The Untold History of the United States Read online

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  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION:

  ROOTS OF EMPIRE: “WAR IS A RACKET”

  Chapter 1

  WORLD WAR I:

  WILSON VS. LENIN

  Chapter 2

  THE NEW DEAL:

  “I WELCOME THEIR HATRED”

  Chapter 3

  WORLD WAR II:

  WHO REALLY DEFEATED GERMANY?

  Chapter 4

  THE BOMB:

  THE TRAGEDY OF A SMALL MAN

  Chapter 5

  THE COLD WAR:

  WHO STARTED IT?

  Chapter 6

  EISENHOWER:

  A NOT SO PRETTY PICTURE

  Chapter 7

  JFK:

  “THE MOST DANGEROUS MOMENT IN HISTORY”

  Chapter 8

  LBJ:

  EMPIRE DERAILED

  Chapter 9

  NIXON AND KISSINGER:

  THE “MADMAN” AND THE “PSYCHOPATH”

  Chapter 10

  COLLAPSE OF DETENTE:

  DARKNESS AT NOON

  Chapter 11

  THE REAGAN YEARS:

  DEATH SQUADS FOR DEMOCRACY

  Chapter 12

  THE COLD WAR ENDS:

  SQUANDERED OPPORTUNITIES

  Chapter 13

  THE BUSH-CHENEY DEBACLE:

  “THE GATES OF HELL ARE OPEN IN IRAQ”

  Chapter 14

  OBAMA:

  MANAGING A WOUNDED EMPIRE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT OLIVER STONE AND PETER KUZNICK

  NOTES

  INDEX

  PHOTO CREDITS

  To our children—Tara, Michael, Sean, Lexie, Sara, and Asmara—and the better world that they and all children deserve.

  FOREWORD

  This book and the documentary film series it is based on challenge the basic narrative of U.S. history that most Americans have been taught. That popular and somewhat mythic view, carefully filtered through the prism of American altruism, benevolence, magnanimity, exceptionalism, and devotion to liberty and justice, is introduced in early childhood, reinforced throughout primary and secondary education, and retold so often that it becomes part of the air that Americans breathe. It is consoling; it is comforting. But it only tells a small part of the story. It may convince those who don’t probe too deeply, but like the real air Americans breathe, it is ultimately harmful, noxious, polluted. It not only renders Americans incapable of understanding the way much of the rest of the world looks at the United States, it leaves them unable to act effectively to change the world for the better. For Americans, like people everywhere, are in thrall to their visions of the past, rarely realizing the extent to which their understanding of history shapes behavior in the here and now. Historical understanding defines people’s very sense of what is thinkable and achievable. As a result, many have lost the ability to imagine a world that is substantially different from and better than what exists today.

  Thus, the book we have written, though inspired by and based upon the documentary film series, is in many ways independent. We see the book and documentary as complementary but not the same. We hope documentary viewers will read the book to get a fuller sense of this history and that readers will watch the documentary to get the full power of the visual and dramatic presentation. We offer both book and film series to the forces of progressive change around the world in the hopes that the information we provide will prove useful in their fight for a more just, humane, democratic, and equitable world.

  INTRODUCTION:

  Roots of Empire: “War Is a Racket”

  We write this book as the curtain slowly draws down on the American Empire. It was 1941 when magazine magnate Henry Luce declared the twentieth century the “American Century.” Little could he have imagined how true that would be, writing before the defeat of Germany and Japan, the advent of the atomic bomb, the boom in U.S. postwar production, the rise and institutionalization of the military-industrial complex, the development of the Internet, the transmogrification of the United States into a national security state, and the country’s “victory” in the Cold War.

  Luce’s vision of untrammeled U.S. hegemony has always been a contested one. Vice President Henry Wallace urged the United States to instead usher in what he called “the Century of the Common Man.” Wallace, whom realists dismissed as a “dreamer” and a “visionary,” laid out a blueprint for a world of science-and technology-based abundance, a world banning colonialism and economic exploitation, a world of peace and shared prosperity. Unfortunately, the postwar world has conformed much more closely to Luce’s imperial vision than Wallace’s progressive one. More recently, in 1997, a new generation of proponents of U.S. global supremacy, who would go on to constitute the neoconservative “brain trust” of the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, called for the establishment of a “new American Century.” It was a perspective that gained many adherents in the earlier years of the twenty-first century, before the calamitous consequences of the United States’ latest wars became widely recognized.

  The United States’ run as global hegemon—the most powerful and dominant nation the world has ever seen—has been marked by proud achievements and terrible disappointments. It is the latter—the darker side of U.S. history—that we explore in the following pages. We don’t try to tell all of U.S. history. That would be an impossible task. We don’t focus extensively on many of the things the United States has done right. There are libraries full of books dedicated to that purpose and school curricula that trumpet U.S. achievements. We are more concerned with focusing a spotlight on what the United States has done wrong—the ways in which we believe the country has betrayed its mission—with the faith that there is still time to correct those errors as we move forward into the twenty-first century. We are profoundly disturbed by the direction of U.S. policy at a time when the United States was recently at war in three Muslim countries and carrying out drone attacks, best viewed as targeted assassinations, in at least six others. Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe, totaling more than a thousand by some counts? Why does the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation poses an imminent threat? Why is the gap between rich and poor greater in the United States than in any other developed country, and why is the United States the only advanced nation without a universal health care program?

  Why do such a tiny number of people—whether the figure is currently 300 or 500 or 2,000—control more wealth than the world’s poorest 3 billion? Why are a tiny minority of wealthy Americans allowed to exert so much control over U.S. domestic politics, foreign policy, and media while the great masses see a diminution of their real power and standards of living? Why have Americans submitted to levels of surveillance, government intrusion, abuse of civil liberties, and loss of privacy that would have appalled the Founding Fathers and earlier generations? Why does the United States have a lower percentage of unionized workers than any other advanced industrial democracy? Why, in our country, are those who are driven by personal greed and narrow self-interest empowered over those who extol social values like kindness, generosity, compassion, sharing, empath
y, and community building? And why has it become so hard for the great majority of Americans to imagine a different, we would say a better, future than the one defined by current policy initiatives and social values? These are only a few of the questions we will address in these pages. Although we can’t hope to answer all of them, we hope to present the historical background that will enable readers to explore these topics more deeply on their own.

  Along the way, we will also highlight some of the forces and individuals who have endeavored, sometimes heroically, to put the country back on the right track. We take seriously President John Quincy Adams’s July 4, 1821, condemnation of British colonialism and declaration that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” lest she “involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” The United States, Adams warned, might “become the dictatress of the world [but] she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”1

  Adams presciently foresaw what would befall the United States if it sacrificed its republican spirit on the altar of empire. Compounding the problem is Americans’ persistent denial of their nation’s imperial past and the ways in which it shapes present policy. As historian Alfred McCoy observes, “For empires, the past is just another overseas territory ripe for reconstruction, even reinvention.”2 Americans refuse to live in history, even though, as novelist J. M. Coetzee understands, empire must always do so. In Waiting for the Barbarians, he wrote, “Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one.”3

  Americans believe they are unbound by history. Historian Christopher Lasch saw this as a reflection of their “narcissism.” It is also, for many, a way to avoid grappling with what their nation has become over the past century. It was easier, while U.S. dominance lasted, for citizens to comfort themselves with consoling fables of U.S. benevolence while real historical knowledge steadily declined. Americans’ continuing separation from the rest of the multilingual and integrated world only exacerbates the problem. Seclusion has not only bred ignorance; it has also bred fear, which we have seen manifested repeatedly in the exaggerated assessment of enemy threats and recurrent panics about alien intruders, domestic and foreign radicals, and, more recently, menacing Islamic terrorists.

  U.S. citizens’ ignorance of their country’s history was once again driven home when the results of a nationwide test, known as the Nation’s Report Card, were unveiled in June 2011. The test of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders revealed that U.S. students are, according to the New York Times, “less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject.” The National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrated proficiency. And even the “proficiency” of that 12 percent was called into question when, shockingly, only 2 percent could identify the social problem that the Brown v. Board of Education decision was meant to correct, even though the answer was evident in the wording of the question.4

  This gaping historical void has largely been filled with myth. Among those myths is the self-serving idea that, in the words of John Winthrop aboard the Arbella in 1630, America shall be as a divinely ordained “city upon a hill”—a beacon for the rest of the world to follow. According to such reasoning, the United States is measurably superior to the rest of the corrupt and venal world. At certain moments, that has been true. There have been times when American values and achievements have led the way to major advances in human history and social progress. But there have been just as many occasions, if not more, when the United States has undermined human progress in pursuing its policies. Though the belief that the United States is fundamentally different from other nations—that others act out of self-interest to achieve power or economic gain while the United States, motivated only by a commitment to freedom and liberty, altruistically sacrifices for mankind—was buried for many in the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the jungles of Vietnam, it has reemerged in recent years as a staple of right-wing historical revisionism.

  This myth of American exceptionalism was perhaps best reflected in the post-Versailles comment by President Woodrow Wilson that “at last the world knows America as the savior of the world!”5 U.S. leaders have expressed that sentiment repeatedly over the years, although usually with a little more humility.

  Such humility is completely missing from declarations by Tea Party xenophobes who have made obeisance to the notion of American exceptionalism the sine qua non of patriotism and take President Barack Obama’s more nuanced comments to confirm their suspicion that, even if he was born in the United States, as most now grudgingly admit, he’s still not really an American. They take great umbrage at his 2009 comment that “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”6

  That Obama refuses to trumpet the notion that the United States is history’s gift to humanity has become an article of faith among Republican leaders who, knowing that 58 percent of Americans believe that “God has granted America a special role in human history,” have opportunistically used Obama’s less-than-full-throated assent to bludgeon him. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee charged that Obama’s “worldview is dramatically different than any president, Republican or Democrat, we’ve had. . . . He grew up more as a globalist than an American. To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation.”7

  The importance of developing an uncorrupted view of U.S. history and a cogent critique of U.S. imperialism has been an article of faith among left-leaning historians and activists dating back to the New Left in the 1960s. Conservatives, on the other hand, have routinely denied that the United States has any imperial pretensions. It is only recently that neoconservatives have broken with this pattern, proudly proclaiming not only that America is an empire but that it is the most powerful and most righteous empire the world has ever seen. To most Americans this is still blasphemy. To the neocons it reflects muscularity—the United States playing the dominating role for which God prepared it. In the euphoria following the October 7, 2001, invasion of Afghanistan, before the folly of the United States’ latest imperial adventures came crashing down on premature celebrants, conservative pundits jumped on the empire bandwagon. William Kristol’s Weekly Standard boldly headlined the cover of its October 15 edition, “The Case for American Empire.” National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry called for “a kind of low-grade colonialism” to topple dangerous governments beyond Afghanistan.8 A few months later columnist Charles Krauthammer took note of the fact that “people are now coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’ ” He thought it timely, given the complete U.S. domination “culturally, economically, technologically and militarily.”9 The New York Times Sunday magazine cover for January 5, 2003, read, “American Empire: Get Used To It.”

  Although many neoconservatives see the empire as a recent development, U.S. expansionist impulse shaped settlement, growth, and conquest from the establishment of the earliest British colonies, an impulse later embodied in the notion of “manifest destiny” and reflected in the Monroe Doctrine. As Yale historian Paul Kennedy put it, “From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation.”10 This sometimes genocidal hunger for others’ land and resources was always couched in the highest of motives—a commitment to altruistically advancing freedom, progress, and civilization—and c
ontinues to be so today. As William Appleman Williams, one of the earliest and most insightful students of the American Empire, explained, “The routine lust for land, markets, or security became justifications for noble rhetoric about prosperity, liberty, and security.”11 U.S. leaders have accordingly denied, though not always convincingly, the racist assumptions that justified this expansionist impulse.

  They have also denied the means by which it was accomplished. But reminders have often come from the most unexpected of places. It was Samuel Huntington, progenitor of the reductionist and wrongheaded “clash of civilizations” thesis, who astutely pointed out: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other religions were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”12

  Wall Street Journal editor and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot understood better than most that U.S. imperial designs were not of recent vintage. He chided Donald Rumsfeld for his sharp response to an Al-Jazeera reporter who asked him if the United States was “empire building.” Boot quipped that Rumsfeld “reacted as if he’d been asked whether he wears women’s underwear.” “We don’t seek empires,” Rumsfeld snapped. “We’re not imperialistic. We never have been.” Boot disagreed, citing the expansion across the continent that began with the Louisiana Purchase; moving abroad with the late-nineteenth-century acquisitions of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Alaska; followed by the post–World War II “bout of imperialism” in Germany and Japan; and capped off with the “recent ‘nation-building’ experiments in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan[, which] are imperialism under another name.” But, unlike critics on the left, Boot applauded U.S. expansionary policies. “U.S. imperialism,” he argued, “has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century.”13