The Making of "Untold History of the United States"

Paul Jay hosts a series of interviews with Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick about their book and documentary on American history that challenges the traditional Cold War narrative -

December 17, 2012

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. This is the beginning of a long series of interviews over the course of a year, or perhaps even more, about the TV series and the book The Untold History of the United States. One of the coauthors of the script and the book, Peter Kuznick, is joining us. And this is a series where you are going to get to interact with us over the course of time. What this means is I'm going to start the interview off today, we're going to begin sort of a general discussion about the history, which more or less is from the beginnings and roots of World War II onwards, and you'll be able to ask your questions and argue and debate. And Peter's agreed to come back from time to time to continue the discussion, digging in further into the history, as well as respond to anything that you the viewer might be raising. And he says that Oliver Stone will join us once in a while. So now we will begin our conversation. Thanks very much for joining us, Peter. PETER KUZNICK, PROF. HISTORY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: Glad to be here. JAY: So Peter is a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute in American University. He's a cowriter of the ten-

part Showtime series called Untold History of the United States, as I just said, and the book. So I guess we'd better get clear for everybody, first of all. Not everybody watching this is going to be able to see the series right away, because you need to subscribe to Showtime. And I suppose maybe you should go watch the series, seeing as for one reason or another Showtime did this, and it's pretty good they did. So you might want to see it. Otherwise, the DVDs, I guess, will be out soon. But the book's available now. Let's start with how does this whole project begin. At some point you go to Oliver Stone and say, hey, let's do a mainstream TV series that says Stalin and the Soviet Union's not so bad. KUZNICK: How did you know that's how we did it? That's very prescient of you. It actually started back in 1996 when I was teaching a course. We decided we'd do a new course at American University called Oliver Stone's America. And I was going to use Oliver's movies and then contrast his interpretations of all the events in recent U.S. history with those by people that participated in those events and by the works of scholars who the students would read. It was a course on historical interpretation. I brought in people like Robert McNamara and Dan Ellsberg and Bob Woodward and John Dean and Ron Kovic and lots of other great, great guests. And it was a very successful course. But the first time I taught it in '96, Oliver heard that I was going to do it, and he said he'd be happy to come in. And after so we had a great session with the class, and afterwards at dinner we went out and we were talking, and I told him, Oliver, I've got an idea for a movie you've got to make, and I laid out the story about Henry Wallace and how close Henry Wallace came to being president in 1945.

JAY: Alright. Let me jump in quickly. For those of you who don't know anything about the story of Henry Wallace, we interviewed Henry Wallace's grandsonand maybe we'll put underneath this video a link to that. It will give you a sense of Henry Wallace, but nothingthe depth that you're going to get by watching this series. Go on. KUZNICK: Right. And I laid this out for Oliver and how that changed the course of history, and Oliver said, Peter, that's a brilliant idea; let's do it. And I thought, well, you know, we're having a good time at dinner and drinking and havingyou know. So he goes back to L.A. the next day, and he calls me up, and he says he's serious, write me a treatment. I said, sure, I'd be happy to, except I didn't know what a treatment was. So I found out what a treatment was, and I got a high-powered person to represent me, and I ended up writing the script. So that was the beginning of our friendship and collaboration. We still haven't made that movie, though it's going to make a great movie when we do make it or somebody makes it. JAY: And just really quickly again, just so you get the significance of this if you don't know the storyand you'll find out more over the course of our interviews and if you watch this piece we did and the series. But Henry Wallace was as progressive a mainstream politician as this country ever saw, and becomes vice president at a critical period. We won't go more into that right now, but one can understand KUZNICK: But he comes within a hair's breadth or, as we would say, five feet of becoming president in 1945. And we say that the course of history would have been fundamentally different had that happened. JAY: Yeah. And this is a guy who'sI don't knowyou could almost call him to the left of Dennis Kucinich, and he becomes vice

president. So it's a piece of history that not many people know anything about. KUZNICK: [crosstalk] people talk about, yeah, starting in '40. So that's how we began. And then we became we stayed friends over the years, and Oliver would try to get into class every year when I taught it. It was the most popular class we offered in the history department at American University. And then Oliver was in town in 2007 to scout locations for his movie Pinkville about the My Lai Massacre, and he was in for a day only, and he invited me to join him for dinner. And over dinner we're talking about history and politics as we always did, and Oliver says, Peter, let's do it, let's do a documentary together; we can do a documentary about Henry Wallace and the atom bomb and the [incompr.] of Cold War. And I was on sabbatical. I said, that'll be fun, let's do that, a 60-minute or a 90-minute documentary. And he asked if I could meet him in two weeks in New York. When I got up to New York to talk about the details, he had this idea for a ten-part documentary film series. So it started to grow, as Oliver's projects do. And then two and a half years into this project, we decided we were going to add a companion book. So at that point we had written the first drafts of the script [incompr.] the fifth drafts of the scripts, and Oliver was working on turning those into the documentary, and I turned a lot of my attention to the book. JAY: Right. Now, you must have discussed how are you going to get this seen, how on earth are you going to get mainstream television exposure, or even cinema exposure. I mean, Oliver has a big name and some clout, but one of the things you do in this series, in this book, is you do goyou kind of unpack or attack the central core of

the post-World War II Cold War narrative, which is the Soviet Union was an equal devil to Hitler. And, you know, every school in North America teaches history which is called two totalitarianisms, communism and fascism, and they're supposed to be the same thing, and the role of the Soviet Union is all, you know, horrific. And you unpack that. You must have discussed how do you get that seen in the United States. KUZNICK: Well, as you say, Oliver's got a lot more clout than most people I work with or collaborate with as a historian. And we didn't know initially who we were going to be able to sell this to, the book or the documentary. And Showtime stepped up. Showtimeand they've gone through two administrations, totally different leaders there, and they both have stuck by this project, and they've really been very, very supportive, and they've shown great courage. And we were never 100 percent certain it was going to get shown. We knew somebody would end up showing it, but Showtime's got a very big viewership. JAY: Now, Showtime's owned by CBS, which is owned by Viacom. If I understand who's running Viacom now, it's not Sumner Redstone, who used to be and who was a big George Bush supporter. But they've left you alone, in the sense that they did their own verification of facts. KUZNICK: Well, we've gone through two rounds of fact check. They wanted this to be accurate. They were going to let us say whatever we wanted in terms of our interpretation of history, but they really wanted to make sure that it was impeccable in terms of being accurate. So we've gone through two rounds of fact checks on this. And they fact-checked every wordliterally, 'cause it drives me crazy, 'cause I've got to. And the things that they can't find, I've got to go back and find proof to them that everything is completely accurate in terms of what we're saying, which we can do, but it's

very, very tedious and time-consuming, as you can imagine, 'cause they give us dozens and dozens of things. But they're not things that they're questioning the accuracy; it's things they're questioning the sources, 'cause they haven't been able to find them on their own. But this isit took us. JAY: But what's your take on this? I mean, this is one of the major media monopolies in the country, Viacom, and the history you give is completely at odds with the official narrative. KUZNICK: Yes, completely. JAY: So why do they allow such a thing? KUZNICK: I think the people we've dealt with at Showtime have really appreciated the history. They've loved the history that we're telling. So that's the only level I've dealt with was the people at Showtime. They're very, very principled, and most of them are actually quite progressive in their views. I don't know about the layers above that. I haven't dealt with them. JAY: I mean, I had a somewhat similar experience. We did a seriesI did a series, a documentary series about ten years ago called Machine Gun, and we followed the rise of, essentially, U.S. empire building by just following the machine gun. And it wound up on Discovery Channel. It was kind of the same thing. It was like, I was amazed they took it, 'cause it was also pretty at odds with the official narrative. But these things happen, you know? KUZNICK: Sometimes we get asked, you know, don't you have anything good to say about the United States? And we say, yes, they tolerate us, you know, the fact that we have a voice in this world. And we're getting onto the mainstream. We just did Mike Huckabee's radio show a few days ago.

JAY: Yeah, the right is very unhappy with Mike Huckabee, 'cause apparently he didn't roast you. KUZNICK: Right. Not only did he not roast us; he was very, very friendly toward us. So yeah. So they wrote people wrote things attacking him for not being. We've tried to get onto O'Reilly. We've offered. But he hasn't taken us, unfortunately. But we've done a lot of very mainstream kinds of things, network television, and the response has generally been overwhelmingly positive. We've had a few right-wingers come after us, but not very many. And the rest of the reviews have been quite good. JAY: Well, we'll see how this all unfolds as more and more people see the series. So, as I said, this is just the beginnings. So we're going to stop here and go to another segment, but this is just the beginning of the contextualization of the series and the book. So please join us for the next part of this interview

Untold History: Early US Imperialism, Hitler, Roosevelt, The Spanish Civil War
Part 2 Peter Kuznick, co-author with Oliver Stone of Untold History of the United States, discusses Roosevelt's attitude towards Hitler and the Soviet Union December 19, 2012

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. We're continuing our series of interviews with Peter Kuznick. He coauthored the script and the book with Oliver Stone of the series The Untold History of the United States. And we're just going to pick up our discussion. Thanks for joining us again. PETER KUZNICK, PROF. HISTORY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: Glad to be here. JAY: So I should remind everybody that Peter's a professor of history at American University. So the series essentially is about the roots of World War II and the effect of this post-war, some people call national security state that gets established. And I've only seen as of this interview the first three parts, so we're going to focus more about the roots of the Second World War and a little bit of. KUZNICK: And the book actually begins in the 1890s. JAY: Oh, is that right?

KUZNICK: The book is broader, 'cause we're dealing with the early vision of empire as articulated by Seward and other American policymakers, and then what an important turning point the SpanishAmerican War (especially the U.S. suppression of the Filipino insurrection) is. JAY: Well, I promise you that we're going to as I say, the reason this is going to be a series, as I said in the first interview, over the course of a year is we're going to start digging into the book as well and dealing with some of these periods. I mean, I don't think many people know that Mark Twain was copresident of the Anti-Imperialist League in the 1890s. And this isn't thethis does go back some ways, this anti-imperialist opposition [crosstalk] KUZNICK: And even such a mainstream politician as William Jennings Bryan, who ran for president three times on the Democratic Party ticket and was secretary of state afterwards, was a leading antiimperialist and very, very critical of U.S. policy in the Philippines. He ran for president in 1900 against McKinley and 1896. JAY: So let'sfor now we're going to kind of focus on the TV series, and then we can dig back intoin other interviews into the book and such. You have a quote in the series of Truman: ~~~ NARRATOR: Missouri senator Harry Truman declared on the floor of the Senate in 1941: HARRY TRUMAN, U.S. SENATOR: If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.

~~~ JAY: So, essentially, this attitude is that, you know, if the Germans and the Russians slaughter each other, that ain't so bad for the United States. And there's a lot of people theorize, have commented afterwards, and even at the time in the 1930s, that there was an interest in the United States for the Germans to invade Russia and, you know, put an end to this socialist experiment. And your series, one of the critiques people have made about the series is that it's pretty soft on Roosevelt and that his position in all of this in the series comes off as someone who's always sort of taking this sort of enlightened, even somewhat open, friendly attitude towards the Soviet Union and its role. But the critique is that in fact Roosevelt's in on this idea that yeah, it wouldn't be so bad if the Germans invade Russia. And some of the evidence they point to is that Roosevelt does very little to stop American corporations from arming Hitler. General Motors was I think there's a quote somewhere where Opel'sGermany depended onGeneral Motors created Opel's for the invasion of Poland, a very important role that American corporate world played. Roosevelt doesn't stop the American team from going to the Olympics in 1936. So what do you make of his role in the leadup to war? KUZNICK: We trace the arches of the Cold War, really, back to the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the United States sends over 10,000 troops, along with many British troops and other Western capitalist troops, to try to put down the Russian Revolution, to kill it in its cradle asstrangle it in its cradle, Churchill says. So that enmity between the U.S. and the Russian/Soviet government goes back to that point, which is central at the conflict at Versailles. And they have two visions: you've got Wilson's vision and you've got Lenin's vision for the world.

JAY: Okay. Quickly for young people watching this who don't know this, Versailles is where the post-World War I peace treaty is signed. And you may want to say just a few words. A lot of people watching this are going to be young and won't know even some of the basic references. So. KUZNICK: Well, so the United States does not recognize the Soviet Union, but it's actually Roosevelt who actually recognizes the Soviet Union in 1933. And Roosevelt is by no means pro-Soviet. He's a dedicated capitalist and is responsible for saving capitalism, but a different kind of capitalism, with the idea that government is not the enemy, like we have in the United States now. The idea was that government was the savior. And Roosevelt revolutionizes in many ways the attitude toward government and the role of government in getting the United States out of the Depression. So you're correct to say we've got a pretty positive portrait of Roosevelt. We are very critical of him in certain ways, and one of the ways we're very critical is that he didn't intervene early enough to stop fascism. The Soviet Union was urging the United States and the Western capitalist nations to rise up against Hitler, to stop Hitler, because the Soviets understood what a threat he was. But there were people in the West who didn't want to stop Hitler, because they hated communism more than they hated fascism, and they were . JAY: And there were some outright fans of Hitler. I know Henry Ford gave Hitlerwhat is it?$50,000 every year on his birthday, and he was awarded the highest honor a foreigner could be given by the Third Reich. KUZNICK: Well, Henry Ford's admiration for Hitler was mutual. Hitler says that he admired Henry Ford and that Henry Ford was his model,

as did several other of the Nazi leaders during that time. Ford was a notorious anti-Semite. Ford had tens of thousands of copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion printed. He was a leading anti-Semite during that time. Ford's a complicated figure. We don't have time to go into Ford. But American businesswe go into this in a later episode, because we tie it into George H. W. Bush and the so-called idea of the greatest generation. And we're trying to complicate that in a later episode of the documentary. But the American corporations were up to their eyeballs in working with the Germans, and even in rearming the Germans in the later '30s. And what most Americans don't realize is that much of that relationship to American corporations continued even after the war started, and that companies like GM and Ford actually get reparations from the U.S. government after World War II to pay them back for the factories that the U.S. bombed during the war that were owned by GM and Ford. JAY: Great. So the argument goes Roosevelt should have done something. KUZNICK: Yes, Roosevelt should have done something. And we're very critical. JAY: And didn't do it just as an oversight. KUZNICK: But it wasn't because he was ideologically soft on fascism. He hated the deal at Munich. He hated Chamberlain's giving in to the Germans there. He said this was a terrible mistake and they're going to pay for this in blood. The problem is, you have to understand the United States in the 1930s. There was a lot of isolationist sentiment. There was World War I was still fresh in people's memories.

JAY: Yeah, you give the number in your series 95 percent of Americans in a poll were against getting involved in it. ~~~ NARRATOR: Although most Americans wanted Britain and France to win the war, according to a Gallup poll in October '39, 95 percent wanted the U.S. to stay out, fearing essentially that Britain was again, as in 1917, drawing the U.S. into a futile world war. UNIDENTIFIED: Another war? Not for me. This time, America should keep out, and I know I will. UNIDENTIFIED: Let Europe fight her own battles. They mean nothing to us. UNIDENTIFIED (SEVERAL): [incompr.] no. No. No. No. ~~~ KUZNICK: World War I was so rancid in America's memory at that point. It was a terrible war. It was a war to redivide the colonies. It was not a war for a democracy. JAY: But I think the critique would be not that Roosevelt had any sympathy to fascismI think clearly he didn't, and he certainly fought those kinds of tendencies within the United Statesbut that he first and foremost was about American national interest and had visions of post-World War II as the era of America, and in that vision, it ain't so bad if the Germans and the Russians kick the shit out of each other.

KUZNICK: No, he had a vision, really, more of four policemen, that the United States and the Russians and the British and the French would be the policemen of the world in the post-war period, that we would be able to collaborate. JAY: During the '30s he has this vision? KUZNICK: That's more in the '40s, early '40s he lays out that vision. In the '30s he's moreI agree with you that he should have intervened. We're critical of him. And you've got these the Germans and the Italians beginning to operate in Ethiopia and in Libya, and then you've got the Spanish Civil War. The United States should have supported the Spanish Republic. JAY: Yeah, talk a bit about the Spanish Civil War, 'cause that's a really critical moment where the United States does nothing and watches the Germans and the Italians support Franco. And go ahead. KUZNICK: They supported him with arms. They supported him with pilots. They bombed them. The Germans and the Italians were militarily involved in supporting Franco's fascist forces. JAY: Overthrowing a legitimate, democratically elected government. KUZNICK: Overthrowing a democratically elected, very progressive left-leaning government, the Spanish Republic. And there was strong pressure in the United States to support the republic. There was also a lot of pressure not to. There was the Catholic Church was very much pro-Franco at that point. And even Churchill had said a lot of very supportive things about Franco. So the world was not clear on that, and the West did not intervene to help the Spanish Republic. And that was the first major defeat. I mean, Hitler has a series of victories at that point, but in a military sense, that's the most important turning point, or failure, too.

But a lot of Americans went over there to support the Spanish Republic. Many of them fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. JAY: Yeah, people from all over the world. ~~~ NARRATOR: The fighting dragged on for three years. Twenty-eight hundred brave Americans snuck into Spain to battle the fascists, most joining the communist-backed Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Almost 1,000 did not return. ACTOR: Tell us, ingls, why have you come so far to fight for our republic? ACTOR: A man fights for what he believes in, Fernando. ACTOR: Well, but in his own country. ACTOR: Well, maybe you feel that I'm sticking my nose into other people's business. [snip] It's not only Spain fighting here, is it? It's Germany and Italy on one side, and Russia on the other, and the Spanish people right in the middle of it all. The Nazis and fascists are just as much against democracy as they are against the communists, and they're using your country as a proving ground for their new war machine, their tanks and dive bombers, stuff like that, so they can get the jump on the democracies and knock off England and France and my country before we get armed and ready to fight. ~~~ KUZNICK: People who were anti-fascist from all over the world.

JAY: Yeah, went to volunteer and fight in the trenches. And what is it? KUZNICK: And a lot of them died. JAY: Thousands. KUZNICK: Thousands. JAY: In the series you have a quote from Roosevelt where he says, this is one of my big blunders. KUZNICK: Yes. ~~~ NARRATOR: By 1939, Roosevelt told his cabinet that his policies in Spain had been a grave mistake and warned that they all soon would pay the price. ~~~ JAY: But was a blunderdoes he see it as a blunder strategically, tactically we could have weakened Germany and Italy then, rather than have such a large-scale war later, versus it was a blunder 'cause I should have understand it was the proper, good thing, democratic good thing to do to support Spain? 'Cause maybe, again, he didn't mind so much if this kind of lefty Spain didn't succeed. KUZNICK: I think Roosevelt by that point was much more left-leaning. We're talking about Roosevelt in his second term, and by 1936 the United States had shifted pretty far to the left for the United States.

If you look at it, you've got a Congress that gets elected in 1936 that's about as left-leaning a Congress as this country's ever had. The Republican right wing had been vanquished. There was really almost nothing left of the Republicanof the right wing in the United States during that time. You've got the Duponts and the Morgans and the people who they're working with who are trying to do whatever they can to revitalize the right wing. But Roosevelt knew that he didn't have enemies on the right who he had to contend with at that point, and his policies became much more progressive in a second New Deal. And I think he was commitedly anti-fascist and increasingly anti-colonialist. That's another thing that people don't understand about the Cold War was that it was a tripartite Cold War in the beginning, that you've got the United States, you've got the Russians, and you've got the British. And the United States and the British were not entirely in bed at that point in our history. It's later that that happens. It does not happen during the Roosevelt period. JAY: But during the Spanish Civil Warmy memory's only a little vague on this, but I thought there was actual more active intervention, in the sense of making it difficult for the American volunteers to get to Spain. KUZNICK: Yes. Yes. We had neutrality legislation, which Roosevelt backed. JAY: Which was very much aimed to stop the support for Spain. KUZNICK: And it really hurt the republic. It didn't hurt it wasn't balanced legislation, because the right wing forces were getting all

the arms and help they needed from Italy and Germany, which made it even. JAY: Yeah. I mean, amongst other things, it became a training ground for the German air force. But that speaks to not just, like, being a blunder; it speaks to being part of an outlook that, you know, we want capitalism as enlightened as we can get it, but we are going to suppress anything that smells like socialism. KUZNICK: I don't know. I don't see that in Roosevelt in that period. I don't see him trying to suppress it because it was leaning left or was socialist. I just see it as a much narrower kind of mistake that he made, but not part of a pattern of trying to repress progressive movements around the world, or in the United States for that matter. This was a period when Roosevelt was being backed by the Communist Party. This is the popular front in the United States. This is the period when American culture shifted dramatically to the left, when almost every important American writer was either in the Communist Party or in the communist front groups the same thing in all of the other arts. So it's a different climate in the United States. And the Spanish Civil War, the Republican forces became the cause clbre of the left during this period. And Roosevelt again, it was partly political, because you had a lot ofhe didn't want to antagonize the Catholic Church, and that was a big mistake on his part, and he didn't want toRoosevelt was always very pragmatic, also, as a politician, and that was part of his downfall during this period. JAY: Okay. Well, one indication of just how different American political culture was was Roosevelt's choice of vice president in his third term, because to imagine that anyone with that kind of politics

became vice presidentI should say it's unimaginable in today's America. KUZNICK: Yes. JAY: So that will be the next segment of our interview with Peter Kuznick. We're going to pick up the issue of Henry Wallace. And it's one of theso far, for me, at least, in the three-part series, this is one of the best parts, the whole deconstruction of the Democratic Party convention where Wallace loses his job as vice president. So join us for the next segment of our series of interviews with Peter Kuznick on The Real News Network.

Untold History: The Rise and Fall of a Progressive Vice-President of the USA
Partt 3 Peter Kuznick, co-author with Oliver Stone of the "Untold History of the United States", discusses the '44 Democratic Convention coup that dumped VP Henry A. Wallace, the man who as President would have opposed the cold war -

December 21, 2012

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. We're continuing our series of interviews with Peter Kuznick, coauthor of the movie and the book The Untold History of the United States. And we're just going to carry on our discussion. Thanks for joining us, Peter. So I'll just remind everybody again, Peter's a professor of history at American University in Washington. We left off at the last segment of the interview talking about what a different type of America it was, the political culture, how different it was. There'd been a kind of Cold War in the 1920s after the Russian Revolution. There was quite a crackdown and anticommunist hysteria and atmosphere. But by the late '30s, and then you get to thewhat is it?I guess it's the third term of Roosevelt, he appoints a man as vice president who is as left on the political spectrum as anyone that ever ran in mainstream politics. How does that happen? KUZNICK: Henry Wallace had been secretary of agriculture from the beginning of the New Deal.

JAY: Yeah. Maybe weyeah, start with that, 'cause even that's surprising. KUZNICK: And he comes from such an interesting family. His father was secretary of agriculture under the Republican administrations of Harding and Coolidge, and his grandfather was rumored to be secretary of agriculture, and almost was, back from Iowa in the 19th century. JAY: Now, he made a lot of money later, if I understand. KUZNICK: Yes. JAY: He sold his agricultural company for. KUZNICK: Well, he did a lot ofyeah. [crosstalk] did a lot of [crosstalk] JAY: But when he's first appointedbut is he already wealthy when he's first appointed? KUZNICK: Not very wealthy, no. No. They were comfortable, certainly, for an Iowa family, they were very comfortable, but I don't think very wealthy until much, much later, 'cause eventually his hybrid corn feeds half the world. And he understood the relationship between dealing with hunger and the possibility of world peace. That was always clear in his mind. And he was a visionary as secretary of agriculture with acontroversial, which we could get into, but it was nothe was the leading antifascist in the New Deal administrations. He was very closely tied to the scientists and working with the scientists in their antifascist and antiracist efforts during that time.

~~~ HENRY WALLACE, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: We cannot fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home. ~~~ KUZNICK: In the early 1940s he says America's fascists are those people who think Wall Street comes first and the American people second. Now we call those Democrats and Republicans, but in those days Wallace called them America's fascists. JAY: I mean, this would be like Obama appointing Bernie Sanders as vice president, something akin to that. KUZNICK: Yeah, something akin to that. But Wallace had was morein a global sense, even more visionary than Bernie Sanders, who's great on a lot of issues. And so it's 1940. Roosevelt's going to run for a third term. He wants a real progressive on the ticket, and he turns to Henry Wallace. But the Democratic Party convention meeting in Chicago did not want to give him Henry Wallace. The party bosses ran the conventions in those days in ways that they can't now, and they refused to put Wallace on the ticket. Roosevelt writes an absolutely extraordinary letter to the convention turning down the nomination. ~~~ FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, U.S. PRESIDENT: The Democratic Party has failed when it has fallen to the control of those who think in terms of dollars instead of human values. Until the Democratic Party shakes off all the shackles of control fastened upon it by the forces of

conservatism, reaction, and appeasement, it will not continue its march to victory. The party cannot face in both directions at the same time. Therefore I decline the honor of the nomination for the presidency. ~~~ KUZNICK: He says, we already have one money-dominated conservative party in the United States; if the Democratic Party has any reason to exist, it has to be a liberal, progressive party committed to social justice, and if it's not going to be that, I'm not going to run as its candidate. JAY: Why did he want Wallace so badly? Why is he willing to wage such a fight for Wallace? KUZNICK: The Roosevelt of this period knew we were going into a war, and he wanted an ally and he wanted somebody who could takehe was aware thatmore at that point than later, perhaps, of his ownthat he might not live forever, and he wanted somebody who could carry on his message and his theme in terms of building a progressive world after the war. And so Wallace gets back on the ticket in 1940. But the party bosses are going to exact their revenge later. And in 1941, Henry Luce writes his editorial saying that the 20th century's going to be the American century, the United States is going to dominate the world economically, politically, militarily. Wallace as vice president counters that. He gives a remarkable speech. The title is "Century of the Common Man". He says the 20th century should not be the American century; it's got to be the century of the common man. And he calls for a worldwide people's revolution. Those are his words.

~~~ WALLACE: The march of freedom of the past 150 years has been a long drawn out people's revolution. In this great revolution of the people there were the American Revolution of 1775, the French Revolution of 1792, the Latin American revolution of the Bolivarian era, the German Revolution of 1848, the Russian Revolution of 1918. Each spoke for the common man in terms of blood on the battlefield. Some went to excess, but the significant thing is that the people broke their way to the light. The people are on the march toward even fuller freedom than the most fortunate peoples of the earth have hitherto enjoyed. ~~~ JAY: It's the vice president calling for this. KUZNICK: Yes. And he says we have to end colonialism, we have to end imperialism, we have to end economic exploitation and monopolies and cartels. We need global full employment. We need to raise the standard of living. The science and technology's got to be spread around the entire globe. This is an extraordinary vision this man had. JAY: And Roosevelt's okay with the speech. KUZNICK: Roosevelt applauded that speech. Yeah. Roosevelt at this period wanted to seebecause Roosevelt understood the effects of imperialism and colonialism. Roosevelt was very critical of the British and the French and the Dutch and the Portuguese, and he understood how much they had actually caused a lot of the problems in the world.

JAY: Roosevelt always had his eye on what would be an American empire after the war. Now, I'm not saying American Empire old colonial style. He was against old colonialism. KUZNICK: Yes, he was against that. JAY: But it would be American Empire, knowing America had more money than anyone else, more manufacturing capacity than anyone else, and sort of this free-market world would be America's world. KUZNICK: Yes, he did want a free-market world, and he wanted the constraints of the old kind of world with the spheres of influences ended. He used his leverage over the British repeatedly to do away with the old imperial system. JAY: But did Roosevelt believe a free-market world could achieve the objectives Wallace talked about? KUZNICK: I think Roosevelt did believe that. He believed we could have a very much more progressive kind of world if you got rid of colonialism and if the U.S. and the Soviets work together. And his vision was for the U.S.this alliance between the postthe wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union to last beyond the war. JAY: So if he believes that, why does he bail on Wallace at the convention where Wallace loses the vice presidency? KUZNICK: Roosevelt by that point in 1944 had become very sick. He clearly was weak. And the party bosses tried to convince him that Wallace was a detriment, that he could actually lose in 1944 in the election. And they kept on coming to him and saying that we have to get rid of Wallace. They understood that Roosevelt would likely not

last another term, and whoever became vice president would be the next president of the United States. And these are very conservative people, the party bosses. These were the hacks who ran the administrations in Chicago and Jersey City and places like that, Alabama. So they wanted to get Wallace off the ticket. And Roosevelt says, I support Henry Wallace; he's my ally. And Roosevelt's family was furious. Eleanor Roosevelt was a huge Wallace supporter. They were very disappointed that Franklin didn't fight harder for Wallace. July 20, 1944, the day that the Democratic Party convention begins in Chicago, Gallup released a poll asking potential voters who they wanted on the ticket as vice president. Two percent said they wanted Harry Truman. Sixty-five percent said they wanted Henry Wallace. Wallace was the second most popular man in America, second only to Roosevelt. You've got to remember the period we're dealing with and what Wallace represented. JAY: Well, even more to the argument, then, why doesn't Roosevelt fight for him? Because, you know, the whole idea, in theory, of getting Wallace is you defend your postwar vision. KUZNICK: Yes. JAY: You bail on Wallace and hand it to Truman, you've got to know you're giving up your whole postwar vision to a hack. KUZNICK: To a hack. To a hack. You know, we have a lot about Truman there, but it was literallyif you look up hack in the dictionary, you have a picture of Harry Truman there when he was part of the Pendergast machine that ran Kansas City. And Pendergast was the one who got him chosen in 1934 to run for the Senate. He was asked by reporters, why of all people did you choose Harry Truman to run for the Senate? And Pendergast says, I wanted to show the world that a well-oiled machine can take an office clerk and

get him elected to the Senate. I mean, Truman was not now he's a near-great president in some people's eyes. Condoleeza Rice called and said, tell Time magazine that Truman was her man of the century for the 20th century. JAY: Well, there is something appropriate in that. But at any rate. KUZNICK: Yes, there is [crosstalk] JAY: But do you get more of a sense of Roosevelt's position? Like, okay, the party bosses come and say, Wallace, we won't support Wallace; he'll split the party and. KUZNICK: Yeah, Roosevelt did not have the strength to fight like he used to, and he said, I can't get myself reelected, it's in your hands, basically. JAY: Did Eleanor write about this? KUZNICK: Eleanor commented about it a lot. And, in fact, after Franklin dies, Eleanor goes to Wallace and says, you're the only hope we have left; you've got to stand up against Truman, you've got to stand up against these conservative policies. You're our one hope forthe liberals' hope for the future. She knew that, as did the other members of the Roosevelt family. They were all publicly on record as Wallace supporters. They were all very disappointed that Franklin didn't fight more. Franklin issued a statement saying, if I were a delegate to the convention, I would vote for Henry Wallace. But there were a lot of other delegates to the convention who tried to do that. I mean, so Wallace has 65 percent support, and when the convention begins, Wallace makes a seconding speech for Roosevelt's

nomination and the place goes wild. And the demonstration is led by people like Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson, who were much more progressive in that period. And it goes on for almost an hour. And in the midst of that, Senator Claude Pepper from Florida realizes if he could get Wallace's name and nomination that night, then he'll defy the party bosses, Wallace will sweep the nomination, he'll get back on the ticket as vice president. And Pepper fights his way up to the microphone. ~~~ NARRATOR: Not knowing what to do, Jackson called the vote for adjournment. A few said aye, but the overwhelming majority boo, nay. And yet Jackson had the gall to announce that the vote to adjourn had passed. It was outrageous. Confusion filled the fall. Pepper had reached the first step of the stage, only five feet, probably nine seconds from the microphone, before the bosses forced adjournment against the will of the delegates. If he could have nominated Wallace in those moments, there is no doubt Henry Wallace would have been overwhelmingly returned as vice president. What I understood Pepper wrote was that for better or worse, history was turned topsy-turvy that night in Chicago. Samuel Jackson apologized to Pepper the next day, and Pepper wrote in his autobiography that Jackson said, I had strict instructions from Hannegan not to let the convention nominate the vice president last night. ~~~

KUZNICK: Had Pepper gotten five more feet and got Wallace's name back in nomination, what we're arguing is not only would there have been no atomic bombing in 1945; there very possibly would have been no Cold War in 1945. Wallace was that much of a visionary and that much of a fighter against these kinds of policies. JAY: Well, this whole convention's extraordinarily well told in the film. Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Peter Kuznick about untold history of the United States on The Real News Network.

Untold History: The Coup Against Wallace and What Might Have Been
Part 4 Peter Kuznick January 11, 2013

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. We're continuing our series of interviews about The Untold History of the United States with coauthor Peter Kuznick. Thanks for joining us again, Peter. And just one more time, to remind everybody, Peter teaches at American University, history, in D.C. So we're just going to pick up the discussion. We were talking about the convention where Henry Wallace loses the vice presidency. We'llas we said in the last segment, you'll see in the series, this is like a coup, in a sense. PETER KUZNICK, PROF. HISTORY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: Yeah. And, in fact, Edwin Pauley, the Democratic Party treasurer, referred to it as Pauley's coup. Pauley's an important figure. He went into he was a California oil millionaire who went into politics, he said, when he realized it was cheaper to elect a new Congress than to buy up the old one. And so he later gets indicted. He's corrupt. And he's the treasurer of the Democratic Party. The chair of the Democratic Party is Bob Hannegan. And the two of them work together. Pendergast, who was Truman's initial sponsor, was in federal prison in Kansas City in 1940 when Truman was up for reelection. Roosevelt refused to support him and endorse him.

Truman was coming in third in that election, and he turned to Hannegan, who was the head of the St. Louis machine, the Hannegan-['dIkl3`] machine around St. Louis. And Hannegan throws his support to Truman, who barely pulls out that election in 1940. He was not very popular. In fact, most of the senators shunned him after his first term. They referred to him as the senator from Pendergast and thought of him as a corrupt hack. It's during his second term where he begins to develop a national reputation. But Truman is no stellar figure at that point, which is why he had so little support. JAY: So let's go back to this moment. KUZNICK: Yeah. JAY: Roosevelt says yes to Truman, knowing he's a hack. He gives in to these party bosses. But there's another step to it. We talked a lot about this thing about Roosevelt in the last segment, so I won't go over that again, but once this coup takes place, it's clear the majority of the party wants Wallace. KUZNICK: Yes. JAY: They manipulate the process to force in a way that gives them time to rally the votes for Truman. They essentially steal it from Wallace. But then, once they do, Wallace says, okay, I accept this. And then the trade unions who one would think were a much more powerful force at the timethey were a powerful forcethey accept it too. I mean, why isn't there a war? Because it you know, you could say the whole soul of what the Democratic Party was under FDR is being wrenched out of that party to quite a different path. Why does Wallaceand particularly the unions, why do they go along with this?

KUZNICK: There's no clear answer to that one. Wallace had the support. I mean, Wallace didn't just have union support. He was the leading spokesperson for labor in the Democratic Party at that point, but he also had the support of every black delegate there. He was the leading spokesperson for civil rights in the Democratic Party. He had tremendous women's support because he was an outstanding spokesperson for women's rights much earlier, and feminism. And hebut his other enemiesWall Street people hated him. The British and the French hated him, 'cause he had been writing books and pamphlets attacking British and French colonialism. And they actually had Roald Dahl spying on him for Churchill during this time. So he had a lot of enemies. But he had the support of labor, and he had the support of the black delegates, and he had the support of all the progressives and the liberal and the average Democratic Party voters. So why does he not fight more? It's not really his nature, in a certain way, if you know Henry Wallace. He's a man of great principle, but he's not the . JAY: Well, yeah, even ifbut my question was more the unions. I understand Wallace might have felt, okay, I'm not going to split the party over this, I don't want it to be about me, and I guess I can imagine that. But why the unions? KUZNICK: But that was why they were when they went through the list of who they could replace Wallace with, the party bosses, they went through various people, and they decided Jimmy Byrnes was too segregationist, that's not going to work. JAY: But were the unions in on the deal? KUZNICK: The unions were not in on the deal. The unions were very strongly supporting Wallace at the convention. And it was actually

finally when theygiven their choices, when it was clear they weren't going to get Wallace, they agreed to Truman. But they were very, very angry about that and they fought very hard for Wallace at the convention. Truman was chosen because he didn't have any real enemies. He wasn't pro-labor, but he wasn't anti-labor like a lot of the other people in the party. The party still had a conservative wing. JAY: And easily manipulable. KUZNICK: They knew he was manipulable 'cause he had always been manipulable. As a senator he was willing to go along with the conservative influences from Missouri who were behind him, Pendergast and other people. JAY: So does it tell us something about the character of the Democratic Party in the long run, which is, when push comes to shove, it is a party of one section of the American elite, and when push comes to shove, it's those instincts that really take over the party? KUZNICK: But it was even worse during this time, 'cause you have such a strong southern segregationist wing of the party that it doesn't have now. It's not held back by those forces in the same way. And those people were outright racists, segregationists, and very conservative on most issues, and they wanted Jimmy Byrnes. So Roosevelt was always a pragmatic politician. I mean, he had some principle, of course, but he was always very pragmatic and he was always figuring how you put together coalitions that can get you elected and where the money was going to come from and where the votes were going to come from. And the party bosses convinced him that he would do better in '44 with Truman on the ticket, or if

not do better, then if they wanted hishe wanted their strong support. JAY: At this time does he think he's going to live long enough for another term? KUZNICK: Yes, yes. JAY: So he's not thinking it's imminent that this guy's going to be the next president. KUZNICK: No, no, he's not thinking it, but everybody else understood that. When he would try to pour people's drinks or light their cigarettes, his hands would shake at that point. They knew that his health was deteriorating rapidly and visibly. JAY: So this is more this guy can help me get reelected more than Wallace can, and as long as I'm around, things are okay . KUZNICK: But then he begged Wallace to stay in the cabinet, you know, said, you can have any position you want, he said, other than secretary of state; I don't want to break old Cordell Hull's heart. So he says, I have to leave him as secretary of state, but you can have any other position. And Wallace chose to stay in as secretary of commerce. And it's from that vantage point that he fights against Truman's policies. And he fights heroically. But I think in some ways it goes against his nature to be a fighter in that way. He's always this man of principle. He's above the fray, in a sense. And that's why some people thought of him as so otherworldly. Some people thought of him as not a typical politician, and he wasn't in any way.

JAY: So, then, let me argue with you on one thing now. KUZNICK: Sure. JAY: Do you not think that if Wallace had remained vice president and he became president, that the fundamentals of the American political system, where power resides, that in spite of all his intentions, he would not have been able to do what he wanted to do, and one way or the other he wouldn't have been president for long, whether they defeat him in an election or they shot him or whatever it was? He's just too at odds with the basic class interest of those people who have real power in the country. KUZNICK: We don't know that. I mean. JAY: Well, I can speculate as well as you can. KUZNICK: You can speculate better than I can, I think. But certain things he could have done. And he could have prevented the atomic bombing at Hiroshima JAY: Yeah, that's possible. KUZNICK: and Nagasaki. And the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a fundamental aspect of the Cold War as it goes forward. That was in large part a warning to the Russians, to the Soviets, of what the Unitedhow ruthless the United States really was. JAY: But the bomb development begins under Roosevelt. KUZNICK: Bomband it begins under Wallace, because the October 1941 meeting in which they decide to move forward with the project, Wallace is the person who's in that meeting with

Roosevelt and Vannevar Bush and others. And I think Wallace had a lot of guilt as a result of that, because he. But, you know, the people who were pushing the project at that point were mostly the emigre scientists who had escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe. It was the Le Szilrds and the Albert Einsteins and the Fermis. These were the. JAY: Because at that time they think Hitler could actually KUZNICK: They thought. JAY: win this war, KUZNICK: Yes. JAY: and if push came to shove, you needed the ultimate weapon. KUZNICK: Well, they thought that Hitlerthey knew that Hitler was going to develop a bomb himself. That was their belief. And the Germans do begin, 'cause the Germans, even though they'd gotten rid of the Jewish scientists, they still were very advanced in science and technology and physics, and they begin the bomb project, and they put it under Heisenberg, who's a brilliant physicist. And so we didn't know till 1944, late 1944, that the Germans had abandoned their bomb project back in 1942. But at this point, the scientists believed that we were actually possibly a year or more behind the Germans in developing the bomb. So that was the reason why Wallace and others supported it initially, for fear that the Germans would get it and use it to take over the world. JAY: Okay. In the next segment of the interview, we're going to talk more about the role of the Soviet Union in the war, because certainly one of the things this series does that you've never seen on

mainstream television before, I think, is unpack the role of the Soviet Union in being the real bulwark or the force that broke the back of German fascism. I mean, anyone that has ever studied this history with any seriousness kind of knows that, but it's sure not part of what's taught in schools KUZNICK: No, it's not taught at all. JAY: and it's not part of the official narrative. KUZNICK: And it's not even a part of people's consciousness. When you ask people who won World War II in Europe, they say the Americans. But when you explain it to them, they get it. JAY: Alright. So join us for the next segment of our interview with Peter Kuznick on the untold history of the United States on The Real News Network.

Untold History: Stalin, the Soviet Union and WWII

Pt.5 Peter Kuznick

January 14, 2013

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And we're continuing our series of interviews with Peter Kuznick. He's the coauthor of the book and the film The Untold History of the United States. Thanks for joining us again. So we'll just pick up the discussion. One of the things the series does which is pretty courageous, really, is deal with the role of the Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, and then particularly in World War II, and really unpack and defy the basic Cold War narrative. And so talk a little bit about that history, and also a little about your discussions about how to deal with it, 'cause, I mean, in some ways politically it's the most sensitive stuff in the series. You know, to talk about Wallace ispeople are okay with that. But your version of the Soviet Union is. PETER KUZNICK, PROF. HISTORY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: They're not so okay with the Wallace. They think that we're because in 1948, when Wallace runs for president again, the Communist Party is very much involved in that campaign. So we do get a lot of negative reaction from the right-wingers on the Wallace story. They're very sensitive to that one.

But you're right to say that the main attacks we're getting from the right are about our treatment of the Soviet Union, because they want to portray the Soviet Union as the equivalent of the Nazis, and Hitler and Stalin are equally bad. JAY: Yeah, I wasI said in my opening introduction, in every school in North AmericaI mean, I grew up in Canada, and it was no differentthe chapter in the history book is communism, fascism, two forms of totalitarianism, and the whole history is that they are simply the equivalence. KUZNICK: Yeah. And there's somenot truth to that, but there is obviously a lot of truth to the critique of Stalinism and the ways in which Stalin hijacks and subverts the Russian Revolution, and from a left perspective, undermines the Russian Revolution. We on the left in the United States in the 20th century had that albatross around our necks for much of the 20th century, and people felt for some understandable reason that they had to defend certain features of the Soviet Union. And under Stalin there's not very much that is defensible of what's going on inside the Soviet Union the massacres that took place, the millions and millions of victims of Stalinism. And the repression is real. And the left in the United States didn't know that in the 1930s. We didn't learn that till much later. So we're actually quite critical of Stalin, but we also understand the important role that the Soviet Union represents, the idea of the Soviet Union representing something as a socialist society in which there is socialized medicine and education and tremendous advances in the sciences in the 1930s. I mean, there are certain things that are positive about Soviet Society that you can recognize without saying that Stalin was a good guy.

JAY: And, one way or the other, had pretty massive popular support, Stalin. You don't rally a country to make the kind of sacrifices the Soviet people made. KUZNICK: But there's still a lot of nostalgia for Stalin inside of Russia. JAY: Still, even now, yeah. I mean, dictators can be popular too, so. KUZNICK: Yeah. Yeah. And he was as brutal a dictator as is imaginable in certain ways during this time. That doesn't mean that everything that the Soviet Union did was bad. The Soviet Union was often on the right side of history on these things. The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War was the main support for the republican causes. JAY: But the main problem in terms of the American historical narrative is he wasn't our brutal dictator. KUZNICK: Right. JAY: Like, it's not like historically the United States has problems with brutal dictators. KUZNICK: No, we love brutal dictators. JAY: They've just got to be ours. KUZNICK: Yes, and he was never ours. And he represented something that was very threatening to the people who liked our brutal dictators. He washe believed that the world could be organized on principles very different than capitalist principles. And even though his works, like, philosophical material, whatever his big book in '36 was on Marxism, it's really pretty lousy Marxism. He was very

crude and mechanistic, and his understanding was, I say, very shallow. But he still represented something that American capitalists hated. And these same capitalists who didn't hate fascism, because fascism was a form of capitalism, hated the Soviet communism because that was a threat to American capitalism and it said the world could be organized in a different way and that way could work. And it did work in a lot of ways in the 1930s. And you have the tremendous economic boom. And there was a lot of literature in the United States in the early '30s when the American was hitting the nadir of its depression, in late 1932, that the only country that was immune to depression was the Soviet Union. And that was not just in liberal papers and publications like The Nation and The New Republic; that was in The Christian Science Monitor, it was in Businessweek, it was in Barron's. It was in very conservative places [crosstalk] JAY: And also something interestingand it's too complicated to unpack all this right now, 'cause it's not the history of the Soviet Union, but one of the facts that comes out in your series, which I didn't know the scale of itwas the extent of the millions of people that are moved KUZNICK: Yes, massive. JAY: east to get out of the way of the German army, and the complete rebuilding KUZNICK: Rebuilding of the economy. JAY: of Soviet economy. Yeah. Tell a bit about that story.

KUZNICK: Well, it's, again, a remarkable mobilization of Soviet resources. The Soviets were fighting Germany. In fact, that's part of the story about World War II that Americans don't know but need to know, that we always think that it was the United States who won the war in Europe and that the bomb ended the war in the Pacific, two very, very big misconceptions that Americans have. Throughout most of World War II, the United States and the British were fighting ten German divisions combined. The Soviets were fighting 200. The United States lost about 300,000 people in combat, 400,000 overall in World War II, which was terrible, but the Russians lost 27 million people in World War II. There's good reason why Churchill says it was the Russians who tore the guts out of the German army. And Roosevelt recognized that, and Americans at the time recognized it, which is partly why the Soviets were consideredviewed so positively by the United States and by American people during World War II. It's part of the reason why there was a possibility for post-war friendship and collaboration as Wallace and Roosevelt envisioned after the war and as Stalin desperately hoped for. The whole Russian vision after the war was based upon this idea that the United States and the Soviets would remain allies. That was essential for Stalin's political dreams, as well as for his economic vision of how you rebuild the Soviet economy, which was devastated. It was Kennedy who recognized that in his famous AU commencement address, when he says that the destruction of the Soviet Union was the equivalent of the entire United States east of Chicago being wiped out and destroyed. I mean, what they suffered was, you know, beyond imagination, really, what the Soviets suffered, which was why there was such an abhorrence of war afterwards inside the Soviet Union, but also why they were so defensive and why they wanted Eastern Europe. This wasn't part of some grand imperial design that Stalin had; this was his

defensiveness as a Russian nationalist who understood that the Soviet Union [incompr.] attacked by Germany through Eastern Europe twice within the past 25 years, and he was going to do anything he could, from the Russian nationalist standpoint, to make sure that never happened again. JAY: I did a series of interviews with Ray McGovern, who was a CIA analyst for many years, and in the interviews he says that as they're briefing Reagan and some of the other presidents, even at that time they're saying that the fundamental posture of the Russians is defensive. KUZNICK: Yes. JAY: It's notyou know, this idea that Russia's going to invade Europe and march through Europe and all this is not real, that from an analyst division of CIA they were saying that, but nobody wanted to hear the argument. And your series, again, you're contradicting the whole narrative that the Soviet threat is the fundamental character of post-World War II period. KUZNICK: Which is why the United States doesn't change, really, after the Cold War ends. Have we cut back our defense spending? Have we gotten rid of our bases overseas? Have we gotten rid of our nuclear weapons? Do we not have this massive defense apparatus that still is looking for enemies around the world? You know, we're expanding, we're shifting. We're shifting now to the Pacific from our previous emphasis in the Middle East and in Europe. But we're not changing our policy. JAY: Now, one of the critical moments in terms of World War IIand it's been a big debateis Stalin makes a deal with Hitler and a nonaggression pact of some sort. And one version of this is Stalin did everything he could to have an alliance with United

States and England and against Hitler, and the other version is Stalin really didn't care who he made a deal with, and he was happy to have a deal with Hitler, and the only reason it broke is Hitler attacked him. What are your sources? How did you come to terms with what you thought was the correct version of this? KUZNICK: Well, Stalin was not always a man of great principle. As we know, Stalin could be ruthless and bloody and tyrannical and could make a deal with Hitler. None of what we're saying is a defense of Stalin. We've got a portrait of Stalin that portrays him to be quite brutal. We're very, very critical of Stalin. However, from 1935 to 1939 he did everything he could to form an alliance with the United States and the Western capitalist nations because he knew that there were forces who wanted to push Hitler to attack the Soviet Union. JAY: My uncle was a writer at the time, a journalist as well, and he was at one of the conferences that they allowed the media into, and he said the Soviet foreign minister was practically begging for an alliance with the West against Hitler, and they just weren't interested. KUZNICK: You know, they went so far that the Communist Party in the United States basically supported Roosevelt. That's the whole Popular Front period from '35 to '39 was about tamping down the revolutionary forces and having the communist parties throughout the world, the Western capitalist world, become allies of liberal and centrist democratic forces. The Communist Party was basically an adjunct of the Democratic Party between '35 and '39 at a time when its popularity became great. And they were sayingduring the Popular Front, they were saying communism is 20th-century Americanism. That was their line. And they traced their lineage back to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. This was not a very revolutionary force at that point, but that was the

policy out of the Soviet Union, because they wanted alliances with the Western capitalist governments. They never did anything to form an alliance with Hitler during that time. And by 1939 they were desperate. They knew that Germans would be launching an invasion. But this was after the Western forces capitulated repeatedly to Hitler. JAY: Well, this kind of goes back to the point I was making in one of the earlier segments, though: where is Roosevelt in all this? I mean, Roosevelt is in on not building an alliance. I mean, if he really wanted to stop Hitler, it was the obvious thing to do. KUZNICK: Yeah, Roosevelt could have done that, but he would have had to buck American public opinion. As you said also, 95 percent of the American people were opposed to even getting involved in World War II when the war was going on and Britain and France were under the gun. JAY: But what I'm getting backwe're getting back into the Roosevelt argument again, but I don't mean intervening militarily, but sanctions against American companies that help Hitler. I saw somethingI mentioned it to you off-camera, but I saw something at the Holocost Museum in Washington. It saidmy memory is it was something like 70, 75 percent of newspaper editors who were asked in 1936 whether to send the Olympic team, American Olympic team to the Nazi-held Olympics, said, don't do it, and they did it anyway. So there was a fair amount of public opinion here against Hitler, even if there was public opinion against military intervention or getting involved in the war, getting into Europe's war. But they were also anti-Hitler. So, like, Roosevelt would have had a platform for at least sanctions for doing various things. KUZNICK: He would have and he should have. I'm not disagreeing with you. Of course I wish Roosevelt would have intervened against

fascism and formed the alliance much earlier, and of course I believe that Roosevelt should have supported the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. And we could have 'cause Hitler at that point was going to back down. Hitler did not have the strength to do the things he was doing. And of course [crosstalk] JAY: And you have an interesting quote from Hitler about that, that hewhen they first start moving into the Rhineland, is it, that he expects to get beaten. ~~~ NARRATOR: In March 1936, German troops occupied the demilitarized Rhineland. It was Hitler's biggest gamble to date, and it worked. The 48 hours after the march were the most nervewracking in my life, he said. The military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance. If the French had marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs. ADOLF HITLER (SUBTITLED TRANSL.): Sending our troops into the Rhineland was the hardest and most daring decision of my life. ~~~ KUZNICK: That is a bluff. But we never called his bluff on that, and that's partly because you had a lot of forces in Europe who were sympathetic. They were either afraid of war or they were sympathetic. JAY: Well, then, why is Stalin's deal with Hitler unprincipled? I mean, if he's facing the destruction of the Soviet Union, what else is he supposed to do?

KUZNICK: What's unprincipled is the way it was defended. If you would say publicly that this was a desperation move done in order to prevent an attack or to preserve the Soviet Union, that would be one thing. But the left forces of the United States defended this on principle, and there was no principled way to defend an alliance with fascism. There was a pragmatic way that you could explain an alliance with fascism for that period of time, and Stalin wanted to buy time; however, by the time the Germans do invade in 1941, he was being warned that an invasion was imminent, and he didn't believe it. Stalin, who doesn't believe anybody and trust anybody, did not realize that this mobilization was. JAY: And how do we know that [crosstalk] KUZNICK: [crosstalk] We know that his generals and others, intelligence people, were warning him, and he said that he didn'tthat they were not about to invade, that the German invasion was not going to come. The Russians were caught totally unprepared. The Germans blitzed right through them in the beginning. And many people, including in the United States, felt that the Russians were about to capitulate. That's part of why the British rushed in there so quickly, to try to keep them in the war. They wanted the Russians in the war against Hitler 'cause they knew it wasthe key to the Europeans, the Western Europeans, the British actually surviving the war was keeping the Russians in, and they were afraid that the Russians were going to cut a deal with Hitler because they were so badly wounded in those early steps. But Stalin said no. Stalin said, give me some material aid so we can fight them, and we will fight, we will defeat them. JAY: And 27 million lives

KUZNICK: Twenty-seven million later, yeah. JAY: and some of the most horrific battles in the history of warfare, somehow they did it. KUZNICK: Somehow they did it. And we show how they did it. And the Russian people were heroic in their resistance. JAY: Okay. We're going to pick this discussion up in another segment. Please join us for the continuation of our discussion with Peter Kuznick on the real history of the United States.

The Bomb Sends a Message to the World Untold History

Partt 6

April 26, 13

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And we're continuing our discussion about the television series and the book The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. And now joining us in the studio once again is Peter Kuznick. Thanks for joining us again. PETER KUZNICK, PROF. HISTORY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: Glad to be here. JAY: So one of the themes you take up in this series is the issue of was the nuclear attack on Japan necessary, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the thesis of the book essentially is that it wasn't. And it seems to me it's such a critical question, because if you can accept that using weapons of mass destruction is legitimate and was acceptable then, then why can't you accept anything after that? So it's perhaps one of or maybe the most critical thing to debate about American history. So what's your take? KUZNICK: It really is in many ways the starting point of where things go badly wrong. We can look at 1898 and the invasion of the Philippines as an important turning point. But after that, it's really the atomic bombing more than almost anything else. It gives the United States a sense of impunity. It gives the United States a sense of power. The United States can really throw its weight around now. We don't have to be afraid of anybody. And Truman says that on the USS Augusta back. He says it to the sailors. He says that we've got this new weapon coming into the war.

But right from the very first time he was briefed on it . It's very interesting that Truman was vice president for 82 days before Roosevelt died, and nobody even told him that we were building the atomic bomb. He was considered such a lightweight. There was so little respect for him. Nobody even brought him in on the fact that we're building this extraordinary bomb. So he finds out after Roosevelt dies. The night after the emergency cabinet meeting, Stimson informs him. The next day, Jimmy Byrnes flies up from South Carolina, and then he gives him a fuller briefing. And Truman writes in his memoir that Byrnes says it's a weapon great enough to destroy the whole world and may allow us to dictate our own terms at the end of the war. But a weapon great enough to destroy the whole worldTruman writes in his memoir. And then he's briefed on that on April 25 by Stimson and Groves. They give a fuller briefing on this. And afterwards, Truman writes that Stimson says that this is so powerful and so dangerous that even if we have it, maybe we shouldn't use it. And Truman says, I felt the same way after reading the report and hearing their briefing. Then, when he's at Potsdam on July 25, he gets the full report on how powerful the Trinity test had been at Alamogordo, and he writes: we've discovered the most terrible weapon ever. He says, this may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era after Noah and his fabulous arc. Truman knows this is not just a bigger, more momentous weapon. He knows that he's beginning a process that could end life on the planet. But he goes ahead and uses it in the most reckless possible way, the way that people had been warning was likely to trigger an arms race with the Soviet Union. ~~~

NARRATOR: Truman vacillated, and ultimately yielded to the Byrnes Forrestal hardline faction. The feared and potentially suicidal arms race would continue. When Truman finally met with Robert Oppenheimer in October 1945, he asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. Oppenheimer did not know. Truman responded that he knew the answer: never. Contrary to the belief of Truman's inner circle, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not make the Soviet Union any more pliable. ~~~ JAY: So the debate's always been, I guess, twofold. One is: was the bomb really necessary to end the war, and meaning that were the Japanese ready to surrender anyway? And there's also been, you could say, a debate that even if they weren't ready to surrender, do you actually unleash such a weapon and begin an era of using weapons of mass destruction? And just to give a sense of the scale of what we're talking about, here's a quote from Truman's chief of staff. Now, it needs to be pointed out he says this afterwards, and I asked you off-camera, and as far as we know, he never actually said this to Truman, but he gives a sense of the nature of what we're talking about. So Truman's chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, who chaired the meetings of the Joint Chiefs, was the most impassioned, classifying the bomb with chemical and bacteriological weapons as violations of, quote, every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all the known laws of war. He proclaimed that, quote, Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.

In being the first to use it, we adopt an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. Leahy angrily told the journalist Jonathan Daniels in 1949, quote, Truman told me it was agreed they would use it only to hit military objectives. Of course, then they went ahead and killed as many women and children as they could, which was just what they wanted all the time. I'm reading now from Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's book. And just as a quick aside, the way to do all this is you got to watch the series, but you've got to read the book afterwards, because there's layers of richness to this history that clearly the series just didn't have time to take in. So let's get back to the key debate. Like, Leahy's not the only one that says the bomb wasn't necessary to win the war. KUZNICK: Six of America's seven five-star admirals and generals who won their fifth star during the war are on record as saying the bomb was either morally reprehensible, militarily unnecessary, or both. So we're talking about people we don't think of as pacifists. We're thinking about Dwight Eisenhauer, who said repeatedon several occasions that he spoke to Stimson at Potsdam and urged him not to use the bomb 'cause the Japanese were already defeated, he said, and I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon. One of the most intriguing, though, is Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur, who actually advocated the use of atomic bombs during the Korean War, was appalled that we used atomic bombs in this war. JAY: Because in Korea he thought it was necessary, and in this one he didn't. ~~~

NARRATOR: General MacArthur, supreme commander of Allied forces in the Pacific, considered the bomb completely unnecessary from a military point of view. He later said that the Japanese would have surrendered in May if the U.S. had told them they could keep the emperor. ~~~ KUZNICK: In fact, there's an interesting exchange that he has with Herbert Hoover, the former president. Hoover wrote a memo in May in which he warned about terrible casualties in an invasion and said, change the surrender terms. Tell the Japanese they can keep the emperor so we can get the war over with, 'cause that was the main stumbling block. JAY: Yeah. Explain that. KUZNICK: Let me first tell this MacArthur exchange. MacArthur wrote to Hoover on two occasions, and MacArthur said to Hoover that that was a wise and statesmanlike memo that you sent, and if we had adopted it, the war could have ended in May, he says. He says, and I'm sure the Japanese would have accepted it gladly. JAY: This is a surrender that allows the emperor to stay in power, at least nominally. KUZNICK: Which we did anyway, right? And, in fact, Stimson argued that we had to keep the emperor in power, 'cause it's our only way to maintain order in Japan. So we had to keep the emperor for our interests. It was actually some of the people on the left who wanted to get rid of the emperor, 'cause the emperor for all the obvious reasons was a war criminal and was complicit in all of this, was a negative force in Japanese life. But they knew they wanted to keep the emperor. And MacArthur says the war could have ended in May.

I think that's premature, I don't think the Japanese were quite ready to surrender in May, but possibly in June and almost certainly in July from what we know. JAY: Okay. So Truman and his generals know this. KUZNICK: Yes. JAY: They're hearing feedback from many of their generals on this count. And Truman says, yes, we're going to use it. So why do they use it? KUZNICK: It's hard to reason with Truman. You know, it's hard to get into his mind. But I think on some level he believed that the bomb would speed up the end of the war, which he wanted to do, and he wanted to do for obvious reasons, 'cause he had American men who were being killed, and that was a consideration for Truman. The other reason was because of the Soviet Union. At Yalta, Stalin had agreed to come into the Pacific War three months after the end of the war in Europe, which means around August 8. JAY: I mean, the Americans were pleading with Stalin to do that. KUZNICK: Yes, for quite some time. And he finally agreed to do it, in return for which he was going to get certain concessions, basically what the Russians had lost in the 1904-1905 war with Japan. So they were going to get the railroads in Manchuria, they were going to get Outer Mongolia, Port Arthur, Port Dairen. They were going to get south Sokal and they were going to get the Kuril Islands. A lot of things that were important to them economically they were going to get back for coming in.

But after [incompr.] test the bomb, it's very clear, as Stimson, Byrnes, Churchill, and Truman all say, let's get the war over with if we can before the Russians get in on a kill. So on the one hand, they wanted to speed up the end of the war for obvious reasons. They also wanted to speed it up for diplomatic reasons, and they wanted to make sure the Russians didn't get it. But in May we've got several leading Americans Le Szilrd, WalterHarold Urey, and Walter Bartky, three leading scientists, went to the White House to see Truman and to talk to him about not using the bomb. Truman sends them to South Carolina to see Jimmy Byrnes. Byrnes was not yet Secretary of State, but he was Truman's behind-the-scenes adviser, his principal adviser on all these things. And in the exchange between Szilrd and Byrnes, Byrnes says to Szilrd, he says, well, you're Hungarian, aren't you? Don't you want to make sure that we get the Russians out of Hungary? And Szilrd says, that's not what we're talking about; we're talking about using a weapon that's beginning to open the door to this era of mass destruction on an inconceivable scale. And all Byrnes was talking about was rolling back the Russians in Europe, the Soviet gains in Europe. So I think the bomb was in large measure a diplomatic weapon. As Leslie Groves says, Brigadier General Groves, who was the head of the Manhattan Project for the army, and he says that from the beginning, as soon as Itwo weeks after I took over this job, I knew that our enemy was Russia. A lot of people thought Russia was our heroic ally. I never felt that way. So in his mind it was always directed toward Russia. And we know that from other people, too. JAY: So you're killing tens of thousands of women and children to send a message.

KUZNICK: Yes. Hundreds of thousands of women and children were being killed. JAY: Now, one of the points you make in the book, that the evidence now examining the sort of logic of the Japanese about when or why surrender, that the bomb wasn't the decisive issue. It actually was the Russians were entering the war. KUZNICK: Yes, and that's what changed it. We knew that that was going to be the fact. If you look at our intelligence reports on April 11 or July 2, the intelligence reports to the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the summary for the week of the Potsdam meeting, they say the same thing: Soviet entry into the war will convince Japanese that defeat is inevitable, or Soviet entry into the war will immediately force Japan's surrender. Our intelligence was saying that. We knew that. And we knew it because we had broken the Japanese codes and we were intercepting their cables, and the cables going from Foreign Minister Tg in Tokyo to Ambassador Sat in Moscow were saying this over and over again: unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to ending the war. But'cause the reason why the cables [incompr.] the Japanese had decided in Mayactually, the end of April, but officially in May, that their only hopethat the best hope for ending the war is to get the Soviets to intervene diplomatically on their behalf to get the Japanese better surrender terms, which meant, essentially, keeping the emperor. So that was going back and forth. We knew that. Truman himself refers to the intercepted July 18 telegram as the telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace. Those are Truman's words: the telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace. We knew that that was decisive. Truman says, I went to Potsdam primarily to make sure the Soviets were coming into the war. And he

writes back, after he meets with Stalin on July 17, he writes in his diary, he says, Stalin'll be in the Jap war by August 15; finis Japs when that happens. That's Truman's own words, finis Japs when the Russians come in. So he knew that the Soviet entry was going to be the main factor. JAY: Finis Japs meaning it's over. KUZNICK: Yeah, the war's over. Truman knew that. So why does he use the bomb? He's not bloodthirsty. I mean, he's not a Hitler. He's not an evil person. But he was using the bomb as the warpeople's morality is lowered in the war. We've got those great quotes there by Dwight Macdonald and Freeman Dyson. JAY: Well, you say he's not a Hitler, but the chief prosecutor of Nuremberg said that heyou have a quote in the book which says, you know, maybe you can debate Hiroshima, maybe. And when you put this in context, which you have from a Japanese point of view, too, if you use one bomb to wipe out a city or 1,000 airplanes and firebomb and wipe out the city, KUZNICK: It didn't make any difference to them. JAY: to some extent it's not that different. But the guy who was the Nuremberg prosecutor says, you can't explain Nagasaki. You sent the message with Hiroshima. You've shown everyone. KUZNICK: He said Nagasaki's a war crime. JAY: He's called it a war crime. KUZNICK: He said there's no difference.

JAY: And, frankly, you know, how you compare who was the war criminal, but it's at the scale of Hitler. KUZNICK: And in one way it's worse, because Hitler's crime was finite. Millions of people were killed as a result of Hitler's crimes. Truman was opening the door to the possible annihilation of the species, and he knew it. He knew that that's what he was beginning, the process. This was the first time when mankind has the ability to end life on the planet. And Truman knew that. And the scientists knew that. In fact, Oppenheimer briefs the interim committee on May 31 and tells them within three years we'll likely have weapons between ten and 100 megatons in destructive capability. A hundred megatons would be 7,000 times as big as the Hiroshima bomb. What he knew and what they knew and what Teller was talking about developing from the beginning was a superbomb, and this superbomb could be made as big as you wanted [incompr.] infinite destructive capability. That's what we were opening up the door to. And the other point you were making, though, about from the Japanese standpoint, the Japanese knew that we were already wiping out cities. We began with the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9 and 10, and we'd firebombed 100 Japanese cities by that point. Destruction reached 99.5 percent of the city of Toyama. We had run out of big targets. We were wiping out middle-sized cities that had no military significance at all. JAY: Yeah, clearly attacking civilians to break the back of Japanese will, but with civilians as the deliberate target, KUZNICK: Yes, that was it. We called it terror bombing.

JAY: which is somethingwhich is more or less something Hitler introduced to modern warfare. KUZNICK: Yes, and then the British paid him back for that. But we called it terror bombing. That was the strategy, to burn down Japanese cities. But we already showed that we could do that. To the Japanese leaders, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not qualitatively different than the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities. And in terms of destruction, it really wasn't even much more than the firebombing of Tokyo, the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. So to them, that didn't make the difference. What made the difference to them was the Soviet invasion, 'cause we bombed Hiroshima August 6; at midnight on August 8, the Soviets come into the war. Stalin had actually sped up the Soviet entry when he found out that the U.S. was going to drop the bomb. JAY: I mean, and the point you're making here is it wasn't just the dropping of the bomb that's the great crime; it's that Truman knew he was opening the door to bigger and bigger bombs. And, I mean, I don't know how he could behe didn't believe the Soviets would ever have the bomb, apparently, but I don't know how you can be that dumb. KUZNICK: No. And if you look at Stettinius's diary, Stettinius records a conversation with Truman in which Stettinius says Truman knew that the Soviets were going to be developing a bomb soon. So even though he says that to Oppenheimer, that famous meeting he has with Oppenheimer after the war, the first time he'd actually met Oppenheimer, who was the head of Los Alamos, the scientist most responsible for the bomb project, and in that meeting Truman says, when did he think the Russians are going to get the bomb, and Oppenheimer says, I don't know, and Truman said, I know, they're never going to get the bomb . And Oppenheimer was just floored by the ignorance of this man. And then Oppenheimer blurts out, he

says, I think I have blood on my hands. And Truman says, ah, well, the blood's on my hands. Let me worry about it. And then, afterwards, Truman calls him a crybaby scientist and he says, I never want to see that son of a bitch in this office again. JAY: Alright. In the next segment of our interview, we're going to pick up this discussion, because the acceptance of this use of weapons of mass destruction as not justas primarily a diplomatic threat, you could say, that we're going to shape the world as we like it, and we've already shown you we're willing to use this weapon to do it. That starts to shape U.S. foreign policy. JAY: So we'll pick all this up in the next segment of our interview with Peter Kuznick on The Real News Network.

The Roots of the Cold War

Part 7

April 26, 13

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And we're continuing our discussion about The Untold History of the United States, by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. And Peter's in the studio with us. Thanks for joining us again, Peter. And just to remind everybody, Peter's a professor of history and the director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at the American University. And as I mentioned, he cowrote the ten-part Showtime series and the book Untold History of the United States. So we're just carrying on our discussion. If you haven't watched the previous segments, you should, because we're moving our way through things more or less chronologically. So United States enters the postwar period as the superpower of the globe. And here's a little bit from the film, where Oliver gives us a sort of a lay of the land of the United States and the world at that time.

~~~

NARRATOR: There was a brief moment in time when the United States, alone among the victors, was on top of the world. Its death toll was 405,000, compared to the Soviet Union's 27 million. The economy was booming. Exports more than doubled prewar levels. Industrial production had grown 15 percent annually. The U.S. held two-thirds of the world's gold reserves and three-fourths of its invested capital. It was producing an incredible 50 percent of the world's goods and services. ~~~ So United States is now the global economic power. It is the global military power. It has used the atomic bomb to tell the world, we are going to make this world as we like it. Pick it up from there, because we start to enter this period of this enormous battle against the Soviet Union, which perhaps wouldn't have happened if Roosevelt had lived longer or his vice president, Wallace, had remained vice president. PETER KUZNICK, PROF. HISTORY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: That's what we argue. We argue that Truman's policies toward the Soviet Union were very, very different than Roosevelt's or Wallace's would have been. Truman takes office on April 12, sworn in April 12. First day in the office is April 13. He immediately changes the tone of U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. Immediately. He gets briefed. He turns to people who Roosevelt paid little attention to on these issues, people like Stettinius, who nobody had any respect for, who was acting secretary of state, or Jimmy Byrnes. So Byrnes flies up the first day, and he gives Truman this briefing, which Truman hears from other people that the Soviets have broken all of their agreements, the Soviets have gone against what they

promised at Yalta. And so Truman's early tone is very belligerent and very hostile. Harriman, who was the ambassador to the Soviet Union, convinces Stalin to send Molotov before Molotov goes to San Francisco for the founding meetings for the United Nations, to come to Washington. That gave Harriman a chance to come here also, 'cause they have been telling Harriman not to come, and he wanted to come. And Harriman comes and briefs Truman, and others talk to Truman, and Harriman tells Truman that there's a barbarian invasion of Europe going on at the hands of the Soviets. So Truman now, who doesn't really know anything about what's going on, when he meets with people, he says, this is a terrible mistake. He says, I shouldn't be president; I'm not big enough. In fact, he'd had a recurring nightmare as vice president in which there'd be a knock on the door in the middle of the night, the Secret Service would be there, and they'd say, the president is dead; you're president now. This was his nightmare. So on April 12, he'sI think it was a Friday afternoon. He's drinking with his buddies at the Capitol at Sam Rayburn's office. And he gets a call from Steve Early at the White House, who says, rush over here as fast as you can. He gets greeted at the door and they send him upstairs. Eleanor Roosevelt greets him at the door. She's a big woman and Truman was a little guy, she towers over him and says, the president is dead. And the room starts spinning. His nightmare starts coming back. He finally gets his bearings, and he says, I'm so sorry; is there anything I can do? And Eleanor says to him, is there anything we can do for you? You're the one in trouble now. But Truman was overwhelmed from the very beginning and admits it to everybody. Everybody he meets with, he says it's a terrible mistake; somebody else should take over for me. But during this time

he's being advised he's got to at least look presidential and act like he knows what's happening. And Molotov comes to meet with him on April 23. Truman says beforehandthey've got this big meeting where they go around, and Leahy, Admiral Leahy, and Stimson and Marshall and the others are there, and they disagree about how to handle the Soviets. Stimson says, well, they're not really breaking their agreement. Stimson's the secretary of war at the time. And he says, they're doing exactly what we expected them to do. JAY: And later Churchill says more or less the same thing, that Stalin actually didn't break any of the agreements. KUZNICK: Right, because Stalin had met with Churchill, and they divided up Europe75 percent here for Russia, 75 percent in Greece for Britain, and Stalin lets the British go in there and mow down the resistance forces in Greece. JAY: Yeah, to the chagrin of many of the Greek communists, who felt that some of the. KUZNICK: Right, and to the chagrin of Tito and the Yugoslavs and others. And that's really the beginning of the break with Yugoslavia is overbecause Tito is supporting the communists and the rebels. JAY: So let's go back to. KUZNICK: Let me say about the April 23 meeting. JAY: Yeah, go ahead.

KUZNICK: So at that meeting Truman says, I'm not going to be able to get 100 percent of what I want from the Russians, but I expect to get 85 percent. And he goes in there and he starts berating Molotov for breaking their agreements. Molotov said, I'd never been talked to in that way in my life. And Truman says, carry out your agreements and you won't have to be talked to like that. Afterwards, Truman starts bragging. He said, I gave it to him one-two to the jaw. And this was the typical Truman, somebody who doesn't really know, who's very insecure, but masks it with this kind of bluster. The tone of America's relations to the Soviet Union changed overnight. From April 13 to April 23, in a ten-day period, we had gone from being wartime allies and comrades to basically being and accusing them of breaking their agreements. JAY: If I have one critique of the series and the book and on the whole, I mean, obviously, I think you guys did a tremendous jobis that maybe it's a little bit too much about the personality, and in the sense of this: if it wasn't Truman, it would have been someone else. And what I mean by that is it's in the nature of capitalism in the United States to expandnot just the United States; any of the countries. Why did Germany go to war? I mean, it's in the nature if it's there to be had, they're going to want it. If they can have the world, they're going to want it. And I'm not even persuaded, frankly, that if Roosevelt hadn't lived and he was in these new circumstances, yeah, maybe he wouldn't have been so belligerent, but I don't think Roosevelt was against running the world; he probably just thought he would have done itlet's have a real democratic world, except we're still going to run it. KUZNICK: Roosevelt had an idea for the various policemen who would help run the world. That would include the United States. It

would include the British. It would include the Soviets. So it's not that the U.S. wasn't going to run the world; it's that the U.S. was going to run the world in partnership, and they were going to set up a United Nations that was going to oversee and try to prevent these kind of conflicts. JAY: But what would Roosevelt have done when he's meeting national liberation struggles that want to start nationalizing American oil or British oil and they're starting to get funding from the Soviets? IsI mean, you know, what I'm saying is you start to get in these objective conflict of interests that I'm not sure which president. KUZNICK: And we don't know. That's a good point. But we do know that Truman surrounded himselfand Roosevelt did, too, also, to an extentwith Wall Street people, with top corporate executives. But Roosevelt trusted his own judgment. Truman gives in to these people in a very different way. Now, Wallace would have supported those kinds of Third World revolutionary movements. JAY: And we've discussed Wallace quite a bit before, and we had a little bit of an argument about why did Roosevelt bail on Wallace. So if you want to, go back and watch that if you haven't. But let's revisit Wallace again now, 'cause Wallace stays in Truman's cabinet. KUZNICK: Because Wallace staysyes, he stays in on Roosevelt's cabinet originally. Roosevelt asked him to stay on and says, you can have any position you want except for secretary of state. He said, I don't want to break poor Cordell Hull's heart by kicking him out of secretary of state. So Wallace chooses secretary of commerce, just as Herbert Hoover had done in the Harding administration given that same basic choice.

But from inside the cabinet, Wallace basically conducts guerrilla warfare against Truman's policies. Wallace meets with Truman. He writes things to Truman. And Truman was ambivalent. Truman doesn't start off asI mean, he does start off as a hardline, crazy cold warrior, but then he becomes ambivalent and he says, oh, I can deal with Stalin; he's like Boss Pendergast in Kansas City. I know this kind. He's a fine man. I don't like the people around him, but Stalin's a fine man. Stalin was not a fine man, obviously, but Truman says that, and Wallace appeals to him. And Wallace says, look at the world from the Soviet perspective, which is a thing that American leaders don't do. He said, from the Soviet perspective, the world looks very different than it does from the U.S. perspective. As President Kennedy later says at his AU commencement address in 1963, for the Soviet Union, it was as if the entire United States east of Chicago had been wiped out. He says, they were devastated by the war, they were terrified by the American bomb. JAY: Well, then, I was going to go ask you about that. Then let's go that step. KUZNICK: Because the Soviets knew. JAY: How did the Soviets see the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? KUZNICK: The Sovietbecause the Japanese had been trying to negotiate through the Soviets to get them better surrender terms, the Soviets knew better than anybody that the Japanese were trying to surrender. In fact, when Hirota meets with Malik in Tokyo on JuneI think it was 2 and 3, Malik, the Soviet ambassador to Japan,

says that the Japanese are desperate to surrender and get out of the war. They knew that. And, in fact, Stalin says that to Harry Hopkins, who was there. Then he says it to Truman. So the Soviets knew that there was absolutely no military necessity or justification for using the bomb. When Stalin finds out that the Americans are going to be using the bomb, then he tells his generals and his scientists, speed up as quickly as possible, the generals to get ready to invade as quickly as possible, and the scientists to speed up the Russian bomb. When the United States bombs Hiroshima, the Soviet response was: the bomb was dropped on us. That was their response. And they knew that from the beginning this was as much a diplomatic weapon as a military weapon. It was a club, a sword of Damocles that the Americans were holding over the Soviet head. And Byrnes uses it in the foreign ministers meeting to the point where I think it was Gromyko says to him: what is that? You've got an atomic bomb in your pocket? Are you trying to threaten us with this? And the Soviets would not be intimidated, but they were very concerned. JAY: I think part of what needs to be told here is that this antagonism with the Soviet Union and this Cold War did not start after World War II. It started after the Russian Revolution. KUZNICK: Yes. JAY: And if you want, Roosevelt was the aberration. The more consistent U.S. mindset towards the Soviet Union, right fromyou know, the idea that workers can take over the country is not an acceptable idea.

KUZNICK: No, and it wasn't acceptable during the Paris Commune, and the capitalists were terrified in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, and it wasn't acceptable. JAY: Now, I'll bet you there aren't many people watching this that know what the Paris Commune is, but go to Wikipedia, look it up, because you really should know what the Paris Commune is, 'cause it's one of the more important modern historic events, I think. KUZNICK: Yes, in 1871. But, yes, the United States sends troops to Russia, along with British and French and Japanese and other troops, tens of thousands of troops there, basically trying to defeat the Bolsheviks in 1918 and 1919. So you're right, certainly, that the Cold War begins right after the Russian Revolution. Russian Revolution poses exactly the kind of threat that you're talking about. It was anticapitalism. Also, in terms of foreign policy, they opened up the files and showed all the secret agreements, between the British and the French, especially, to divide up the world after World War I, which undermines the whole basis for Truman's kind of international peace that he was proposing with the Treaty of Versailles and his other seemingly liberal global efforts. JAY: So Roosevelt and, even more, Wallace break with what had been traditional U.S. foreign policy towards the Soviet Union. If anything, Truman and his gang are kind of going back to where things were before the war alliance. KUZNICK: Yes. The United States doesn't recognize the Soviet Union until 1933 under Roosevelt. And then when the war starts, the United States reaches out to the Soviet Union, promises a second front, and isn't able to deliver. It's unfortunate, but Roosevelt's heart

was in the right place in terms of dealing with the Soviet Union. And the last telegram he sends related to this he sends to Churchill, and he says, these kind of issues come up every day between us and the Soviets, but they get resolved, and let's not make too much of them; there's no reason why we can't continue this kind of post-war collaboration and friendship. JAY: So what are the economic and political forces that are driving Truman? And, again, I don't think we're just talking about Truman; we're talking about a whole stratum of professional foreign policy technocrats and the military and so on who all want to get this heat on, notyou know, they want to get as close to a hot war with the Soviet Union as they can get. In fact, some of them wanted a hot war. KUZNICK: Leslie Groves, for example, in December 1945 writes a very important memo in which he says that if anybody else is developing an atomic bomb, meaning the Soviet Union, then we should attack them preemptively. So he was calling for a preemptive war against the Soviet Union at the end of 1945. And there were others who were pushing a similar line. Wallaceif you read Wallace's journals, he's very, very upset about the warmongering sentiment in certain parts of the administration and the military. JAY: We're hearing it today about Iran. KUZNICK: Yeah. Well, that's the same kind of approach. Look at the world through the eyes of your adversaries. They weren't even our enemy at that point, but they were our competitors in certain ways. And Wallace's genius was to see it the way it looks to them. He says, we've got all the atomic bombs. We've got the thriving economy. We're developing military bases around the world from which to attack the Soviet Union. He says, look at it from their perspective. They don't see the United States as being the night in shining armor

on a white horse coming in to help the world; they see the United States as this aggressive antagonist that's trying to deny the Soviets the gains from the post World War, from World War II. The Sovietsthat was the other thing about the atomic bomb. The Soviets immediately said, all of the gains we've made in the war are now going to be eroded by the fact that the United States not only is having the bomb, but it's brandishing it, it's wearing it on its hip. Stimson, the secretary of war, who goes way back Stimson was first secretary of war under the Taft administration, so we're talking about somebody who goes way back. And he was not in any way a liberal. He was a Victorian conservative by all means. But he writes a memo to Truman. He's 78 years old at this point. He's about to retire. His last cabinet meeting, I think it was September 21, 1945. The last cabinet meeting was devoted to his memo, in which he calls for sharing the atomicactually getting rid of all atomic bombs, opening up to the Soviets. He says, if we want somebody to act trustworthy, we've got to trust them. And he calls for this kind of postwar collaboration with the Soviet Union. They have a cabinet meeting at which Wallace is the strongest supporter of what Stimson is calling for there. And Truman is open. He'syou know, Truman at this point is still somewhat ambivalent. When we finally do go before the United Nations with what's called the AchesonLilienthal plan, they make one terrible blunder. And this was a plan for the United Nations to take over all the development of nuclear power, so no country will have nuclear weapons. And AchesonOppenheimer really drafted this. But then the person they choose to present it to the United Nations was Bernard Baruch, and Baruch did it in such a way as to use it as an advantage against the Soviets. The Soviets of course reject it, which everybody knew that they would. It was a terrible tragedy. And at that point, the United

States decides to go ahead with building up its nuclear stockpile, its nuclear arsenal, and using it. JAY: And Wallace critiques it, and Wallace gets fired. KUZNICK: Yes. Wallace spoke out very strongly against the Acheson against Baruch and Baruch's plan, and he's speaking out very strongly against the Cold War as it's developing. He gives a very important speech at Madison Square Garden in September 1946. And the interesting thing about that speech is that Truman read it. Truman went over it page by page and told Wallace he agrees with every word of it. Then Truman went before the press and said he agrees with what Wallace is saying in this speech. Once Wallace said it and he says the United States is not going to support the British, and we're not going to send our troops after oil in the Middle East, and we're going to maintain friendship with the Soviet Union, after that, everybody'sattacks Wallace for this leftist speech and they attack Truman for having approved it. Then Truman tries to backpedal. JAY: But when you say "everybody,". KUZNICK: I'm talking about the conservatives. JAY: In the ruling circles, KUZNICK: Yes, yes. JAY: becauseI mean, I only know from your book, but according to your book, Wallace is actually very popular amongst American people.

KUZNICK: Yes, Wallace is still enormously popular at that point. And Truman wanted to keep him in the cabinet in order to have support from the left, 'cause Wallace was the leading spokesperson for the left. But when Wallace critiques the Cold War as it's emerging, especially Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, Churchill comes there, and. JAY: Well, we're going to. Okay. Well, let's stop here, 'cause that's sort of the beginning of the next segment. So we're going to pick up with Churchill's famous speech about the Iron Curtain and this whole world that Truman helps create gets handed over to President Eisenhower. So please join us for the next segment of our interview with Peter Kuznick on The Real News Network.

End

American Exceptionalism and US Imperialism Peter Kuznick on Reality Asserts Itself Part 1

the ideas that justify American conquest and empire October 15, 2013

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to Reality Asserts Itself. When President Obama spoke at the United Nations, he again said ('cause he had said before) that he considered America an exceptional country. He called it "exceptional". And I'll play that quote for you in just a few minutes. But, of course, he's not the first one to have said that. This idea of American exceptionalism, according to many, goes to the very heart not only of American foreign policy, but of American identity itself. Here's a quote from 1900. This is Senator Albert J. Beveridge in support of the annexation of the Philippines. He said: "God has. . . . made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth." He goes on to say: "This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace."

Of course, it's not only from a fairly conservative position that this gets articulated. Let's jump ahead a few decades, just before the Iraq War. Here is a liberal version of the same thing. Michael Ignatieff, Canadian academic, at the time living in New York (and had become quite a renowned intellectual in many circles), writes in a cover story for The New York Times Magazine, just on the eve of the Iraq War, the following: "America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden. . . . The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." Michael Ignatieff went on to become leader of the party for about five minutes, and this article helped to send him into political oblivion in Canada. One of the more militant spokesmen for American exceptionalism and a hawk on most affairs and foreign policy is John McCain. Here's McCain on exceptionalism: "I do believe in American exceptionalism. . . . We're the only nation I know in the world that really is deeply concerned about adhering to the principle that all of us are created equal and endowed by our creators with certain rights. And those we have tried to bring to the world." And here's another quote: "Some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional, in part because we have shown a willingness, through the sacrifice of blood

and treasure, to stand up not only for our own narrow self-interest, but for the interests of all." No, that wasn't John McCain. That was Barack Obama at the United Nations, the quote I referred to at the beginning of all of this. And I think you find from 1900 on--and I'm sure we'll find quotes even earlier than that--it's all more or less the same story. Now joining us in the studio is Peter Kuznick. Peter is a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He's a cowriter of the ten-part Showtime series called Untold History of the United States with Oliver Stone, which is just about to come out--in fact, I think it has just come out on DVD and in all the various ways. One can download an electronic book. Thanks very much for joining us, Peter. PETER KUZNICK, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY (WASHINGTON): Good to see you, Paul. JAY: Now, I've done a whole series with Peter and Oliver on their Showtime documentary, which I think is an excellent film, and I think you should go back and watch that series after we watch this. But we're going to now focus on this one concept, because Barack Obama, when he said--it's a big code word to say America's exceptional. Everyone knows that you're positioning yourself in this whole tradition of the defense of America as the exception. And in many ways this begins, does it not, as an exception to the old colonial world. We're not colonial Europe. We don't go and colonize people. We are the land of liberty. We fought for revolution, for our own freedom, and we bring freedom everywhere. We don't bring chains. I mean, that's the narrative, isn't it?

KUZNICK: Yeah, that's the narrative. This is deeply rooted in American history and American traditions, this idea that the United States is not only different from all the other countries, that we're better than all the other countries. This goes back way before the American Revolution, goes back to John Winthrop's sermon aboard the Arbella in Massachusetts Bay in 1630, when the Puritans were out to disembark and build the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In his famous sermon he says, America shall be--he says, "we shall be as a city upon a hill" and the eyes of all the world will be upon us. And they, from the very beginning, were staking out a position that they were going to be the model, and it was termed the model for Christian charity. JAY: The new Jerusalem. KUZNICK: Yeah, the new Jerusalem, the model for all the backward people in Europe, in England especially. And they were going to follow the American example, the example of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were going to convert to the true vision of Christianity. And then the forces of Satan would be vanquished and the force of God would triumph. We always represented the forces of God in that way. And Americans still see us as the force of God. According to a fairly recent survey, 57 percent of Americans said that God has given America a special mission to perform in the world and in history--57 percent. So this is not only deeply rooted in our past; it's still with us today. So it's part of this evangelizing, Christianizing, civilizing mission that the United States has towards the rest of the world. JAY: That narrative isn't so original, though. Like, the British thought they were doing that, the Spanish, the Portuguese. All the old European colonizers would have talked about sending priests, and they were going to go civilize. And I assume that was still the

mentality in terms of the expansion in North America, the genocide against native people. I mean, nobody thought they were being liberated. They thought they were being civilized, quote-unquote, which is still the kind of old colonial narrative. KUZNICK: [crosstalk] the notion of liberation is a much more modern notion. And they weren't thinking in those terms. JAY: But when we get--jump ahead, which is--and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me the first big overseas adventure which is dressed up as liberating is the invasion and then what leads to the annexation of the Philippines. Or is there something before that, where that more modern narrative--? KUZNICK: It's the biggest overseas adventure. But the war against Mexico can be seen also as an imperialist venture of a different sort. JAY: [crosstalk] the rhetoric of liberation there? Or was it more straight colonial conquest? KUZNICK: Well, the rhetoric of defending America's honor was there from the beginning. And Lincoln was among those who denounced it most fervently. But in terms of the broader overseas conquest, what you're getting at is the change that occurs the 1890s with the invasion of the Philippines as part of the Spanish-American war. It didn't have a lot to do with what was going on in Cuba, which was the main focus, but we immediately took the Philippines also. And why did we do that? Because we needed those way stations, because we were obsessed even at that point with the China market. And so the Philippines and other stations on the way, Midway and Guam, were important for us developing the--taking over the China market.

JAY: And this meant narrative of liberating, not colonizing, Stuart Creighton Miller in 1982, writing about the American adventure in the Philippines, writes: "Americans altruistically went to war with Spain to liberate the Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos from their tyrannical yoke. If they lingered on too long in the Philippines, it was to protect the Filipinos from European predators waiting in the wings for an American withdrawal and to tutor them in American-style democracy." This is from Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines. KUZNICK: Yeah. That sounds pretty hollow now, doesn't it? JAY: Doesn't it? KUZNICK: Yeah. But even then, this is 1982. JAY: This is in 1982. KUZNICK: So this was in the aftermath of Vietnam. There's no excuse for that kind of thinking back in 1982 either. But, you know, to understand that, the Beveridge quote that you started off with, he goes on to say, God "has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace."

I mean, so, it's this vision, again, suffusing this Christian vision--we're doing--we're God's nation, the chosen people, going out to civilize the rest of the planet of all these heathen, and especially in the Philippines. But Beveridge was important, because he was the only senator to actually visit the Philippines, and everybody was waiting for his benediction or criticism. And he comes back and he gives this glorious support for what America was doing there. JAY: And it's almost never talked about, what America did in the Philippines. So I'm sure most of our viewers don't really know how barbaric that war was. KUZNICK: It was barbaric. If you look at the island of Samar, the order was to turn it into "a howling wilderness," to kill every male over the age of ten. And we did that. It was a slaughter. But it was also a racist slaughter. Some of the soldiers wrote back letters saying it was so much more fun to kill these little niggers here in the Philippines. There was a big southern element involved in this, a lot of discrimination, a lot of racism. JAY: Concentration camps where hundreds of thousands of people died. KUZNICK: Concentration camps. The beginning of waterboarding for the United States occurs in the Philippines. We explicitly use waterboarding there. JAY: And this is all--in the beginning is a sort of American support for-there was a revolutionary movement to fight against Spanish colonization. KUZNICK: Yeah. The revolutionary movement was run, headed by Emilio Aguinaldo. He was sure that he was going to get American support, 'cause they were a popular democratic movement. But

instead--up to that point the United States had generally been on the side of progressive reform around the world. Why 1898 is so important: because the turning point--the United States goes from being a supporter of revolutionary movements--and we have a revolutionary tradition ourselves that we're proud of--to becoming the leading counterinsurgency force in the world. That doesn't begin with Petraeus; this begins really in 1898, when the United States begins to position itself against reform and radical change everywhere. And then the United States begins its mission of intervening in a lot of places throughout Latin America. Every time there's unrest or revolutionary movements, especially the ones that threaten American business interests, the United States sends in the Marines. Smedley Butler's warning about that in his later statements about-that he was a muscleman for capitalism [incompr.] go in there. He said, we overthrew this movement to support the national bank boys here and for Harriman here. And he talks about it very explicitly. And Butler, as you know, was the most decorated Marine of his generation, maybe even still. And he says--he wrote a book, War Is a Racket and denounced everything he'd been doing from the Philippines and China up through the 1920s and 1930s. JAY: Well, talk a little bit more of happened in the Philippines, 'cause, as I say, it's almost been eliminated from the popular historical discourse. KUZNICK: It was the first major American colonial venture. The United States at that point was differentiating itself from the Europeans and from the old European empires. The American attitude was that we're not going to be a colonial empire. We hated colonial empires 'cause we fought against and liberated ourselves from one. Britain was not very popular in the United States during this time. Even when we enter World War I, there's a lot of

resistance to going in on Britain's side, because the Fourth of July celebrations were anti-British celebrations throughout this period. There was a lot of hostility toward the British Empire still, and we didn't want to be classed as an empire with them. American public thought very negatively about empires. But that thinking is beginning to change. And we see that happen in the 1900 election when William Jennings Bryan is running against McKinley. McKinley might have been a reluctant imperialist, but by 1900 he had embraced imperialism pretty fully. JAY: This is William Jennings Bryan in 1900 accepting the nomination for president from the Democratic Party. Here's a quote: "If we have an imperial policy, we must have a great standing army as its natural and necessary complement. The spirit which will justify the forcible annexation of the Philippine islands will justify the seizure of other islands and the domination of other people, and with wars of conquest we can expect a certain, if not rapid, growth of our military establishment." That's 1900. KUZNICK: I guess he was wrong, 'cause we never developed a military establishment or a national security state. JAY: Yeah, everyone goes on about Eisenhower's warning about this. This is 1900. KUZNICK: Yeah, Bryan was on the mark when it came to this. It's unfortunate that Bryan is remembered more for his reactionary stance in the Scopes Trial, for his opposition to evolution in the 1920s. But Bryan was a real progressive, and Bryan was an outspoken

anti-imperialist, and he was in favor of progressive policies toward women, toward elections. I mean, there are a lot of things about Bryan. And he stood up on principle against Wilson before World War I. He resigned in principle as secretary of State because it was clear to him that Wilson was pushing the United States toward war on the side of Britain in World War I. JAY: Just to give a sense again of just how barbaric the American war against the Philippines was, here's a couple of quotes from Mark Twain. Many people probably don't know--some of you probably do know--but Mark Twain was one of the leaders of something called the anti-imperialist league that came into being to oppose the war against the Philippines. Here's a couple of quotes from Twain. "It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." And he writes: "And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed"-referring to what Philippines would be after annexation. "We can have a special one--our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones." It was an intense, vicious, vigorous debate about all of this in 1900. KUZNICK: Yes. There was a sharp debate in the Senate. Many people denounced imperialism from the beginning and, like Bryan, understood that we're going down this slippery slope toward becoming an empire. And an empire to them meant the big standing army, which was going to repress strikers, was going to repress

farmers. This oppression doesn't only exist overseas; it's going to be directed at home as well, in their vision. And it goes against what they saw as the revolutionary tradition, everything that America was supposed to stand for. But you see that split, and that split reoccurs over and over again. That's the battle between Henry Wallace and Henry Luce in 1941, 1942, when Henry Luce says, the 20th century must be the American century and the United States is going to dominate the world in all these ways, militarily also. And Wallace says, no, the 20th century must be the century of the common man; we need a worldwide people's revolution in the tradition of the American, French, Latin American, and Russian revolutions. So [incompr.] we still have that in the United States now, a conflict between these two visions of the role the United States is supposed to play, and which is why in a situation recently when the public comes out so strongly against military attack against Syria, that's part of that tradition again. And that's also a part of America. Unfortunately, that has been muted, has been--the other forces have tended to win, 'cause you can usually rally people around the flag and around warfare in the United States throughout the time from 1898 to the present--with some exceptions, but that's been more the case. JAY: Okay. Well, in the next segment of our interview, we're going to talk a little bit more about why this shift takes place towards the end of the 19th century, and then a little more examination of the narrative of American exceptionalism and the reality of American foreign policy. So please join us for part two of our interview with Peter Kuznick on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.

Obama Embraces American Exceptionalism Peter Kuznick on Reality Asserts Itself Part 2

Obama's claim of an enlightened US foreign policy October 17, 2013

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And this is Reality Asserts Itself. We're continuing our series of interviews with Peter Kuznick on the whole theory of American exceptionalism. Peter now joins us in the studio. Peter is professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He's cowriter of the ten-part Showtime series called Untold History of the United States. And there's now a 12-part of that series coming out, two new episodes, on a DVD and through digital download all over the place, and that's coming out as we speak. Thanks for joining us again Peter. PETER KUZNICK, PROF. WASHINGTON: Hey, Paul. HISTORY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY,

JAY: And let me say I'm kind of looking forward to seeing these two parts, 'cause I'm particularly interested in the one of the Philippines. As we talked in part one, we started talking about America's war against the people of the Philippines, and that gets very little coverage. I mean, I would venture to say 99 percent of our audience who's under the age of--well, I'll bet you most of our audience knows nothing about the war of the Philippines. But young people absolutely know nothing about the war in the Philippines.

KUZNICK: Well, you're raising a sensitive point, because not your audience, but most Americans know nothing about American history. That's one of our big concerns, that according to the national report card issued in June 2011, high school seniors tested lower in U.S. history than they did in math or science. The lowest of any area, the area they knew the least, was U.S. history. Twelve percent of U.S. high school seniors were judged to be proficient in American history. But even that's misleading, because only 2 percent could identify the issue that Brown v. Board of Education was addressing, even though the answer was obvious from the way the question was posed. So we have a real problem, first, that people don't know any history, and secondly, that most of what they know is wrong. JAY: And let me just add one little segue, caveat to that, which is in Ontario--I grew up in Toronto, and you can get through the whole of high school with one history credit. I'm on the advisory committee to a masters of journalism program at a university in Ontario, and you can finish your masters in journalism and have taken only one high school history credit. And now you're supposed to go out and do journalism. KUZNICK: My whole project with Oliver is based on the idea that history is important, that everybody has an understanding of history, and what their view of history is, no matter if it's well articulated or not, is going to shape what they--not only what they think of the past, but what they think of the future, what they think of future possibilities. When you've got such a narrow, constrained, distorted view of history, you can't think, you can't imagine that you could create a future that's different from the present. I see that all the time with the students and with others in American society. There's no utopian thought anymore. They can't envision a different society, a different way of relating, a different kind of world. And that limits their ability to act.

JAY: Right. Okay. Let's pick up where we left off in part one. You talked about the war in the Philippines being a major shift. But before that, America--now, let's--again, the narrative is all about America the progressive, America the revolutionary, America fighting for independence, and we can never forget slavery and the genocide against native people. So the American narrative already starts with an exception to how wonderful we all are, because you could be wonderful and still have slavery, you can be wonderful and still wage genocide. That being said, America wasn't going to be the country of foreign adventures, and then it was. So talk a bit about that shift and why you think it took place. KUZNICK: You have to put it in the context of the 1890s. And in 1893, the United States suffered its greatest depression up to that point. You have to remember the United States had cyclical depressions-1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, a little bit in 1883. Then the big one hit in 1893 and there was millions unemployed. People were riding the rails. They were hobos, and they were trying to sleep in police stations for the winter so that they would at least be able to keep warm and get fed. This was a terrible time. And this was a depression that endured, and it lasted. There were uprisings around the country. But there were really two fundamental ways to get out of that. One was to--because it was a depression based on overproduction-America's factories, American industry was booming during that time. And so they were producing more than the American market could absorb, the way it was structured. So there were two possible alternatives to that. The progressive alternative is to raise standard of living so that people could actually buy those surplus goods. JAY: Raise wages. KUZNICK: Yeah, raise wages. And the other alternative was to look for markets overseas. And that's the view that triumphed. And if you

look at the statements of the leading industrialists of the time, the Rockefellers and others, they were all talking about the fact that American production has outstripped America's capacity to consume, and we've got to find overseas markets. In addition to the markets, we wanted the cheap labor as well. JAY: And raw materials. KUZNICK: And raw materials, yeah. They all go together. JAY: And there's nothing new about that in a sense. That's what colonialization, European colonization to a large extent was about, maybe less about the problem of overproduction, but certainly finding raw materials, finding new markets. KUZNICK: But the Americans had a different vision. We were going to accomplish everything that the Europeans had. We were going to get all the benefits of Empire without being a colonial force. That was the American idea. We saw how tied down the kind of big bureaucracies that the Europeans needed to become colonial powers. The United States never develops that in that way, or at least not till much later. So what we have is what we call an open-door empire. Secretary of State John Hay issues these "Open Door" notes, and we're going to be able to batter down all the barriers. We're going to get access to the markets. We want a world of free trade in which we have access to all those people. So we're opposed to those kind of colonial spheres that exclude the United States. And so that's our vision. It's a different vision than the Europeans had. And we even--if you look at Wilson versus the French and the British during World War I, Wilson's 14 points were predicated on the idea that there wasn't going to be this kind of colonial distribution

afterwards. However, Wilson caves in time after time after time and allows them to follow through on the secret treaties that they had established before World War I, even that Lenin later exposes. But Wilson allows them to keep those deals. In exchange, he was hoping for establishing the League of Nations. The idea was that we'll create the League of Nations in order to clean up all the problems that were resulting from the agreements that we had made at Versailles. JAY: Now, this idea that America is the city on the hill, that God gave us this--we're going to keep the world from chaos and this--we have higher ideals. But then there's always exceptions to that. So, in other words, I was saying to you off-camera, you know, Europe does bad things for bad reasons. America does bad things for good reasons. But on the other hand, the real practice is [crosstalk] Well, let's go back to the Monroe Doctrine and the whole--how do you explain that we're the country of justice and liberation and sovereignty and everything else, and then we say, well, except that we own Latin America, and everybody in Latin America better submit to us? KUZNICK: Because we're going to go there to civilize them. We going to uplift them. We're going to raise their standards of living. We're going to improve their education. And you see how much they love us now, so it must've worked. But we have a lot of exceptions. The United States, like other countries, is full of contradictions. The treatment as you were saying, of Native Americans is not something that Americans are proud of. There's still a big controversy of whether or not to change the Washington Redskins' name which is now all over the news. But Americans' treatment of the Native Americans, the genocide against Native Americans is universally condemned now and considered shameful, at least in the last two decades. Slavery is universally condemned and considered to be shameful.

We haven't dealt with the consequences of either of those problems in any serious way, but at least if you look at America's textbooks, they're not going to be celebrating the genocide against the Indians, they're not going to be celebrating the enslavement of AfricanAmericans. JAY: Which at the time they did. KUZNICK: Which they did till quite--much more recently. It was part of this uplifting, civilizing mission that the white men in the Northeast were going to conduct for all of humanity. And we continue to have that view in terms of our foreign involvement. That's a view that still exists to a large extent. There are still historians, as you were saying, who are going to support what the United States did in the Philippines and as part of this Christianizing, uplifting mission. It gets complicated. It gets complicated a little bit after World War I. World War I is not a popular war in its aftermath. It wasn't very popular at the time, between the gas warfare and the trench warfare. I mean, that's not going to be very popular. In the aftermath of World War I, the nation recoils and there is a strong antiwar sentiment [incompr.] it takes Roosevelt a long time to get the Americans to agree to go into World War II, and there was still a lot of resistance. But then, after World War II, the United States comes out of World War II as, again, this shining knight on the white horse, and the United States is this civilizing force, and we're fighting the good war now against communism, at least by 1948. So World War II, although even that, because of the atomic bombing and because of what we learn about World War II, it's hard to have that untrammeled, unvarnished sense of American greatness. But it

continues through the 1950s to a large extent and through the early 1960s. And it's really Vietnam that changes the narrative. Much like Iraq and Afghanistan are changing the narrative again, Vietnam changed the American narrative in the '60s. JAY: Well, before we get to Vietnam, the ability of this official narrative, which is mostly total mythology--I mean, yeah, there's-you could say, you know, maybe the Belgians were more brutal in the Congo than the Americans were in Guatemala [incompr.] they didn't cut people's hands off and hang them from trees and things, but certainly many of the regimes that have been supported in Latin America and around the world have been, you know, every bit as brutal as European colonialism was. Yet there's still this ability to keep this narrative that Barack Obama can say what he said, and it seems perfectly reasonable. And let me just play the quote of Obama again, just to remind everybody what it was. So President Obama at the United Nations says: "Some may disagree, but I believe America is exceptional--in part because we have shown a willingness through the sacrifice of blood and treasure to stand up not only for our own narrow self-interests, but for the interests of all." It's a narrative that still can be talked about. KUZNICK: Yes. But Obama--that wasn't his position originally. During the 2008 campaign, he says--he was asked about it. He says, I believe in American exceptionalism as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism. And he got pounced upon. Right? The neocons and the conservatives all jumped on him. McCain--. JAY: Yeah, let me--I'll read you a quote from Mike Huckabee about that. Huckabee says, "His"--meaning 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." And

here is, of course, the punchline: "To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation." KUZNICK: Yeah, and that was a view--that's probably the strongest statement of it, but others said the same thing. And Obama learned-in typical Obama fashion, he didn't learn the right lesson. He didn't learn that you stand up on principle and you educate the American people as to why this is a dangerous philosophy, American exceptionalism. He embraced American exceptionalism. When the troops came back from Fort Bragg, what--Obama's greeting to them was really troubling. Obama says to the troops coming back from Iraq--he greeted them at Fort Bragg, and he commended their willingness to sacrifice so much for a people that you never met, which is "part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don't make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it's right. There can be no fuller expression of America's support for self-determination than our leaving Iraq to its people. That says something about who we are." And then he goes on to say: "... the values that are written into our founding documents, and a unique willingness among nations to pay a great price for the progress of human freedom and dignity. This is who we are. That's what we do as Americans," you know, paying a unique price. What did Alan Greenspan say? He said, of course this war is about oil. He says, why can't the Americans accept the fact? And Greenspan's not a raving liberal. He was the former head of the Federal Reserve. But Obama's got to cloak it in this idea of this noble mission. It's very, very dangerous. Even Vietnam, if you look now, Obama has called for a 13-year reassessment and commemoration of Vietnam. As other presidents before him, he once had a critical narrative on Vietnam, but now he's embracing Vietnam. Again, very dangerous.

Recent surveys show that 51 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds think that the Vietnam War was worth fighting and justified. This is shocking to some of us, any of us who lived through that period, to see this kind of sea change among young Americans. But you hear this kind of rhetoric, you see somebody like Obama, who they think is progressive, embracing Vietnam to a much greater extent than before, and it distorts their view of what the United States should do and can do in the world. The reality of Vietnam, as you know, was one of the worst bloodbaths in the 20th century. JAY: Millions of people killed. KUZNICK: Yeah. And if you ask young people how many millions were killed, they estimate between a half million and a million Vietnamese died in the war. When Robert McNamara came into my class, he told my students that he accepts that 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war. McNamara was the architect of that war. Three-point-eight million. I did this calculation recently. If you go down to the Vietnam War Memorial, you look at that, it's got the names of 58,272 Americans who died in the war. The message is the tragedy of Vietnam is that 58,272 Americans died. The Okinawa war memorial, which I think is a real war memorial, has the names of all the Okinawans who died, all the Japanese, all the Americans, all the Brits, all the Australians, all the people who died. That sends a message about war. The Vietnam Memorial sends a very different message. It's 146 feet long. If they included the names of all the Vietnamese, all the Cambodians, all the Laotians--I calculated recently it would be over four miles long. Could you imagine a war memorial over four miles long in the heart of Washington, D.C., and the message that that would send? I think that that would be the message that that really needs to get out there.

And to me it's shocking, again, American historical ignorance. If you ask--I ask my students, how many Jews died in the Holocaust, all the hands go up. They all know the 6 million figure. But imagine how we would feel, because they have no idea how many Vietnamese died in their own war. But the atrocities committed by their country they don't know. They know the atrocities committed by other countries. What would we feel if the average German student thought that, let's say, 1 million Jews died in the Holocaust? We would be appalled at the moral depredation that's gone on there to allow them to not understand their history in the atrocities. But the Germans do. They've studied it. The Americans don't. Maybe they know something about the Native Americans now in a general sense [incompr.] about slavery. But they don't know--as you were saying, they don't know about the Philippines. They don't know about this narrative that we're trying to convey, which is not just about American flag-waving and all the good things we do. Yeah, the United States does a lot of good things. But it's about the terrible things that the United States does. JAY: And part of that narrative is that if Assad uses chemical weapons and kills several thousand people, that is an absolutely unacceptable red line. But if the United States dropped atomic bombs and actually used the worst weapons of mass destruction on a civilian population, within this narrative it can all be justified. And, well, make this point, and then we're going to go to the next segment. KUZNICK: And it is justified, because right now the United States, at the Udvar-Hazy Annex of the Air and Space Museum, this national museum, is displaying the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And instead of being critical of the era of weapons of mass destruction, General John "Jack" Dailey, the head of the aerospace museum, announced in 2003--when they

announced this, he said, we're going to display the Enola Gay in all of its glory as a magnificent technological achievement. We celebrate this, we celebrate the atomic bombs dropping, even though, as we show in our Untold History, in our book and our documentary series, there was no military justification, no moral justification. It wasn't necessary to end the war. And it didn't end the war. That's another fallacy in the United States. It was the Soviet invasion that ended the war. JAY: And we'd done a whole segment on this, and you should watch this whole series on Untold History, 'cause it's really good. Alright. In the next segment of our interview, Peter and Oliver were in Japan recently, and it was on the anniversary of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing. And in the next segment, I'm going to ask Peter, well, what do they think of American exceptionalism? Please join us for the continuation of our discussion on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.

American Exceptionalism: Doing Bad Things for "Good Reasons" Peter Kuznick on Reality Asserts Itself Part 3

beneath the veneer of America's commitment to democracy is this hard-nose policy which says: how are we going to keep 50 percent of the world's wealth and it's not by idealism October 18, 2013

In part three of an interview with historian Peter Kuznick, Senior Editor Paul Jay continued the discussion of American exceptionalism in the context of U.S. American foreign policy post-World War II. One of the main principles or pillars of the American exceptionalist argument about post-World War II is Japan and Europe, that America didn't colonize Japan or Europe, says Jay. It helped Japan and Europe rebuild. They became independent countries. And this is an example of the sort of benign American power that when we conquer, we also help the people rebuild, and we don't control them. I think there's an element of truth to that, admits Kuznick. The U.S. occupation of Japan was in some ways very repressive, but in other ways it was pretty progressive. But beneath the veneer of America's commitment to democracy and freedom and uplift, says Kuznick, is this real hard -nose, realistic policy which says: how are we going to keep 50 percent of the world's wealth if we are 6 percent of the world population? And it's not by idealism. It's not by spreading democracy. It's being very realistic and doing whatever we have to do to maintain that wealth and that position. And that means overthrowing governments.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. This is Reality Asserts Itself. We are continuing our series of discussions with Peter Kuznick, who now joins us in the studio. Peter's a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He is a cowriter of the Showtime series Untold History of the United States, which is now going to be coming out as we speak, paperback book and DVD and digital download, and with two new episodes, one on the Philippines and one on--what's the second one? PETER KUZNICK, PROF. HISTORY, WASHINGTON: Well, really, the-JAY: Twenties and '30s. KUZNICK: --it covered the period from the 1890s through 1940. So the second episode, which I showed to my students for its world premiere yesterday, talks a lot about the dark side of the 1930s, about American business relations with the Nazis, with German business, going actually up to World War II, and then continuing in German hands during World War II, but with the profits accruing in blocked accounts, which the American companies got back after the war. And not only that, but IBM and General Motors sued the U.S. government for the bombing of their factories in Germany and were-actually got millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars in reparations from the U.S. government after the war. So that's in this episode. AMERICAN UNIVERSITY,

JAY: Alright. Well, we will be doing this. We're going to get a copy of the segment soon, I hope, and then we're going to interview Peter and perhaps Oliver about those two episodes. But now we're going to pick up where we left off. One of the ideas, central modern ideas, post-World War II ideas of American exceptionalism--and I'm positioning this thing, as I said before-America, Europe, and others, Russia, they do bad things for bad objectives, but America does bad things with good objectives, and somehow that explains bombing--dropping nuclear weapons on Japan. And you were there just a few weeks ago on the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So how are people there-what do they make of this idea of this America, the exceptional American city on the hill? KUZNICK: Well, Japan was pretty amazing this year, 'cause Oliver joined me, and we spent 12 days--I was there with my students. If any of your viewers want to join us in Hiroshima and Nagasaki next year, I do this every year, I take students to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Oliver joined me this year and we spent 12 days in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and Okinawa. We were in Okinawa supporting the anti-base movement there. The response in Japan is just fabulous to what we're saying. We did public events every day, sometimes three a day, ranging from 400 people to 8,000 people. And even before we'd gone there, our Japanese book Untold History, in Japanese, had sold close to 50,000 copies before we went there. The response there from the media-we had up to 150 media following us at some of these places. Universally positive. Not a word of criticism or negativity. And we were raising the same issue about Japanese falsification of their history hand-in-hand with American falsification of our history. The two histories are very similar in a lot of ways. But in Japan we

have no problem convincing them about the wrongness of the atomic bombs. That's pretty widely accepted in Japan. What's important there is to convince them to look equally critically at their own history, which they have a tendency not to do. And Prime Minister Abe, who is now in power, is one of the great falsifiers of Japanese history, trying to deny the Japanese treatment of the comfort women, the sex slaves, the Koreans and the other comfort women, trying to deny the Japanese Rape of Nanjing and the atrocities toward China. But he goes back to a history. His grandfather, Prime Minister Kishi, in the 1960s was one of the early great falsifiers, as was Kishi's younger brother, Sat, who was prime minister in 1974 when Okinawa reverted to Japan. So there's a lot of history there. JAY: And this is part of the American narrative is that the Japanese imperialists were so brutal, so vicious, it was such a terrible dictatorship that the--and the only way to end the war, and thus it's okay to kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with nuclear weapons. KUZNICK: Yeah. The idea, the narrative, as you know, is that we had to drop the bomb in order to avoid an invasion in which half a million to a million Americans would have been killed in the invasion and lots of Japanese. So it was really a humane thing. We did this not because we were bloodthirsty or cruel or militaristic. We did this to save lives. It's a little twisted. The reality, as Truman knew and others knew, was that the Soviet Union was about to come into the war, that the thing that the Japanese dreaded the most was the Soviet entry into the war, and that it was the Soviet entry and [incompr.] immediately [incompr.] for the Kwantung Army in Manchuria and then going toward the Japanese mainland. That's what Prime Minister Suzuki said was the

reason why they had to surrender immediately, not that--. The atomic bomb is a factor, but it was a factor--. The United States had already firebombed 100 Japanese cities. We'd wiped out 99 percent of the city of Toyama. We'd proven that we could wipe out Japanese cities. That didn't change the equation, wiping out two more Japanese cities. In the Japanese militarists, it didn't make the difference. But the Soviet invasion changed the whole equation. It undermined their diplomatic strategy and destroyed their military strategy. So we can go into a lot of detail, but we've done some of that. JAY: And we'll show that segment you'll find when you watch our series with Peter on The Untold History. You'll find a whole segment on [crosstalk] KUZNICK: And then we get into--as you're saying, into World War II. JAY: Well, before you do that, let me--there's another piece in this. One of the main principles or pillars of the American exceptionalist argument about post-World War II is Japan and Europe, that America didn't colonize Japan or Europe. It helped Japan and Europe rebuild. They became independent countries. And this is an example of the sort of benign American power that when we conquer, we also help the people rebuild, and we don't control them. KUZNICK: I think there's an element of truth to that. The U.S. occupation of Japan was in some ways very repressive, but in other ways it was pretty progressive. The United States instituted a peace constitution in Japan with Article 9, and Article 9 says that the Japanese are not allowed to have an offensive military force that goes overseas and commits aggression against anybody. The United States tried to get them to change that during the Korean War. We had imposed it under MacArthur, and then we decided we hated it because we wanted them to be on our side, to go out there in Korea

and elsewhere. And the Japanese people resisted. And it's now that Abe is really trying to get that to change. And in many ways they've effectively changed that. But even in Europe we've got two kinds of policies. One is the repressive Cold War policy. The other is the Marshall Plan. And they're both designed to stop the spread of communism, to contain communism. But there's a positive way to relate to the world, and that's through economic development. The United States--you know, there's a myth in the United States. The American people think that the United States spends 20 percent of its budget on foreign aid. What's the reality? The reality is that the United States spends less on developmental foreign aid then any other advanced industrial country in the world. According to the OECD, the United States spends 0.2 percent, two-tenths of 1 percent of its gross domestic product on foreign aid. The average for advanced industrial countries is 0.47 percent. Sweden and other countries spend five times as high a percentage as we do. Even Ireland spends three times as much. JAY: If you go back to post-World War II and the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan, what was the choice? I mean, they're not going to colonize Japan and Europe. KUZNICK: But there was--no, no, there was another possibility. JAY: A realistic--? KUZNICK: Yes, there was a realistic possibility. And many people in the American government wanted to pursue a policy of pastoralization of Germany, of actually deindustrializing Germany, because Germany was considered to be so dangerous after the aggression in World War I, and now the aggression in World War II.

American leaders--and for a while Roosevelt embraced this idea-wanted to actually cut the legs out from under Germany so it could never be aggressive again. JAY: But for the commercial elite of America, who had been happy doing business with Hitler anyway, as your new segment's going to show, General Motors was making--I mean, many people say he couldn't have invaded Poland without General Motors. They're up to their eyeballs in helping German industry get ready and wage war. KUZNICK: Yes. JAY: From the point of view of American capital, what other choice was there than to re-create another great big enormous market, another place to invest? And number two (and this is another piece of history that gets--that you raise in your series but that gets eliminated in most narratives), the Soviet Union was wildly popular in Europe and in much of the world, and you needed to let, you know, these countries succeed. If you were seen as the sort of tyrannical exploiter of these countries, you were dealing with populations that would have become revolutionary. KUZNICK: The Soviet Union was wildly popular for a while. JAY: I'm talking right after the war [crosstalk] KUZNICK: Right after the war. But then their efforts in Eastern Europe were so brutal, the mass rapes and other things that they did--they had been through--they liberated--the Soviet troops had liberated the concentration camps. They saw the horrors of Naziism. Their hatred toward the Germans really kind of almost is inexpressible, and

they acted out in terrible ways. So the Soviets are going to undermine their own credibility with many of those populations, in Germany especially and other parts of Eastern Europe. But the Americans were not very popular either, and there was a lot of rape going on by the Americans, and the Brits and others as well. So the American policy, we decided that Japan is going to be the fulcrum of our development in Asia, and Germany's going to be the fulcrum of our development in Europe. So we want to build up those economies rather than tear them down was the decision. JAY: And my point is this wasn't an exception to American exceptionalism. It's consistent. This was in the interests of America to do it. It wasn't done because of some high ideals. It was the best choice for--. KUZNICK: But it's a wise policy. JAY: It was, but--. KUZNICK: It's possible to have a wise policy that's also in American interest, and this is one of those rare exceptions when that actually happens. But if you look at the reality of postwar policy, George Kennan, who was the architect of our containment policy, wrote a secret memo in 1948. And this is one of the most startling documents I've come across, in which he says that we have about 50 percent of the world's population--we have 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of the world's population. I'm just going to read this, because I want to get this exact:

"... [W]e cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. . . . To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming. . . . We should cease to talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. . . . [W]e are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better." So beneath the veneer of America's commitment to democracy and freedom and uplift is this real hard-nose, realistic policy which says: how are we going to keep 50 percent of the world's wealth if we are 6 percent of the world population? And it's not by idealism. It's not by spreading democracy. It's being very realistic and doing whatever we have to do to maintain that wealth and that position. And that means overthrowing governments. It was 1947 that we developed the CIA. We developed these counterrevolutionary operations as part of that. We start to send troops in behind the Iron Curtain during that time in the Ukraine and other places. We've got all these dirty tricks and operations going on under Allen Dulles later during the CIA. So the United States policy is going to be very, very realistic, hard-nosed. The idealism that we sell to the American people: that we're spreading freedom and democracy; this idea of exceptionalism, that the United States is different from all other countries. All other countries operate on the basis of greed or territorial acquisition or geopolitics; the United States operates only on the basis of spreading freedom, democracy, goodwill. We're altruistic, we're benevolent, nobody else is. So that's why we have the right to do this.

But that's this idea that comes out time and time again. Madeleine Albright as secretary of state says in 1998, she says, if we have to use force, it's because we're the United States. "We are the indispensable nation." We stand taller and see farther than other countries. That's Madeleine Albright. Hillary Clinton says, we're the indispensable nation. Barack Obama says, we're the indispensable nation. You can trace this in the thinking of leader after leader. And in some ways it goes back to Woodrow Wilson when he says after Versailles that at last the world will see that the United States is "the savior of the world." Those were his words. This is the idea that is very deeply ingrained in the American public. They grow up believing this. It seems outrageous to people around the rest of the world. Vladimir Putin mocked this two weeks ago. But to the American people, this is the air that they breathe. This is the water that they drink. This is the world that they grew up in. They don't even question this assumption that the United States is different in this way. But after we start losing wars in Vietnam, and then Iraq and Afghanistan, these horrible episodes, or even Libya, and these things backfire, then Americans get war weary. They decide, well, maybe we are the greatest thing in the world, but that doesn't mean we have to be intervening everywhere. JAY: And then when something happens, they wonder, "Why do they hate us?" KUZNICK: Why do they hate us? JAY: It's such a surprise. All we do is good, and then they hate us. They're so ungrateful. KUZNICK: Ungrateful, yeah. Yeah.

JAY: In the next--. KUZNICK: And why is the 97 percent of the Pakistanis--are they opposed to American drone strikes? Why do they not like our infringing on their sovereignty? Can't understand that. What's wrong with those people? JAY: In the next segment of the interview, we're going to take up this question, does the United States stand between order and chaos. This is a quote I read in episode 1 which I'll read again as we start the next episode. But there is this deeply ingrained feeling in the American identity. Not only does America do good, and if we do bad things sometimes, it's only 'cause we're trying to do good; but also that the world would fall apart, there would be chaos, there'd be nothing but war and destruction if America wasn't there to play the policeman. So join us for the next segment of our interview with Peter Kuznick on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News.

In Does American Might Prevent Global Chaos? Peter Kuznick on Reality Asserts Itself Part 4
the core idea of American exceptionalism, that US military power creates world order October 20, 2013

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News. We're continuing our series of interviews with Peter Kuznick, the cowriter of the 12-part series Untold History of the United States he made with Oliver Stone. Peter's in the studio with us. Peter's a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. As I said, he did Untold History of the United States with Oliver. And as we speak, the DVD and digital downloads and paperback version of the book is coming out. Congratulations on all of that. PETER KUZNICK, PROF. WASHINGTON: Thank you. HISTORY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY,

JAY: So just to wind up this series of discussions on American exceptionalism, let me go back to the quote of Senator Beveridge. And I'll read just a little piece of that quote, which I read in part one of this series. Beveridge says: "He [God] has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth."

Peter, this idea that America stands between order and chaos, it seems to me that goes to the core of American exceptionalism. I don't know if everyone really believes that America wants to liberate everybody. I know that's the rhetoric. You know, George Bush goes and invades Afghanistan to save the women of Afghanistan. Most people didn't believe that. People--most people, I think, understand there is a thread of commercial interest. You know, most people know Iraq was about oil, and they knew it at the time. But there's another factor there which I think kind of gets people into this idea of exceptionalism, and that's if we don't do what we do, there will be chaos. Even if we do bad things, even if we make money out of doing bad things, the alternative to us doing bad things is other people doing worse things. KUZNICK: Except that people are learning the lesson of that. If you look at the recent statements by Robert Gates--Gates is one of the architects of the American empire for decades. First he screwed up the intelligence agencies. He was behind the reform of the CIA. And he's a real planner of the wars and empire for a long time, the head of the CIA, head of the Defense Department. He came out a couple of years ago saying that if an American secretary of defense advises a president to invade another country in Asia or Africa or Latin America, he should have his head examined. But he came out more recently saying after Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, that anybody who supports another American military intervention, as in Syria, is crazy. He says that because what he realized that other people realize is that we create the chaos. He says, we don't ever know what the unintended consequences are and that what results from these interventions is chaos. We've--look at the chaos that exists now in Iraq. Did we leave that a peaceful place? Of course not. So people might make the assumption that what we're doing is better than chaos, but the reality is we create chaos. We don't know what the ramifications are. We don't understand the situations. George Bush

doesn't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites when we go and start this kind of "crusade," which he called it. So in some people's mind, maybe what we're doing is better than what's out there. And there's a lot of bad stuff out there. If you look at the Shabaab in Africa, you look at the other terrorist groups throughout the Middle East or Central Asia, I mean, there's a lot of very dangerous elements out there. But for us the reckless notion that somehow the United States is going to intervene and make things better in those circumstances is at the root of a lot of the chaos we've created in the world. JAY: These dangerous elements to a large extent were produced by exactly these kinds of interventions. KUZNICK: Well, and deliberately produced. The Islamic extremists were certainly nurtured by American policy in the late '70s and early '80s, Brzezinski and then much more so Reagan. We helped train those people. We helped arm them. We funded them. And we trained them with American books. The University of Nebraska in Omaha created the textbooks that were used to teach jihad among Afghan rebels in the late '70s and early '80s. JAY: Let me make an argument. Let me play devil's advocate and make the counterargument. I've heard the argument made that you have a very intense rivalry, for example, between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It gets reflected in a Shia-Sunni ideological argument. At the heart of it is a big-power regional competition: which of these two powerhouses in the Middle East is going to be the dominant power in the Arab world or Islamic world? And the argument goes that if it wasn't for the United States being able to maintain a kind of status quo in the region, everybody--not Iran, but all the other countries depend on the United States for arms, to a large extent for military funds--now, not the Saudis, but the Saudis buy massive amounts of

military hardware from the United States. But they kind of rely on the United States to keep various regimes and governments in power, and thus they don't fight each other and it doesn't erupt into regional warfare as much as it might have if the U.S. wasn't there. KUZNICK: But it still erupts--. JAY: Do you buy that argument? KUZNICK: No, I don't buy that argument. It still erupts repeatedly. You trace some of this back to the Iran-Iraq War, for example. That war went on for a decade. Over 1 million people were killed. The United States at different times was supporting each side. JAY: Fueling it. KUZNICK: Yeah, fueling it and arming it and giving intelligence. Who were we giving intelligence to? Saddam Hussein, who, of course, we later decide to topple. And we were selling them the ingredients that they use to make their chemical weapons in those cases. But a lot of--then you look at the chaos that's going on in Syria, for example, or throughout the Middle East. A lot of that chaos was the result of American invasion of Iraq. That started these sectarian divides. The sectarian divides were not strongly felt in Iraq before that. They certainly weren't strongly felt in Syria. But now we've exported that throughout the region. So, again, the situation we create, our intention is not to create that, but we go in blind. Americans don't really know anything about other countries. We're very, very ignorant. We were totally ignorant about Vietnam. We had actually fired most of the experts at the State Department who knew something about that region as part of the

McCarthy purges in the '40s and early '50s. We know nothing about the countries we invade. What do we know about the Vietnamese people? Larry Heinemann, who wrote Paco's Story, which won the National Book Award, a Vietnam veteran, tells a great story that I love. And he says that he was interviewing somebody from the--a professor at the University of Hanoi. And he says that he asked him, what did you do during the war? And he said, first I went to Beijing and I learned English. Then I went to the University of Moscow and I read American literature. Then I went back to Hanoi, and they sent me out to the Ho Chi Minh trail, where I educated the troops there on the Ho Chi Minh trail about American literature. And they were reading Hemingway, Whitman, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Jack London. You know, they carried these books in their backpack. They were studying American literature, the Vietnamese troops. And then he turns to Larry Heinemann and he says, and what Vietnamese author did you American troops read? And Heinemann says, I laughed so hard that the beer started to squirt out my nose. You know, Americans are ignorant. You know. And that to me captures it. That story captures a lot. And so we go into these situations blind. We think that somehow maybe we can impose order. And at times we do. But we impose order at the--you know, what we sacrifice there is social justice in those countries. So, yeah, we work with the Saudis. Saudi Arabia's a terrible country where people don't have any democratic rights, where women--I don't know if they're allowed to drive yet or not, but if they are, it's something very, very new. In a lot of ways, the Iranians have a lot more freedom--not that Iran is a good society in that sense, but they have a lot more freedom than our allies in Saudi Arabia.

ElBaradei, when he was looking at what was the cause of this unrest, he says it was U.S. policy. For decades, the United States supported these very repressive regimes that kept down the educational level in much of the area, that created no civil society, no democratic institutions. And then the thing explodes. It's not a surprise that it turns Libya to militias killing each other off, or in Iraq you've got 50 to 100 people being killed every day. We create chaos where we go. It's not our intention. We want to stabilize these areas. We could do things to stabilize these areas. We should try to stabilize Iraq--I mean Syria. We should bring in other countries to help us do that. We bring resolutions before the United Nations. They get vetoed by China and Russia. What could we do to bring China and Russia in to help us stabilize that region? China and Russia have things that we could offer them to help them partner with us. The United States' policy toward China is a hostile aggressive one that Hillary Clinton announced with the "Asia pivot" in late 2011. We're trying to militarize that whole region to contain China now. The Chinese leading newspaper said recently that if the United States expect Chinese cooperation on anything, they'd better change this policy; otherwise, we're not going to cooperate on anything. The Russians. Why do we have this enmity with Russia? What are they concerned about? Missile defense. They're concerned about weaponization of space. You know, there are things that the United States could do. And they're concerned about the expansion of NATO, which Bush the first had promised we wouldn't do, then Bush the second does, and they're very threatened by that. We could pull back on some of these. If we care about the Syrian bloodbath, which we should, then we would begin to negotiate.

Iran. Iran is reaching out to the United States. It's not the first time. In 2003, the Iranians proposed what they called a grand bargain, which they would recognize Israel, a two-state solution, in which they would stop supporting Hamas, in which they would rein in Hezbollah, do all the things the United States wanted. But the United States instead wanted to overthrow that regime. We should reach out to the Iranians. JAY: Yeah. Wilkerson tells this story that Cheney wouldn't even entertain the offer. KUZNICK: It was such a generous offer. It would have given the United States everything we wanted vis--vis Iran. JAY: I remember in the late '60s, early '70s there was something called the "Friendly Dictators" playing cards. Did you ever see this? KUZNICK: Oh, vaguely, yeah, yeah. JAY: It was a deck of 52 cards, and every card was the picture of a dictator that had been supported by the United States and considered a friendly dictator. It was a wonderful thing. In fact, I think maybe we'll see if we can find that artwork and reproduce it somehow. In fact, if anyone's out there that had anything to do with that thing, get hold of us, 'cause it was brilliantly done. And they'd have in the back of the card the biography of 52 dictators supported by the United States, you know, during the Cold War. How does--do you see people starting to break through this? I mean, the ability to keep this narrative of exceptionalism going, you know, that we're there to fight for democracy, the ahistorical view that most Americans have--and I've met young soldiers, you know, who went to Iraq or Afghanistan in full belief they were fighting for freedom and to defend the American way and defend this city on the

hill, fully believe it, and knew nothing about any of the history of the places they were going to. KUZNICK: That's the struggle that you're up against. It's the struggle that Oliver and I are up against. The positive thing: we see the response to our Untold History. We were told by a leading expert in Turkey that Untold History had gone viral in Turkey. It was being discussed everywhere. This was before, right before the uprising. We have great viewership all over the world and we're getting into more and more markets. So it's going out all over the world. And now with these developments here, Oliver and I do interviews as much as we can. We speak at campuses all over the country. We're doing everything we can to get it out, because much like you do with Real News, we're trying to challenge that narrative. And people are receptive if they can hear it. Oliver has Garrison say in--oh, no, Mr. X character, played by Donald Sutherland, says in Oliver's movie JFK, he says, deep down, "people are suckers for the truth." And we have to have that faith that if people are given the choice between bad history, bad science, and the truth, that a big percentage are going to gravitate toward the truth, which is why one of the factors in Syria that people don't comment on very much, although it's being recognized now, is that there's been a six-year drought in Syria that preceded this uprising, in which 75 percent of the farmers went bankrupt and they moved into the cities. In some areas, 85 percent of the livestock died. And then they moved into the cities and created all this chaos, including areas where the uprising first began. But the National Oceanic--NOAA, the American agency, said that the drought in the Middle East, especially Syria, was caused by manmade global warming. And you've got people out there who are climate deniers, the Koch brothers and their ilk, especially the energy companies, who pour millions and tens of millions of dollars to create bad science to mislead the American people about man-made global warming, which is a very serious crisis that we also have to

take quite seriously. But that's the same problem, a parallel problem to what we deal with bad history or just historical ignorance. We're trying to get Untold History into the schools. We're trying to get it as part of the official curriculum, high school curriculum in California right now. We've got a middle school book coming out. We've got a comic book, a graphic novel coming out. We've got it coming out--it's coming out in Arabic and Russian and Chinese and Korean and other languages. So that's the goal is to--we're arguing-we're believing that if we reach people, we can persuade them that there's another way of solving problems. And maybe we could even influence people in this country that there is another way of solving problems, because they see that militarism isn't working, which is why this latest--the resolution on Syria that both houses of Congress were about to vote down, to me it's astounding. I give Putin a lot of credit for introducing a way to eliminate chemical weapons, which is a good thing, but I deplore him for his timing. Had he waited one more week, both houses of Congress would have voted down that measure. It would have sent such a signal to the world and I think would have been the most important victory for the antiwar movement in the United States in decades, since Vietnam. JAY: Well, I think--someday I think we'll find out just what President Obama gave Putin to save his bacon, KUZNICK: To save him, yes. JAY: Because he was in a corner and Putin saved Obama's bum there. Thanks very much for joining us.

KUZNICK: Thank you. JAY: And thank you for joining us on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.

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