American History Tellers - The Cold War - Hearts and Minds | 2

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

Forget trenches, infantry and tanks. The United States and Soviet Union fought the Cold War with ideas and information. Episode 2 describes the cunning of Soviet propaganda campaigns. The United States adapted those techniques for their own purposes, broadcasting an image of the nation as a beacon of hope and freedom through covert ops and jazz concerts alike - even if those at home were hurting or oppressed.For more information on the subjects and themes discussed in the episode, see the book “Total Cold War,” by Kenneth Osgood. It’s essential to understanding how propaganda shaped policy and vice-versa during the Cold War.Penny Von Eschen’s books, “Race Against Empire,” and “Satchmo Blows Up the World,” discuss at length the ways in which black American culture, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement both helped and hindered US foreign policy goals.Finally, Audra Wolfe’s book, “Competing with the Soviets,” was crucial to our overall understanding of the Cold War.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine yourself in Brooklyn, 1948. It's springtime. Trees are just budding out. It's Sunday, and everyone in your neighborhood is either cooking family dinner or getting ready for church. The smell of tomato sauce wafts in through the open windows. You leave your wife in charge of the pasta so that you can take your elderly mother to church down the street. The pews are filled with familiar faces from the neighborhood.

Everyone's wearing their Sunday best. The women in hats and nylons, the men in suits. You stretch your neck. Maybe you work in construction or maybe a new airplane factory. But whatever you do, it doesn't usually involve wearing a tie. All around you, greetings in Italian, the familiar scent of candle wax. You settle in for Mass. All of this is routine, almost second nature to you. That's why you notice immediately when the priest departs from the usual script. His sermon barely touches on the gospel reading. Instead, for a solid ten minutes, he describes the horrors of life under communism. Unless something happens, the communists are going to win the upcoming election in Italy.

It is your sacred duty, as a Catholic and as an American, to stop this travesty. Your mother raises an eyebrow. She does not approve of politics from the pulpit. When you glance around the sanctuary, though, you see lots of heads nodding. You wait to see what the priest has in mind. The diocese has a way for you to help.

If you look inside your bulletin, you'll find a yellow insert in Italian. It's a sample letter that you can use to write to your friends and your family in the old country. Just sign and address it, return it to the church, and the diocese will take care of postage and mailing. Your Italian is rusty, but later, after the meatballs make their rounds, your mother translates it for everyone at the table. The communist victory at the polls will bring God's wrath down on Italians. A vote for the communists will destroy your churches, your homes, and your land. Russia will drag your loved ones away as slaves. If the communists win, the United States will cut off money, food, and medicine.

Anyone who personally votes for the communists should not expect to see or hear from relatives in America ever again. After a brief moment of stunned silence, everyone begins talking at once. You can't be serious. I'm not going to cut off Cousin Lucha. Who wrote this anyway? What's it doing in a church? Are the communists really that bad? Look, if Father Bocelli wants us to write our relatives, we'll write our relatives. You drop off your signed copy at the rectory later that week. At work, the other Italians on your crew say that they've been asked to send similar letters, and all of them did. Their letters joined tens of thousands of others that crossed the Atlantic that spring. The campaign was effective. In late April, the Christian Democrats won a resounding victory at the polls.

Italy was safe from the communists, for now. The priests thanked the parish for its role in preserving freedom. And you? Well, you just helped the CIA pull off its first successful psychological warfare campaign. And many more would follow. With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine

without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their ever-growing catalog. Explore themes of friendship, loss, and hope with remarkably bright creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. Find what piques your imagination. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial, and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. From Wondery comes a new series about a lawyer who broke all the rules. Need to launder some money? Broker a deal with a drug cartel?

Take out a witness? Paul can do it. I'm your host, Brandon Jinks Jenkins. Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. I'm Lindsey Graham. Last time on American History Tellers, we talked about why Americans had come to see communism and the Soviet Union as existential threats in the early days of the Cold War. We talked a lot about ideology, what Americans meant when they referred to freedom, and what the Soviets thought they had to offer the world instead. Specifically, we mentioned the common term and the common form,

two communist propaganda agencies that use front organizations to appeal to mainstream, liberal opinion all over the world. The Soviets were very, very good at propaganda, so much so that the Americans began to wonder if they could learn from them. And so, beginning in 1948, the leading lights of American foreign policy, from the State Department to the newly created CIA, embraced propaganda and covert operations as major tools in the fight against communism. In today's episode, Propaganda, we're taking a closer look at the hows and whys of psychological warfare in the first decade of the Cold War. We'll focus on the period from approximately 1947 to 1960, the end of the Eisenhower administration. It's not that psychological warfare stopped after that. If anything, President Kennedy ramped up covert operations,

but later propaganda programs followed the patterns established in the Truman and Eisenhower periods. Let's say it's April 1950. Two years have passed since loyal Italian Americans used a letter-writing campaign to help stop the spread of communism. You are a newspaper editor from a medium-sized city in the Midwest, like Akron or Boise, or maybe the senior political writer for a national daily. You've come to Washington, D.C. to join hundreds of your colleagues for the annual meeting of the American Society

of Newspaper Editors. The filigreed ballroom at the Statler Hotel buzzes with the sound of industry gossip punctuated by the clinks of glasses and forks. It's a formal affair, with tuxedoed waiters passing through to collect the luncheon plates and pour the coffee. The elaborate bouquet in the center of your table perfumes the air, but obscures your view. Still, you can see enough to know that there's more than one opinion at your table. Everyone is talking about the guest of honor, President Harry Truman. Truman's got to do something. The communists are killing us in the press.

It's because the communists are winning all over the world. It's our job to report those facts. A hush settles on the room as the host introduces the president. Chairs scrape the floors as the diners turn towards the front. According to the heavy stock of the luncheon program, the president's address will announce a new campaign for truth. You and everyone else in the room sit up to make sure you catch his every word. You're a reporter, after all.

Mr. Chairman, distinguished guests, members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, thank you. The president begins by praising the independent spirit of the American press. In democracies, he says, the press have to have a free hand. But soon his tone shifts. The United States was losing the worldwide contest for, as he put it, the minds of men. American media wasn't doing enough to stop the deceit, distortion, and lies being spread by the Soviet Union. Just as it begins to dawn on you that President Truman is asking you and the other editors to carry out a government propaganda campaign, he makes it explicit.

This is what President Truman said in his speech that day in April 1950. The task is nothing less to meet false propaganda with truth all around the globe. Everywhere that the propaganda of the communist totalitarianism is spread, we must meet it and overcome it with honest information about freedom and democracy. The president explained that all Americans, from union leaders to farmers to college students, had a part to play in this fight. The heaviest responsibility, though, fell to the nation's newspapers. I am confident that the American press can and will

make a tremendously useful contribution toward finding new solutions. The president's language was careful. He never actually said that he wanted American journalists to promote propaganda. Instead, he asked them to share the truth about the benefits of American foreign policy to audiences at home and abroad. He was, in other words,

asking you to share the government's version of the truth. You and the other assembled journalists will spend much of the rest of the conference debating whether this definition of truth is just another name for propaganda. We don't usually associate propaganda and psychological warfare with democracies. These are fairly loaded terms,

so for definitions, let's turn to the work of historian Kenneth Osgood. In his book, Total Cold War, Osgood defines propaganda as any technique or action that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, or behavior of a group. The purpose of propaganda, he explains, is to persuade. Sometimes propaganda consists of false information aimed at the masses. Think of Nazi films. But it can also involve the strategic use of false information aimed at the masses. Think of Nazi films. But it can also involve the strategic use of factual information.

And propaganda isn't just limited to mass media. An Uncle Sam Wants You poster is a kind of propaganda, but awards, memorials, even fellowships can be propaganda. The World Peace Congress I mentioned in the first episode, for instance, is classic propaganda. Propaganda's bad reputation comes from its lack of transparency. Even if propaganda is true, it's not neutral. And quite often, the authors of propaganda attempt to hide their role or even misattribute the source. During the Cold War, the United States experimented with all of these

different kinds of propaganda. The National Security Council established a division of labor for handling overt or acknowledged propaganda and covert or secret propaganda. Voice of America built radio towers around the world to broadcast the United States' message to the furthest corners of the globe. But because Voice of America owned up to its relationship to the U.S. government, its reporting had to be factual. In the taxonomy of propaganda, Voice of America was white propaganda. It was true, and its source was acknowledged. Gray propaganda pushes factual information, but it might cloak its origins. Let's say, for instance, that you attended a concert by an American orchestra in Munich.

The concert is sponsored by the mayor's office. He welcomes concertgoers to the performance with a speech that praises freedom of expression in the West. The program for this concert might not necessarily acknowledge that the mayor got his funding from the Marshall Plan, but it's not hard to figure that out. Gray propaganda allowed local officials to get credit for actions that the United States wanted to happen. Black propaganda is the stuff of spy novels. Lies, misinformation, misdirection, all things that could embarrass the government if found out. This was the CIA's realm.

When Hungarian refugees urged their compatriots to rise up against Stalin using radio transmitters paid for by the CIA, this was black propaganda. When the CIA stuffed weather balloons full of leaflets denouncing communism and launched those balloons into Lithuania, that was black propaganda. As broad as the categories of propaganda are, they represent only one flavor of psychological warfare. In the first episode, we talked about how the Marshall Plan hoped to stabilize Europe through an influx of cash. The Soviet Union considered this an act of psychological warfare. The Italian letter-writing campaign I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, drawn from the work of historian Wendy Wall, was a specific kind of psychological warfare known as political warfare. Psychological warfare

includes everything from economic to political warfare to resistance movements and sabotage. The U.S. government has a funny relationship to propaganda. On the one hand, politicians urge media outlets to push the government line. Truman didn't just speak publicly about the need for propaganda. He spoke about it to newspaper editors, virtually guaranteeing that the American public would learn what was happening. In 1952, presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower campaigned on the need for more psychological warfare.

So the U.S. government's interest in propaganda was not exactly secret. But on the other hand, the entire point of so-called black propaganda is misinformation. It's unseemly. It's indecorous. It's disreputable. Black propaganda can cause embarrassment or spark a diplomatic scandal. In the case of the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, it very nearly started a war. For this reason, U.S. psychological warfare campaigns were buried in layers and layers of secrecy. The goal was plausible deniability.

Political leaders can't be blamed for things they don't know exist. When Eisenhower's new Director of Central Intelligence, Alan Dulles, arrived in office in 1953, even he despaired of getting truthful information about what the covert ops arm of the CIA was up to. There were rumors, of course. International broadcasting networks don't come cheap. European intellectuals attending conferences on the nature of freedom learned not to ask too many questions about who was footing the bill if they wanted to be invited back.

And members of Congress had a pretty good guess as to what the CIA's covert operations arm was doing with its hundreds of millions of dollars. U.S. officials from the president on down explicitly saw these activities as psychological warfare, but no one liked to call it that. When Secretary of State George Marshall agreed that the State Department should shoulder the responsibility for overt propaganda, for instance, he insisted that it be called information. That's where the U.S. Information Agency, or USIA, got its name. Most Americans never saw the thousands of newsreels and feature films produced by the USIA.

They never heard the jazz programs broadcast over Voice of America. That's because the law establishing the USIA barred it from broadcasting propaganda to domestic audiences. The architects of Cold War foreign policy considered this truthful propaganda so dangerous that they didn't want the country's own citizens to see it. The language of freedom, it turns out, is powerful stuff. Are you in trouble with the law? Need a lawyer who will fight like hell to keep you out of jail? We defend and we fight just like you'd want your own children defended. Whether you're facing a drug charge, caught up on a murder rap,

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Oh, my God. Are we excited for this moment? Ah! I cannot believe it. Buy it now. Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. Back in 1948, President Truman had promised the United States support to all people seeking freedom. And those words really meant something then. Because after World War II, a wave of independence movements completely redrew the world map. In Africa, French Tunisia simply became Tunisia. The Gold Coast became Ghana. And across the world, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, new countries like Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam were born.

All told, a world map from 1962 would show 40 more countries than one from 1940, representing nearly 800 million people. These new countries entered a world that pitted communism against capitalism. The leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States expected each of these countries to pick a side. But what did Truman's promise mean to an ambitious student in Accra in Ghana, or to a young clerk in Nairobi in Kenya? Put yourself in the shoes of a young nationalist in one of these countries in 1957. You're in a bustling African metropolis, honking cars and motorbikes everywhere you are. Prosperity.

The streets are full of men in suits and horn rims and women in brightly colored prints. You head to a cafe to catch up with your equally ambitious friends. One is going to London for a graduate degree in civil engineering. A new country needs new roads. Another wants to open up a travel agency. You're not sure what your own future holds, perhaps a degree in economics or law. The cafe is crowded today. Towards the back, you see a group of people gathered around a television. People seem animated, upset. You thread your way through the smoky room to see what the fuss is about.

A BBC News report shows footage from a chaotic scene in the American South. On the screen, you see eight black teenagers standing in a group surrounded by a white mob. Soldiers are there, but it's unclear whose side they're on. What's happening? It's a school in the South, the state of Arkansas. They're supposed to be desegregating, but the governor's not letting them in. You look back at the television, just in time to see the image cutting away to a frenzied crowd of white Americans shouting and shaking their fists. The image is fuzzy, but you can make out a sign saying, segregation now and forever. You take a seat, troubled by what you've just seen. You know about racism in the United States, of course, but you were under the impression that the situation was improving.

Why is this happening? I heard a Voice of America broadcast on this just last week saying that the courts were winning the legal battles. You believe that propaganda? The Americans are capitalist imperials. They'll never treat black people as equals in their own country or here. They'll never let Africans run their own affairs. On this, you're in agreement. You and your friend, like everyone else in this cafe, are black. If this is how the United States treats its black citizens, you are not interested in anything it has to offer. Are you a communist now? Are you kidding me?

Communists aren't any better. All the communists take orders from Moscow. If you want Africans to be free, they have to follow their own path. These sorts of young elites, future leaders, were exactly the people that both the United States and the Soviet Union hoped to convince. But the United States' core messages of peace and freedom meant nothing when contradicted by images like those coming out of Little Rock. Racism was and is a major problem in the United States.

But during the Cold War, it was also a public relations disaster. Segregation obviously complicated the United States' ability to build relationships with Black elites in newly independent countries. But it also threatened to alienate potential allies in Europe. The former colonial powers resented being told that they had to let go of their colonies while the United States continued to mistreat its own black and brown citizens. So the architects of U.S. propaganda faced a choice. They could actively lie about how blacks were treated in the United States, or they could simply direct their audience's attention elsewhere. For the most part, the United States stuck by President Truman's strategy of truth. Voice of America and the USIA would not lie.

Instead, they'd tell strategic truths. If you turned into Voice of America in Lisbon, you might hear a report that emphasizes the courage of civil rights leaders, but it might not mention what exactly they were fighting for. A USIA pamphlet highlighting racial progress might include photographs of noted Black leaders like surgeon Charles Drew or baseball star Jackie Robinson, but not include any scenes of ordinary, regular family life. And then there was jazz. Imagine that it's a Thursday night in some Middle Eastern or Asian metropolis. It could be Cairo or Bangkok or Kabul.

Let's say Beirut. It's in the late 1950s and the air is buzzing with excitement. Dizzy Gillespie is in town and there's a rumor he's playing a local club that night. Earlier in the day, Dizzy's 22-piece band played a formal concert outside the U.S. Embassy. Tickets were expensive and hard to get. Dizzy scandalized State Department officials by insisting that the gates be opened to everyone. The whole city pulsed with a rhythm echoing through the city streets. You managed to get into the club, but just barely. The men and women are packed so tight you can

barely move. Room reeks of sweat, smoke, and booze. The sound of the trumpet hits you before you can even see the stage. There he is, Dizzy Gillespie, jamming with some locals. He's brought a few bandmates with him. You don't know their names, but one thing's unmistakable. The trombonist is white. The American South might be segregated, but American jazz was not. This scene and others like it really happened. Starting in March 1956, the U.S. State Department sent out jazz ambassadors to promote this uniquely American art form to the rest of the world. Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington toured the world with their integrated jazz bands. In Thailand, Benny Goodman's band

jammed with The King, an American ally who was himself an accomplished jazz saxophonist. According to historian Penny Von Eschen, the State Department came to see jazz as its secret weapon. International audiences loved it. Every night, tens of millions of listeners around the globe tuned in to hear Music USA, an hour-long jazz show on Voice of America that stayed on the air for more than 30 years. For liberals at the State Department, jazz offered a vision of America as it could be, rather than how it was. But this was precisely the problem for conservatives in Congress. Southern segregationists opposed using State Department money to send Black musicians abroad. They threatened to cut off appropriations for any

cultural tour that included jazz. If the State Department wanted to highlight a uniquely American art form, perhaps it could send college marching bands abroad instead. The Senate's attempt to end jazz diplomacy failed, but the incident is a good example of why Eisenhower's State Department struggled to find the right message to connect with audiences in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. As Von Eschen explains in her book on the topic, the State Department had to protect the integrationist agenda of the tours, their core diplomatic messages from conservative audiences at home. The savviest architects of psychological warfare understood that jazz music alone would not be enough to persuade African and Asian elites to take the United States' side in the Cold War. Still, they struggled to see these new leaders as equals who wanted and deserved control over their own affairs. A growing number of these new leaders resented the idea that they had to choose between

capitalism and communism. They saw this as a false choice. Instead, they tried to stay neutral, refusing to sign up with Moscow or Washington. Some leaders, like Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser, used their loyalty as a bargaining chip for development money. You pay me for my hydroelectric dam, and I'll support your vote in the United Nations. Others rejected interest-based politics in favor of a hybrid nationalism that combined liberal democracy with socialist planning, like Julius Nyeri of Tanganyika, which later became Tanzania. Their insistence on a third way between capitalism and communism gave these newly independent, less developed nations a new name, the Third World. Today, we associate the phrase Third World with developing nations.

It's a derogatory phrase, not a, or the Second World, the Communist bloc. In retrospect, it's doubtful that any psychological warfare campaigns based on American values could have appealed to Third World leaders. They weren't shopping for what the United States was selling. But the mismatch of the American hearts and minds approach to the needs of the third world had consequences for domestic politics as well. We've mentioned the two obvious paths for the United States to take in dealing with the public relations fiasco of racism in America. U.S. propaganda could lie, or it could distract foreign audiences by pointing out what was right in America.

There was, of course, a third option. The United States could have launched an all-out assault on racism to demonstrate its commitment to freedom and equality. Every now and then, when the embarrassment became too much, the U.S. did. Those images out of Little Rock were an international scandal. President Eisenhower was no civil rights champion, but even he realized the damage being done. Three weeks after Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus sent the Arkansas National Guard to keep black teenagers out of Little Rock Central High, Eisenhower addressed the nation to explain why he was sending federal troops to make sure they got in. Here's Eisenhower. At a time when we face grave situations abroad,

because of the hatred that communism bears toward a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety of our nation and the world. Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation. Eisenhower's speech is remarkable for what it does not say. He doesn't mention the students' rights to an education or the moral imperative of the civil rights movement. In his telling, segregation was bad because it gave the communists an easy target.

The Eisenhower administration acted as if the struggle for civil rights and the struggle for decolonization were entirely unrelated. As historian Laura Beltmore puts it, in their struggle to defeat communism, U.S. information officials were forced to defend America's indefensible race relations. American civil rights leaders took note. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s,

they began to wonder if they needed a decolonization movement of their own. Their open admiration for the neutralist governments in Africa and Asia only fueled the FBI's paranoia that civil rights leaders must have links to communism. But we're getting ahead of this story. Let's return to the struggles of the civil rights movement later in this series. For today, the point is that it's extraordinarily difficult to present your country as a beacon of freedom if you're unwilling to address racism and oppression at home. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands.

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In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reached the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of them. I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they

can get away with. In the Pitcairn trials I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Beginning in 1948, the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-communist psychological warfare and propaganda campaigns. If you include the Marshall Plan, the total is in the billions. Beyond a vague plan to win hearts and minds, what was all this money for?

If the enemy was the Soviet Union, how exactly did sending a jazz orchestra to Beirut advance the national defense? The official answer was that hearts and minds campaigns were designed to keep the Cold War from turning hot. If you were a U.S. soldier deployed to Korea in 1952, you might wonder why everyone kept calling it a Cold War. Imagine that you're a medic assigned to a rear-area field hospital in the mountainous terrain surrounding Seoul. It must have been a beautiful country once, but two years of mortar shells and aerial bombing has stripped the hillsides of everything but mud, snow, and rocks.

You and your fellow medics, nurses, and surgeons work at a mobile army surgical hospital, affectionately known as a MASH. That's where the 70s television show gets its name. It was based on the memoirs of a Korean war medic, not unlike the hypothetical one I'm describing now. You spend your days moving between a 200-bed hospital, a surgical tent, and the helicopter landing pad where the medevac pilots bring in

the wounded. By now, the war has ground down to a stalemate. U.S. and South Korean troops are burrowed into positions on either side of the 38th parallel, an imaginary line that separates two very different ideologies with similar peoples. As a MASH medic, you haven't personally seen the front. What you have seen, though, are its effects on the bodies of young enlisted men. With the cutting shudder of an arriving Sikorsky H-5, the entire unit jumps into action. You ready bags of whole blood to treat shock while a nurse preps serum and sedatives. You take pride in your work. The soldiers injured in Korea are almost twice as likely to survive their injuries than soldiers in prior wars.

The courage and skills of frontline medics and helicopter pilots have saved countless lives. The ready availability of penicillin helps too. But some of the injuries are terrible. And too often there's just nothing you can do. On bad days, you're grateful that the cold temperatures keep the smell down. It's days like that, when you've lost a dozen soldiers, that you find the news coverage of the conflict with the Soviet Union most baffling. Here in Korea, battle sure seems hot.

Throughout the entire history of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union only exchanged gunfire a handful of times. There were some tense moments and accidental engagements, to be sure. In Korea, for example, some Soviet pilots wore Chinese uniforms to make sorties on behalf of their North Korean allies. They almost certainly fired at U.S. troops. And Soviet fighter jets forced down at least a dozen U.S. reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union in the 1950s. These engagements remain closely held secrets. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted to call attention to these incidents, even when pilots were captured or killed. The stakes of direct confrontation were simply too high to bear. About a week before Truman gave his campaign of truth speech, the U.S. National Security

Council endorsed a document that would shape the course of U.S. strategy for the rest of the Cold War. Labeled NSC-68, it acknowledged that a war with the Soviet Union was basically unwinnable. Both countries already had atomic weapons, and each was committed to building hydrogen bombs that could kill tens of millions of people at once. Historians often describe this document as apocalyptic, and for good reason. Here's some language from the very first page describing how the emergence of atomic power had changed international relations forever. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction, every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation should the conflict enter the phase of total war. This was dire stuff.

Obviously, the United States needed to be in a position to defend itself against Soviet aggression, but it could not, it would not, attempt to destroy its enemy. NS-68 called for a rapid build-up of political, economic, and military strength against the Soviet Union, but in order that it may not have to be used. Instead, the goal of the United States would be containment. As the only superpower strong enough to resist the Kremlin, the United States had a responsibility to the world to prevent the spread of communism. This is why the United States entered Korea when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel in the summer of 1950. A North Korean victory

would have expanded communist territory. But it's also why the United States stopped there, and why President Truman fired General MacArthur when he wanted to chase the North Koreans into China. The United States would not attempt to roll back communism, only stop its expansion. That's what containment meant. But containment didn't necessarily mean peace. The United States got involved in many conflicts throughout the world in the 1950s and 60s. Beginning in 1949, for example, the CIA began parachuting refugees into Albania in hopes of kindling a resistance movement. The mission failed spectacularly. Of the more than 300 resistance fighters dropped in between 49 and 52,

almost all were killed or captured within hours or at most days of their arrival. It turned out that Soviet spies within the CIA were tipping the Albanian authorities off. The CIA was sending men directly to slaughter. But only a handful of people outside the CIA knew about these failures because the need for plausible deniability trumped the need for oversight. These operations were so secret that for years, the CIA operated with what amounted to a blank check. The details of the Albanian operation weren't released until 2006, more than 50 years after the fact. Sometimes these operations were well-coordinated with the rest of foreign policy, and sometimes they weren't.

Like the Soviet Union, the United States funded its allies to fight proxy wars on its behalf. In Vietnam, anti-communist forces used American weapons to shoot at communist partisans firing Soviet guns. To American strategists, all of these conflicts were mere stand-ins for the larger battle that could not be fought. In the broader frame of history, this bipolar logic has made it possible for many Americans to forget these conflicts that happened in faraway places. In Korea, the Forgotten War, over 36,000 American soldiers and an estimated 2 million Koreans died. But there was another reason why the United States preferred to keep the Cold War cold. NSC-68 envisioned the Cold War as a clash of civilizations, a battle between slavery and freedom.

In this kind of war, a victory by force would be hollow. For a victory over communism to be truly meaningful, the citizens of the world must choose freedom. Hear the conviction, the sense of moral fortitude expressed in NSC 68. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses

the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society. The Cold War was a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake. Remember, this document was written in 1950, in the early years of the Cold War. NSC-68 is a crystal ball of sorts, eerily predicting the conflicting moral choices the United States would face in fighting the Cold War. In 1953, the CIA was involved in a coup d'etat in Iran. In 1954, in Guatemala. The FBI hounded civil rights activists at home,

while the Voice of America praised their accomplishments abroad. For the next 20 years, the United States would wrestle with this question of how to impose its singular vision of freedom on the rest of the world while staying true to its tenets at home. From Wondery, this is Episode 2 of The Cold War for American History Tellers. On the next episode, we look at the alternative to Cold War, a hot war with nuclear weapons. The advent of the atomic age changed everything, from military strategy to city planning, and the arms race transformed nearly every aspect of American life. Free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.

And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode is written by Audra Wolfe, Ph.D. Executive Producers are Ben Adair and Hernan Lopez for Wondery. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present

the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid

to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition, wherever you get your books.