Part 16 (2/2)

37. Ibid., VI-A, p. 3.

38. Ibid., VIII, p. 14.

39. Ibid., VIII, p. 13.

40. Ibid., III-B, p. 6 ; C, p. 7. The strategy of encouraging peoples in the satellite nations to revolt was tested in the ill-fated Hungarian revolt in 1956 when, despite the desperate pleas from Hungarian resistance fighters, the United States did nothing.

41. NSC-68, VI, pp. 7, 10, 11.

42. Ibid., VI-B, p. 10.

43. Ibid., VIII, pp. 13, 14.

44. Ibid., VI-A, pp. 23.

45. Ibid., VIII, p. 13.

46. See John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 34, 44144.

47. NSC-68, VII-A, p. 9.

48. Ibid., Conclusions and Recommendations, p. 1.

49. Ibid., IV-B, p. 6 ; C, p. 7.

50. Quoted in Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 330.

51. Quoted in Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 8.

52. Quoted in ibid., 7. According to the minutes of the March 1953 meeting of the National Security Council, ”the President and Secretary Dulles were in complete agreement that somehow or other the tabu which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed.” Quoted in ibid., 8.

53. Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 19461948 (New York: Knopf, 1975), 196, 243, 272, 298.

54. Gaddis, The Cold War, 80.

55. See Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 46970, 473; also the spirited contemporary polemic, The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, by Noam Chomsky et al. (New York: The New Press, 1997).

56. I have relied on the excellent account in Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 11957. See also Freeland, The Truman Doctrine, 28185.

57. See the numerous references and discussion in Hogan, A Cross of Iron (see references in his index under ”garrison state”).

58. The fact that the n.a.z.i regime was proudly racist evoked little self-examination by Americans of their own support and toleration of racism. Throughout the war segregation was enforced in the American armed forces.

59. On the government's recruitment of intellectuals, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2000).

60. Cited in Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 44.

61. See Hogan's account in A Cross of Iron (42644) of the ”Freedom Train” and the role of corporate sponsors; and also of the tragicomic episode in Mosinee, Wisconsin, where the town produced a mock communist takeover of the town.

62. Quoted in Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 34. The study group was chaired by General James Doolittle, who had led the first bombing raid on Tokyo during World War II.

63. Ibid., 9297. See also the brilliant study by Michael Rogin, McCarthy and the Intellectuals: The Radical Specter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967). For the impact on the State Department, see Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969), 36265. For a readable account emphasizing the effects of McCarthyism upon the media, see Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005).

64. Gaddis, The Cold War, 192.

65. NSC-68, Conclusions, p. 4.

66. Gaddis, The Cold War, 79.

67. On the messianic element, see Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 298, 384; and on the defense economy, see ibid., 47273.

68. See the discussion in James P. Young, Reconsidering American Liberalism: The Troubled Odyssey of the Liberal Idea (Boulder, Colo.: West-view Press, 1996), 60 ff., 166 ff., 276 ff. Also Christopher Lasch's splendid The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), especially 455 ff.

69. ”The effective operation of a democratic political system requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” Samuel P. Huntington, ”The Democratic Distemper,” in The American Commonwealth: 1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 37.

70. Elitism was not solely an academic construction. Here is Dean Acheson describing NSC-68 as ”a formidable doc.u.ment [that] presents more than a clinic in political science's latest, most fas.h.i.+onable, and most boring study, 'the decision-making process,' for it carries us beyond decisions to what should be their fruits, action. If it is helpful to think of societies as ent.i.ties, it is equally so to consider their direction centers as groups of cells, thinking cells, action cells, emotion cells, and so on. The society operates best, improves its chances of survival most, in which the thinking cells work out a fairly long-range course of conduct before the others take over-provided it also has a little bit better than average luck. We [i.e., the authors of NSC-68] had an excellent group of thought cells. . . . In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical 'average American citizen' put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his own country. a.s.suming a man or a woman with a fair education, a family, and a job in or out of the house, it seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average. . . . [Our] points to be understandable had to be clear. If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.” Acheson, Present at the Creation, 37475.

CHAPTER THREE.

TOTALITARIANISM'S INVERSION, DEMOCRACY'S PERVERSION

1. New York Times, June 9, 1991. See Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 30. Jean Edward Smith, George Bush's War (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 68.

2. ”2nd Presidential Debate . . . ,” New York Times, October 12, 2000, A-20.

3. Hans Mommsen, ”c.u.mulative Radicalisation and Progressive Self-Destruction as Structural Determinants of the n.a.z.i Dictators.h.i.+p,” in Stalinism and n.a.z.ism: Dictators.h.i.+p in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Levin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75.

4. ”The Bush Doctrine,” Weekly Standard, June 4, 2001. Cited in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 83.

5. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2004), 72 describes how after World War I, German politics and culture were saturated with talk of violence.

6. The remark is attributed to Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform.

<script>