Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (67 page)

A
MERICAN
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OICES

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN
on the firing of General MacArthur, from Merle Miller’s biography of Truman,
Plain Speaking
(1973):

I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

July 10
While fighting continues, the United States joins peace talks between the UN and China. The U.S. goal is a negotiated truce confirming the status quo before the war—a return to the containment policy.

1952

January 24
Peace talks with the Chinese are declared stalled. The war continues, fought primarily in a seesaw battle in North Korea’s cold, rugged mountain terrain. These battles, for Heartbreak Ridge, Bloody Ridge, the Punchbowl, and other hills, essentially end in a bloody stalemate, bringing to mind the trench warfare of World War I.

November 4
Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected president. Richard M. Nixon is his vice president. His opponent, Democrat Adlai Stevenson, has won only nine states.

December 5
President-elect Eisenhower visits troops in Korea and attempts to break the stalemate in truce talks.

1953

July 27
An armistice is signed at Panmunjon, halting the Korean fighting. The war ends where it started, at the 38th parallel.

What were the results of the Korean War?

The war cost America more than 54,000 dead and another 100,000 casualties. More than 2 million Koreans were killed in the fighting. After three years, the situation in Korea was almost exactly what it had been when the North first attacked the South. All the fighting and deaths had changed almost nothing, and it has remained that way to this day. At home, the war produced a massive call for militarization and a buildup of American conventional and nuclear forces—strengthening what President Eisenhower himself would later label “the military-industrial complex.”

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From the “Checkers” speech by
RICHARD NIXON
(September 1952):

I should say this—that Pat [Nixon’s wife] doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she would look good in anything.

One other thing I should probably tell you, because if I don’t they’ll be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the nomination. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog and, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. . . . You know what it was?

It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas—black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers. And you know the kids, like all kids, love that dog and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.

Nixon’s speech came in the midst of Eisenhower’s campaign against Adlai Stevenson. While the Republicans ran on a platform of scourging Democratic corruption in Washington, Nixon was accused of keeping a “secret slush fund” provided by “fat cat” contributors. It certainly existed, but was legal. The appearance of the “war chest” was terrible for the Republicans, however, and Nixon was on the verge of resigning from the ticket. Instead, he took to the airwaves in a televised speech that would be called maudlin and mawkish by the media. But the speech won heartland votes, and it saved Nixon’s career and the Republican ticket’s chances.

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C
HARLES “ENGINE”
W
ILSON,
an executive at General Motors who became Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, to the Senate Armed Forces Committee (1952):

For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.

The difference did not exist.

Often quoted as, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA,” these were in fact Wilson’s exact words, though the sentiment is much the same. The country’s and the world’s largest corporation, General Motors was the first corporation to gross a billion dollars. In 1948, Wilson had signed a historic agreement with the United Auto Workers (UAW), guaranteeing not only traditional wage increases but also raises tied to a cost-of-living index. The contract, called the Treaty of Detroit, brought GM labor peace for a generation.

What was Teddy
Roosevelt
’s grandson doing in Iran?

Part of the Republican campaign during 1952 had been to blame Democrats for losing parts of the world to the Communists. Once in power in 1953, Eisenhower’s administration wanted to make sure that it would not be accused of the same thing. But, as David Halberstam writes in his history
The Fifties
, “The Korean war proved there were certain domestic restraints on American military involvement in the third world. The Eisenhower administration quickly found a solution in the Central Intelligence Agency, which had developed a covert operations capability in addition to its mandated role of gathering intelligence. This willingness to use the CIA for paramilitary and other clandestine operations was a marked contrast from the policies of the Truman years.”

The Republican administration’s first opportunity would come in a struggle with the Soviet Union for control of oil in a place that for most Americans was more of a storybook land than a real place. Once known as Persia, Iran had been a battleground in the First World War when the Russians battled the Ottoman Turks (then allied with Germany) over the area’s territory and oil. After the war, a cavalry officer named Reza Khan overthrew the government, named himself shah, and changed the family name to Pahlavi. During World War II, the shah tried to remain neutral, but British and Soviet forces—then allies against Nazi Germany—had forced Shah Reza from the throne and installed his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as the new shah. He agreed to a treaty with Britain and the Soviet Union, allowing them to use the Trans-Iranian railway to ship oil and to keep troops in Iran for the duration of the war.

The British treated Iran as a colony, taking the country’s oil as if it were theirs. While the British were earning millions of pounds, the Iranians were given only a small share of the profits. The British also established segregated facilities for British oil workers in Iran, increasing tensions and resentments among the Iranian people. In 1951, a group of Iranian nationalists led by Mohammad Mossadegh demanded an end to British control of the oil industry. Mossadegh became Iran’s Soviet-leaning prime minister, and the oil industry was placed under government ownership and control. The shah was reduced to a figurehead.

Then, at the request of the British, the CIA engineered a coup that would restore the shah—whose CIA code name was Boy Scout—to power. With the blessings of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, the chief organizer of the coup was Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt (and cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt). A CIA desk chief who specialized in the Middle East, Roosevelt secretly drove from Baghdad to Teheran, where he convinced the young shah that London and Washington would back him if he seized control. Roosevelt organized massive public demonstrations in favor of the shah, and the cooperative Teheran police suppressed any counterdemonstrations. Although Roosevelt succeeded on this occasion, he was generally opposed to such CIA interventions. According to CIA historian James Srodes in his book
Allen Dulles
, a biography of the spy legend, Roosevelt later resigned from the CIA rather than participate in a plan to overthrow Egypt’s Nasser.

The shah was in power. Mossadegh was toppled and arrested. The coup had accomplished all of America’s immediate goals. And, as David Halberstam notes, “It had been done quickly, cleanly, and on the cheap.” In the short term, this clandestine success encouraged the CIA. Covert intervention in Third World countries would increasingly become a part of America’s Cold War containment policy, led by CIA planners. Even as the Iran venture was concluded, a new plan was hatched to supplant a leftist government in Guatemala that threatened the status of United Fruit, an American company that all but owned Guatemala.

But what about longer term? If history is about connecting the dots, fast forward a few years. During the early 1960s, the shah attempted a series of economic and social reforms, including a land reform program that redistributed the holdings of wealthy landlords among the peasants who worked the land. He also promoted education, improved social welfare services, and gave women the right to vote. At the same time, he exercised nearly absolute control over the government through a hated secret police force, called the SAVAK. Opposition began to grow, especially among students and conservative Muslims.

Barely a quarter of a century later, the ultimate unforeseen outcome of the CIA coup came about. In January 1979, mass demonstrations, strikes, and riots led to the shah’s departure from Iran. The fundamentalist Islamic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared Iran an Islamic republic, and the ayatollah became the country’s supreme leader. When President Carter allowed the shah to enter the United States for medical treatment and refused to hand him over for trial in Iran, Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Teheran, taking a group of Americans as hostages. This was the beginning of a long history of the fundamentalist Islamic movement, whose anti-Americanism would ultimately lead to September 11, 2001.

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From
Invisible Man,
by
RALPH ELLISON
(1952):

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you sometimes see in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

What was
Brown v. Board of Education
?

Every day, eight-year-old Linda Brown wondered why she had to ride five miles to school when her bus passed the perfectly lovely Sumner Elementary School, just four blocks from her home. When her father tried to enroll her in Sumner for fourth grade, the Topeka, Kansas, school authorities just said no. In 1951, Linda Brown was the wrong color for Sumner.

In July 1950, a year before Linda was turned away, segregated black troops from the 24th Infantry Regiment scored the first American victory of the Korean War when they recaptured Yechon. A few months after that, PFC William Thompson was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism in Korea—the first black so honored since the Spanish-American War. (It’s hard to win combat awards when the Army will only let you peel potatoes and dig slit trenches.) In September 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book
Annie Allen,
the first black ever cited by the Pulitzer Committee. And that month, American diplomat Ralph J. Bunche (1904–71) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of the Palestinian conflict, the first black to win that honor.

For most of the country’s 15 million American blacks—in 1950, they were called Negroes—these accomplishments held little meaning. In the first place, a good many of those 15 million people couldn’t read about these achievements. Illiteracy among America’s largest racial minority (approximately 10 percent of the total population in 1950) was commonplace. Schools for blacks, where they existed, didn’t offer much in the way of formal education. The law of the land remained “separate but equal,” the policy dictated by the Supreme Court’s 1896
Plessy v. Ferguson
ruling (see pp. 282–83). “Separate but equal” kept Linda Brown out of the nearby Topeka schoolhouse and dictated that everything from maternity wards to morgues, from water fountains to swimming pools, from prisons to polling places, was either segregated or for whites only. Exactly how these “separate” facilities were “equal” remained a mystery to blacks: If everything was so equal, why didn’t white people want to use them?

Nowhere was the disparity more complete and disgraceful than in the public schools, primarily but not exclusively in the heartland of the former Confederacy. Schools for whites were spanking new, well maintained, properly staffed, and amply supplied. Black schools were usually single-room shacks with no toilets, a single teacher, and a broken chalkboard. If black parents wanted their children to be warm in the winter, they had to buy their own coal. But a handful of courageous southern blacks—mostly common people like teachers and ministers and their families—began the struggle that turned back these laws.