlin (where the two leaders backed away from war but never reached agreement) and the civil war in Laos (where they agreed to recognize a neutral government). Unlike in Vienna, where he had stunned Kennedy with his harshness of heart toward a nuclear war, in the letter he emphasized the fundamental need for peace and underscored his and JFK's common ground with a biblical analogy, comparing their situation "with Noah's Ark where both the 'clean' and the 'unclean' found sanctuary. But regardless of who lists himself with the 'clean' and who is considered to be 'unclean,' they are all equally interested in one thing and that is that the Ark should successfully continue its cruise." In his response to the Soviet Premier, President Kennedy whole-heartedly agreed with the Noah's-Ark analogy, but after a year of private letters that included enough Cold War debate, Kennedy and Khrushchev had by October 1962 not resolved their most dangerous differences. The missile crisis was proof of that. In the weeks leading up to the crisis, Khrushchev felt "betrayed" by Kennedy's eventual plans for another Cuba invasion, whereas Kennedy thought Khrushchev was "betraying" him by sneaking nuclear missiles into Cuba. Both were again acting out Cold War beliefs that threatened everyone on earth. Nevertheless, thanks to their secret correspondence, each knew the other as a human being he could respect and remembered that they once had agreed both the 'clean' and the 'unclean' had to keep the Ark afloat. That's why Khrushchev stopped his ships dead in the water. However, the crisis was not over. Work on the missile sites was in fact speeding up, and the Pentagon and ExComm advisers increased their pressures on the president for an air strike. On Friday night, October 26, Kennedy received a hopeful letter from Khrushchev in which the Soviet premier agreed to withdraw his missiles. In exchange, Kennedy would pledge not to invade Cuba. However, on Saturday morning, Kennedy received a second, more problematic letter from the Soviet leader, adding to those terms the demand for a U.S. commitment to remove its missiles from Turkey. In exchange, Khrushchev would pledge not to invade Turkey. JFK was perplexed. Khrushchev's second proposal was reasonable in its symmetry. Yet, Kennedy felt he could not suddenly surrender a NATO ally's defenses under a threat, failing to recognize for the moment that he was demanding Khrushchev do the equivalent with his ally Fidel Castro. While the Joint Chiefs continued to demand an air strike, an urgent message arrived heightening those pressures. Early that Saturday morning, a Soviet surface-to-air missile had shot down a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba, killing the Air Force pilot. The Joint Chiefs and ExComm had already recommended immediate retaliation in such a case; they now urged an attack early the next morning to destroy the missile sites. JFK, though, called off the Air Force reprisal for the U-2's downing and continued the search for a peaceful resolution. The Joint Chiefs were dismayed. Robert Kennedy and Theodore Sorensen drafted a letter accepting Khrushchev's first proposal, while ignoring the later demand that the United States withdraw its missiles from Turkey. What became the moving force for Khrushchev's dramatic announcement that he was withdrawing the missiles was Robert Kennedy's climactic meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. According to Khrushchev's memoirs, RFK told Dobrynin that the President was in a grave situation, that "[i]f the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power." When in a November 9, 1961 letter, the Soviet leader had hinted, regarding Berlin, that belligerent pressures in Moscow made compromise difficult from his own side, Kennedy had not pushed him. Now Khrushchev felt the urgency of the pressure on the President and was returning the favor – he withdrew his missiles. The crisis was over. Neither side revealed that, as part of the agreement, on the parallel issue of U.S. missiles in Turkey, Robert Kennedy had in fact promised Anatoly Dobrynin that they, too, would be withdrawn, though not immediately. The promise was fulfilled. Six months later the United States took its missiles out of Turkey. ...more |
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Change of rating on 10/03/21. I just finished reading Sheldon M. Stern's The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality, and my opi
Change of rating on 10/03/21. I just finished reading Sheldon M. Stern's The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality, and my opinion about Robert F. Kennedy's memoir degraded tragically, so I am removing the five stars I assigned to it the first time I read it. (My old review is below my new one.) I recommend Stern's work to everyone who has read Thirteen Days. -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- New review: Ask any Cold War buff for a good book about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, without doubt, he will recommend you Robert F. Kennedy's Thirteen Days. Published in 1969, Bobby's memoir, based on his private diary and papers, quickly became the definitive authority on the subject – probably because Bobby had been an insider, he had been "there." As Sheldon M. Stern argues, though, President John F. Kennedy's secret tape recordings of the meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council during that nightmarish week in October 1962 reveal that someone's insider status does not guarantee the authenticity of their claims. In reality, the ExComm recordings, which the author of this book has painstakingly examined, tell a whole different story than Robert Kennedy. While Bobby presents himself as his brother's indispensable adviser, who helped Jack overcome the urgent demands for military action and rejected the crazy idea of launching air strikes against Cuba by contending that "[i]f you bomb the missile sites and the airports, you are covering most of Cuba. You are going to kill an awful lot of people and take an awful lot of heat on it," he actually was one of the most aggressively hawkish participants in the meetings. And he quoted his words misleadingly to make them seem dovish. In fact, as the tapes reveal, he was arguing that bombing the sites was a weak and inadequate response and demanding a full-scale invasion – a course of action even the hawkish chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, had warned the President not to take a few minutes before. Had Thirteen Days not been so popular, had it not been considered the most authentic source available for so many years, Bobby Kennedy's deception would not be such an issue. The trouble is that his memoir was perceived as truthful by historians and laymen – me among them – alike, thus giving birth to myths, which had permeated the public's consciousness and created a fictional Cuban Missile Crisis that has little to do with reality. And the reality, according to Stern, was that there was only one person at the intense ExComm meetings who consistently and persistently resisted the advocates of military escalation from the ExComm, the Joint Chiefs, and the Congress: President John F. Kennedy himself. Robert Kennedy, Theodore Sorensen, MacGeorge Bundy and everyone else who tried to portray himself as a staunch dove was of no help. That is why, armed with the evidence from the tape recordings, historian Sheldon M. Stern sets out to debunk the many myths surrounding the week when the whole world held its breath. He has divided his book into chapters according to the key players whose actual stance during the crisis had been obscured by false or incomplete accounts. He begins, naturally, with Robert F. Kennedy, who played a unique role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, for he was both the President's brother and his most trusted adviser. "I can vividly recall, for example, first listening to their recorded telephone conversations and initially finding it difficult to even understand what they were talking about. Typically, as soon as the connection was made, the brothers, without so much as a hello or “how are the kids,” would burst into a staccato exchange of barely coherent verbal fragments and exclamations before abruptly concluding with “OK,” “Good,” or “Right” or just hanging up. Their intuitive capacity to communicate often transcended the limits of conventional oral discourse. They always understood each other," describes Stern the wonderful trust and loyalty that existed between the Kennedy brothers. If John Kennedy temporarily left the room or did not attend an ExComm meeting, the participants instinctively recognized Robert Kennedy as his brother’s substitute – his frequent disagreements with the President notwithstanding. But unlike John's, Robert's attitude during the ExComm meetings was like that of a bantam cock preparing himself for a fight. The tapes reveal that he avidly opposed the naval quarantine his brother eventually chose to impose (to the Joint Chiefs' of Staff dismay) and argued in favor of intercepting a Soviet ship that had approached the blockade, preferably one that might carry missiles. “My God,” he declares tastily in one of the recordings. “The point is to . . . intercept a ship that had something rather than a lot of baby food for children.” This is hardly a dovish remark! Next comes Robert S. McNamara, John Kennedy's whiz kid of a Secretary of Defense. Aside from Robert Kennedy himself, McNamara was the participant whom Thirteen Days most consistently portrays as a dove. The President's brother writes that McNamara “became the blockade’s strongest advocate.” But the tapes paint a more complex picture. Two days later, on October 18, McNamara abandoned the caution he had recommended and boldly embraced the Joint Chiefs' demand for an air and land attack on Cuba: "In other words," he announced, “we consider nothing short of a full invasion as practicable military action.” President Kennedy was surprised by the Secretary of Defense's about-face and asked, "Why do you change? Why has this information changed the recommendation?" McNamara declared that there were too many targets, including many not yet located, to be realistically destroyed by air strikes, and there was a big chance of the loss of the Guantánamo base and/or attacks on the civilian population on the eastern coast of the United States from the new missile bases or the Soviet nuclear bombers. As can be concluded from Stern's quoting of the ExComm tape recordings, President Kennedy was the one to oppose McNamara staunchly. He reminded the Secretary of Defense that an invasion of Cuba could not be justified because most of America's allies regarded Cuba “as a fixation of the United States and not a serious military threat. . . . because they think that we’re slightly demented on this subject. . . . they will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn't change" the nuclear balance of power. And only minutes afterwards, Kennedy came up with the idea that would eventually resolve the Missile Crisis: "If we said to Khrushchev . . . 'if you're willing to pull them out, we'll take ours out of Turkey.'" At first, McNamara voiced his support for the President's suggestion, but later opposed it vehemently. Nor was MacGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, of any help to the President, who fought a lone battle against the gung ho Joint Chiefs. Interestingly, Bundy, who was another key player in the ExComm decision-making process, is hardly mentioned in Thirteen Days. Robert Kennedy was unimpressed by Bundy’s performance —accusing him privately of weakness and indecisiveness, of "strange flipflops. First he was for a strike, then a blockade, then for doing nothing because it would upset the situation in Berlin, and then, finally, he led the group which was in favor of a strike – and a strike without prior notification, along the lines of Pearl Harbor." First of all, the foremost advocate of a "Pearl Harbor" strike was Bobby himself. Second, calling the brilliant, self-assured, arrogant MacGeorge Bundy weak and indecisive is a description that strains credibility. In his own memoir, Bundy, in a Churchillian effort to make History kind to himself, describes himself as the coolly rational pragmatist of the group, but the tapes dispel this myth too. In fact, Bundy frequently clashed with the President and fiercely resisted the missile trade Khrushchev proposed on October 27: if the United States pledged not to invade Cuba and pulled its Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, the Soviet Union would pull out of Cuba. Bundy also joined the virtually unanimous demand for simultaneously announcing both a blockade and a declaration of war, insisting that a blockade alone was illegal and “an act of aggression against everybody else.” He lectured the President: “your whole posture” must reflect the fact that Khrushchev has done “unacceptable things from the point of view of the security of the hemisphere.” From the tapes it becomes clear that John Kennedy was more often annoyed with Bundy than with anybody else, for the National Security adviser frequently forgot he was not the President of the United States. And contrary to Robert Kennedy's claims in Thirteen Days, Mac Bundy was among Bobby's most outspoken allies in resisting Khrushchev's proposal. Last but not least, Dean Rusk's role was tragically misrepresented in the Attorney General's memoir. The Secretary of State, whom Robert Kennedy disliked, was outright libeled by Bobby. According to Thirteen Days, Rusk had initially been in favor of air strikes at the ExComm meetings, and afterwards was missing because “he had other duties during this period of time and frequently could not attend our meetings.” As Stern points out, in this case, the recordings help catch Robert Kennedy in an outright lie. Dean Rusk attended nineteen out of twenty ExComm meetings. His presence and contributions were recorded. He only failed to attend the meeting of the evening of October 18 because he was required to host a dinner at the State Department for Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who had met with the President earlier in the day, and part of the morning meeting on October 23 because he was on one of the most difficult diplomatic assignments of the week: negotiating a unanimous vote in favor of the blockade. Furthermore, he was not silent, passive, indecisive, or reluctant to recommend tough decisions and did not have a mental breakdown during the crisis, as Bobby claimed. (If he had had a mental breakdown, it is doubtful that both Kennedy and Johnson would have chosen to retain him as Secretary of State.) He was actually an outspoken and influential participant in the discussions and was more often, except in the case of the Turkey-Cuba trade, a louder voice for caution and diplomacy than anyone other than President John F. Kennedy. He came closest to playing the dovish role that Robert Kennedy assigned to himself in Thirteen Days. That is probably the reason Bobby sought to discredit Rusk's importance so eagerly. Overall, Stern's analysis of the ExComm tapes persuasively confirms that nothing during the momentous week of the Cuban Missile Crisis was what it seems to be in Robert Kennedy's account. As it turns out, President John F. Kennedy used his intellectual and political skill to steer not only the Soviet Union but also his own brother and advisers away from a nuclear war. On his own. -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- Old review: Starting with the Bay of Pigs and continuing through a succession of covert (but not too secret) actions against Castro's government, President Kennedy convinced the Cuban dictator that the USA intended to destroy him, which they did. Fear of American attack urged both the Soviets and the Cubans to station missiles on the island. "It was clear to me," Nikita Khrushchev would write later, "that we might very well lose Cuba if we didn't tale decisive steps in her defense." On October 14, 1962, CIA officer Richard Bissel's U-2 spy plane first captured nearly a thousand images of the Soviet missiles installed in Cuba. When on October 16 he was alerted about these findings, President John F Kennedy, still in his pajamas, called his brother Robert – "We have some big trouble. I want you over here." The news were a slap in the face after all the efforts of the new administration to establish better relations with the Soviet Union. On the very doorstep of the United States, the Soviets were preparing sites for medium range ballistic missiles that could be used in a strike on America and take the lives of millions of Americans. As Kennedy indignantly told Khrushchev, it was the same as if the United States had built nuclear-missile sites in Polland. JFK told National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy to call an emergency meeting of his National Security team, assembling what would be known over the coming days as EXCOMM (Executive Committee of the National Security Council). Thus began the two weeks during which the world came as close to nuclear war as possible. The Cuban Missile Crisis, as the thirteen days came to be known, was JFK's finest moment. With the fate of millions of people (Americans, Cubans, Russians) in his hands, he laid a path that led, after many twists and turns, to the Soviets pulling themselves out of Cuba. His brother portrays his performance as calm, measured, and firm, no doubt a result of the valuable lessons he head learned from the doomed CIA invasion of the Bay of Pigs. When the Joint Chiefs, eager to avenge the Bay of Pigs and destroy Fidel Castro, advised an all-out, "surgical", aerial bombing of Cuba, followed by a ground attack, Kennedy knew better and weighed the advice skeptically – the Chief's solution would have triggered a nuclear war. President Kennedy, impressed by Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, a brilliant history of The Great War, told his brother that he would do everything possible not to facilitate such a development of events that would later be described in a book called "The Missiles of October" by the survivors of a nuclear war. He steered his bellicose advisors towards a far less antagonistic "quarantine" of Soviet ships and saved humanity from nuclear annihilation. He saw that the air strikes favored by so many would have brought death to thousands of innocent Cuban civilians and to thousands of U.S military personnel, and that they ran the risk of triggering the launch of nuclear weapons from Cuba against the U.S and of Soviet retaliation attacks on Berlin. As Secretary of US Department of Defense Robert S. McNamara reveals in his introduction to Robert Kennedy's memoir, the performance of the US Government during the critical period was more effective than at any other time during his seven years of crisis. The agencies of the Government – the CIA, the Defense Department, the State Department, the White House staff – worked together mostly because of the efforts of Robert Kennedy, who, acting with his brother's consent, did much to organize the effort, monitor the results, and assure the completion of the work on which the President's recommendations were based. On the fundamental policy question of whether to force the missiles out by air and ground attack or by far less risky application of marine quarantine, he stood by his brother's choice of the latter. Interestingly, Bobby also discusses the moral side of the question. He strongly opposed a massive attack by a large country on a small one because he believed such an attack to be inhuman, contrary to American ideals and traditions, and an act of brutality for which the world would never forgive the United States. As his brother's most trusted advisor, closest confidant, and a central player in the drama himself, Robert Kennedy gives the readers much inside into the top-level strategical thinking and decision-making throughout the whole crisis. JFK's objective was to force the missiles out of Cuba without war, to defend his country's vital interests without causing a nuclear holocaust. Eventually, he accomplished this objective by a strategy Bobby shaped and he directed – applying pressure against the Soviets without ever pushing them to the point where they would be forced to an irrational, suicidal response. As RFK writes, "Miscalculation and misunderstanding and escalation on one side bring a counterresponse. No action is taken against a powerful adversary in a vacuum. . . . For that is how wars begin – wars that no one wants, no one intends, and no one wins." JFK made each decision keeping this in mind and asking himself if Khrushchev would understand what they felt was their national interest and if the Soviet Union would have sufficient time to react soberly. All action – from stopping a particular ship to making a public statement – was judged against that standard. According to RFK, President Kennedy understood that the USSR did not want nuclear war, and that Khrushchev also realized that America wished to avoid armed conflict, and he dedicated himself to making it clear to the Soviet leader by word and deed that the United States had limited goals and had no interest in accomplishing them by humiliating the USSR. His decision to adopt the blockade gave the opportunity both for Americans to prepare and for the Soviets to recede. With his shrewd sense of diplomacy, Robert Kennedy was invaluable to his brother. In fact, it was his suggestion, when they received two contradictory messages from Khrushchev, the first favorable and the second unfavorable, that they replied to the first. He himself drafted this reply, stating the terms the Administration was willing to accept, and this terms eventually became the basis of the settlement. However, JFK himself had a perfect sense of timing and tactic. Against the advice of some, he refused to bargain the security of the Western world by yielding to the special, "face-saving" Soviet offers, and agreed only to withdraw US missiles from Turkey, which she didn't particularly need for her security anyways. Throughout the hectic thirteen days, he was always ready to act, but also to allow his opponent the opportunity to recede. The world, which had been holding its breath for thirteen days, breathed out a collective sigh of relief when on October 28 the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to turn his ships carrying more arms to the island back and to remove the missiles already stationed on the island. In exchange, the United States promised not to invade Cuba and to withdraw its nuclear missiles from Turkey, the latter deal remaining a secret for decades afterwards. While this fortunate unfolding of events by no means ended the raging Cold War, it represented the first tentative step towards the easing of hostilities. Clear, concise, and grippingly written, THIRTEEN DAYS is a brilliant, action-packed account of the JFK Administration's operations during those days when the fate of the whole world was being decided. ...more |
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it was amazing
| For much of the twentieth century Cuba had remained a quasi-colony of the USA. In the 1950s, Fulgencio Batista, the last of its pliant dictators, stru For much of the twentieth century Cuba had remained a quasi-colony of the USA. In the 1950s, Fulgencio Batista, the last of its pliant dictators, struck lucrative deals with American gangsters, who built lavish hotels and casinos, filled them with American tourists, and turned Havana into the most glaringly sinful city in the hemisphere. American businesses dominated the country. They owned most of its sugar plantations and were heavily invested in oil, railroads, utilities, mining, and cattle ranching. Eighty percent of Cuban imports came from the United States. Although most Americans could not or did not want to see it, Cuba’s corrupt tyranny was increasingly unpopular. In 1958 Fidel Castro’s guerrillas won a series of victories, and on the last day of the year, Batista resigned, fleeing to the Dominican Republic and taking several hundred million dollars with him. A week later, after a victorious trip across the island, Castro arrived in Havana and began a political career that would shape world history. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the older brother of the infamous CIA director Allen Dulles, was recuperating in nearby Jamaica when Castro seized power. “I don’t know whether this is good or bad for us,” he mused after hearing the news. Three months later Fidel Castro made his tumultuous trip to the United States. The nascent counterculture embraced him; Malcolm X came to his hotel in Harlem while supporters cheered outside. After returning home, Castro gave a speech scorning Vice President Nixon, the highest-ranking American he met, as “an impenitent disciple of the gloomy and obstinate Foster Dulles.” Soon afterward he confiscated hundreds of millions of dollars in American investments, imprisoned thousands of suspected counterrevolutionaries, including some with close ties to the United States, and executed several hundred. Anti-Castro terror began. A large department store in Havana was set on fire, a ship in the harbor was blown up with the loss of more than one hundred lives, sugar plantations were burned, and planes from Florida dropped bombs and mysteriously disappeared. While some of the first attacks might have really been carried out by self-employed exiles, CIA Director Allen Dulles soon took control of the operation, entrusting it to his deputy director for plans, Richard Bissell, one of the restless sons of privilege Allen had recruited to help him run the CIA. On January 15 Allen asked the Special Group (the secret body that reviewed covert operations) for authorization to begin plotting against Castro. President Eisenhower said he would favor any plot to “throw Castro out” because he was a “madman.” By mid-January, the CIA had eighteen officers in Washington and another twenty-two in Cuba designing “proposed Cuba operations.” A lifetime of military command had given Ike the habit of denying covert operations, and he maintained it as president. Less than two weeks after he authorized plotting against the Cuban dictator, he told reporters that although he was “concerned and perplexed” by Castro’s anti-American statements, the United States would take no action against him. At a Special Group meeting on February 17, however, he brushed aside a proposal from Allen under which the CIA would sabotage Cuban sugar mills and urged him to come up with more audacious ideas, “including even possibly things that might be drastic.” In general, Eisenhower launched the anti-Castro operation with determination and focused enthusiasm. He gave his orders directly to Allen and Dickie, and when on March 17, Dulles presented “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime,” written by Bissell, which proposed a multistage operation “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US, in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of US intervention" by building a covert network inside Cuba, saturating the island with anti-Castro propaganda, infiltrating small teams of guerrilla fighters, using them to set off a domestic uprising, and providing a “responsible, appealing, and unified” new regime, Eisenhower said he could imagine “no better plan” and approved. He insisted only on one condition: US involvement must be kept strictly secret. “The great problem is leakage and breach of security,” he said. “Everyone must be prepared to swear he has not heard of it.” With that statement, Ike made the overthrow of Castro an official but secret U.S. policy goal. Notably, another curious detail emerged from this meeting: Allen spoke first, but when there were questions, he deferred to Bissell; it was an early sign that unlike in all previous oversea operations, such as the Iran coup, he would not supervise this operation. The anti-Castro plot was as ambitious a project as the CIA had ever undertaken, and much hung on the outcome. Allen, however, floated above it. Each time he and Bissell came to the White House to brief Eisenhower on its progress, Bissell took the lead while Allen listened. When Dickie briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff on April 8, Dulles did not even attend. The bulk of Dickie Bissell's experience with the CIA came from running the theatrical “rebel air force” that had helped push Jacobo Arbenz from power in Guatemala in 1954. Most of the officers he assembled for his anti-Castro operation were also veterans of the Guatemala campaign. All had enough experience to recognize the considerable differences between Guatemala in 1954 and Cuba in 1960. One of Castro’s closest comrades, the Argentine-born guerrilla Che Guevara, had been in Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed the coup against Arbenz. Later he told Castro why it succeeded: Arbenz had foolishly tolerated an open society, which the CIA penetrated and subverted, and also preserved the existing army, which the CIA turned into its instrument. Castro agreed that a revolutionary regime in Cuba must avoid those mistakes. Upon taking power, he repressed dissent and purged the army. Many Cubans supported his regime and were ready to defend it. All of this made the prospect of overthrowing him quite daunting. However, most of the CIA’s “best men” came from backgrounds where all things were possible, nothing ever went seriously wrong, and catastrophic reversals of fortune happened only to others. World leaders had fallen to their power. They never believed that deposing Castro would be easy, but they also enjoyed the challenge. This was why they had joined the CIA, after all. Quietly, but watched closely by Castro’s spies, CIA officers rushed across the Cuban sections of Miami, where anti-Castro fervor "ran hot", and recruited a handful of exiles to serve as the political facade for a counterrevolutionary movement, and dozens more who wanted to fight. Those would-be guerrillas were brought to camps in Florida, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, and the Panama Canal Zone and trained in tactics ranging from air assault to underwater demolition. Meanwhile, tensions between Washington and Havana rose steadily. Cuba recognized the People’s Republic of China and signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union. Tankers carrying Soviet petroleum arrived in Cuba. American oil companies refused to refine it. Castro nationalized the recalcitrant companies. The United States stopped buying most Cuban sugar. Cuba began selling sugar to the Soviets. In mid-1960 this hostility broke beyond politics and economics straight into the Cuban soul: the Eisenhower administration pressed the International League, one of professional baseball’s top minor leagues, to announce that it was pulling its baseball team, the Sugar Kings, out of Havana. Love of baseball is deeply ingrained in the Cuban soul. Castro, an avid fan who had been known to suspend cabinet meetings so he could watch the Sugar Kings play, protested that this blow violated “all codes of sportsmanship" and even offered to pay the team’s debts. It was to no avail. The Cuban people lost one of their strongest sentimental ties to the United States. America did to Cuba what should never be done to revolutionary countries – she pushed the Cubans behind an iron curtain raised by herself. When on the morning of January 19, 1961, Eisenhower’s last full day in office, he welcomed Kennedy to the White House, Kennedy brought up the second most obvious crisis after Laos. He asked if they should support guerrilla operations in Cuba. “To the utmost,” Eisenhower replied. “We cannot have the present government there go on." Thus, Kennedy faced a no-win situation: he was young, inexperienced in world affairs, and new in office. During his electoral campaign he had vowed to confront Castro. Many Americans wished him to do so. Now Allen, whom he had decided to keep at his post as Director of Central Intelligence, and Bissel were giving him a plan. Allen pointedly reminded Kennedy that canceling the operation would give him a "disposal" problem: Cuban exiles at the Guatemala camp would have to be discharged; many would return to Miami; their story would be, “We were about to overthrow Castro, but Kennedy lost his nerve and wouldn’t let us try.” This narrative would become part of Kennedy’s permanent legacy. In short, Dulles made it very clear to the President that to call off the operation would result in a very unpleasant situation. Thus, in the words of one of Kennedy's aides, Allen and Dick didn't just brief them on the Cuban operation; they sold them on it. In a typically CIA manner, the Central Intelligence "fell in love with the plan" and ceased to think critically about it. Allen agreed with those statements, reasoning that "you present a plan, and it isn’t your job to say, ‘Well, that’s a rotten plan I’ve presented.' In presenting the merits of the plan, the tendency is always – because you’re meeting a position, you’re meeting this criticism and that criticism – to be drawn into more of a salesmanship job than you should.” While none of the unexperienced president's secret advisers raised serious doubts about the plan, other powerful people did. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sent Kennedy a memo warning that the United States would certainly be blamed for any invasion of Cuba, and that this would “fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions.” When former secretary of state Dean Acheson visited the White House and was informed about the plan for invasion of Cuba by Kennedy, Acheson was incredulous. “Are you serious?” he asked. “It doesn’t take Price Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred Cubans aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand.” Yet, Bissell somehow managed to accommodate all Kennedy's doubts about the plan. When the President complained that the chosen location for the invasion, a town below the Escambray Mountains, would be too "noisy", Dickie satisfied him by choosing a remote beach one hundred miles eastward, at the Bay of Pigs. When Kennedy worried that using sixteen disguised planes for the first wave of air strikes would increase the odds that the CIA’s role would become clear, Bissell agreed to cut the fleet to eight. Kennedy insisted that the United States military must not be involved – Bissell assured him this would not be necessary. What made Dick Bissell allow the operation to proceed despite all these major changes, rather than telling Kennedy that they greatly reduced the chances for success, remains a mystery. Personal pride and ambition may have encouraged him; his reputation in the Central Intelligence Agency and the Kennedy administration depended on this operation, as was his position as the heir of Allen Dulles. To pull out would have equalled forfeit. Another possible reason was that Bissell assumed President Kennedy would not let it fail – would eventually do whatever was necessary to make it succeed, even if that meant sending US military forces to the rescue. Whatever the reason, Dickie also ignored one last, glaring warning, which came only nine days before the Bay of Pigs invasion. On April 9, Jacob Esterline, the CIA officer he had put in day-to-day charge of the operation, and Colonel Jack Hawkins, its senior military planner, told him what he already knew – the new landing beach was isolated, with no local population to support the invaders and few escape routes; there would not be enough air cover to prevent Castro from counterattacking; the secrecy that was an essential part of the original plan had long ago evaporated. Given these new conditions, concluded the two, the invasion was certain to end in “terrible disaster.” Despite Esterline and Hawkins's appeals, Bissell refused to call the plot off, and their last hope vanished. Strikingly, the two officers had considered Dick Bissell the only target for their plea; Allen Dulles had so successfully distanced himself from the operation's planning. When on April 17, the exile force waded ashore at the Bay of Pigs, thousands of Cuban troops counterattacked. Fidel Castro himself arrived to take command. At a news conference only five days earlier, President JFK had again emphasized that there would not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces. When the crucial moment came, he refused to change his mind. On that calamitous day, the invasion force was scattered by Cuban artillery, attacked by Cuban bombers, and overwhelmed by Cuban troops. At White House meetings the next day, Kennedy fended off more pleas that he send U.S. forces to support the Bay of Pigs invaders. The strongest came from his chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, who came to the Oval Office with an equally agitated Bissell: “Let me take two jets and shoot down those enemy aircraft,” Burke pleaded. “No,” Kennedy replied. “I don’t want to get the United States involved in this.” “Can I not send in an air strike?” “No.” “Can we send in a few planes?” “No, because they could be identified as United States.” “Can we paint out their numbers?” “No.” Grasping for options, Burke asked if Kennedy would authorize artillery attacks on Cuban forces from American destroyers. The answer was the same: “No.” Later that day Kennedy told an aide that he had probably made a mistake keeping Allen Dulles. By then the full scope of the disaster had also dawned on Allen, who had acted quite nonchalantly the previous day. Arriving at his old friend Richard Nixon's house, he told him that "[t]his is the worst they of my life" and that "everything is lost". Everything was lost, indeed. More than one hundred of the invaders died. Most of the rest were rounded up and imprisoned. For Castro it was a brilliant triumph. Kennedy was staggered. “How could I have been so stupid?” he wondered aloud. Standing before reporters in the White House, the President took “sole responsibility” for the failure. Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, mused he. From this moment on he stopped trusting experts and mainly conferred with his brother Bobby. A year later, Castro released the Bay of Pigs prisoners in exchange for $52 million in donated food and medicine. That hardly closed the episode, however. Its effects have reverberated through history. This was the first time the CIA was fully unmasked seeking to depose the leader of a small country whose crime was defying the United States. It became a reviled symbol of imperialist intervention. A new wave of anti-Americanism began coursing around the world... "THE BRILLIANT DISASTER" is a gripping, action-packed account of the ill-starred CIA coup against Fidel Castro. Jim Rasenberger's research is impressively meticulous, his attention to the smallest details showing through the narrative. This history both gives us access to JFK's thoughts and allows us to peek over Castro's shoulder, as well as thrusts us in the very core of action. Outstanding. ...more |
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it was amazing
| Link to my YouTube History Channel: https://youtu.be/D6_7kwHfIXw (THE 1950s RED SCARE: Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn & McCarthyism) Although there had been a Link to my YouTube History Channel: https://youtu.be/D6_7kwHfIXw (THE 1950s RED SCARE: Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn & McCarthyism) Although there had been a post-WWI Red Scare and a New-Deal Red Scare, three main developments distinguished the post-Second-World-War Red Scare from them: the American development of an atomic bomb — a weapon of unparalleled destruction that, from the beginning, was understood to have the capacity to destroy entire civilizations and perhaps human life altogether; the Soviet recruitment and use of American spies to get access to American military secrets, especially the knowledge of atomic weaponry, and the national response to the rapid expansion of communism all over the globe. In addition, the military-industrial complex was reluctant to lose the money and the power that came with it, which it had gained during WWII. During the war, the USA had become a warfare state in order to defeat Nazi Germany and make Europe "safe for democracy." It succeeded; to the military-industrial complex's disappointment even the war to start wars all over again ended. Now America was about to make an about face and demobilize — unacceptable. The only way to keep the war machine working at full pace was to find a new enemy. Nothing could have been easier! I mean, it was obvious: there, an ocean apart, lay a gigantic country headed by an agressive dictator and governed by an ideology fervently opposed to capitalism. World Communism again loomed menacingly on the U.S horizon like a sinister apparition, or did it? In the 50s, Americans were high on success and economic prosperity. They had survived the Great Depression, battled Hitler, and bombed Imperial Japan into surrender. Unlike Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, they were tired of going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. They wanted to enjoy the skyrocketting standard of life, buy cars, and raise big, happy families. Special efforts had to be made to convince them danger was still hovering over their heads. Yet, the dollars flowing into the defense and armament budgets were a powerful stimulus for the miltary-industrial complex. And they had the best weapon — propaganda. The CIA, this ever vigilant guardian against communist influence, summoned its army of writers and journalists — all enticed with the promise of fame or threatened with career ruin — and the American Goebbels-es threw themselves into the task of brainwashing and frightening the American people. With the national defense mobilized to the utmost, the USA did not have to fear much from the outside. To instill true terror into the minds of Americans, the media aimed to impress on them that the enemy had infiltrated governmental agencies, that it was "among us." No need to say that the FBI and the CIA are masters of their craft and that the propaganda campaign proved to be more than effective, sowing panic in the hearts of Americans. Ironically, though, it was so well-conducted that its creators got taken in by their own propaganda. The artifically created Red Scare became real, seeping into all levels of the U.S Government. This is the only way to explain how the phenomenon McCarthyism happened. Early in the 1950s (a.k.a in the whirl of the growing Red Scare), Joseph R. McCarthy, an obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, was suddenly propelled to the forefront of American news by his declaration of an all-out attack on Communist spies in the government. McCarthy took up the cause of anti-Communism with a fiery speech to a women’s Republican club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, in which he charged that the State Department was infested with Communists; he even claimed to have their names. But one (in)significant detail has to be mentioned: he never provided those names. At those tumulous times of terror, however, this was not important. Joe McCarthy successfully fed the fear already deeply engraved in the mind of the average newspaper-reading American. His reckless charges created a media sensation — or should I say the media seized the opportunity to make a sensation out of his claims? I think each one of us should decide for himself/herself. What matters is that everything went downhill from there. Joe McCarthy had come a long way from the Wisonsin dairy farm where he had grown up. His search for Communists was not an investigation — it was a witch hunt reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. Even the military-industrial complex came to regret the fact they had let this monster loose. No one — from the loftiest general or cabinet member to the lowliest government clerk — was immune from McCarthy's suspicious gaze. His most favorite target, as I already mentioned, was the U.S State Department, which according to him was teeming with communists. He attacked it mercilessly, dragging its employees before his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. There, instead of providing actual evidence (which simply did not exist) he bullied and browbit them into confessing their (unexistent) Communist sympathies. Truman privately denounced McCarthy as “just a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings with wild charges,” but the raging senator was not so easily dismissed. He was a monster of the Republican Party's own creation and enjoyed the backing of the unscupulous Nixon, who in turn was backed by the CIA, and other Republicans, all eager to hurt Democrats in the 1950 Congressional elections by convincing America they were “soft on Communism.” LBJ said McCarthy was “the sorriest senator” in Washington. “But he’s riding high now, he’s got people scared to death. . . .” Well, that was the goal, after all: scare Americans to death so that they would support the continuing armament, enlarge the defense budget, and enrich the military-industrial giants. As Ike Eisenhower took over the White House in 1953, it was uncertain whether the most dynamic force in Washington would be the widely popular new President or the senator from Wisconsin. Eisenhower confided that he reviled McCarthy nearly as much as Hitler — but he kept pulling back from confronting him. McCarthy, for his part, quickly made clear that he considered the new Republican administration fair game. Nobody in the capital was safe. The senator would boldly target the three institutions at the very center of Washington's global power: the State Department, the CIA, and the Army. The last would be his undoing. The State Department became the target of no less than ten separate, on-going congressional investigations by McCarthy, who saw it as a hotbed of Communists, pinkos, and other soft types. His relentless probes daunted even the solemn, formidable Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was widely known for his policy of brinksmanship and hatred towards communism. In spite of all his efforts and rage, Joe found no evidence of Communist sympathies against any State Department officials. This, of course, did not prevent his witch hunt from ruining reputations, careers, and lives by bluntly and irrationally accusing many of those employees of Communist affiliations. On top of that, the unstoppable senator soon found a new target — homosexuals. Here the ridiculousness of the whole phenomenon reaches its climax. The thing is that McCarthy could not run his high carnival alone. He had a right hand — Roy Cohn, a vicious and unprincipled mob-connected attorney. While he himself was a closeted gay man, Cohn threw himself into exposing and accusing all homosexuals who had the misfortune to work in the State Department and other governmental agencies. Homosexual was turned into a synonym for Communist. Although at first this sounds absurd, there is a lot of logic behind this horrendous connection. It's the easiest to make people fear something they know little about, and most Americans knew next to nothing about queer people, whom they shunned like the plague because at the time homosexuals were considered to be on the same level as pedophiles and rapists (mutual consent apparently did not matter.) To top the climax, Cohn installed his 26-year-old playmate, a rich son of a hotel tycoon with no particular credentials named David Schine, on the staff of the witch trials. "Essentially," observed one Cold-War historian, "Schine was Cohn's dumb blonde." Thus, the Subcommittee turned into a playground for two gay men who took obvious pleasure in humiliating homosexual witnesses appearing before Joe McCarthy, demanding to know the locations of their illicit trysts and the names of their sexual partners. Some investigation, eh? Ironically, it is exactly because of David Schine that McCarthy's well-constructed control over Washington came crashing down. Schine joined the armed forces, and they decided to send him to a remote base overseas. Naturally, his boyfriend, Cohn, went ballistic at the news. Out of vengence, he and McCarthy, who had long ago set his sights on the Army, outrageously accused George Marshall, the former secretary of state and war hero, of making “common cause with Stalin.” The military-industrial complex was furious. No one touched their precious Army. McCarthy's fate was sealed. The Army opened an investigation into David Schine. After Schine had been drafted into the Army, Roy Cohn sought, with McCarthy’s help, to get him exempted from service, and when that did not work out to have him commissioned as an officer. With Schine duly enlisted as a private, Cohn pressed the secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, to give Schine special privileges with the result that Schine was issued special equipment: mittens rather than gloves, special boots with straps and buckles, a fur-lined hood and other luxuries. Moreover, Schine was allowed to leave the base on weekends to “work on committee business.” The Army’s report listed 44 counts of improper pressure, among the most glaring being Cohn’s threat, if Schine were to be sent overseas, to make sure that Stevens was “through” and to “wreck the Army.” Schine himself did not mean much to McCarthy, but Roy Cohn was vital to him; by this time Joe had a very serious drinking problem — “a quart or more a day” — and he desperately needed Cohn to do much of the committee work. In addition to the embarrassing Army investigation, McCarthy was facing a very serious problem behind the scenes: Director J. Edgar Hoover, disturbed by the senator's increasing recklessness, had cut him off from FBI files. Now McCarthy was fighting blindfolded, blinded by the lack of information from his old sources and blinded by the enormous quantities of alcohol he was consuming, morning and night. The puppet masters had decided to get rid of him, so in an unprecedented political drama, they even televised his proceedings — a sight that proved to be unpleasant for the 80 million viewers, who got to witness the senators bullying behavior and dishonest tactics. As a political force, Joe McCarthy was spent. Nobody wields power alone; a person is only as socially and politically strong as his/her base of support. McCarthy had had fairly strong public support but his performance on television had weakened that dramatically. Just as important, he had been a political asset for his fellow Republicans while the Democrats had held the White House; with a Republican president, he was no longer needed. Since he had brought unfavorable publicity to himself and had attacked the precious U.S Army, he could not be tolerated. The age of McCarthy came to its unglorious end. During the four years of his reign of terror, he had not uncovered a single Communist spy in the government. However, his smear campaign tarnished and ruined lives and reputations. During the Red Scare, thousands of left-wing Americans were “blacklisted” from employment because of past political associations, real or rumored. Fears of Soviet spies in the United States working with American sympathizers led Congress to pass the McCarran Internal Security Act over President Truman’s veto, making it unlawful “to combine, conspire, or agree with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to . . . the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship.” Communist organizations had to register with the Attorney General. Would-be immigrants who had belonged to totalitarian parties in their home countries were barred from admission to the United States. And during any future national emergencies, American Communists were to be herded into concentration camps. The McCarran Internal Security Act, Truman said in his veto message, would “put the government into the business of thought control.” The artifically ignited Red Scare had achieved its goals: it had kept the military-industrial complex rich and powerful and it had curbed the civil liberties of the American people. ...more |
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really liked it
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It had been a busy and tiring day for Mrs. Raymond A. Parks, an NAACP activist and a tailor's assistant at the Montgomery Fair department store; her n
It had been a busy and tiring day for Mrs. Raymond A. Parks, an NAACP activist and a tailor's assistant at the Montgomery Fair department store; her neck and shoulders were very sore after all the work. On that December 1, 1955, the buses were especially crowded, and when she boarded one, a single row of seats – the row immediately behind the first ten seats that always were reserved for whites only – had any vacancies. She took a seat with a black man on her right next to the window, and two black women in the parallel seat across the way. As more whites boarded the bus, one white man was left standing, so the driver, J. F. Blake, demanded that Mrs. Parks and her three colleagues vacated their seats. While the two women and the man rose and moved to the rear, Mrs. Parks only shifted to the window side of the seat. Blake, who could see that she hadn't stood up, said, "Look, woman, I told you I wanted the seat. Are you going to stand up?" At that, Rosa Parks uttered her first word to him: "No". Blake threatened to have her arrested, but she calmly replied he could go ahead, and remained seated. The driver promptly got off the bus and proceeded to call the police. Mrs. Parks, however, was neither angry nor frightened, even when two police officers arrived and arrested her. As she later recalled, she was tired and felt she was being mistreated, and the only way to communicate her feelings to others was "to do just what I did – resist the order." The very night of Rosa Parks's arrest, Montgomery's leading civil rights activist, E. D. Nixon, telephoned King, who'd already become a local celebrity for his preaching, and asked him to join in supporting a boycott of the city's bus lines to begin the following week. In his brief pastoral career, King had come to the realization that "the right word, emotionally charged, could reach the whole person and change the relationships of men,", yet at first he hesitated to accept Nixon's invitation. When he finally agreed, he had set a condition: he should not be required to do any organizing. However, within days, as the boycott got under way with resonating success, King found himself the sole person nominated "to lead the crusade," as head of the newly created MIA (Montgomery Improvement Association). At a mass meeting King intoned, ". . . You know, my friends, there comes a time, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. . . ." And so it went on, month after month, as King preached and prodded, and the boycott dragged on, supported by an elaborate carpool system in which two hundred volunteer drivers supplied some twenty thousand rides a day. "The fight here," said King, "is between light and darkness." Soon enough, though, the darkness threatened to overwhelm him: there was a bomb threat, then an actual bomb at his house, then a shotgun blast that blew open his front door. Yet, as he prayed aloud at the kitchen table one night, he found inner peace, realizing that he must stand for justice and righteousness no matter what happened. While Martin Luther King, Jr. had achieved inner peace, the Montgomery establishment remained stubbornly impervious in negotiations to end the boycott, until finally, with the help of the NAACP, the boycott's leaders filed suit in federal court. The powers of Montgomery retaliated with a mass local indictment of the MIA leadership and a request that a state court grant an injunction against the carpool system as an unlicensed transportation network. Just when things looked the most inauspicious, however, after nearly a year, the U.S Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that segregation of the buses was illegal. Weeks later, the city government finally enacted an ordinance allowing blacks to sit virtually wherever they wanted. If a weary black seamstress had not been ordered to surrender her seat to a white passenger and then been arrested for her refusal to do so, there probably would have never been any sit-ins or Freedom Rides. And if a reluctant but gifted Martin Luther King, Jr. had not been willing to assume the leadership of a mass movement to integrate Montgomery's buses in the wake of Mrs. Parks's protest, there maybe would not have been any fateful marches, and fire hoses, and bombs in Birmingham, "the country's most segregated city". The boycott's impact reached far beyond Montgomery. Through the press and interested racial activists from all over the United States, it made civil rights a national moral cause, and Martin Luther King, Jr. an international figure, who would meet with President Eisenhower, visit India and Ghana, and make it to the cover of Time magazine. ...more |
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really liked it
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3.75 stars In 1951, the Korean War had settled into a series of unbearable, unwinnable battles; it had reached the point where there were no more victo 3.75 stars In 1951, the Korean War had settled into a series of unbearable, unwinnable battles; it had reached the point where there were no more victories, only death. Both sides wanted to get out, but the figure of Joseph Stalin, not unhappy to see two potential rivals caught in so unhappy a war, slowed down any chance of getting out easily, and in addition, both China and the United States were hindered by their own policy of nonrecognition – the only place they recognized each other was on the battlefield, at gunpoint. Nevertheless, peace talks, or at least armistice talks, began in mid-July 1951 at Kaesong, the ancient Korean capital just below the thirty-eighth parallel, and "went forward at a speed somewhat slower than a snail’s pace"(David Halberstam). Eventually moved to Panmunjom, the talks were slowed by great ideological hostility and distrust, and by the fact that neither of the two Koreas wanted to admit the existence of the other. The issue of repatriation also turned out to be a major obstacle: a large number of Chinese prisoners did not want to go back to the mainland; according to one estimate, there were some twenty thousand Chinese POWs, and only about six thousand wanted to be repatriated. This made an already difficult process even harder. Before there could be peace in Korea, the American politicians had to accept the idea that the war had reached a deadlock. The Democrats, unhappily framed as the war's architects, were badly limited in their ability to do that, but a Republican president might be able to bring home a kind of imperfect settlement. Thus, what the election of the Republican candidate, Ike Eisenhower, did was ease the way for a future settlement in Korea. When Stalin, the man secretly pushing the Chinese to be more obstinate, died, both sides became freer to get a settlement than they were a few months earlier, the Americans because Eisenhower could afford bringing home the same disappointing settlement that Truman might have been condemned for, and the Chinese because Mao no longer had Stalin looking over his shoulder. A letter to the Chinese from Mark Clark, the United Nations commander, suggesting an exchange of sick and wounded prisoners, drew an immediate positive response. In late April 1953, the exchange, known as Operation Little Switch, took place, and the way was opened to future progress. Yet, there were still problems. Syngman Rhee, furious about the the fact that he would, like Kim Il Sung, after all that bloodshed and sacrifice, once again rule only half a country, tried to undermine the talks. He pulled his guards from the prison camps in the South, allowing some twenty-seven thousand North Koreans, who might have been forced into repatriation, to escape and slip back into South Korean society, thereby enraging Pyongyang. But even that did not stop the process. The two larger powers really wanted out. As the peace talks continued, the war also went on, grimly and meanly. The fighting became especially cruel, resembling the worst of World War I: trench warfare, constant artillery barrages, men caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet, it was also obviously intended just to show that neither side was going to lose military face. Finally, on July 27 the chief negotiators entered a specially-constructed building at Panmunjom and, "without exchanging a single word", signed the documents. The armistice negotiations had lasted just over two years. South Korea maintained to the end its opposition to an armistice not based on the unification of North and South Korea, but Rhee's protests were in vain – the armistice had been signed. Korea had remained divided. A difficult, draining, cruel war had ended under terms that no one was very happy with. The history of the Korean peace talks is fascinating, but The Korean Armistice is a hard book to plough through. Dry, based on an enormous quantity of documents, which are not well organized, it is not the most engaging of reads, in my opinion. However, if one is interested in the anatomy of the peace talks in Korea, with all their difficulties and frustrations, the book is worth it. ...more |
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| 4.41
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it was amazing
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"This is not a history of the Korean War." Bill Richardson begins his story with this sentence, but what he has to tell us indeed is the story of the
"This is not a history of the Korean War." Bill Richardson begins his story with this sentence, but what he has to tell us indeed is the story of the struggle in Korea, or of any other war for that part, with all its poignancy, pointlessness, pain, and dark humor. When on the night of June 25, 1950, President Truman told the nation that he was committing US forces to Korea, Bill Richardson went to Fort Dix to get not a discharge, like most men did, but an extension. He had spent the last four years in Italy, Germany and finally Austria, on occupation duty with the U.S. Army; in Austria he'd met a girl, and therefore hoped to get back over Europe with a new unit. After fighting with the sergeant, who looked "like a cobra ready to strike", over being discharged, he managed to secure himself an extension, and his odyssey began. When he arrived at Fort Devens to which he was assigned, Richardson realized the first unfortunate fact of the Korean War: it was a war that neither the country nor the military was ready for. "Our Army was hollow." The fifteen-man section Bill was expected to train in weaponry was mostly raw recruits, only four having experience beyond basic training. Despite the dismal situation, at Fort Devens Bill found himself great friends, friends who all joked about how short this war would be. Little did they know... Shortly after arriving at Taegu, South Korea, Richardson's battalion was subjected to heavy North Korean attacks. With his vivid descriptions, Bill covers it all: the fear, the almost inedible C-rations, which would soon make all the men thinner than their skinny South Korean allies, the death of his comrades, the terrible heat and humidity. The awful culmination of the story is the battle of Unsan, one of the bloodiest battles of the Korean War. Surrounded by North Korean forces and aware that no reinforcements were coming, Richardson and a few others bravely and desperately fought on until they fell into North Korean hands and were led to Death Valley, the place where the prisoner camp was located. What is amazing about Richardson is his immensely strong survivability. Even when subjected to intense torture and brainwashing, he perseveres not only in defying his captors, but also in organizing rebellions in and attempting escapes from the prisoner camp. Tired of the inedible food the prisoners were given, Bill instigated some of his fellow prisoners to help him steal the guards' kimchi, which "stunk to high heaven" but tasted better. (Later, he was alone punished for this escapade because he wouldn't betray the ones who helped, and even drew a picture of the punishment.) After severely injuring his legs while performing forced labor, he even became the only one to return from "The Morgue" as the camp's hospital was called (for a reason). Richardson's story gives a lot of food for thought, not only about war, but also about life, about chances, about remaining human in inhuman conditions. Bill's narrative teems with the weirdest coincidences, such as realizing that one of his fellow prisoners is the boyfriend of Clair, the daughter of his father's girlfriend, because the guy showed him a half-photo of her. ("I looked at it closely and then started to laugh. 'Do you know who is on the other part of the photo?' They all looked at me. 'I know who’s on the other part. Me.'") The two of them had taken this photo when he'd visited her home with his father. And guess what? With his unwavering resolve, good heart, and bravery, Bill finally navigated his way out of Korea and toward his own happy ending. Well, his Austrian girlfriend got tired of waiting for him, but he was met at the airport by his whole family and by a beautiful young woman named... Clair. He married her. Bill Richardson's narrative smells, sounds, and looks like war. It is an outstanding memoir, a story of determination and survival through the eyes of the soldiers who fought America's first battle of the Cold War. ...more |
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| 3.67
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really liked it
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Jan 2022
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Dec 31, 2021
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Dec 13, 2021
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Dec 13, 2021
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| 3.93
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it was amazing
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Dec 12, 2021
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Dec 09, 2021
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| 4.14
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it was amazing
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Dec 03, 2021
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Dec 03, 2021
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| 4.37
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it was amazing
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Nov 2021
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Oct 31, 2021
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Oct 26, 2021
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Oct 26, 2021
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| 4.01
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it was amazing
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Jun 15, 2021
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Jun 14, 2021
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| 4.34
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it was amazing
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Feb 24, 2021
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Feb 17, 2021
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| 4.04
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it was amazing
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Feb 2021
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Jan 29, 2021
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| 4.20
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it was amazing
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Jan 31, 2021
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Jan 24, 2021
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| 4.04
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it was amazing
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Jan 26, 2021
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Jan 23, 2021
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| 4.09
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Jan 23, 2021
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Jan 22, 2021
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| 4.20
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it was amazing
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Jan 24, 2021
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Jan 21, 2021
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| 4.07
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Jan 21, 2021
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Jan 18, 2021
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| 4.11
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Jan 22, 2021
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Jan 18, 2021
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| 5.00
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it was amazing
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Jan 18, 2021
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Jan 14, 2021
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| 4.03
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really liked it
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Jan 14, 2021
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Jan 09, 2021
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| 3.88
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Jan 14, 2021
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Jan 09, 2021
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| 3.50
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really liked it
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Jan 09, 2021
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Jan 08, 2021
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| 4.41
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it was amazing
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Jan 09, 2021
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Jan 08, 2021
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