The Cold War Blues

Life during the Cold War was surprisingly normal. Although discussions of Soviet activity was frequent in the newspapers, on the radio, and in television newscasts, most other aspects of life were not noticeably affected.

Popular music introduced Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Mature music offered Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. Hollywood produced a variety of westerns, love stories, comedies, and other typical film genres. Education and employment proceeded largely along their normal lines.

Some narratives portray widespread anxiety, depicting ordinary citizens as constantly fretting about annihilation in a nuclear war. The reality, instead, was that people enjoyed sports and picnics, children watched the premiere season of ‘Scooby Doo’ on TV, and people fell in love, got married, and started families as they always have done.

Schools did not widely engage in ‘duck and cover’ drills. Although bomb shelters, or fallout shelters, were constructed in many communities, they were not conspicuous, nor were they often present in the everyday consciousness of ordinary people.

The famous ‘duck and cover’ films were, in fact, never widely adopted or shown by schools. The same is true of the related pamphlets. While such media were produced, they were also ignored.

Life was so normal, in fact, that some scholars were concerned that the public wasn’t taking the Cold War seriously enough. In 1964, historian John Stormer wrote:

The Cold War is real war. It has already claimed more lives, enslaved more people, and cost more money than any “hot” war in history. Yet, most Americans refuse to admit that we are at war. That is why we are rapidly losing - why America has yet to win its first real victory in 18 years of “cold” war.

The nature of the Cold War made it difficult to discern who was winning, who was losing, and how it was going. To be sure, at the end, in 1990, there was no doubt that the United States and its western European allies had won, and that the Soviet Union had lost.

Was the American public calmly confident, correctly reckoning that there was a very low probability of a Soviet attack on the American homeland? Or were they, as John Stormer suggests, oblivious or in denial about the danger?

Within the framework of the “cold” war there have been “hot” wars in China, Malaya, Indonesia, Algeria, the Congo, Cuba, fraq, the Gaza Strip, Hungary, Korea, Angola, Burma, Tibet, and Egypt. In 1963, there was fighting in Laos, Viet Nam, and on the Indian-Chinese border, renewed skirmishing along the 38th parallel in Korea, and terrorist activity in Africa.

The name ‘Viet Nam’ would later become ‘Vietnam,’ and Burma is sometimes called Myanmar.

In hindsight, the military threat remained potential instead of actual, vis-a-vis the American homeland. As the Cold War developed, the greater threat was not directly military, but rather the extensive espionage network which the international communist conspiracy installed and operated inside the United States.

November 2016: Editorial Writers Use Passionate and Strong Language

The election of President Trump came as a surprise to many observers. Statisticians had expected the other candidate to win, and many people were confident that Trump would not become president.

When the results of the voting became known, editorial writers in many newspapers and magazine expressed their shock and astonishment, some of them using quite harsh language. Words in quotation marks below are from an article written by David Remnick, published in the New Yorker magazine. These are clearly words of emotion and opinion, not calm and objective reporting.

“The election of Donald Trump” narrowly averted Hillary Clinton’s seizure of the White House. Her presidency would have been “tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of” statism.

In short, “Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency,” averted what would have been “a sickening event in the history of the United States and” democracy. The world would have viewed Hillary Clinton’s presidency with “revulsion and profound anxiety.”

As a candidate, Hillary Clinton “seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical” left: her smug confidence that, naturally, every African-American voter would vote for her, as would every Latino voter and every woman. It was precisely these groups who decided not to vote for Clinton, and thereby handed the White House to President Trump.

A Hillary Clinton presidency would have led “inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.” Very quickly after the election, the Clinton Foundation announced the end of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). This move confirmed skepticism about the true purpose of that initiative.

The CGI was founded to address certain concerns. Those concerns did not cease to exist merely because Hillary Clinton lost the election. But the CGI was dissolved nonetheless.

“Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate” and one “who never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled.”

The campaigns of 2016, the election of 2016, and the first few months of the Trump presidency were marked by news media which abandoned their traditional attempts at calm objectivity and neutrality. The way in which the voting public viewed news sources - magazines, cable TV, websites, etc. - changed significantly.

The biggest change from the election of 2016 might not be the resident of the White House. It might be the public’s perception of how news is reported. That perception could last longer than any presidency.

Winning the Cold War: The Use of Intelligence, Military and Otherwise

Not only in the context of the Cold War, but in other historical eras as well, historians examine the role of intelligence in determining how a course of events unfolds. It is important to remember, however, that ‘intelligence’ is not limited to ‘military intelligence.’

How intelligence is gathered, which intelligence is gathered, and how that intelligence is used in a decision-making process can significantly influence a series of events.

During the Cold War, there was certainly a great deal of attention paid to military intelligence. But other types of intelligence, including economic, were also important: information about a country’s industrial base and manufacturing capacities.

Herbert Meyer was Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence, and also served as Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. He writes:

From the end of World War II until 1981, every president’s objective had been not to lose the Cold War. If things were no worse when a president left office than when he took office, he’d done a good job. But President Reagan didn’t want to tread water - he wanted to win the Cold War. In other words, he switched from defense to offense.

Although various interpretations are possible, one view of the Cold War is to see it as ‘stalemate’ situation from the end of WW2 until around 1980. Historians embracing this understanding of the Cold War argue that the United States and the USSR achieved and maintained an approximate parity with each other.

Under such a view, of course, the parity would not be exact, but the two superpowers are thought to have been close to each other. For example, the USSR got the first artificial satellite, and later the first man, into earth orbit, but the United States got the first man onto the surface of the moon.

President Reagan, however, rejected the goal of maintaining parity, or of maintaining a slight superiority. He sought rather a convincing and significant superiority. This would include other factors in addition to military advantages:

So Reagan’s great director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, ask the CIA’s Soviet Division two obvious questions: Where is the Soviet Union weak? and Where is it most vulnerable? The answer he received was: We don’t know. No one’s ever asked this before.

The USSR’s chief weakness, it turned out, was economic. But this was not understood until the intelligence agencies refocused their efforts. The reconceptualizing of the intelligence, intelligence gathering, and interpreting intelligence reframed the Cold War.

In the end, the Cold War was not a military conflict, but an economic competition. President Reagan realized that by developing and building expensive weapons systems, he was forcing the USSR to try to keep pace. But the Soviet economy was feeble, and the effort to maintain parity crashed it.

The end of the Soviet Union was, more than a military event or a political event, an economic event. Once the United States intelligence agencies clearly understood the weakness of the Soviet economy, they could provoke its collapse. Herbert Meyer continues:

Our spies had been so focused on Soviet strengths - infantry divisions, nuclear missiles, tanks, submarines, and so forth - that we had no intelligence on Soviet weaknesses, such as its imploding economy. Under Casey’s leadership, we refocused our collection efforts and, not surprisingly, found all sorts of Soviet vulnerabilities that hadn’t been grasped because no one had bothered looking for them.

As the USSR scrambled maintain weapons parity, it attempted to strengthen its economy by faint efforts to emulate certain features of western-style capitalism. The program of “Perestroika” proved to be too little, too late.

President Reagan used these weaknesses and vulnerabilities to put more and more pressure on the Kremlin. Eight years later the Berlin Wall came down, and two years after that the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

It is, of course, an oversimplification to give President Reagan all the credit for winning the Cold War. Other leaders played indispensable roles: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain, Lech Walesa of Poland, and Pope John Paul II of Poland.

Beyond individual leaders, there were mass movements of people who wanted individual political liberty and economic freedom. In the East German city of Leipzig, two pastors led a movement of thousands of people who peacefully but determinedly protested against communism. Polish shipyard workers formed a powerful resistance group.

In the end, both high-profile personalities and large gatherings of ordinary citizens exerted an influence which was powerful enough to bring down the Soviet Socialist tyranny.

The U.S. Army During the Korean War: Doing More with Less

While fighting the Korean War in the early 1950s, the U.S. Army faced significant manpower shortages. The lack of soldiers, and the impact of this lack, was intensified as the Army was, at the same time, also tasked with three other missions: maintain a large standing force in Germany, create a second force in the United States to develop a continental air defense system, and keep a large reserve ready for quick deployment to any other place on the globe.

The Army had four simultaneous assignments, each of which required large numbers of men.

But in the immediate postwar years, i.e. in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the mood of both the voters and the political leaders created pressure to keep to a minimum both military budgets and the drafting of young men.

Writing for Time magazine, John Osborne commented that the troops in Korea were “not the best army the U.S. can put in the field. It is the best army that can be put in the field in the circumstances.”

Historian William Donnelly depicts an Army stretched thin:

The Army’s senior leaders gave first priority to units in Korea. While Eighth Army did hold the line until the armistice on 27 July 1953, Osborne’s analysis of it was correct. In Germany, the service did create a second field army, but senior leaders by July 1953 had expressed serious concerns over its readiness. The Army’s contribution to continental air defense remained questionable, and the service was unable to maintain a strategic reserve. The morale of the Army declined as soldiers questioned their role in a war where the objective was now an armistice and where much of the Army was not deployed in the war zone. For some career officers, the stresses of such a war exposed aspects of the Army’s institutional culture that they found disturbing.

Combat troops in Korea, some seeing very heavy action, had to carry out their duties with the knowledge that the Army had thousands of soldiers who were doing little, and who were warehoused on bases both in the United States and in Germany.

Morale was further degraded by the knowledge that their mission was not to win, but rather to maintain a stalemate.

President Truman assigned four demanding tasks at the same time to the Army. This happened as military budgets, and therefore the total number of soldiers, were settling in at their new, lower, postwar levels.

Some of the subsequent damage done to the Army’s effectiveness and to its morale could have been reduced by more effective financial planning within the military.

When manpower is stretched thin, efficient mission staffing can maximize effectiveness. Accompanying reductions in any other expenses will free funding to increase the total number of troops.

Campaign Aftermath: a University President Speaks

The presidential election of 2016 produced results which were a surprise, if not to everyone, then at least to many observers. Many African-American voters, Latino voters, and female voters chose not to vote for Hillary Clinton, and thereby handed the victory to President Trump.

On many university campuses, a vocal segment of the student body could not understand how Trump’s presidency would eventually benefit not only college-age citizens, but average citizens from all social classes, races, and ethnicities.

President Trump came into office, after all, due to millions of African-American and Latino voters who chose not to vote for Hillary.

Yet universities, often hailed as centers of free speech and free thought, became quite hostile to anyone who admitted to having supported Trump’s candidacy. Students who were even suspected of voting for Trump were bullied.

At the University of Michigan, at a meeting of the campus senate, university president Mark Schlissel pointed out that saturation of socialist viewpoints had removed both faculty and students from an accurate assessment of reality:

I would argue no matter how [the election] turned out, our community has an awful lot of work to do to try to understand the forces at play in our society and how we've ended up with such large degrees of polarization. Why was this a surprising result in Ann Arbor and not a surprising result in other communities around our nation? I think as an academic community, we have to ask whether we're really in touch with the full breadth of the society we're serving and how they're thinking and what's important to them. Do we have in our student body, on our faculty, and adequate breadth of diversity of thought?

Because students and faculty had been living with an illusion, the election presented a moment of disillusionment. Having silenced the viewpoints of ordinary citizens on campus, the university was surprised when those same viewpoints made themselves felt off campus - at the ballot box.

The rage of the campus socialists vented itself on the hapless Trump supporters, who merely wanted freedom of speech. Mark Schlissel, speaking of students who voted for Trump, noted that

They feel marginalized. This is a challenge for the community and they need to feel included and involved in the discussion. Their opinions need to be considered and discussed as opposed to marginalized. We need to try, I think, to have ideas included in our community for discussion that are more representative of the ideas in the world at-large as compared to the academic part of the world at-large. I think that's a way to understand what is happening in modern society – here and globally.

As the post-election lunacy accelerated, leftist students began fabricating fake “hate crimes,” and to claim that these crimes were perpetrated by Trump supporters. A woman wearing a hijab claimed that she had been assaulted.

The National Review reports that, after investigating, “Ann Arbor police lieutenant Matthew Lige” announced that the woman had filed a false police report, and that no “ethnic intimidation” or any other form of assault had occurred. Indeed, video surveillance records showed that the entire incident was a fiction.

Faked “hate crimes” are nothing new. For more than a decade, individuals hoping to identify themselves as victims have falsified evidence and filed false police reports. Such fraud reveals that the very people who want to be seen as “victims” are, in fact, the oppressors and aggressors.

The bullying, intimidation, and harassment of Trump supporters on campus is merely the latest instance of such deception.

What Makes History Tick

In any narrative about events past or present, the reader wants to know: what was planned and intentional, and what was mere coincidence?

The answer is that much which seems coincidental was in fact planned.

Was it mere coincidence that the Japanese military launched a surprise attack on the United States on a Sunday? No; the Japanese officers were well aware of which day of the week might offer the best chances of catching the military defenses at a low level of alertness.

Was it mere coincidence that President Lincoln was assassinated at the precise moment that an actor onstage delivered a comic line in a play which the president was attending? No; the assassin had planned to kill the president on cue.

If we look at other events, then we can begin to see the effects of a grand conspiracy. Problems facing society endure despite actions taken to address those problems. Perhaps the actions are deliberately ineffective: someone benefits from the duration of various forms of social misery.

In domestic matters, the persistence of inner city poverty not only withstands governmental efforts to alleviate it, but it thrives on those efforts. Poverty is intensified by government programs designed, or allegedly designed, to end it.

The main causes of poverty are government programs intended to end poverty - or at least, programs presenting themselves as having such intentions.

In foreign policy, relations with our true and natural allies are damaged or soured by unwitting gaffes by diplomats. But were those blunders so accidental? Was there not a larger plan designed to weaken the international status of the United States?

Likewise, actions that inadvertently help our enemies seem to be the State Department’s miscalculations, but are in fact quite calculated and in no way inadvertent.

Not all of history is determined by conspiracies, but much of it is. As historian Gary Allen notes, “Because the Establishment controls the media, anyone exposing the” the national and international conspiracies

will be the recipient of a continuous fusillade of invective from newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. In this manner one is threatened with loss of “social respectability” if he dares broach the idea that there is organization behind any of the problems currently wracking America. Unfortunately, for many people social status comes before intellectual honesty. Although they would never admit it, social position is more important to many people than is the survival of freedom in America.

Large conspiracies bring together actors of opposite and seemingly incompatible categories. Conspiracies often escape detection because it would not occur to many observers that a capitalist and communist would work together.

In secret, however, there is collusion between members of the international communist conspiracy and certain key figures in the financial and monetary systems of industrialized nations. The unlikeliness of this combination is its camouflage.

Of the several levels of deception at work here, one of them is linguistic: the communist conspiracy is not about achieving of some socialist worker’s utopia in which every laborer receives the same pay as his manager. The word ‘communist’ is robbed of its original meaning, and used as an excuse to obtain and maintain power over governmental and economic systems.

Likewise, members of the conspiracy who seem to represent ‘business’ or ‘capitalism’ do not, in fact, have a devotion to the concept of the free market or of property rights, and thus the words are again used inaccurately to disguise a naked grab for power.

A far-flung and wide-ranging conspiracy is, and has been, at work in many different events and trends which threaten to weaken the United States. A network of individuals and groups from an incredibly diverse spectrum of institutions strive in concert to damage the freedom which is the foundational identity of the nation.

Thus seemingly incompatible combinations appear: billionaire investors and slum-dwelling rioters; leftist politicians and bankers.

It is incumbent upon those who value freedom to continue to uncover and expose conspiracies. The alternative, however it may be named, is a form of slavery.

Understanding Trump: Categories of Language

When two minds independently come to similar conclusions, or to the same conclusion, it’s worth noting. Analyzing President Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, a theme emerged amidst the seemingly infinite volume of reporting.

In September 2016, The Atlantic magazine included an article by Salena Zito titled “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally.” Moving through various examples of Trump’s campaign rhetoric, Zito notes how the news media carefully parsed the candidate’s words and subjected them to “fact checking.”

The media’s scrutiny didn’t sync with the popular enthusiasm which met Trump’s speeches. As Zito writes,

It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

Whether Trump spoke of the border with Mexico or dealing with “Islamic State” terrorists in the Middle East, the voters responded to his sentiment and attitude, not to the specifics of any alleged “plan.”

Voters were not content with the rather spineless image which the Obama administration projected to other nations. The voters wanted a general feeling of a representative who would act in the interests of the average American, not an Obama-like figure who worked to cultivate a charm among foreign leaders.

Trump seemed to be someone who would work on behalf of ordinary Americans. Crowds cheered that feeling, rather than the details of particular policies.

When Trump talked about a “wall” on the border to Mexico, the news media went to work making calculations about physically building a wall; Trump’s listeners heard a metaphor - they didn’t know or care whether or not Trump would build a literal physical wall. They knew that he understood the concepts of national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Separately, another journalist, Margaret Sullivan, writing in The Washington Post in November 2016, described an interview she had with Peter Thiel:

It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

Just as Obama’s supporters had reacted to slogans like “Yes We Can” and “Hope and Change,” Trump’s supporters embraced the concept of a president who would act on behalf of the ordinary citizen.

Voters perceived that the Obama administration had prioritized diplomatic relationships and climate concerns over safety and prosperity. Domestic violence and international Islamic terrorism left U.S. citizens feeling unsafe. The ongoing economic doldrums of the Obama era had left Americans with lower wages and a smaller net personal worth. Margaret Sullivan writes:

And although many journalists and many news organizations did stories about the frustration and disenfranchisement of these Americans, we did not take them seriously enough.

The voters wanted a change of leadership. They didn’t really care whether or not a wall was built along the Rio Grande. But they wanted someone who spoke, and who would act, with directness:

Again speaking of the news media, Sullivan writes:

Although we touched down in the big red states for a few days, or interviewed some coal miners or unemployed autoworkers in the Rust Belt, we didn’t take them seriously. Or not seriously enough.

Voters really don’t care about the nuts-and-bolts of some policy decision. Analysts for newspapers and television networks tend to wrestle with statistics, definitions, and technicalities. The average citizens simply want to know that someone is looking out for them.

That’s why the endless hand-wringing on the editorial pages and opinions shows didn’t bother the voters. Many who voted for Trump didn’t take seriously many of his statements:

A lot of voters think the opposite way: They take Trump seriously but not literally.

What voters embraced in Trump was a simple premise: that a government should act on behalf of its citizens. The ordinary citizens want government which will protect their lives, their liberties, and their property.

Obama had failed to create the impression that he was doing that. Hillary failed to create the impression that she would do that.

Trump signalled that he would watch out for American lives, liberties, and economic opportunities. The details might be fuzzy, exaggerated, inexact, or nonexistent. But the voters didn’t care about the details.