Lies My Teacher Told Me (33 page)

“ZaYre” or “the Congo” appears in the index of just two textbooks, The American Pageant and Triumph ofthe American Nation, Neither book mentions that the CIA urged the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961.“ Pageant offers an accurate account of the beginning of the strife: ”The African Congo received its
independence from Belgium in 1960 and immediately exploded into violence. The United
Nations sent in a peacekeeping force, to which Washington contributed much money but no
manpower.“ There Pageant stops. The account in Triumph of the American Nation mentions Lumumba by name: ”A new crisis developed in 1961 when Patrice Lumumba, leader of
the pro-Communist faction, was assassinated.“ Triumph says nothing about U.S. involvement with the assassination, however, and concludes with
the happiest of endings: ”By the late 1960s, most scars of the civil war seemed healed.
The Congo (Zaire) became one of the most prosperous African nations.“ Would that it were!
The CIA helped bring to power Joseph Mobutu, a former army sergeant. By the end of the
1960s, Triumph to the contrary, Zaire under Mobutu had become one of the most wretched African nations,
economically and politically. As of 1993, Mobutu had yet to hold an election, allow the
free functioning of political parties, or condone a free press. The New York Times noted that starvation was growing in Zaire and called the problems ”self-inflicted, the
result of nearly 30 years of Government corruption.“24 While per capita income in Zaire fell by more than two-thirds, Mobutu himself became one
of the richest persons on the planet and perhaps the most hated person in the country.25 As I write in 1994, Zaire is ripe for a ”new“ crisis to ”develop," quite possibly with
anti-American overtones. If it does, we can be sure, textbooks will be just as surprised as our students when “chaos breaks out.” Ali
twelve textbooks are silent about our repeated attempts to assassinate Premier Fidel
Castro of Cuba. The federal government had tried to kill Castro eight times by 1965,
according to testimony before the US. Senate; by 1975 Castro had thwarted twenty-four
attempts, according Ç_Cuba. These undertakings ranged from a botched effort to get
Castro to light an exploding cigar to a contract with the Mafia to murder him. Since Pres.
John F, Kennedy probably ordered several of the earlier attempts on Castro's life personally, including the Mafia
contract, Kennedy's own assassination might be explained as a revenge slaying. Because no
textbook tells how Kennedy tried to kill Castro, however, none can logically suggest a
Cuban or Mafia connection in discussing Kennedy's death,i6 The Kennedy administration also lied about its sponsorship of the Bay of Pigs invasion;
immediately after that failed, Kennedy launched Operation Mongoose, “a vast covert
program” to destabilize Cuba. Pierre Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary, has written that
JFK even planned to invade Cuba with U.S. armed forces until forestalled by the Cuban
missile crisis.27 No textbook tells about Operation Mongoose.

Undaunted by its failures in Cuba, the CIA turned its attention farther south. Only three
textbooks, Life and Liberty, The American Adventure, and Triumph of the American Nation, mention Chile. “President Nixon helped the Chilean army overthrow Chile's elected
government because he did not like its radical socialist policies,” Lift and Liberty says bluntly This single sentence, which is all that Life and Liberty offers, lies buried in a section about President Carter's human rights record, but it is
far and away the best account in any of the textbooks. According to Triumph, Nixon approved “the secret use offunds by the CIA to try to prevent a socialist-communist
election victory in Chile. The CIA later made it difficult for the Marxist government
elected by these parties to govern.” Since the “difficulties” President Allende faced
included his own murder, perhaps this is the ultimate euphemism! TheAmericanAdventureoffers a fuller account:

Some people, in the United States and abroad, said that the United States arranged the
overthrow of Allende. Indeed, in 1974, Pres. Ford admitted that the United States CIA had
given help to the opposition to Allende. However, he denied that the United States
encouraged or knew ofthe revolutionary plan.

Why leave our involvement open to question? Historians know that the CIA had earlier
joined with ITT to try to defeat Allende in the 1970 elections. Failing this, the United
States sought to disrupt the Chilean economy and bring down Allende's government. The
United States blocked international loans to Chile, subsidized opposition newspapers,
labor unions, and political parties, denied spare parts to industries, paid for and
fomented a nationwide truckers' strike that paralyzed the Chilean economy, and trained and
financed the military that staged the bloody coup in 1973 in which Allende was killed. The
next year, CIA Director William Colby testified that “a secret high-level intelligence committee led by Kissinger himself had authorized CIA expenditures of over $8,000,000
during the period 1970-73 to 'destabilize' the government of Pres. Allende.“28 Secretary of State Kissinger himself later explained, ”I don't see why we have to let a
country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.“29 Since the Chilean people's ”irresponsibility” consisted of voting for Allende, here
Kissinger openly says that the United States should not and will not respect the electoral
process or sovereignty of another country if the results do not please us. With this
attitude and policy in place in our government, whether the CIA or its Chilean allies
pulled the trigger on Allende amounts to a nitpicking detail. The American Adventure at least mentions our action in Chile; however, nine books overlook it entirely.

Do textbooks need to include all government skullduggery? Certainly not. I am not arguing in favor of what Paul Gagnon calls “relentless mentioning.”31 Textbooks do need to analyze at least one ofour interventions in depth, however, for they
raise important issues. To defend these acts on moral grounds is not easy. The acts
diminish U.S. foreign policy to the level of Mafia thuggery, strip the United States ofits
claim to lawful conduct, and reduce our prestige around the world. To be sure, covert
violence may be defensible on tealpolitik grounds as an appropriate way to deal with
international problems. It can be argued that the United States should be destabilizing governments in other countries, assassinating leaders unfriendly to us, and
fighting undeclared unpublicized wars. The six cloak-and-dagger operations recounted here
do not support this view, however. In Cuba, for instance, the CIA's “pointless sabotage
operations,” in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's words, “only increased Castro's popularity.” Even
when they succeed, these covert acts provide only a short-term fix, keeping people who
worry us out of power for a time, but identifying the United States with repressive,
undemocratic, unpopular regimes, hence undermining our long-term interests. The historian Ronald Kessler relates that a CIA officer responsible for engineering
Arbenz's downfall in Guatemala agreed later that overthrowing elected leaders is a
short-sighted policy.“ ”Was it desirable to trade Mossadegh for the Ayatollah Khomeni?“
asks the historian Charles Ameringer about our ”success“ in Iran. When covert attacks
fail, like the Bay of Pigs landing in 1961, they leave the U.S. government with no viable
next step short of embarrassed withdrawal or oven military intervention. If instead of
covert action we had had a public debate about how to handle Mussadegh or Castro, we might
have avoided Khomeni or the Bay of Pigs debacle. Unless we become more open to nationalist
governments that embody the dreams of their people, Robert F. Smith believes we will
face ”crisis after crisis.

This debate cannot take place in American history courses, however, because most textbooks
do not let on about what our government has done. Half of the twelve textbooks I surveyed
leave out all six incidents. Most of the other textbooks pretend, when treating the one or
two incidents they include, that our actions were based on humanitarian motives. Thus
textbook authors portray the United Stales basically as an idealistic actor, responding
generously to other nations' social and economic woes. Robert Leckie has referred to “the
myth of 'the most peace-loving nation in the world'” and noted that it persists “in
American folklore.” It also persists in our history textbooks.

These interventions raise another issue: are they compatible with democracy? Covert
violent operations against foreign nations, individuals, and political parties violate the
openness on which our own democracy relies. Inevitably, covert international interference
leads to domestic lying. U.S. citizens cannot possibly critique government policies if
they do not know of them. Thus covert violent actions usually flout the popular will.
These actions also threaten our long-standing separation of powers, which textbooks so
justly laud in their chapters on the Constitution. Covert actions are always undertaken by
the executive branch, which typically lies to the legislative branch about what it has
done and plans to do, thus preventing Congress from playing its constitutionally intended
role.

The US. government lied about most of the six examples of foreign intervention just
described. On the same day in 1961 that our Cuban exiles were landing at the Bay of Pigs
in their hapless attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, Secretary of State Dean Rusk said,
“The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to
do so in the future. The answer to that question is no.” Among the dead three days later
were four American pilots. When asked about Chile in his Seriate confirmation hearings for
U.S. Secretary of State in 1973, Henry Kissinger replied, “The CIA had nothing to do
with the [Chilean] coup, to the best of my knowledge and belief, and I only put in that
qualification in case some madman appears down there who, without instruction, talked to
somebody.” Of course, later statements by CIA Director William Colby and Kissinger himself
directly contradicted this testimony. The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee eventually
denounced our campaign against the Allende government,

President Eisenhower used national security as his excuse when he was caught in an obvious
lie: he denied that the United States was flying over Soviet airspace, only to have
captured airman Gary Powers admit the truth on Russian television. Much later, the public
learned that Powers had been just the tip of the iceberg: in the 1950s we had some thirty-one flights downed over the USSR, with 170
men aboard. For decades our government lied to the families of the lost men and never made
substantial representation to the USSR to get them back, because the flights were illegal
and were supposed to be secret. Similarly, during the Vietnam War the government kept
our bombing of Laos secret for years, later citing national security as its excuse. This
did not fool Laotians, who knew full well we were bombing them, but did fool Americans.
Often presidents and their advisors keep actions covert not for reasons of tactics
abroad, but because they suspect the actions would not be popular with Congress or with
the American people.

Over and over, presidents have chosen not to risk their popularity by waging the campaign
required to persuade Americans to support their secret military policies." Our
Constitution provides that Congress must declare war. Back in 1918 Woodrow Wilson tried to keep our intervention in Russia hidden from Congress and
the American people. Helen Keller helped get out the truth: “Our governments are not
honest. They do not openly declare war against Russia and proclaim the reasons,” she wrote
to a New York newspaper in 1919. “They are fighting the Russian people half-secretly and
in the dark with the lie of democracy on their lips”38 Ultimately, Wilson failed to keep his invasion secret, but he was able to keep it hidden
from American history texrbooks. Therein lies the problem: textbooks cannot report
accurately on the six foreign interventions described in this chapter without mentioning
that the U.S. government covered them up.

The sole piece of criminal government activity that most textbooks treat is the series of
related scandals called Watergate. In its impact on the public, the Watergate break-in
stood out. In the early 1970s Congress and the American people learned that President
Nixon had helped cover up a string of illegal acts, including robberies of the Democratic
National Committee and the office of Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist. Nixon also tried with
some success to use the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the CIA, and various regulatory
agencies to inspire fear in the hearts of his “enemies list” of people who had dared to
oppose his policies or his reelection. In telling of Watergate, textbooks blame Richard
Nixon, as they should.59 But they go no deeper. Faced with this undeniable instance of governmental wrongdoing,
they manage to retain their uniformly rosy view of the government. In the representative
words of The United SlatesA History ofthe Republic, “Although the Watergate crisis was a shock to the nation, it demonstrated the strength of
the federal system of checks and balances. Congress and the Supreme Court had
successfully checked the power of the President when he appeared to be abusing that power.”

As Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, “the problem will not go away with the departure of
Richard Nixon,” because it is structural, stemming from the vastly increased power ofthe
federal executive bureaucracy. Indeed, in some ways the Iran-Contra scandal of the
Reagan-Bush administrations, a web of secret legal and illegal acts involving the president, vice-president, cabinet members, special
operatives such as Oliver North, and government officials in Israel, Iran, Brunei, and
elsewhere, shows an executive branch more out of control than Nixon's.1 Textbooks' failure to put Watergate into this perspective is pan of their authors'
apparent program to whitewash the federal government so that schoolchildren will respect
it. Since the structural problem in the government has not gone away, it is likely that
students will again, in their adult lives, face an out-of-control federal executive
pursuing criminal foreign and domestic policies.41 To the extent that their understanding of the government comes from their American history
courses, students will be shocked by these events and unprepared to rhink about them.