John R. Murnane
(C) copyright, 2013

Introduction
Boston Globe writer Steven Weinberg called it “must-have information for all presidents—and citizens—of the twenty-first century." 1 He was referring to Richard
A. Muller's book Physics for Future Presidents, a book that explores the science behind everything from "dirty bombs," nuclear weapons, global warming, and a host of science-related issues in the news today. As Muller argues, presidents and future leaders need to be science literate. "Many, if not most, important decisions today have a high-tech component," Muller explains. "How can you lead your country into a clean-energy future if you don't understand solar power or how coal could be converted into gasoline? How can you decided important issues about research funding, arms control treaties, threats from North Korea or Iran, spying and surveillance, if you understand only the political issues and not the technical? Even if you don't plan to be a world leader, how can you vote intelligently without understanding these issues?" Muller is right to assume that most Americans and political leaders lack a fundamental understanding of many scientific concepts and processes. President Harry Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, for example, related a somewhat comical account of his efforts to understand nuclear weapons in the late 1940s. Acheson recounted Manhattan Project Director Robert
Oppenheimer’s attempts to explain nuclear physics to political leaders working on the "Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy" written by a committee chaired by Acheson and Director of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) David
Lilienthal in 1946, better known as the Acheson–Lilienthal Report:
At the beginning of our work he came to stay with us and after dinner each evening and would lecture [Assistant Secretary of War John J.] McCloy and me with the aid of a borrowed blackboard on which he drew little figures representing electrons, neutrons, and protons, bombarding one another, chasing one another about, dividing and generally carrying on in unpredictable ways. Our bewildered questions seemed to distress him. At last he put down the chalk in gentle despair, saying, “It’s

hopeless! I really think you two believe neutrons and elections are little men!” We admitted nothing.
2
Clearly, a degree of technical savvy is a must for leaders today and will be in the foreseeable future. However, another must-have for political leaders is historical perspective. Here, a lack of fundamental understanding is less of an issue (as in the case of science); the problem is the way many Americans look at history--not the names, dates and information involved, but the interpretation of that information.
Borrowing somewhat from Muller, this book looks to the future and asks what
Americans of future generations will need to understand about history in order to function effectively in a rapidly changing world. It focuses directly on issues of perspective. It attempts to explain how common American assumptions about history are a detriment in light of (1) the scope of today's problems, (2) the rise of anti-American feeling around the world, and (3) the relative decline of the United
States as a world power. What mindset will future leaders need to face these dramatic shifts in world politics? What historical insights will allow Americans to find and forge a place in the future?
A glance at the headlines reveals the staggering array of today's problems. Humanity faces global crises of epic proportions—global warming, dwindling resources, population pressures, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, conflict in nearly every corner of the world, the threat of deadly pandemics, economic uncertainty, and an enormous gulf between rich and poor. Despite the obvious need for cooperation international organizations (such as the U.N.) have never been weaker; the forces of nationalism, separatism, violence and hatred have never been stronger. All of this comes at a time when no one nation can address the challenges that confront and impact all of humanity, problems that affect every region of the globe. The United States, mired in dept and in decline relative to China and India, cannot address these problems alone. Clearly, Washington's "go-it-alone" approach to foreign policy is not sustainable in the decades ahead. Future leaders will need to change course. Before that can happen, however, they will need to adopt a new

outlook (recognizing and then abandoning old notions in the process), a more cooperative outlook based on an understanding and respect for cultures from around the world.
Present American thinking--arrogant, parochial and simplistic—will hinder the
United States from playing a constructive role in world affairs in the future. An emphasis on cultural differences, ultra-nationalism and the projection of the "other"
—the idea that people are very different (ethnically, racially, culturally, ideologically)—are formidable barriers standing in the way, hampering America’s ability to collaborate at the global level. Viewing people as "strange" and through "us vs. them" lenses makes it easier to ignore the plight of millions of human beings in other regions of the globe; it leads to the oversimplification of international problems as well. And yet the us/them formulation is reinforced in the media, by political figures, popular culture, and school curriculum in the United States and elsewhere. The "good vs. evil," "us/them" mindset, and all its variations, is pervasive. Americans in particular need a new view of history in order to face complex global problems just as its privileged position in the world is coming to an end. In short, Americans must adjust their thinking about the past in order to prepare for the future. In a world where global cooperation is critical, Americans must abandon an us/them outlook. It will be no easy task, of course. Such methods of thinking seem to be deeply rooted in human biology and our evolution as a species as well as our psychological development. Judeo-Christian traditions and the culture of the West play a role; lastly, it is clearly rooted in the ideas of American
Exceptionalism and its many offshoots (the idea that American are “a chosen people” with a “mission” to remake the world). As difficult as it may be, Americans need to reformulate a sense of themselves, while embracing a more nuanced view of world history, a view of history relevant to the sea changes that are likely to sweep away many of the older ways of thinking about the past.
Adopting such a view might go a long way toward reversing growing anti-American feelings around the world. As Fareed Zakaria points out, "in many countries outside

the Western world, there is pent-up frustration with having to accept an entirely
Western or American narrative of world history--one in which they either are miscast or remain bit players. Russians have long chafed at the standard narrative about World War II, in which Britain and the United States heroically defeat the forces of fascist German and Japan." 3 American history textbooks, for example, hardly mention the Soviet role in defeating Hitler's Germany. True to form, the text
Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People mentions the Battle of
Stalingrad in a few sentences and then quickly moves into a detailed overview of the
Normandy invasion in northern France.
4 This despite the staggering Soviet losses during the war--as many as 25 million Soviets perished on the "eastern front," while
70% of Nazi Germany's casualties were sustained in the East. Such was the Soviet role that military historians have referred to the Second World War in Europe as
"Stalin's War." 5
In America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked, a book based on the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, Andrew Kohut and
Bruce Stokes identify a similar problem. The authors posed the following question:
Are the values and attitudes of the American public fueling much of the anti-
Americanism in the world?" At root, they claim is The City Upon a Hill Syndrome.
"Nothing is more vexing to foreigners than Americans' exalted view of their country, their belief that the world would be a better place if people everywhere thought and acted like citizens of the United States. The criticism goes something like this:
America sees itself as a shinning city on a hill--a place apart where a better way of life exists, one to which all other people should aspire. American intellectual and political leaders from Governor John Winthrop of colonial Massachusetts to
President Ronald Reagan have used this image to suggest that America is somehow different and special." 6 Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of
Public Policy, Singapore's former foreign secretary and ambassador to the United
Nations, claims "there are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without." Americans live in a "cocoon," he adds, and do not understand the "sea change in attitudes towards America throughout the world." 7

Future leaders will need to abandon such a narrow mindset; they will need to breakout of the "cocoon" in order to play a constructive role in world affairs. As a first step, Americans must reevaluate their sense of history and move toward a more cooperative outlook. Consequently, this book focuses on the following questions: What is the old outlook? How was it formed? How does it preclude
America playing a constructive role in world affairs? These are the core questions in
Part I of this book. Part II asks, what should the new outlook consist of? What perspective will be most useful in the future?

Chapter 1
The Roots of the Us/Them Outlook: A Brief Sketch
Tracing the contours of some of the scholarly work in a variety of areas regarding the roots of us/them thinking is a necessary step toward changing America’s role in world history and moving American thinking in a more collaborative direction, a direction better suited for the challenges of the 21 st century and the world that future presidents must grapple with. The scholarly literature regarding the roots of us/them thinking can be clustered into three areas or layers.
The deepest layer of us/them thinking can be found in basic human development and our evolution as a species. Biologists, anthropologists, psychologists and others point to deep-seated causes of us/them thinking--from human biology and genetics, natural selection, to human psychological and cognitive tendencies. In short, they claim that humans may be “wired” to think in us/them terms or that societies function on the basis of us/them in order to insure group cohesion and as part of the process of group and individual identity formation.
A second area can be found in the culture of the West, in Judeo-Christian ideas and the growth of Nationalism especially. Such thinking fostered a zero-sum approach to the world, beliefs that greatly shaped the earliest settlers of the United States and have reverberated throughout American culture ever since.

The third layer involves American thinking and culture itself—some of the foundational ideas in American life. Here, American Exceptionalism, Manifest
Destiny and America’s long history of racism are particularly potent. In an attempt to define America’s role in world history, American thinkers and political leaders assigned a heroic role to the United States, branding it unique or exceptional among nations with a mission to lead the world sanctioned by God or the “forces of history.” Meanwhile, encounters with Native Americans and the institution of slavery and the one hundred years of segregation that followed its demise led to a dim view of non-whites within American society and in general.
What follows is a brief look at some of the findings of scholars in a variety of fields of study. This chapter will delve into these areas only so far as they shed light on the us/them outlook; a comprehensive overview of sociobiology, genetics, primatology, the social sciences and American history is beyond the scope of this work.
Are We Wired for Us/Them Thinking?
Ten minutes later the soft whimper of an infant was heard just ahead. Instantly, after glancing at each other, the males and Gigi raced toward the sound. Just as they reached a tall, sparsely foliaged tree a female leapt down. She might have got away, but her infant, between two and three years old, was still up in the branches, screaming now in fear. The mother raced back, seized her child and once more hurled herself to the ground. But she had lost valuable time—the Kasekela patrol was upon her. Goblin was the first to seize the stranger, hitting and biting her and stamping on her back. A juvenile, who had also been in the tree, quietly climbed down and vanished into the dense bush. Satan and Mustard leapt to join Goblin as he continued the attack, and a moment later Figan and Jomeo hurled themselves into the fray. During this fierce assault, Evered seized the infant and charged off through the bushes, flailing it against the ground as though it were the branch of a tree. Then, hurling the little body ahead of him, he turned back, racing to join the other males who were still attacking the mother.

The passage above is from Jane Goodall’s Through a Window: My Thirty Years With
the Chimpanzees of Gombe. The attack marked the beginning of what Goodall described as a “war” that raged from 1974 to 1977 between two groups of chimpanzees at Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Over the course of three years, a larger group of chimpanzees, the Kasekela group, hunted down and brutally killed the six adult males and two adult females of a smaller group of chimpanzees at
Gombe, a smaller group called the Kahama group. It came as a shock to Goodall and the world. The rivalry had been brewing since 1970. As Harvard Professor of
Biological Anthropology Richard Wrangham later recalled, “I arrived at Gombe in
1970, just as the north-south community division was beginning to be recognized. A zoology graduate student, I was supposed to be studying the relation between behavior and the food supply, but naturally I was drawn to the unfolding drama of the rival subgroups.” In Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by
Wrangham and Dale Peterson, the authors explain the significance of the clash of chimpanzee groups at Gombe:
The killer ape has long been part of our popular culture: Tarzan had to escape from the bad apes, and King Kong was a murderous gorilla-like monster. But before the
Kahama observations, few biologists took the idea seriously. The reason was simple.
There was so little evidence of animals killing members of their own species that biologists used to think animals killed each other only when something went wrong-
-an accident, perhaps, or unnatural crowding in zoos. The idea fit with the theories of animal behavior then preeminent, theories that saw animal behavior as designed by evolution for mutual good. Darwinian natural selection was a filter supposed to eliminate murderous violence. Killer apes, like killers in any animal species, were merely a novelist's fantasy to most scientists before the 1970s.
And so the behavior of people seemed very, very different from that of other animals. Killing, of course, is a typical result of human war, so one had to presume that humans somehow broke the rules of nature. Still, war must have come from somewhere. It could have come, for example, from the evolution of brains that happened to be smart enough to think of using tools as weapons, as Konrad Lorenz argued in his famous book, On Aggression, published in 1963.
However it may have originated, more generally war was seen as one of the defining marks of humanity: To fight wars meant to be human and apart from nature. This larger presumption was true even of nonscientific theories, such as the biblical concept of an original sin taking humans out of Eden, or the notion that warfare was

an idea implanted by aliens, as Arthur C. Clarke imagined in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In science, in religion, in fiction, violence and humanity were twinned.
The Kahama killings were therefore both a shock and a stimulus to thought. They undermined the explanations for extreme violence in terms of uniquely human attributes, such as culture, brainpower, or the punishment of an angry god. They made credible the idea that our warring tendencies go back into our prehuman past.
8
The clash of chimpanzee groups at Gombe did more than suggest that warring tendencies are part of a pre-human past. It may suggest a pre-human root for us/them thinking as well. Prior to the war between the Gombe groups, the Kasekela and Kahama chimps had lived as one larger group. When Jane Goodall first arrived in Tanzania in 1960, the chimpanzees were unaccustomed to a human presence.
Goodall started feeding them bananas in order to get close enough to observe their behavior. After eight years of this, Goodall stopped feeding the chimps: the pressure to find enough food on their own set a dynamic in motion, one that would lead to the formation of rival groups, culminating in the slaughter of the smaller and weaker group by the larger, stronger, group. The larger group killed off the smaller group despite the fact they had lived closely as one group for nearly ten years before the split. Somehow, the two groups came to see each other as distinct and alien (as “us” and ”them”). Gombe is not the only place where this type of behavior has been observed. Researchers have recorded similar behavior in Mahale Mountians
National Park in Tanzania, Tai National Park in Sierra Leone and in Uganda’s Kibale
National Park as well.
According to Michael Patrick Ghigliere, a primatologist and author of The Dark Side
of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence, there is a genetic predisposition to chimpanzee group behavior, including rivalry between groups in adjoining territories that often leads to violence. Male bonding is the key. Male chimps work closely together to protect their group; females will leave the group once it gets too weak to provide defense against rivals. Rival male groups will kill off the males of another group and incorporate the females of reproductive age into their own group as well. Ghigliere believes this can be explained by kin selection theory, that this

type of cooperation allows the males to pass on their genetic material more efficiently to the next generation, better than going it alone. Mutations in chimp DNA favor traits that allow for male grouping or bonding. According to Ghigliere, humans are the only other species that depends upon male bonding as the basis of survival.
Are humans like chimps? Can we extrapolate? Most geneticist and primatologists would answer yes, on both counts.
In his 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson claims that “the genetic fitness of human beings is a consequence of both individual selection and group selection.” 9 Alleles that favor both individual and group selection are part of human DNA. Wilson concluded that in “its power and universality, the tendency to form groups and then favor in-group members has the earmarks of instinct.” Beyond genetic wiring, Wilson maintains that different parts of the brain have evolved by group selection to create groupishness.” These tendencies create “tribalism,” which drives conflict. “Our bloody nature, is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principal driving force that made us what we are.” 10
US/Them and the Formation of Identity
Beyond our biological make up, sociologist and psychologists look at how groupversus-group dynamics shape social interactions, personality and identity formation. Group identities have been essential for human survival over millennia.
As sociologist Joel M. Charon explains, "it seems that ethnocentrism may contribute to social solidarity and social order. It helps bind us, and it creates in us a commitment to society." Belief systems, customs and other facets of cultural identity help galvanize a society, giving it the cohesion necessary to function smoothly, to gather and use resources, to organize and defend against outsiders.
Of course, the human brain—its size relative to body weight, its complexity and adaptability—set humans apart from other living creatures on Earth. Part of the

way it functions is to organize information into categories and to make generalizations. In The Nature of Prejudice Gordon Allport highlighted this tendency in the formation of prejudice and racism. “Categories that are two-valued, especially those that declare objects within a category to be all good or all bad,” he found, “are easily formed, and readily control our thinking about ethnic groups” 11 The tendency to generalize works in tandem with the perception of in-groups and out-groups, according to Allport. Part of the process of human development and the formation of identity is learning to see ourselves as part of a group—a family, a community, a religious group, etc. Building on Allport’s work, Marilynn Brewer found the formation of in-groups and out-groups to be part of this effort to forge a sense of identity. In “The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate?” published in the Journal of Social Issues, she wrote:
Many discriminatory perceptions and behaviors are motivated primarily by the desire to promote and maintain positive relationships within the ingroup rather than by any direct antagonism toward outgroups. Ingroup love is not a necessary precursor of outgroup hate. However, the very factors that make ingroup attachment and allegiance important to individuals also provide a fertile ground for antagonism and distrust of those outside the ingroup boundaries. The need to justify ingroup values in the form of moral superiority to others, sensitivity to threat, the anticipation of interdependence under conditions of distrust, social comparison processes, and power politics all conspire to connect ingroup identification and loyalty to disdain and overt hostility toward outgroups.
12
Understanding the deepest layer of us/them thinking—tied to universal human traits and development--is a work in progress. Scholars in the fields mentioned here continue to debate and disagree (some of those disagreements will be explored in a subsequent chapter that looks at the possibility of overcoming some of the us/them thinking in the United States). However, American thinking has been shaped by particular historical and cultural forces as well; us/them thinking has been sharpened by Western thought and by specific American ideas—the second and third layer of the roots of us/them thinking in the United States.

Us/Them and Western Culture
In the Price of Monotheism, Jan Assmann explores a major root of us/them thinking in the Western world, tracing this type of thinking to the ideas attributed to Moses in the Hebrew Bible. The “Mosiac distinction,” as he calls it, divided the world between true and false religion, where the Hebrews, and later the Christians and
Muslims, claimed that they worshiped the “true” religion and everybody else’s views of God were “false”. It was clearly a black-and-white vision of the world. Moreover,
“for these religions, and for these religions alone, the truth to be proclaimed comes with an enemy to be fought. Only they know of heretics and pagans, false doctrine, sects, superstition, idolatry, magic, ignorance, unbelief, heresy, and whatever other terms have been coined to designate what they denounce, persecute and proscribe as manifestations of untruth.” 13
Violence and an us/them mentality in the name of religion certainly has a long pedigree in Europe. According to one observer at the Council of Clermont in 1095,
Pope Urban II launched the Crusades, saying, “O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race [the Seljug Turks, a nomadic people from central Asia who converted to Islam and battled the Christian Byzantine Empire for control of the Holy Lands], which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent
God and is made glorious with the name of Christ! With what reproaches will the
Lord overwhelm us if you do not aid those who, with us, profess the Christian religion!” 14 These battles between Christian Europe and the Muslims world saw horrific battles, including reports of cannibalism and slaughter of innocent women and children. Violence over religion bolstered us/them distinctions, particularly during the Crusades; these ideas were applied to European encounters with Native

Americans in the New World, as such thinking became a powerful force in the dehumanizing of Native Americans.
The “Doctrine of Discovery” underscores the us/them mindset regarding Native
Americans in stark terms. Expressed in a series of Papal Bulls during the 1400s, the
Roman Catholic Church sanctioned violence against non-Christians (in Africa and in the New World). Moreover, the Church did not recognize the sovereignty of non-
Christians. Explorers such as Christopher Columbus were given papal approval to claim territories for God and King. In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas directed King
Alfonso of Portugal to "capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens [Muslims], pagans, and other enemies of Christ," to "put them into perpetual slavery," and "to take all their possessions and property." 15 Shortly after Columbus’s voyage, Pope
Alexander VI issued Inter Cetera; it granted much of the New World to Spain and urged that "discovered" people be "subjugated and brought to the faith itself." 16
Violence in the name of Christianity would come to shape American thinking, particularly during clashes between Native Americans and the early English settlers of New England.
William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Plantation Massachusetts, described the horrific treatment of Native Americans during the Pequot War (1634-1638):
Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.
17
A war that raged for two years, the Pequot War ended in the near-extermination of the Pequot people. After the Mystic Massacre, one of the most horrific episodes of the war, similar to the one described by Bradford above, Major John Mason declared that the massacre of the Pequot was the act of a God who "laughed at his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven . . . Thus

did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies." 18 Mason and his compatriots were convinced that they were doing God’s work; horrific violence against non-Christians was consistent with their worldview. For Mason, and for most Europeans of his generation, the world was divided between “us”
(Christians) and “them” (everybody else). Violence against non-Christians was therefore justified. They could certainly find support for their actions in the Bible:
If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;
Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him:
But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.
And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the L
ORD
thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
19
Nationalism added fuel to the us/them mentality in Europe and elsewhere. Models to explain the origins of nationalism range from the “primordial school” (nations have existed in one form or another for millennia) to the “modernism” school (the idea that the shift to industrial societies and the birth of democracy, particularly with the French Revolution, gave rise to nationalism) to the “historical ethnosymbolists,” a school of thought that combines the other two (nationalism is a modern invention, but it builds on older traditions and a sense of ethnic solidarity).
Scholars in this field maintain that nationalism is a construct—an “imagined community” to quote Benedict Anderson. In any case, the myths and traditions that hold a community together often define the in-group as opposed to the out-group
(the “us” and the “them”). According to Anthony Smith, the meaning behind ethnic identity and national movements are “encapsulated in distinctive ethnic myths which like all myths, bring together in a single potent vision elements of historical

fact and legendary elaboration to create an overriding commitment and bond for the community. Of course, such myths often change their symbolic forms and content over time in relation to different perceptions of significant others outside the community and varying degrees of conflict or competition with those outsiders.” 20
Nationalism was a key ingredient in European competion for empire, particularly the “Scramble for Africa” in the 1880s, where the Great Powers vied for position as they occupied and colonized nearly the entire African continent. Nationalism was later the catalyst for the First and Second World Wars. In the United States, a process of myth making and the formation of national identity can certainly be seen in the constructs of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.
The American Context: American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny
The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the
"shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
So ended Ronald Reagan's farewell address. No public figure embraced the idea of
American Exceptionalism more than the 40 th President of the United States. For
Reagan, America was charged by God, fate or History to guide the world. As historian Michael Schaller explained:
Throughout his career, Reagan told stories of pilgrims, patriots, cowboys, Indians, and other icons of "rugged individualism" who seemed to have emerged from
Hollywood film scripts. In public ceremonies, he often paraphrased the seventeenthcentury Puritan leader John Winthrop, who described the new American

settlements as "shining cit[ies] upon a hill," blessed by God. Reagan many times repeated a story about an angel who descended into Philadelphia to give divine inspiration to the squabbling Founders as they debated the text of the [U.S.]
Constitution.
21
Modeling himself on Reagan, Newt Gingrich embraced American Exceptionalism as part of his bid for the presidency in 2012. In a run-up to his campaign, Gingrich published A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters and released a film called “A City Upon a Hill: The Spirit of American Exceptionalism.”
Gingrich's wife, Calista Gingrich, was enlisted in the effort, publishing a children's book on "American Exceptionalism that will teach children why America is a unique country. The book, Sweet Land of Liberty, features Ellis the Elephant who will guide children on a tour through our nation’s history." 22
In The Myth of American Exceptionalism, Godfrey Hodgson explains several tenets of
American exceptionalist ideology—the belief that America is special because of its incredible resources and the material opportunity open to its citizens, particularly immigrants; the unique influence of the frontier in shaping American character
(particularly the idea of "rugged individualism"); the idea that America developed in the absence of class divisions; and that America is a unique land of freedom. The overarching idea of American Exceptionalism, however, is a sense of uniqueness blended with destiny. To quote Hodgson:
The core of this belief is the idea that the United States is not just the richest and most powerful of the world's more than two hundred states but is also politically and morally exceptional. Exceptionalists minimize the contributions of other nations and cultures to the rule of law and the evolution of political democracy.
Especially since Woodrow Wilson, exceptionalists have proclaimed that the United
States has a destiny and a duty to expand its power and the influence of its institutions and its beliefs until they dominate the world.
23
American Exceptionalism has provided Americans with an inflated view of themselves; it has also led to simplified versions of history (the “good war” narrative of World War II, for example, will be explored in a later chapter). Under such a guise the United States is seen as the ultimate force for “good,” an exceptional nation with

a mission to save all of mankind. Such thinking has dangerous implications for
America’s relations with the rest of the world, leading to a kind of arrogant lack of self-awareness and inability to find common ground when relating to other cultures and people around the world. It is a view that lacks nuance. For example, exceptionalists wrench the American Revolution and the ideas embodied in the U.S.
Constitution out of historical context. As Hodgson explained,
The political ideas of Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, James Madison, and Thomas
Jefferson were hardly American ideas, even if the founders of the American republic were both compelled by the revolutionary conflict to announce those ideas with clarity and enabled by their military success to explore their implications as they could not have done with impunity in Europe. The Founding Fathers staked out noble and forward-looking propositions in the Declaration of Independence, and they hammered out a Constitution that has effectively protected the essence of those ideals for more than two centuries. But their ideas were not original. They had literally been to school to the Common Law of England. They were the intellectual heirs of the "commonwealthmen" and radical Whigs who kept alive the principles of the English Revolution. They were also the children of the English, Scots, and French
Enlightenment, of John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, and of Montesquieu,
Voltaire, and Diderot. 24
The American Revolution and the birth of the republic was not led by “supermen,” the “founding fathers,” who appeared out of thin air. Political trends in the United
States were part of a larger context (one that included the French and Haitian
Revolutions and the revolutions of Latin America as well as movements such as the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment). In other words, Americans learned from others in constructing their form of government. Westward expansion is similarly misunderstood. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which made much of America’s westward movement possible, was an outgrowth of the Napoleonic wars in Europe
(The French sold the huge chunk of land to the U.S. while their hands were tied fighting in Europe and they needed the funding). Moreover, British investors provided most of the capital for the building of the transcontinental railroad—a major component of American expansion across the continent. Industrialism, the true basis of American power in the world, was a transplant as well. In 1789,
Samuel Slater, having memorized plans and blueprints of English textile mills, left for New England; the founder of Slater Mills in Pawtucket Rhode Island, he became

known as the “father of the American industrial revolution.” Andrew Carnegie famously adopted the Bessemer process of producing steel after visiting Henry
Bessemer's factories in England. Clearly, many changes in American history have been influenced by European developments. Simply realizing the larger context of
American history erodes the us/them formulation. Many of the developments in
American history were the product of shared ideas and collaborative efforts; they were not the product of “us” versus “them,” but more like the product of us and them, part of a complex interplay of people from other cultures and a mixture of factors and circumstances.
As Hodgson pointed out, these simplistic views of history are compounded by
America’s sense of mission, the belief in America’s duty to lead the world as part of its Manifest Destiny. This element of American thinking is often traced back to John
Winthrop's 1630 sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity." Delivered just prior to the
Puritan voyage to New England, here Winthrop claimed that the eyes of the world would be watching the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that the new colony would serve as a model to the world—a dubious claim given the state of communications and the remoteness of Massachusetts vis-à-vis Europe in the 1600s, or Asia, for that matter, where most of the world's population resided then as now. The speech was meant, of course, to inspire the colonist, to give them a sense of divine mission.
In Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, Anders Stephanson traces the idea of "Manifest Destiny," (the idea that God or History has assigned a special role to the United States, sanctioning expansion across the continent of
North America and beyond). Although the term itself was coined in the 1840s,
“Manifest Destiny” grew out of Christian ideas during the 1600s. The Puritan view of
America as God's instrument on Earth "lay directly in the old biblical notion, recharged through the Reformation, of the predestined, redemptive role of God's chosen people in the Promised Land," Stephanson explained. Winthrop and his
Puritans saw America as the New Israel; they were embarking on a new Exodus. God had unveiled the New World just in time for the Puritans to set humanity on a new

course. Such notions were melded with the ideas of the American Revolution:
"Visions of the United States as a sacred space providentially selected for divine purpose found a counterpart in the secular idea of the new nation of liberty as a privileged ‘stage’ (to use a popular metaphor of the time) for the exhibition of a new world order, a great ‘experiment’ for the benefit of humankind as a whole." 25
No figured embodied the idea of America's special role in history more than Thomas
Jefferson. Jefferson saw the United States as an "empire of liberty." U.S. expansion would safeguard democracy by allowing "independent" yeoman farmers to vote their conscience, out from under the boss in a manufacturing-based economy
(evolving in New England by the early 1800s); meanwhile, incorporating more territory into the U.S. system would bring democratic government to more and more people, he claimed. More land meant more freedom. When Jefferson authorized the Louisiana Purchase, he claimed that Americans would have land enough to the “thousandth generation.” It was not long before Americans cast their eyes on additional territories further west, however. Echoing Jefferson, columnist and editor of the Democratic Review, John L. O’Sullivan wrote in November 1839:
Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement. Equality of rights is the cynosure of our union of States, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality of individuals; and while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot retrograde, without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We must onward to the fulfillment of our mission -- to the entire development of the principle of our organization -- freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature's eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man -- the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity? 26
Here was Jefferson in stark language. O’Sullivan went on to coin the term “Manifest
Destiny,” in an article in support of the annexation of Texas, which had recently

gained independence from Mexico after a bloody conflict. O'Sullivan published an essay entitled "Annexation," which called on the U.S. to admit Texas into the Union.
Because of concerns over the expansion of the number of slave states and the possibility of war with Mexico, allowing Texas into the Union was a controversial issue. In support of annexation, O'Sullivan pointed to "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." In a column, which appeared in the New York Morning
News on December 27, 1845, O'Sullivan made similar arguments regarding boundary disputes with England over Oregon. “And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us,” O’Sullivan argued. In the wake of the U.S.-Mexican
War (1846-48), a war that forced Mexico to cede one-third of its territory to the
United States)--stretching from Texas to Southern California--the term "Manifest
Destiny" gained momentum. The idea has been used to support American expansion and intervention ever since.
27
During the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States expanded its power well beyond the continental United States. Seizing Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the
Philippines from Spain in a matter of weeks, the U.S. encountered fierce resistance in the Philippines, however. In describing U.S. goals in the Philippines, President
William McKinley said that American troops were there to oversee a process of
"benevolent assimilation." Despite torture (including water boarding), the rounding up of civilians into concentration camps (or "zones of protection" as the U.S. Army called them), and the death of 600,000 Filipinos, McKinley cast the war in the light of
Manifest Destiny and Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.” In an address to Congress he claimed:
No effort will be spared to build up the waste places desolated by war and by long years of misgovernment. We shall not wait for the end of strife to begin the beneficent work. We shall continue, as we have begun, to open the schools and the churches, to set the courts in operation, to foster industry and trade and agriculture, and in every way in our power to make these people whom Providence has brought

within our jurisdiction feel that it is their liberty and not our power, their welfare and not our gain, we are seeking to enhance. Our flag has never waved over any community but in blessing. I believe the Filipinos will soon recognize the fact that it has not lost its gift of benediction in its world-wide journey to their shores.
28
Woodrow Wilson thought along similar lines. President at a crucial moment in
American history—he led the U.S. during the First World War (1914-1918) and during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that ended the war, where he introduced the idea of the League of Nations (the forerunner of the United Nations in many respects)--Wilson had a profound influence on American foreign policy. For Wilson, the United States entered the war against Germany in 1917 in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” And the U.S. had the most important role to play in that effort. In his 1920 address to Congress, Wilson claimed:
I think we all realize that the day has come when Democracy is being put upon its final test. The Old World is just now suffering from a wanton rejection of the principle of democracy and a substitution of the principle of autocracy as asserted in the name, but without the authority and sanction, of the multitude. This is the time of all others when Democracy should prove its purity and its spiritual power to prevail. It is surely the manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail.
29
Nearly a century later President George W. Bush echoed Wilson: "Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity." 30
In the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Bush underscored the idea of a
Wilsonian mission to spread democracy around the world. During his second inaugural address, he explained:
At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together. For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical - and then there came a day of fire.
We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies

that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.
There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom. We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. 31
Such ideas certainly painted a simplistic and overly positive picture of America, downplaying or ignoring the blood that was spilt as the United States expanded across the North American continent and beyond. Under such thinking, Americans have been chosen by God to defend and spread freedom and democracy everywhere; they certainly have a heroic role to play in world history (the “good guys” in an us/them world). The ideas of American Exceptionalism and Manifest
Destiny have shaped the way Americans defined themselves, how they’ve come to see the “us” in the us/them outlook. Such thinking has worked along side a process of defining “them,” a dehumanizing process centuries in the making.
Race in the Formation of the Us/Them Outlook
The rapid rise of slavery codified American ideas about race in dramatic fashion.
The first African slaves in British North America landed in Virginia in 1619. By the time slavery was abolished in 1865, millions of Africans had been enslaved and brought to the United States in chains. In addition to the scope of this heinous enterprise, it hardened ideas about race. In 1705, the Virginia General Assembly ruled: "All servants imported and brought into the Country. . .who were not
Christians in their native Country. . . shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion . . . shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his master . . . correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction . . . the master shall be free of all punishment. . . as if such accident

never happened." 32 In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” written in 1784, Thomas
Jefferson gave voice to the racism that slavery spawned:
They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.
33
Such thinking became enshrined in the U.S. Constitution itself. In the famous threefifths compromise slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of tallying populations and assigning representatives to serve in the U.S. House of
Representatives. Chief Justice Rodger B. Taney’s opinion in the Dred Scott Case
(1857) is another clear example of racist, us/them thinking. Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin before moving back to the slave state of Missouri, appealed to the Supreme Court to gain his freedom. Taney and the Court denied Scott the right to petition the Court in the first place, ruling that slaves were not citizens of the U.S. In his ruling, Taney interpreted the Declaration of Independence in an us/them fashion:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood.
But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration; for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.
Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men -- high in literary acquirements -- high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others; and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery. They spoke and acted according to the then established doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary language of the day, no one misunderstood them. The unhappy black race were separate from white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.
34
In addition to American political leaders, nineteenth and early-twentieth century academics embraced similar views, as part of what historians call “scientific racism.”
Scholars such as Samuel George Morton, Josiah C. Nott, George Gliddon, and John
Fiske purported to prove scientifically the superiority and inferiority of certain races. A Professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania (1839-1843),
Morton wrote Crania Americana: An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the
Aboriginal Race of America (1839); he argued that skull size correlated with intelligence and that Europeans sat at the top of a hierarchy of race. Africans were at the bottom. In discussing Africans, he wrote:
Like most other barbarous nations their institutions are not infrequently characterized by superstition and cruelty. They appear to be fond of warlike enterprises, and are not deficient in personal courage; but, once overcome, they yield to their destiny, and accommodate themselves with amazing facility to every change of circumstance.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.
35
In Types of Mankind (1854), physician Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon, a prolific author, Egyptologist and a vice-council to the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, claimed that
Morton’s findings supported “polygenism,” that races evolved separately and were distinct and different from one another—Charles Darwin would later refute these ideas in the Descent of Man (1874). In American Political Ideas Viewed from the
Standpoint of Universal History (1885), Harvard lecturer in Philosophy, John Fiske insisted on the superior character of "Anglo-Saxon" institutions and peoples. The
English-speaking "race," he argued, was destined to dominate the world as the result of ingrained racial characteristics.
36
Such views permeated American culture. The treatment of black jazz musicians throughout much of the 20 th century provides a case in point.
Will Marion Cook’s bitter experiences in the concert world had cut short his promising career as a classical violinist. Born in Washington D.C., in 1865, the son of a professor of law at Howard University, Will Marion went to Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music at thirteen years of age. His outstanding studies won for him a scholarship to study in Berlin under the famous German violinist Josef Joachim. After five years of study abroad, Cook returned to the Unites States in 1895 and studied composition at the National Conservatory of Music in New York, then headed by Antonin Dvorak.
Cook was the first violinist with the Boston Symphony when the orchestra’s soloist died; Cook assumed he would automatically take over the role. But though he could sit in the first chair, the orchestra committee told Cook, as a black man he would not play the solos. Angered by the racist decision, he stamped on his violin and walked out (Shack, 46).
This passage from William A. Shack’s Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story
between the Great Wars illustrates the atmosphere black musicians faced in the
United States—the frustration of talent denied, subordinated under the humiliating strictures of Jim Crow. Cook’s musical training was never in question—just his skin color. Cook would go on to retrain himself as a jazz musician and, along with New

Orleans born clarinetist Sidney Bechet, set out for Paris in 1919. Cook’s Southern
Syncopated Orchestra played in Europe for the next four years to great success.
Bechet would spend the next four decades on and off living between New York and
Paris, dying in Paris in 1959. Cook and Bechet were part of the first generation of jazz expatriates in Paris —along with others such as Josephine Baker, Eugene
Bullard, Louis Mitchell, and Ada “Bricktop” Smith. Cook’s frustration seemed to be sparked by the psychological pressure of living in a racist society and despite obvious talent, hitting a racial “glass ceiling.” It was a feeling described by James
Baldwin in a famous interview for Essence magazine in 1970. Baldwin left America in 1948 and again, in 1970, despite worldwide fame as a writer. He did so to avoid death, he said. “The death of working in the post office for 37 years; of being a civil servant for a hostile government. The death of going under and watching your family go under.”
Humiliation like Cook’s was common even for famous jazz musicians. Duke
Ellington biographer John Hasse explains a telling incident when the Duke Ellington
Orchestra made its first film appearance in 1930:
Check and Double Check was an RKO feature starring Amos ‘n’ Andy, played by wildly popular white radio comedians wearing blackface makeup and speaking in exaggerated black dialect. Amos ‘n’ Andy play bumbling taxicab drivers in this dreadful movie. Due to the movie studios strictures bandmember Juan Tizol, a
Puerto Rican, and Barney Bigard, a Creole, were forced to put on black makeup so they would appear to be Negro. Racial mixing, even on a bandstand, was opposed by some whites, especially in the South, (Hesse, 129).
Blacks faced more than psychological pressures. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is a testament to the horrors of lynching in the United States. ("Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.") Over 3,000 blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1968, as University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law Professor Douglas Linder graphically illustrates on his Famous Trials website. Linder’s “The Trial of Sheriff Joseph Shipp et al., 1907” includes statistics and James Allen’s gruesome postcard images of lynchings given as souvenirs in the
1930s and 40s.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Great Migration northward blacks faced brutal and humiliating circumstances elsewhere in the United States. The Zoot Suit Riots in
Los Angeles during World War Two saw both blacks and Mexican immigrants targeted by white mobs. The Northeast was no haven for blacks either. Famous black jazz musicians such as Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Miles Davis were the victims of police harassment and police brutality in postwar New York City,
Philadelphia and other major cities in the northeast, for example. Miles Davis gives a graphic account in his autobiography:
I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of
America and all that bull... I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab, and I’m standing there in front of Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steaming, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. I said, “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs.
That’s my name up there, Miles Davis.” I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights. He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on
I’m going to arrest you."
After a scuffle, a second police officer cracked Davis’s head open with his billy club.
Davis was charged with resisting arrest; at the trail all charges were dropped.
Ironically, the year was 1959—the year Bud Powell left for Paris, driven out by many years of much worse abuse.
Trying to defend Thelonious Monk from rough treatment by police at a nightclub in
Philadelphia in 1945, Powell was hit over the head. Arrested, Powell went without treatment for several days, before being released into his parents’ custody. He was
20 years old. Suffering severe headaches, he was admitted to Bellevue and later
Creedmoor State Hospital in 1947. After a little over a years, where he was fed sleeping pills, tranquilizers, experimental drugs and electroshock treatments,
Powell was released. He would never be the same.
Suffice it to say, the roots of us/them thinking are deep and are part of complex network of ideas and tendencies. Us/them thinking may stretch back to pre-human

times to our evolution as a species; it seems to be part of the development of our identities as individuals and in society. Us/them thinking has played a bloody yet prominent role in Western history and culture—stemming from the idea of monotheism itself, further heightened by the growth of Nationalism. In the United
States, religion and Nationalism took a certain trajectory, as the ideas of Manifest
Destiny, American exceptionalism and race became hallmarks of American culture.
Such ideas of race, choseness, mission, Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism worked their way into American history textbooks and can still be clearly detected in the way textbooks present history today. These ideas are also perpetuated in popular culture in the United States. The us/them outlook in textbooks and popular culture is taken up the next chapter, entitled “Perpetuating the Us/Them Outlook.”

Chapter 2
Perpetuating The US/Them Outlook:
The Role of History Textbooks, Popular Culture, Hollywood and the Media
While understanding the roots of us/them thinking in the United States is a daunting task, identifying the major vehicles that convey and perpetuate the us/them outlook is somewhat easier—or at least more straightforward. There are two major conveyers of us/them thinking in the United States: U.S. history textbooks and popular culture, particularly Hollywood and the media.
The standard presentation of the “road to Pearl Harbor” and the War in the Pacific is a clear example of the us/them formulation making its way into history textbooks.
Many textbooks take a limited view of the War in the Pacific; starting with the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, they focus on the diplomacy leading up to
1941, presenting a story of American reaction to Japanese aggression. The U.S. role in bringing about the conflict is absent: Commodore Matthew Perry's "opening of
Japan" in 1854, where the U.S. forced Japan to trade or face naval bombardment; the joint British, Dutch, French and American bombing of Japanese coastal fortifications in 1864; disputes over the resources and markets of China--all are missing from the story. Seldom is a Japanese point of view presented, certainly not the idea of “Japan’s
Monroe Doctrine for Asia,” a view Japanese and American policymakers and intellectuals debated in the decades before Pearl Harbor. Missing too are the racial overtones of the war. The furious racism seen in cartoons by Theodore Geisel (Dr.
Seuss) and Walt Disney, and even the U.S. postal service, which stamped mail with racists slogans during the war ("Smash the Jap, Buy More War Bonds," "From the
Buggy to the Grave, They're Nasty Little Chaps") as well as the practice of mutilating
Japanese war dead. These problematic aspects of American history and/or conduct are excluded or downplayed in the textbook versions of the “good war.” World War
Two will be examined more closely in the next chapter. The textbook version of

World War Two is part of a much larger trend when it comes to American history textbooks, however. In other words, the story of American history is often told as one of “us” versus “them” from start to finish.
A second area that perpetuates us/them thinking is popular culture. Hollywood action movies are notorious for their “good guy, bad guy” formulations. Moviegoers know that a film starring American box-office stars such as Clint Eastwood, Arnold
Schwarzeneggar, Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stalone will end with some kind of violent reprisal—in the end, the “good guys” will kill the “bad guys.” Be it
Hollywood’s over-the-top depiction of Indians, Mexicans, Nazis, Russians, or Islamic terrorists, “they” will get it in the end. Movies based on history often fare no better—Hollywood’s depiction of Pearl Harbor, and World War Two in general, are a case in point. Japan was evil seems to be the message in these films—there is no gray area to be explored. In these types of action movies, war movies, or “cowboys and Indians” movies the us/them formula can hardly be missed. Nevertheless, this motif can be subtle as well. Stereotypes and repeated images can go unnoticed and work their way into seemingly innocent stories; Disney movies are a prime example of this aspect of the problem. In the end, Hollywood perpetuates values and ideas that are part of the larger culture, together with text books, they support the ideas of choseness, mission, Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism. Given the deep rooted nature of us/them thinking, in conjunction with the ubiquitous imagery
Americans are exposed to--in the classroom, on the silver screen and elsewhere in
American life—it is no wonder that this distorted view of the world is so incredibly potent.
Us/Them and History Textbooks
In his bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History
Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen critiques what he calls “feel-good history.”
Textbooks offer an “amalgam of bland optimism, blind patriotism, and

misinformation,” according to Loewen. In short, textbooks preserve an us/them telling of history by avoiding negatives about the United States through a variety of means (leaving it out, minimizing it, or describing problems in general terms and in the passive voice so that no one is ever to blame). The process starts in earnest with
Christopher Columbus. In addition to simplifying the story of Columbus (ignoring others that sailed to the New World before him, not providing the European context for his voyage, nor the contributions of Arabs, Egyptians and the Phoenicians in the development of navigational techniques that Europeans such as Henry the
Navigator of Portugal and Columbus borrowed), American history textbooks minimize the ugly side of Columbus’s voyage, its purpose and results. Columbus was an “explorer,” not a “conqueror,” in these accounts. Benign portraits fill text books despite the fact that Columbus’s “purpose from the beginning was not mere exploration or even trade, but conquest and exploitation, for which he used religion as a rationale,” Loewen explains. Textbooks also focus on questionable or
“humanizing” details about the voyage, while leaving out the results of his voyage:
To make a better myth, our textbooks find space for many. . . humanizing particulars. They have the lookout cry “Tierra!” or “Land!” Most of them tell us that
Columbus’s first act after going ashore was “thanking God for leading them safely across the sea”—even though the surviving summary of Columbus’s own journal states only that “before them all, he took possession of the land, as in fact he did, for the King and Queen, his Sovereigns.” Many of the textbooks tell of Columbus’s three later voyages to the Americas, but they do not find space to tell us how Columbus treated the land and the people he “discovered.” 37
Loewen quotes Columbus’s son, Ferdinand, who accompanied his father on his fourth voyage to the New World and later wrote a biography of his father. Ferdinand provided some gruesome details regarding treatment of the Native Americans the
Spanish encountered:
Having as yet found no fields of gold, Columbus had to return some kind of dividend to Spain. In 1495 the Spanish on Haiti initiated a great slave raid. They rounded up
1,500 Arawaks, then selected the 500 best specimens (of whom 200 would die en route to Spain). Another 500 were chosen as slaves for the Spaniards staying on the island. The rest were released. A Spanish eyewitness described the event: "Among them were many women who had infants at the breast. They, in order the better to

escape us, since they were afraid we would turn to catch them again, left their infants anywhere on the ground and started to flee like desperate people; and some fled so far that they were removed from our settlement of Isabella seven or eight days beyond mountains and across huge rivers; wherefore from now on scarcely any will be had." Columbus was excited. "In the name of the Holy Trinity, we can send from here all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold," he wrote to
Ferdinand and Isabella in 1496. "In Castile, Portugal, Aragon, and the Canary Islands they need many slaves, and I do not think they get enough from Guinea." He viewed the Indian death rate optimistically: "Although they die now, they will not always die. The Negroes and Canary Islanders died at first."
Textbook presentations of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War provide another prominent example of this one-sided narrative, according to Loewen.
Readers of history textbooks are unlikely to encounter Lincoln’s darker side--his racist views (articulated during the Lincoln-Douglass Debates during the 1860 presidential campaign) or the extent to which he violated and/or stretched his powers under the Constitution during the Civil War (suspending the Writ of Habeas
Corpus and blockading southern ports without congressional approval, for example).
Such alterations—leaving out the gory details when it comes to American heroes or government policies--may be part of a psychological process, according to Loewen.
As Loewen concluded, “it is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit... No one likes to think of him or herself as a bad person.
To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier.” Such distortions may well be part of a subtle process, but this is not always the case.
Overt political manipulation has often buttressed the us/them rendition of history
Americans learn in school. The 2010 controversy over history textbooks in Texas is a recent example of this problem. As the Wall Street Journal reported:

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state's social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history. The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good -- and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart. "America is a special place and we need to be sure we communicate that to our children," said Don McLeroy, a leading conservative on the board. "The foundational principles of our country are very biblical.... That needs to come out in the textbooks." 38
Among the recommendations from the board were cutting Thomas Jefferson out of the curriculum (for advocating the separation of church and state) as well as
Thurgood Marshall (the first black Supreme Court Justice) and Cesar Chavez
(protest leader for migrant workers in the 1960s and 70s); they also called for a ban on the words “imperialism”, “capitalism” and “the slave trade”—instead, text book authors should use the terms “expansion”, “free-enterprise”, and the “Atlantic triangular trade” respectively as replacements. While the Texas State Board of
Education may fall on the extreme end of the spectrum, it would seem to be a trend in American culture more broadly. As a result, text-book-history has played a crucial role in perpetuating the us/them outlook. The popular media is no better; here, too, the us/them formulation is reinforced and made palatable to an even wider audience, starting with young children.

Us/Them and Popular Culture
Ask any parent. Disney films are pervasive. In a review of "Mickey Mouse Monopoly:
Disney, Childhood and Corporate Power," a documentary film by Chyng Sun,
Barbara Meltz explained the ubiquitous nature of Disney today. “Disney holds a position unique in the world. As the biggest player in children's entertainment (it owns the Disney Channel, ABC-TV and radio, ESPN, Miramax, Touchstone and
Disney Pictures), it sets the agenda for everyone else. With 660 stores worldwide,
Disney's reach is international.” 39 More important than Disney’s reach, however, are the messages found in its films. In his 1999 book, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and
the End of Innocence, for example, Henry A. Giroux is critical of the role Disney plays
“in shaping public memory, national identity, gender roles, and childhood values; in suggesting who qualifies as an American; and in determining the role of consumerism in American life.” 40
Defenders of Disney, and critics of this postmodern trend of “deconstructing” traditional narratives and popular culture, claim that scholars often read too much into these films, that Disney films are simply meant to provide entertainment. True enough. But who can deny the fact that Disney provides many young children in the
United States with their first glimpse of the larger world, some of their first ideas about people and cultures in the Middle East (Aladdin), Africa (The Lion King,
Tarzan), India (The Jungle Book), China (Mulan), as well as Native American
(Pocahontas, Peter Pan) and African American culture (Dumbo, The Lion King)?
These films are certainly not the only forces shaping young minds today. Everything from religious teaching to comic books to popular music and family upbringing plays a role in forming children’s views of the “other,” in depicting the world as a case of “us” versus “them”.
Yet Disney films are integral shapers of American thinking; they—and the images found in them—are part of a common cultural experience. As Benjamin Schwarz

recently explained, “for better and for worse, Walt Disney (1901-1966) implanted his creations more profoundly and pervasively in the national psyche than has any other figure in the history of American popular culture.” 41 And Disney films present an us/them view of the world with a vengeance.
There are exceptions. Take Mulan, a 1998 Disney movie about Chinese legend Hua
Mulan (or Fa Mulan). Granted the film’s primary message of female equality, something that is given a nod-and-a-wink in China today, was a not-too-subtle subversive political film directly challenging China’s current political situation.
Nonetheless, the film is still helpful in illustrating some of the social ramification of
Chinese Confucianism. The heroine of a famous Chinese poem written during the
Northern Dynasties (CE 420-589), the story of Mulan was expanded into a novel during the late Ming Dynasty (CE 1368-1644). It is a drama that relies on the tensions found in traditional Chinese gender roles—the Confucian edict to “act as a son should act, act as a daughter should act,” and so on. Disney’s Mulan struggles to bring honor to her family—another key component of Confucianism and Chinese culture in general. She must learn the intricacies of etiquette expected of women especially. She must follow the exact steps, for example, involved in making and serving tea. She must attract and win over a suitable husband. She ends up breaking out of her role as a daughter and a woman; disguised as a man, she fights in the army in the place of her elderly father. She helps fend off an attack by the Huns. This
Disney film compliments and reinforces some important aspects of Chinese culture and history and may serve as a jump-off point for exploring important issues in more depth.
In short, Disney presents a nuanced view of ancient China in Mulan.
More often, however, comparing Disney with history, cultural geography, or other scholarly works reveals oversimplification and stereotyping of other cultures.
“They” are presented as very different than “us”. Take, for example, Disney’s
Aladdin. The film's opening song, "Arabian Nights," originally went:

Oh, I come from a land,
From a faraway place,
Where the caravan camels roam.
Where they cut off your ear
If they don't like your face.
It's barbaric, buy hey, it's home.
Here, stereotypes abound. In 100 Myths About the Middle East, Fred Halliday exposes inaccuracies and misconceptions regarding the Middle East. High on his list is the belief that the “Arabs are a desert people,” (myth number 7 in Halliday’s book) as well as the notion that “contemporary political and social developments can only be understood by reference to ancient, centuries-old—if not millennia-old— conflicts” (number 77) and the corollary, “the peoples, and states, of the region have been more or less at war for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years” (number 78).
“The whole perception of the Arab world through the desert and its nomadic inhabitants is a grotesque distortion of the reality of these societies,” Halliday explains. “Most people in the [Arabian] Peninsula are not nomads, but are either agricultural laboures (Yemen, Oman) or inhabitants of the eight or so major maritime and cosmopolitan cities that mark the coast of the Peninsula, from Kuwait
City in the northeast via Manama, Dubai, Muscat, Mukalla, Aden and Hodeida to
Jeddah in the southeast.” The Middle East is clearly not simply a place “where the caravan camels roam”—not now, and not during its long history.
42
And what of the “barbaric” nature of the Middle East, the second point in the theme song of Disney’s Aladdin? Again, Halliday’s book is useful:
There have been many wars in the Middle East, in the distant and more recent past. There may well be more. But in modern times the Middle East has been no more riven by war than other part of the world such as Africa and East Asia, and, in the past century, much less than its neighbouring continent to the northeast, Europe. For all the wars between the Ottomans

and Safavis (later Qajars), the two empires coexisted reasonably well for four centuries (1500-1914). In the period since 1945 there have been five Arab-
Israeli wars but these, while catastrophic for the Palestinians, have been confined in time and space. Only the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-8 escaped external and regional state control and involved, by modern standards, high levels of casualties.
43
Beyond the theme song, an analysis of the charters in Aladdin would reveal other stereotypes and misinformation that underscore the us/them formulation in dramatic fashion—the “good guys” in the film (Jasmin, the Princess, and Al’ Aladdin, a street urchin who rescues the princess) have lighter skin and speak without accents. The “bad guys” are quite another story. Yousef Salem, a former spokesperson for the South Bay Islamic Association, characterized the film as follows:
All of the bad guys have beards and large, bulbous noses, sinister eyes and heavy accents, and they're wielding swords constantly. Aladdin doesn't have a big nose; he as a small nose. He doesn't have a beard or a turban. He doesn't have an accent. What makes him nice is they've given him this
American character. . . . I have a daughter who says she's ashamed to call herself an Arab, and it's because of things like this.
44
With a focus on “good guys” and “bad guys, as well as the supposed “barbaric” nature of the Middle East, children certainly get an early doze of the us/them outlook.
45
In the case of Africa and the 1999 movie Tarzan, Disney made an understandable decision to deviate from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original depiction of Africans in his
1912 novel, Tarzan of the Apes. The original work reflects the racism of Burroughs’ generation (particularly ideas associated with Social Darwinism). In one instance, when the young Tarzan had to flee in the face of a dominate male ape, Burroughs wrote: “Had Tarzan been a full-grown bull ape of the species of his tribe he would have been more than a match for the gorilla, but being only a little English boy, though enormously muscular for such, he stood no chance against his cruel antagonist. In his veins, though, flowed the blood of the best of a race of mighty
fighters [emphasis added].” Describing Tarzan’s first encounter with Africans,

Burroughs painted a crude picture, riddled with words and phrases like “kinky wool of their heads,” “protruding lips,” and “bestial brutishness.” 46
Disney’s solution? Show no Africans at all. By doing so, however, the film plays into another misconception regarding Africa, the idea that nothing really happened in
Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans. A glance at most any history, geography or anthropology text would dispel this notion. The civilization at Axum (present day
Ethiopia), the grandeur of Timbuktu or Great Zimbabwe or early evidence of iron smelting among the ancient Bantu are just a few examples.
Disney’s The Lion King perpetuates another misunderstood aspect of African societies: the egalitarian and peaceful nature of many African societies. In The Lion
King, Disney helps further three sets of stereotypes and misinformation—(1) that the West is the font of all notions of equality and democracy, (2) African societies are tyrannical and hierarchical, and (3) African cultures are warlike. Comparing The
Lion King with John Reader’s book, Africa: A Biography of the Continent highlights the problem. Reader explains the Age Grade system in West Africa (sometimes called Gerontocracy), where “chiefs had status, but little authority or power over the community in general. . . . Indeed, as though to counter friction likely to arise if authority and power were vested in certain chiefs and lineages and thus flowed vertically, from the few at the top to the majority at the bottom, a system emerged
[in West Africa] whereby authority and power were spread horizontally throughout the group as political structure uniquely suited to the social and economic conditions of sub-Saharan Africa.” 47 This is certainly a contrast with The Lion King, where the animals are happy in a hierarchical order—ruled by the “king of the jungle.” Moreover, unlike the scorched earth scene after the epic battle between the
“bad” lion (Scare) and the new, “good” king (Simba) in Disney’s Lion King, people in the Niger valley lived in peace and cooperation in order to survive in a harsh environment. To quote Reader again:
The people who inhabited the inland Niger delta left no monumental public architecture, extravagant burials, or incised tablets praising kings and

recording feats or conquest, but the archaeological record speaks no less eloquently (and certainly more impartially). The history of Jenne-jeno appears to have been extraordinarily peaceful. While evidence of dwellings razed to the ground is commonplace at urban sites elsewhere, with level after level of burning, not a whiff of such disaster is evident at Jenne-jeno throughout it 1,600 years of occupation.
48
Disney is by no means alone—the Indian Jones movies directed by Stephen
Spielberg depict people from other cultures as strange and demonic, in Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom (1984) the “bad guys”, lead by a deranged Indian maharaja, eat monkey brains and perform satanic-like rituals; Indian Jones is chased by either evil Nazis or Soviet KGB agents throughout the series (the release of Indiana Jones
and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in 2007, for example, was banned in Russia and roundly criticized in the Russian media). 49 Films aimed at older audiences fare no better. Jack Shaheen found a similar thread running through over 900 Hollywood films. In Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, Shaheen explained “I document and discuss virtually every feature that Hollywood has ever made—more than 900 films, the vast majority of which portray Arabs by distorting at every turn what most Arab men, women and children are really like. In gathering the evidence for this book, I was driven by the need to expose and injustice: cinema’s systematic, pervasive and unapologetic degradation and dehumanization of a people.” 50
Armando Jose Prats examined the cowboy movies that dominated Hollywood throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s and found a “grand source of transformations, of cultural transmutations, a system capable of converting, often past all recognition, the historical encounter with the Indian into a powerful mythology of triumphalist nationhood.” The Westerns “would keep the Indian all but invisible, yet it must still
‘present’ him somehow,” according to Prats. “The conqueror must produce an Other whose destruction is not only assured but justified.” 51
Hollywood did not event these stereotypes (they reflect the culture as much as they shape it). And similar depictions of the Other can be found in societies around the globe.
52 Nevertheless, the us/them formulation has become an enduring framework

Americans have used to understand themselves and their role in the world. It defines other cultures and people around the world in binary fashion at the same time. Such views became part of a volatile mixture with the rise of the U.S. to global power, particularly with America’s entrance into World War Two. The us/them outlook was combined with unprecedented power. The results were catastrophic.

Chapter 3
The US/Them Outlook and World War II in American Memory:
Seen as the "good war" by most Americans, World War II is the embodiment of the good vs. evil, us/them approach to understanding history and America's role in the world. It has become part of a triumphalist view, the exclamation point on the story of America's "manifest destiny," fought by the "greatest generation." In The "Good
War" in American Memory historian John Bodnar traces the evolution of this view of the war. According to Bodnar, "the American memory of the war was indeed contested, but like the recollections of other wars the nation had fought, the sweet sounds of valor ultimately eclipsed the painful cries of loss." Americans debated the meaning of the war during and immediately following it. Many "highly critical writings of the war [were] presented by veterans [such as Norman Mailer and Kurt
Vonnegut] who questioned the brutality of the fighting and expressed resentment over the loss of their individual rights." However, over time such critical views gave way to more patriotic accounts of World War II, as the weight of Hollywood films, politics, nostalgia and the passing of the World War Two generation took its toll:
Over the course of the twentieth century—a century of incredibly destructive wars—the United States expanded its capabilities to deliver massive forms of destruction and instigate violence. Culture, identity, and commemoration became more militarized and centered on thousands of tales about extraordinary patriots who protected their nation out of an inherent sense of love and duty. The land of the free became known as the home of the brave; acts of killing and dying were transformed into heroic deeds and cherished memories. National identity and the remembrance of war were never issues that were completely settled, and the trope of brave men could be inserted into tragic narratives of loss and remorse as well.
Yet, over time, the defense of the nation became as important as the old dream of uplift and equality. Americans talked not only about the pursuit of happiness but about the road to victory. In the "American Century" towns and communities were considerably more likely to build memorials to veterans who defended the nation than to commemorate the Declaration of Independence or [FDR's] Four Freedoms.

Film studios made thousands of movies of gunfighters and soldiers that suggested that our problems could be solved more effectively through "human heroism" and military force than through political movements. Certainly there were warriors who were courageous and battles that had to be fought. Virtue and violence did not have to be mutually exclusive. But to a significant extent, that is how they were cast in the great debate over the remembering of World War II that consumed the American people.
53
Bodnar's findings were similar to Stud Terkel's in his Pulitzer Prize winning work
The Good War. Terkel's oral history of the war gave voice to all walks of life--from former infantryman to generals to journalists to workers in wartime industry.
Terkel interviewed Retired Admiral Gene LaRocque, who started his naval career in the Pacific. At Pearl Harbor when Japan attacked on December 7 th , 1941 LaRocque told Terkel that "the twisted memory of [World War II] encourages the men of my generation to be willing, almost eager, to use military force anywhere in the world." 54 Dempsey Travis's recollections contradict the "good war" image as well:
The army was an experience unlike anything I've had in my life. I think of two armies, one black, one white. I saw German prisoners free to move around the camp, unlike black soldiers, who were restricted. The Germans walked right into the doggone places like any white American. We were wearin' the same uniform, but we were excluded. This was Camp Shenango, Pennsylvania. . .. When I arrived, I stepped into mud up to my knees. The troop train was Jim Crow. They had a car for black soldiers and a car for whites.
Contrary voices like LaRocque's and Travis's have been largely forgotten. Instead, memories of World War II have been distilled in the decades since 1945. In place of the complexities of the war, a popularized view has come to symbolize "good" versus "evil"—a simplistic view from beginning to end (from the origins of the war, the meaning and conduct of the war, and the way it ended).
No episode in American history has been more misrepresented than the events that brought America into the Second World War, the events leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As historian John Dower put it:

All narratives have their icons, and the heroic narrative of World War II has several.
One stands at the beginning of the war and another at the end. The first symbolizes treacherous victimization and humiliation, the second triumph. The U.S. battleship
Arizona, sunk with over two thousand American sailors on board in the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, is the first of these icons, and the Enola Gay the second. Although the Enola Gay is clearly the more ambiguous, the veneration of both symbols in patriotic circles amounts to a civil religion.
Dower's point about the dropping of the atomic bomb is a reference to the controversy over the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit during the 1990s, an exhibit originally designed to show multiple viewpoints regarding the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. The exhibit met with a storm of protest, particularly from World War II veterans, the Air Force Association,
House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former head of the National Endowment for the
Humanities Lynne Cheney, and radio personality Rush Limbaugh. Within a year, the exhibit was cancelled. A new exhibit showing only the technical details of the Enola
Gay, the B-29 aircraft that carried the first bomb over the skies of Hiroshima, opened in 2003 (without mentioning the civilian casualties involved nor the controversy over the decision to use the bomb—did it save a million American lives, as President Harry Truman claimed when explaining his decision to use the bomb on Japan? Was Japan ready to surrender prior to the bomb's use?). Such questions were ignored in order to avoid political outcry. No wonder there has been little interest in reexamining the events leading up to Pearl Harbor.
Like the history of the United States' decision to drop the atomic bomb, the origins of the War in the Pacific have suffered from limited renditions of history, often tied up in patriotic lure rather than historical scholarship. Explanations regarding the origins of the War in the Pacific have become mythic tales, some of the most onesided beliefs in American culture. In the midst of the 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush confided in his diary "we were living through a 21 st -century Pearl Harbor." Time magazine called the 9/11 attacks "a day that will live in infamy," evoking FDR's famous speech in response to the Japanese attack. In short, Pearl Harbor has entered into American popular culture and myth.

What does it stand for? The answer runs something like this: Japan attacked the
United States for no reason. An "evil empire," to borrow Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union, was bent on world domination and only the wellintentioned United States stood in the way. An innocent United States was dragged into the "good war" and became a superpower as a result.
Missing from the usual story of Pearl Harbor is the role the U.S. played in the lead up to the War in the Pacific, a role that stretches back to Commodore Matthew Perry's famous "opening of Japan" in 1854, where the U.S. forced Japan to trade at gunpoint, or when a joint flotilla of British, Dutch, French and American warships bombarded
Japanese coastal fortifications in 1864 over tariff disputes between Japan and the
Western powers. Missing too is the decades-long contest over the resources and markets of China at the turn of the 20 th century, a contest that set the U.S. and Japan on a collision course. What might be called a prelude to the Second World War in the
Pacific—events prior to the 1930s--led Japan to take a "if you can't beat them, join them" view of international relations. Japan industrialized during the 1860s and 70s and then joined the Western game of empire as a defensive act. They hoped to prevent any future "Commodore Perrys" from violating Japanese sovereignty.
Japanese expansion ran counter to American interests in the Pacific, however, particularly America's "open door" policy regarding China. These conflicting aims in the Pacific were settled by one of the most brutal wars on record. However, such nuisance is absent from the orthodox American view of the War in the Pacific in favor of a more black-and-white version of events. Where did the simplistic story line come from?
55
The first iteration of the standard us/them story of Pearl Harbor—one where an innocent United States reacted to Japanese aggression from 1931 to 1941—was made popular by the Frank Capra series, a film series commission by the War
Department entitled "Why We Fight." Meant to rally the nation during the war, it showed a very black and white view of World War II (where the "free world" was locked in battle with the "slave world"). According to the War Department film,

World War II began on September 18 th , 1931 with Japan's attack on the Chinese province of Manchuria. The world should have stood up to the aggressive Japanese then and there. Instead, a weak League of Nations issued its censure resolution, but did nothing militarily to stop the Japanese march across Asia. The emboldened
Japanese then launched a campaign to swallow all of China and eventually, despite economic sanction by the U.S. in 1940, the entire Asian Pacific region. They took on the U.S. –striking a preemptive blow at Pearl Harbor--as part of this plan of conquest.
Buttressed by firsthand accounts in the memoirs of Secretary of War Henry L.
Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, along with the writings of historians during the 1940s and 50s, such as Herbert Feis, William Langer, and S. Everett
Gleason, the War Department's version of events made its way into history textbooks as well as American memory, where it remains firmly entrenched. The widely used textbook, Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy's The American
Pageant refers to Pearl Harbor as "Japan's hara-kiri gamble in Hawaii." The sanctions imposed on Japan by the United States in 1940 were part of a "devil's dilemma," as the Roosevelt administration "wished to halt Japan's conquest in the
Far East—conquest that menaced not only American trade and security but international peace as well." Tracing the roots of the conflict only as far back as the
Manchurian incident of 1931, readers are left with the image of a "rampaging Japan" stealing "the Far East spotlight." Gerald A Danzer's The Americans begins in 1931 with Manchuria as well, and immediately links Japan with Hitler and Nazism, ignoring the fact that Japan did not join the Axis alliance until September 1940.
Students are told that "halfway around the world from Germany, nationalistic military leaders in Japan were trying to take control of their government. These leaders shared Hitler's belief in the need for more "living space" for a growing population."
A visitor to the National Park Service's U.S.S. Arizona Memorial would get the same picture. A guide to the site begins with Manchuria and follows the usual pattern:

"The attack on Pearl Harbor was the culmination of a decade of deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States over the status of China and the security of Southeast Asia. The breakdown began in 1931 when Japanese army extremists, in defiance of government policy, invaded and overran the northernmost Chinese province of Manchuria. Japan ignored American protests, and in the summer of 1937 launched a full-scale attack on the rest of China." It then links Japan to Nazi Germany: "Over the next three years, war broke out in Europe and Japan joined Nazi Germany in the Axis Alliance." The guide mentions negotiations: "The
United States applied both diplomatic and economic pressures to try to resolve the
Sino-Japanese conflict. The Japanese government viewed these measures, especially an embargo on oil, as threats to their nation's security. By the summer of 1941, both countries had taken positions from which they could not retreat without a serious loss of national prestige." But then it dismisses the seriousness of diplomatic negotiations: "Although both governments continued to negotiate their differences,
Japan had already decided on war.... the attack on Pearl Harbor was part of a grand strategy of conquest in the Western Pacific." This, in effect, presents the story as
"inevitable" war between the forces of "good" and "evil".
Such views resonate in American popular culture. The good vs. evil version of Pearl
Harbor had been a favorite of Hollywood long before Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael
Bay's portrayal in Pearl Harbor (2000) starring Ben Affleck. Thirty Seconds Over
Tokyo (1945) and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), both box-office successes, have aired on television countless times since their releases. There is even a Pearl Harbor
T-shirt company which features the "Remember Dec 7th"" T-shirt. "This doublesided tee shirt shows a war torn American Flag at half mast and reminds us of the
Americans that lost their lives on this fateful day in 1941. The back contains statistics about Pearl Harbor." These shirts can be ordered on-line at www.soldiercity.com, along with the "Infamy T-shirt" and the "Doolittle's Raid On
Japan T-shirt. "Johnny Lightning toy replica cars include the "Pearl Harbor: Day of
Infamy" set, complete with the "Schofield Barracks ambulance" used at Pearl Harbor to care for the dead and wounded after the attack.

History is much more complex, however. During conflict, especially, there is usually another side to the story, a different view of events. When it comes to the War in the
Pacific, one very different perspective is encapsulated by the notion of a Japanese
Monroe Doctrine for Asia, an idea that was ironically first suggested by President
Theodore Roosevelt. Later articulated by Japanese intellectuals and policymakers, rejected by American policymakers during the 1930s and 40s, ignored during the war, and forgotten ever since, such a view certainly provides another side to the
War in the Pacific. In the context of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia, the United
States was not a blameless victim of Japanese aggression. Japan was defending itself.
Moreover, advocates of this view tried to point out the hypocrisy of American foreign policy (calling for free and open trade in Asia, while declaring a closed,
"hands-off" system in the Western Hemisphere, a system dominated by the United
States). Advocates of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine in essences asked: if the United
States could dominate the regions in its backyard—the Western Hemisphere—why couldn't Japan do the same in East Asia? Such questions fell on deaf ears.
A Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia?
Theodore Roosevelt outlined a "Japanese Monroe Doctrine" during conversations with fellow Harvard classmate and Japanese journalist Kentaro Kaneko in July of
1905. The two met regularly that year as the President brokered an end to the
Russo-Japanese War that would earn him a Noble Peace Prize. The war shocked the world—Japan easily defeated the Russian navy in what historian Piotr Olender called "the first great war of the 20th century," as Japan and Russia competed for control of Manchuria and Korea (as the Russians hoped to gain a long sough after
"blue water" port, while Japan hoped to secure access to coal and other materials need for its new industrial economy). During negotiations, TR engaged in a series of talks with Kaneko during this effort at peacemaking. The President told Kaneko "the future policy of Japan towards Asiatic countries should be similar to that of the

United States toward their neighbors on the American continent. A 'Japanese
Monroe Doctrine' in Asia will remove the temptation to European encroachment, and Japan will be recognized as the leader of the Asiatic nations, and her power will form the shield behind which they can reorganize their national system." During further discussions of the Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt told both Kaneko and
Japanese ambassador Kotoro Takahira that it would make sense for Japan to become "paramount in the region around the Yellow Sea, just as the United States was paramount in the Caribbean." Taking his cue from the British, who had recently concluded an alliance with Japan, Roosevelt gave a tacit green light to Japan's annexation of Korea, and, of course, outright approval to Japan's occupation of
Southern Manchuria, as granted in the Portsmouth Treaty that ended Japan's war with Russia. Within a decade, commentators on either side of the Pacific began to draw comparisons between American and Japanese foreign policy in the wake of the
Russo-Japanese War. Further strengthened during the Lansing-Ishii Agreement in
1917, when Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing secretly recognized Japan's "special interest" in China, a notion of Japan's Monroe Doctrine for Asia steadily gathered momentum in the decades leading to Pearl Harbor.
For many Japanese intellectuals and policymakers alike, the notion of a Japanese
Monroe Doctrine came to symbolize two things. First, that its acceptance would be an admission on the part of the Western powers that Japan, too, sat at the table of
Great Power diplomacy, and that it too had "special interests" that other nations were bound to respect. Second, it also became a shorthand method for highlighting a double standard inherent in American policy during much of the twentieth century, or what historian Gaddis Smith has called "the sauce-for-the-gander problem." Many
Japanese—such as diplomats-turned-scholars Yamato Ichihashi and Inahara Katsuji, journalist Kiyoshi Kawakami, and policymakers like Matsuoka Yosuke—began to ask how it was that the United States could claim an "open door" in China, while maintaining a "closed door" in the Western Hemisphere.

The idea of Japan's Monroe Doctrine for Asia emerged along side Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. For Japan, however, defeating Russia was part of a larger struggle stretching back to the 1830s, to the Opium Wars in China and the beginning of Western dominance in Asia. The first "Opium War" in 1839–1842 between Great Britain and China began the process of forcing open China to
European trade on terms dictated by the West. When in the 1850s Commodore
Matthew Perry and the United States similarly "opened" Japan at gunpoint, turmoil ensued in Japan. However, whereas China failed to establish strong central government leadership and failed to adopt aspects of Western policies to strengthen the state, in Japan events took a different course. The restoration of the Japanese emperor to power in 1865 was accompanied by the growth of a strong central government pledged to modernization following many Western models (the Meiji period that extended to 1912). Internal politics were largely responsible, but those who advised the Emperor could always point to the fate of China, whose territorial sovereignty was being nibbled away by the European states, beginning with
Britain's acquisition of Hong Kong. In any event, Japan became an industrial power as a form of self-defense, quickly becoming one of the Great Powers, defeating
Russia in 1905, laying claim to Southern Manchuria in the process. Japan also seized
Korea as well and later became an ally of Britain and joined the allies during World
War I. As one of the "allied powers," Japan quickly expelled Germany from its Asian-
Pacific holdings. Writers began to call Japan the "Britain of the Far East." It had certainly joined in Great Power diplomacy, and in doing so, it was on a collision course with an equally expansionist United States.
This clash of interests became clear in 1898—in the wake of the Spanish-American
War. In a burst of energy, the United States occupied Guam, Western Samoa, and the
Philippines, annexing Hawaii as well. After declaring the "Open Door" in China in
1900, the United States sent Marines into China during the Boxer Rebellion. Yet, while becoming a Pacific power, the United States continued to claim special rights in the Western Hemisphere (under the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt
Corollary), intervening on a regular basis throughout the Caribbean and Central

America. American troops invaded Cuba (1898–1902, 1906–1909, 1912, 1917,
1922), the Dominican Republic (1904), Haiti (1916–24), Honduras (1912–19, 1924–
25), Nicaragua (1912–25, 1926–33), Colombia (1903), and Mexico (1914–1917).
The hypocrisy of the American claim to special rights in the Western Hemisphere, while denying that right to Japan in Asia, was precisely the view advocates of
"Japan's Monroe Doctrine" tried to highlight. Kiyoshi Kawakami, a Japanese journalist living in the United States in the years between World War I and Word
War II, was the first to bring American attention to such views. A Christian-convert and author of hundreds of articles and several books on United States-Japanese relations, Kawakami urged Japan to play a larger role in Asia and warned against
"preponderating Western influence" in China and areas "contiguous or adjacent" to
Japanese territory. In his American-Japanese Relations: An Inside View of Japan's
Policies and Purposes, published in 1919, Kawakami devoted a chapter to "Japan and the Monroe Doctrine." "Many Japanese see how the Monroe Doctrine becomes a handy tool in the hands of American politicians," he wrote. "They make piquant and flippant remarks about the peculiar psychology of American publicists who failed to see their inconsistency in trying, one the one hand, to exclude all Japanese enterprise from Mexico, while, on the other hand, they have no scruple in urging the extension of American interests in China and Siberia." Here he was referring to
Woodrow Wilson's well know "consortium" idea, which allowed American investors to develop railways in Northern China and Siberia. American investment of this sort went full steam ahead just as the Lodge Corollary gathered support in the American press and in the halls of Congress. This proposed interpretation of the Monroe
Doctrine, named for Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, enlarged on the Roosevelt
Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and called for the blocking of Japanese investment in the Western Hemisphere. Kawakami found it odd that the "apostles of the Monroe
Doctrine ... could blandly and with no feeling of embarrassment advise their government to finance the Chinese Government, build railroads in China, purchase
Manchurian railways, control the Philippines, procure shipyards on the Chinese coast and even assume control of the Siberia railroad."

The Japanese intellectuals-turned policymakers Yamato Ichihashi and Inahara
Katsuji kept the spotlight on such contradictions. A technical advisor to the Japanese government during the Washington Conference on disarmament in 1921–22 and
Professor at Stanford University (1913–1942), Ichihashi published The Washington
Conference and After in 1928. Here, he noted that by the turn of the century Japan had decided to imitate the conduct of the Western powers when it came to relations with China, writing:
She joined the international expedition against the Boxers; she formed an alliance with Great Britain; she fought and defeated Russia; she was now a full-fledged Great
Power. But the West began to apprehend this aggressive Asiatic nation, and, when she proved herself so successful in her economic enterprises in South Manchuria,
Europe and America became hostile to her. Japan was severely criticized by her
Western colleagues for doing what they were doing [emphasis added]; she was vehemently charged with violating the sacred open-door principle.
Inahara Katsuji, a journalist who had studied at Stanford and Harvard Universities before attending the Washington Conference as a member of the Japanese delegation, echoed Ichihashi's sentiments. The author of several books on foreign policy, Inahara also wrote for the prestigious Japanese journal Ekonomistuto (The
Economist). In a December 15, 1931 article at the height of the international crisis caused by Japan's apparent take-over of Manchuria, he asked how could "this nation
[the United States] with a grave criminal record ... establish itself in a position to watch over Japanese activities in Manchuria?" In an April 1932 article for the same publication, Inahara pointed to the contradiction in United States policy towards
Japan. "After all," he wrote, "as long as the United States maintains the Monroe
Doctrine—that is, a 'closed door policy'—and still insists on enforcing the Open
Door policy [in China], it is only natural and should not be objectionable at all that
Japan, acting on the principle of equality, should establish an Asian Monroe

Doctrine—that is, 'a closed door policy'—and further demand that the Open Door policy be applied to Central and South America."
Matsuoka Yosuke, famous for leading Japan's delegation out of the League of
Nations—dramatically walking out of the League conference on Manchuria in the spring of 1933—and declaring the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" as foreign minister (1937–41), went further. Matsuoka fully embraced the idea of
Japan's Monroe Doctrine for Asia. As historian Kimitada Miwa noted, Matsuoka oversaw the "first serious attempt by the Japanese to acquire for themselves a status of equality with the United States." Matsuoka asked "if the United States could rely upon the Monroe Doctrine to support its preeminent position in the Western
Hemisphere in order to sustain American economic stability and prosperity, why could not Japan do the same with an 'Asian Monroe Doctrine'?" In an address to the
Japanese Diet in January 1941, Matsuoka pointed to this in no uncertain terms:
The United States has evinced no adequate understanding of the fact that the establishment of a sphere of common prosperity throughout greater East Asia is truly a matter of vital concern to Japan. She apparently entertains an idea that her own first line of national defense lies along the mid-Atlantic to the East, but westward not only along the eastern Pacific, but even as far as China and the South
Seas. If the United States assumes such an attitude, it would be, to say the least, a very one-sided contention on her part, to cast reflections on our superiority in the
Western part of the Pacific, by suggesting that it betokens ambitious designs. I, for one, believe that such a position assumed on the part of the United States would not be calculated to contribute toward the promotion of world peace.
Ironically, in the last official Japanese communication before the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan, in Tokyo's famous "counterproposal" of
December 7, 1941, a similar theme was sounded:
It is impossible not to reach the conclusion that the American Government desires to maintain and strengthen, in coalition with Great Britain and other powers, its dominant position it has hitherto occupied not only in China but in other areas of
East Asia. It is a fact of history that the countries of East Asia for the past hundred years or more have been compelled to observe the status quo under the Anglo-
American policy of imperialistic exploitation and to sacrifice themselves to the

prosperity of the two nations. The Japanese Government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of such a situation since it directly runs counter to Japan's fundamental policy to enable all nations to reach their proper place in the world.
Of course, Japanese officials like Matsuoka saw a dominant Japan in Asia as part of its "proper place in the world." They were as one-sided as their American counterparts. However, Japan lost the War in the Pacific and many of their myths regarding Japanese superiority were punctured. Not so the United States. Because the U.S. was victorious, there has been very little impetus for "re-framing" the story of Pearl Harbor, and no room, as such, for understanding or evaluating Japanese views involving the conflict. Victory spawned a one-sided view and reinforced an us/them reading of history. The danger of holding such one-sided views can be seen in the State Department's handling of U.S.-Japanese relations in the decades before
Pearl Harbor. Here the us/them mindset helped trigger a war of staggering proportions. The State Department's inability to understand any other point of view led to a dramatic break down in diplomacy.
The U. S. State Department and the Rejection of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine
Stanley K. Hornbeck, head of the State Department's Far East Division (1928–1937) and the State Department's Special Adviser on Political Affairs (1937–1944), was the leading opponent of the notion of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia. During his long career, Hornbeck rejected Japanese claims that the American Monroe
Doctrine had been a pretext for the creation and maintenance of an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. He dismissed any parallels between
United States policy in the Americas and Japanese policy in Asia, particularly any comparisons between United States intervention in the Caribbean and Central
America and Japanese intervention in Manchuria and Northern China. Hornbeck

assigned nothing but pure motives to United States policy in Latin America. For
Hornbeck, the Monroe Doctrine was the cornerstone of the United States' efforts to defend and protect the Western Hemisphere. It was not, in his mind, a vehicle "to restrain or coerce the other American states." Nor was it an excuse for imposing a
"closed door" policy in the Western Hemisphere and the creation of an exclusive
American sphere of influence. This, of course, was the sticking point between
Hornbeck's orthodox reading of the Monroe Doctrine and the logic inherent in
Japan's Monroe Doctrine for Asia. "The United States," he would often claim, "never asked any American state for special privileges or self-denying promises in any way comparable to those which Japan has exacted of China."
Hornbeck held steady when it came to his views. Just after Japan's invasion of
Manchuria in 1931, for example, he reminded Secretary of State Henry Stimson:
For nearly twenty years, Japanese statesmen and writers have been speaking of a
"Japan's Monroe Doctrine for Asia". Some years ago they were given to comparing the position of Japan vis-à-vis China with that of the United States vis-à-vis Mexico.
More recently they have insisted that Japan's relationship to Manchuria is essentially that of the United States toward weak countries of the Caribbean. They not infrequently say: "The South Manchuria Railway is our Panama Canal." During the past few weeks they have compared their activities in Manchuria with those of the United States in Nicaragua. The fact that these comparisons and analogies are not sound is neither here nor there. Many Japanese believe them to be so, and not a few of our own people accept as gospel the allegations that they are so.
At a deeper level, any such claims of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia offended
Hornbeck's sense of history. For Hornbeck—like many of his generation—the expansion of Western power was a fact bound up with a Whig interpretation of history (the idea that history was developing toward a certain end, toward a world of democracy and free market capitalism) and notions of racial hierarchy. His ideas were similar to Woodrow Wilson's, encapsulated in his famous dictum that the
United States intervened in Mexico in order to "teach the Mexicans how to elect good men." For men like Hornbeck, the idea that Japan (considered a racially inferior people) should stand as a "teacher" in Asia or in any way on a level equal

with the West was preposterous. Japan's claims of a Monroe Doctrine for Asia threatened to unravel a 500-year process of Western domination in Asia, a development contrary to the overall flow of world history itself.
Clark University Professor and part-time State Department advisor on the Far East,
George Hubbard Blakeslee, echoed Hornbeck's views in a 1933 article for Foreign
Affairs, entitled "Japan's Monroe Doctrine." It was written shortly after the League of
Nation's censure resolution in response to Japan's invasion of Manchuria. While
Blakeslee allowed that there was, as Japanese policymakers claimed, some similarity to United States policy in the Western Hemisphere and the Caribbean in particular, he argued that these were not analogous situations, that "the position of Japan in
Asia in certain important respects [failed] to parallel the United States in America."
First of all, there were differences in size. Japan was small in relation to Asia, and especially compared to China. The United States was a colossus in relation to its immediate neighbors to the south. "An attitude which therefore appears natural
[emphasis added] for the United States [that of regional policeman] does not appear natural for Japan to take toward China." He saw no similarity to the actual principles contained in any would-be Japanese Monroe Doctrine and American policy.
Blakeslee argued that the "the doctrine of the right to live, the life line, and economic expansion" which Japan put forth in defense of the Manchurian invasion, was
"exclusively Japanese." The United States, Blakeslee insisted did "not need to use military force to induce the Caribbean republics to permit American capital to find profitable investment. The doors are voluntarily wide open [emphasis added]." And lastly, there were no "statements in the American press that the status quo in the
Caribbean should be changed to the economic and political advantage of the United
States,"—none like those filling the Japanese press in the 1930s. In addition to these important differences, Blakeslee explained that other powers were involved in the
Far East and had certain "rights" in China and elsewhere in the region, whereas none had any similar claims in the Caribbean.

Hornbeck was not above manipulating the historical record in order to preserve a one-sided view of United States-Japanese relation and as a means of undermining
Japanese arguments in favor of Japan's Monroe Doctrine. When the editor of the series Foreign Relations of the United States, the State Department's official public collection of documents, informed Hornbeck that documents regarding the Lansing-
Ishii Agreement were to be published in 1936, Hornbeck raised concerns. He did not want "the story of the Lansing-Ishii separate ('secret') protocol and the use subsequently made of it to be made public." He asked that the matter be taken up with the Secretary of State and also that George Blakeslee look into the matter.
Blakeslee came back with less than what Hornbeck wanted to hear, writing, "The record is one in which it appears that we led Ishii into making of a commitment, which was to be kept secret, and we afterwards used the commitment as a diplomatic club toward compelling them to make other commitments."
Consequently, information regarding these negotiations was not published by the
State Department in 1936. Given the fact that these agreements were known—for example, Time magazine ran a story about the Lansing-Ishii Agreement in its foreign news section on April 7, 1923—Hornbeck's behavior here is rather strange. Perhaps it was a matter of timing. Publishing these documents in 1936 might have supported
Japanese claims at the time, lending credence to the notion of Japan's Monroe
Doctrine for Asia.
Hornbeck was engaged in more than a war of words, however. Insisting on a hardline against Japan during his long career, he helped convince Secretary of State
Cordell Hull and President Franklin Roosevelt to reject Japanese attempts at peace talks in 1939 and 1940. As the head of the Far Eastern Division, Hornbeck discouraged both the Grew-Nomura conversations (talks between U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew and Japanese Foreign Minister Nomura Kichisaburo), and proposals for a high-level meeting between the President and Japan's Prime
Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye. Whether such talks would have prevented the war in the Pacific is impossible to say. But certainly, given the catastrophic nature of that war—with millions of deaths, culminating with the dropping of atomic bombs

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—that the State Department rejected any meaningful chance for dialogue is important in and of itself. Moreover, the clear connection between Hornbeck's selective reading of history—his unequivocal rejection of
Japan's Monroe Doctrine—and the breakdown of diplomacy between the United
States and Japan leads to some disturbing revelations about how foreign policy is made that offer lessons for the future and for world peace. Hornbeck's perspective seems far from unique. In fact, Hornbeck's black-and-white vision of the world seems typically American. It certainly squares with the standard story of Pearl
Harbor that Americans subscribe to. However, such views are as dangerous now as they were seventy years ago when they guided Hornbeck's thinking at the State
Department. In short, such an unequivocal rejection of the other side's point of view is not conducive to diplomacy and finding peaceful solution to international problems. Americans then and now fail to recognize a blatant double standard: the
United States could occupy Nicaragua, but Japan could not occupy Manchuria.
Certain rules applied to "them," but not "us."
Too useful as a symbol of American righteousness perhaps to be questioned,
Americans have not thoroughly reexamined the standard narrative regarding the
"day that will live in infamy." Instead, prewar-Japanese scholars and intellectuals and their argument for a Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia have been edited out of the narrative, so to speak. Instead, a limited story, beginning with Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931, prevails. Such selective vision regarding the circumstance that drew the United States into the Second World War provides the foundation of the "good war" myth and by extension part of the good versus evil, us/them approach to understanding history in general. As John Dower put it, Pearl
Harbor is an "icon" in the heroic narrative of the war. The other major icon, he claimed, "standing at the end of the war," is the decision to drop atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. Here too, simplicity supplants complexity—prevailing ideas about the decision to the drop atomic bomb are tangled in an us/them formulation of World War II as well.

The Atomic Bomb and the US/Them Formulation of the War
As part of the eighty-fifth anniversary celebration of the New Yorker, in the spring of
2010, the editors of the magazine "turned a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history" every day for eight-five days consecutively. In the final installment of the series, they highlighted John Hersey’s "Hiroshima”
(August 31, 1946), no doubt the most famous piece published in The New Yorker. As the editors explained:
The idea for “Hiroshima” came from William Shawn, then The New Yorker’s managing editor, who believed that, despite the exhaustive news coverage of the first atomic attack, the story of the bomb’s victims remained untold. Early in 1945,
Shawn discussed the idea with Hersey as Hersey prepared for a reporting trip to
Asia. Hersey traveled through China and then spent a month in Japan interviewing
Hiroshima survivors before returning to the U.S. in June to write his report. The result was a chronicle of the immediate aftermath of the atomic explosion seen through the eyes of six survivors: two doctors, two women, a Protestant clergyman, and a German Jesuit priest. Originally, the magazine planned to publish it as a series over four issues, but Shawn persuaded Ross to publish the article in its entirety in a single issue without cartoons, Talk of the Town, or reviews. The response to
“Hiroshima” was strong and immediate and not universally positive. The magazine sold out at newsstands. Many newspapers republished portions of the article on their front pages or devoted editorials to it. The Book of the Month club distributed
“Hiroshima” free of charge to its members. ABC pre-empted its radio schedule to broadcast a reading of the entire piece. Later that year, the article was published in book form by Alfred A. Knopf and has gone on to sell more than three million copies.
Debate about the atomic bomb had certainly begun before Hersey, and it would swirl in a number of directions for decades after "Hiroshima" was published, particular among scientists, historians, politicians, and military planners. The
Hungarian-born physicist, Leo Szilard, who helped persuade President Roosevelt to launch the A-bomb project in the first place, famously led a group of Manhattan-
Project scientists (code name for the secret American project to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War) to sign a letter against American use of the bomb. He, and many of his fellow-Manhattan-Project colleagues, spent a lifetime speaking out against the use of the bomb and working towards international control of nuclear weapons. A group of Protestant clergy led by the leading American

theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared the atomic bombings “morally indefensible” in a joint statement published in the New York Times on March 6, 1946. Likewise, historians have been engaged in a bitter controversy over this issue, particularly with the publication of Gar Alperovitz's 1965 book Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and
Potsdam. Alperovitz argued that the real purpose behind Truman's use of the bomb was to scare the Soviet Union and to keep Joseph Stalin and the Soviets out of the
Far East in the postwar period. Others, members of the so called "revisionist" school, maintain that Japan was already trying to surrender (extending "peace feelers" in the final months of the war), and that the U.S. policy of "unconditional surrender," which many in Japan feared would jeopardize the status of the Japanese Emperor, were sticking points in an earlier end to hostilities. Prominent military leaders such as Douglas MacArthur, Admiral William Leahy and Dwight Eisenhower expressed disagreement with the President's decision as well. In his memoirs, Eisenhower's wrote:
In [1945] Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his [Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'.
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Given the enormous destructive power unleashed by the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Japan (through a controlled chain reaction, the bomb dropped on
Hiroshima leveled an area of nearly five square miles in a matter of seconds, killing
80,000 people instantly and another 20, 000 or more slowly due to radiation), and the consequences for humanity later (during the Cold War the world lived in fear of a nuclear war of unimaginable proportions), such controversy is understandable.

Scientists like Szilard and military officials like Eisenhower knew that humanity had crossed a new threshold in terms of the technology of war.
Hersey's essay was on a different plane, however. His account was not about decision-making or diplomacy or the future of war per se. It was about something deeper. Hersey had put a human face on the "enemy" only a year after Japan's surrender. In short, Hersey’s work caused a sensation because it collided with the us/them formulation of World War II. During the war the us/them outlook had been raised to shocking heights. Frank Capra was not alone in depicting the war in blackand-white terms. His series "Why We Fight" was certainly powerful, as noted above.
However, anti-Japanese sentiment, in particular, reached a frenzied pitch during the war. Americans were fighting "Hitler" or the "Nazis" in Europe. Seldom was the war in Europe depicted as a war against the German people or the German "race"—after all, the Allied Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, was of German extraction, as were millions of other Americans. And no German-Americans were placed in
"interment camps," something over 100,000 Japanese-Americans experienced during the war. Clearly, when it came to Japan the war took on a racial dimension— the ultimate in an us/them outlook. Americans were not fighting Hirohito, the
Japanese Emperor, or Hideki Tojo, head of the Japanese military; they were fighting the "Japs." The U.S. Post Office stamped mail with derogatory statements, such as
"Smash the Jap, Buy More War Bonds," "From the Buggy to the Grave, They're Nasty
Little Chaps," even cartoonist and children's author Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) depicted the Japanese as buck-tooth and inhuman. Americans wore buttons on their lapels that read "We'll Bomb Each Jap Right Off the Map" and carried "Slap-A-Jap" club membership cards or "Jap Hunting Licenses," that said "No Closed Season on
Yellow Belly Japs; Ammunition Furnished by Uncle Sam." Comic books entitled "Jap
Blood Cut" and "Jap Beast" appeared in 1942. Hollywood film stars talked about fighting the "Japs" or the "little monkeys."
Nothing conveys the intensity of the us/them outlook and American distain for the
Japanese like the practice of mutilating Japanese war dead, however. "When he said

goodbye two years ago to Natalie Nickerson, 20, a war worker of Phoenix, Arizona, a big, handsome Navy lieutenant promised her a Jap. Last week, Natalie received a human skull, autographed by her lieutenant and 13 friends and inscribed: 'This is a good Jap--a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.' Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo. The armed forces disapprove strongly of this sort of thing." So read the caption to a grotesque full-page photograph of Natalie Nickerson posing with her Japanese "skull souvenir," published by Life Magazine as the "Picture of the
Week" on May 22, 1944. Pennsylvania's Congressman Francis Walter presented
FDR with a letter-opener made out of the arm bone of a Japanese soldier. American servicemen cut off ears, pickled them and kept them in jars; they wore the teeth of dead Japanese soldiers around their necks as mementos. So widespread a practice, the War Department told commanders "to prevent such illegal and brutal acts" by members of the armed services.
The dropping of the atomic bomb—and Hersey's "Hiroshima"--when seen in this intensely emotional context takes on a different light. As historian James J.
Weingartner concluded:
But a dehumanized enemy is one to whom it is easy to do terrible things while he is still living. The area bombings of Japanese cities in the latter stages of the war, culminating in the two atomic bombs dropped in August 1945, were based on considerations which, in the context of total war, were rational. Yet the widespread image of the Japanese as subhuman constituted an emotional context which provided another justification for decisions which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Two days after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, president
Truman remarked: "The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true."
Hersey's account of innocent victims, Japanese victims, ran counter to this dehumanizing process. Hersey related the stories of ordinary people affected by the atomic bomb. He gave Americans a glimpse into the life of Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a mother of two, for example:
As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion towards her children. She had taken a single

step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three quarters of a mile, from the centre of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house. Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower of tiles pummeled her; everything became dark, for she was buried. The debris did not cover her deeply. She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child cry, 'Mother, help me!’ and saw her youngest - Myeko, the five-year-old - buried up to her breast and unable to move, As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way towards the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children.
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Albert Einstein immediately bought 1,000 copies of Hiroshima when it came out in book form. Manhattan-Project scientist Arthur M. Squires wrote:
I wept as I read John Hersey's New Yorker account of what has happened during the past year to six who were lucky enough to survive Hiroshima. I am filled with shame to recall the whoopee spirit ... when we came back from lunch to find others who had returned with the first extras announcing the bombing of Hiroshima. That evening we had a hastily arranged champagne dinner, some forty of us; ... [we felt] relief at the relaxation of security, pride in our part in ending the war, and even pride in the effectiveness of the weapon. And at the same moment, the bomb's victims were living through indescribable horror (or rather, describable only in the simple, straightforward reportorial style used by Hersey). We didn't realize. I wonder if we do yet. 58
When Harvard president and wartime adviser on the development of the bomb
James B. Conant read a favorable review of Hersey's essay by Norman Cousins in the
September 14 th issue of Saturday Review of Literature he was outraged. Conant urged M.I.T. President and former Manhattan Project scientist, Karl T. Compton and former Secretary of War Henry Stimson to enter the fray. Compton's article supporting the decision ("If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used") appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly in December of 1946 (five months after Hersey's essay was published). Stimson's "The Decision to Drop the Bomb" was published in the
February edition of Harper's the following year. According to Conant, Hersey's approach to understanding the bombing of Japan was dangerous: "This type of sentimentalism . . . is bound to have a great deal of influence on the next generation.
The type of person who goes into teaching, particularly school teaching, will be influenced a great deal by this type of argument." Henry Stimson made a similar point, as he, Conant, Compton and others hoped, in historian Barton Berstein's

words, to seize "the contested terrain of early nuclear history." Stimson told
President Truman that his article in Harpers "has also been intended to satisfy the doubts of the rather difficult class of the community which will have charge of the education of the next generation, namely educators and historians, I have therefore gone into a good deal of detail to show the care that we all took to get the best advice." This was disingenuous. Stimson's closest advisor at the War Department,
John J. McCloy, had raised objections about the decision to drop the bomb on civilian targets. Stimson neglected to mention this as well as Eisenhower's contrary view outlined above, or that of other military and civilian government officials, not to mention many of the scientists who had actually worked on the bomb and tested it in the deserts of New Mexico before its use on actual targets. What did Stimson mean by "the best advise"? As Barton Bernstein concluded, "recognizing that the past was valuable contested terrain, Henry L. Stimson had easily seized the high ground. For many years, his triumph endured—virtually unchallenged." Stimson had cemented the claim that the bomb saved American lives:
My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in the armies which I had helped to raise. In the light of the alternatives which, on a fair estimate, were open to us I believe that no man in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.
Stimson did not mention Japanese attempts to surrender before the bomb was dropped. And although his personal diary is filled with references to how the bomb might temper Soviet conduct, this aspect of the decision to drop atomic bombs was not mentioned in the Harper's article either. Jolted by Hersey's attempt to step outside of the wartime paradigm, Stimson, who had commissioned Frank Capra's film series during the war, wanted to continue providing the American public with the type of us/them information that had characterized the war years—in this case, a simple reading of the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945.

Examining the distortions that have marred the history of Pearl Harbor, the dropping of the atomic bombs (and the Second World War more generally) reveals the dangers of the us/them outlook in dramatic fashion. There is a cost to such selective vision. If foreign policy is, as famous cold war diplomat and policymaker
George F. Kennan once said, "really a series of responses to challenges, and that the responses are largely determined by, first, our own principles of conduct and ethics, and, secondly, our concept of ourselves as a nation and its past in the world," then any meaningful change in America's relations with the rest of the world must begin with a reevaluation of American history. World War Two was not a conflict between
"good" and "evil." While it is true that Nazi Germany committed atrocities of horrifying proportions (underscored by the Holocaust), and that Japanese conquests in the Pacific led to the deaths of millions of innocent civilians and shocking levels of brutality (The "Rape of Nanking" certainly comes to mind), the Allied war effort was not free of blemishes.
First, American policy had a hand in bringing about the war in the first place. This is true of the War in the Pacific as seen above. In Europe, the Treaty of Versailles which ended World War I, certainly set the groundwork for the rise of Adolf Hitler— punitive measures such as war reparations, the "war guilt clause" (where the Allies forced Germany to accept all blame for the war), the loss of German territory, territory with millions of German inhabitants who were detached from their homeland in one form or another. American policymakers had played a major role during this peace conference. And, clearly, Hitler did not come to power in a vacuum. In fact, American policymakers were highly aware of the dangerous implications of the punitive peace of 1919. The Marshall Plan, which pumped millions of dollars into war-shattered Germany and Europe in 1948, was based in part on this reading of history, as both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations wished to avoid the folly of Woodrow Wilson, the American President who had called the First World War "the war to end all wars" but who had stumbled at the
1919 Paris Peace Conference at the end of the war. Clearly, the origins of the Second
World War were complex.

Second, American conduct during the war was not flawless—the ill treatment of
Japanese war dead is a dramatic reminder. So too is the interment of American-
Japanese or the Allied practice of firebombing civilians in Germany and Japan
(100,000 were "burned, backed and boiled" to death as General Curtis E. LeMay put it in one night raid on Tokyo, while Hamburg, Dresden and hundreds of other cities were burned with incendiary bombs during the war). And the dropping of the atomic bomb at the end of the war is not an open and shut case. There is clearly room for debate on this issue, a fact that is often ignored as a means of preserving a mythic rendition of the American war effort during World War II. Despite a kind of
"group denial" regarding aspects of American conduct and decision-making during the war, the us/them outlook had catastrophic consequences and played a vital role in the most destructive war in human history. Moreover, such views persist--they certainly played a critical role during the Cold War that followed World War II. An us/them reading of the US-Middle East relations colored the “war on terror” as well-
-as the Bush administration framed US policy in response to the 9/11 attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. As in the case of World War Two, seeing the world in us/them terms heightened conflict and lead US policymakers down dangerous roads that might have been avoided.
Chapter 4
US/Them on Steroids: the Cold War
The Cold War (1945-1991) took the us/them template to new heights. The division between the “Slave World and “The Free World” made popular by wartime films like the Frank Capra series, “Why We Fight,” became the predominant framework for understanding U.S.-Soviet relations and American foreign policy in general in the

decades after World War II. No longer a wartime contingency and a means of mobilizing the American people during a global war, instead, the us/them outlook became an enduring framework for understanding the world. The consequences of this permanent shift in thinking were profound, transforming American foreign policy, the role and power of the U.S. military at home and abroad, and the political and cultural life of the nation. It is a way of seeing that outlived the Cold War as well. The “War on Terror,” since 9/11, is the most noteworthy example.
Despite their wartime alliance, the Soviet Union and the United States became advisories after the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945. Winston Churchill coined the term the “iron curtain” in 1946 to describe the division of Europe into two zones after the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. One zone was dominated by the United States
(Western Europe), the other by the Soviet Union (Eastern Europe). “Containment” of the Soviet menace, keeping the U.S.S.R. from expanding its sphere of influence beyond Eastern Europe, became the bedrock of U.S. foreign policy. As American officials came to see communism in monolithic terms—the idea that communism everywhere was controlled by the Soviets—containment went global. By the 1950s, the U.S. built alliances and military bases around the world, particularly with the emergence of Communist China in 1949, and the Korean War, 1950-53; the Soviets followed suit, building alliances and sending military aide to China, North Korea,
North Vietnam, Cuba and a handful of other nations. The world became divided into rival camps. Both sides also became locked in a dangerous arms race. Hiroshima was but a first step; by 1949 the Soviets detonated their own atomic bomb—the U.S. countered with the H-bomb (which had over 1,000 times the destructive power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). A dangerous spiral ensued.
At home, the Cold War transformed American society. Throughout the 1950s, children lived in fear, learning “duck and cover” drills at school in case of a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers. Americans built fallout shelters in their backyards meant to ride out a nuclear holocaust. Senator Joseph McCarthy set off a frenzy, claiming that the federal government, especially the State Department and

the U.S. Army, was riddled with communist spies. Congress held trials on national television. Hollywood actors were put on trial too—many were “blacklisted,” and branded “communist”, “communist sympathizers”, or “fellow travelers”. Many never made movies in the United States again. By the end of his presidency, in 1961,
World-War-Two-General-turned-president Dwight Eisenhower warned of the development of “a military-industrial complex,” as the power and influence of the
Department of Defense grew exponentially after 1945. “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” Eisenhower cautioned. By the height of the Cold War the U.S. military accounted for nearly half the federal budget. It has remained a powerful player in the political and economic life of the country—spending billions of dollars annually and eclipsing the State Department as the driver of U.S. foreign policy by the mid-1960s.
In short, World War II and the Cold War marked a turning point: the U.S. emerged as the most lethal military force in human history and acted on “us/them” thinking on a global scale, dividing the world between the “Slave World” and the “Free World,” extending that framework to every regional problem around the world (seeing anticolonial movements in Asia and Africa or peasant revolts against wealthy landlords in Latin America as part of the fight against communism and as the work of the Soviet Union.) Almost no corner of the world remained untouched. Most importantly, the Cold War has had a profound impact on American thinking and
America’s perception of itself, spawning an arrogant go-it-alone approach to world affairs with dangerous implications for the future. Despite the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, the Cold War is still the touchstone for American foreign policymakers, as the “War on Terror” has taken on very familiar, cold-war-tones
(“you’re either with us or against us,” President George W. Bush declared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks). In addition to its us/them qualities, the War on Terror has been primarily a military effort. This is in keeping with the “lessons” of World
War Two and the sine qua non of the Cold War: force is what matters most in

international relations; after World War Two, diplomacy was branded
“appeasement,” a term first used to describe the weak response to Hitler by England and France during the 1930s. As a result, military solutions have supplanted negotiations by and larger in American foreign policy. Yet as the U.S. continues to decline relative to other powers—especially China—America’s brand of us/them diplomacy will grow more out of touch with the changing international scene. Not only will the U.S. lack the power to dictate to other countries, as it did during much of the Cold War, but many of the world’s most pressing problems cannot be solved through military means—addressing global warming, the spread of disease, poverty and overpopulation, for example, will require international cooperation. Seeing the world in terms of “us” versus “them” will not help foster the kind of cooperation needed to address the most pressing problems of the next several decades.
Us/Them, the Truman Administration and the Origins of the Cold War
The superpower clash that dominated the second half of the twentieth century began during the Second World War. The death of President Franklin Roosevelt
(FDR), only months before the war ended, was perhaps the most significant factor in the demise of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Granted, FDR had no illusions about the Soviet Union. “I can’t take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge [the fight against Nazi Germany] I would hold hands with the Devil,” Roosevelt told his close advisor Joseph Davies. Nevertheless, FDR set out to compromise and worked diligently to create a framework for postwar cooperation between the emerging superpowers, symbolized by the Yalta agreement in 1945 (an agreement reached by the Big Three, the Soviet Union, the
United States and Great Britain) and the formation of the United Nations. As the
State Department explained,
Initial reaction to the Yalta agreements was celebratory. Roosevelt and many other
Americans viewed it as proof that the spirit of U.S.-Soviet wartime cooperation would carry over into the postwar period. This sentiment, however, was short lived.
With the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman became

the thirty-third president of the United States. By the end of April, the new administration clashed with the Soviets over their influence in Eastern Europe, and over the United Nations. Alarmed at the perceived lack of cooperation on the part of the Soviets, many Americans began to criticize Roosevelt's handling of the Yalta negotiations. To this day, many of Roosevelt's most vehement detractors accuse him of "handing over" Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia to the Soviet Union at Yalta despite the fact that the Soviets did make many substantial concessions. 59
FDR and his advisors such as Joseph Davies, Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace had an appreciation for Soviet losses during the war. Twenty to twenty-seven million
Soviets lost their lives fighting against Germany. Russia had withstood a German onslaught twice in a generation—both times Russia was attacked through Poland, a weak Russian neighbor and a geographic “corridor” for large, mechanized armies (in
1941 Hitler launched over 3 million troops and 600,000 motorized vehicles, including over 3,000 tanks, mostly through Poland in a surprise attack on the Soviet
Union). Moreover, the Soviets expected Germany to recover relatively quickly in the postwar period—after all Germany had abundant industrial resources, and had become the hub of the European economy in the decades prior to WWII. Meanwhile,
Soviet Russia was devastated during the war. Control of Eastern Europe was, therefore, an act of desperation. As Walter LaFeber wrote:
Through absolute control of Eastern Europe, Stalin might obtain both security . . . and the economic resources need for Soviet reconstruction. Russia had lost one quarter of her capital equipment, 1700 towns, 70,000 villages, nearly 100,000 collective farms and more than 20 million dead during World War II. In 1945 Soviet steel production sunk to only one eighth the amount of American production. 60
FDR understood Soviet postwar concerns. The president had corresponded with
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin throughout the Second World War—the collection of letters numbers just over three hundred. FDR was well aware of Soviet fears and the cost the war had inflicted on the U.S.S.R. His inexperienced successor lacked the context and the temperament to deal with the Soviet Union on a sympathetic basis.
Much as the U.S. rejection of the idea of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia prior to
World War Two destroyed the chance for negotiations and a diplomatic settlement in the Pacific in the decades prior to Pearl Harbor, Truman made very little effort to

understand the Soviet point of view with similar results. It also never occurred to administration officials that Stalin was taking a position in Eastern Europe not unlike the U.S. position in the Western Hemisphere where American troops were dispatched to countries in South America hundreds of times to secure American strategic and economic interests. In us/them fashion, such contradictions were ignored—the Soviets were branded “evil” another version of Nazism, Stalin and
Hitler were seen as nearly interchangeable in the Truman administration’s official rhetoric and public pronouncements. Trillions of dollars and millions of lives were sacrificed during the six decades that followed.
When FDR died unexpectedly on April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia, Harry S.
Truman became president. Ill-prepared for the presidency, Truman had been a compromise vice-presidential candidate in 1944, when Roosevelt, seeking an unprecedented fourth term as president, decided to replace his controversial vice president, Henry Wallace. Moreover, FDR kept Truman completely in the dark on foreign policy. Truman had no idea that the U.S. was working in secret on the atomic bomb, learning about the Manhattan Project after being sworn in as president, for example. Truman also lacked the finesse of FDR—Truman often told his secretary of state James Byrnes to tell the Soviets “to go to hell if you have to,” he often complained that he was tired of “babying the Soviets,” and that the Soviets were
“oriental or Eastern-minded”. At the Yalta conference, FDR had compromised with the Soviet Union, particularly on Poland—FDR agreed to new boundaries in accord with Soviet security concerns; he also agreed to a dominant role for the communist party in postwar Polish politics. At the Potsdam conference, the final Big Three meeting just months before Germany surrendered, things went very differently. As historian Arnold Offner put it: “if Yalta had symbolized U.S.-Soviet détente and common belief that peace depended on a moderately punitive policy toward a defeated Germany, Potsdam represented a bitter chill in Soviet-American relations.” 61 At Yalta the Russian were to receive, in addition to Polish territory, $10 billion in reparations from defeated Germany. At Potsdam, Truman backed away from this policy. He also insisted on a greater role for non-communist parties in

postwar Polish politics. U.S.-Soviet negotiations became deadlocked and relations between the two countries deteriorated quickly over the course of the next few years.
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On February 9, 1946 Stalin declared that communism and capitalism were incompatible. That same year, a crisis erupted in Iran as Stalin delayed the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the region—Soviet troops had originally been sent there to block German acquisition of Iranian oil during World War II. The Soviets withdrew when Truman sent word that he was prepared to dispatch U.S. forces into the region. That same year, George Kennan wrote his famous “Long Telegram.”
Historian John Lewis Gaddis called it one of the “iconic texts in Cold War history,” adding that it “became the conceptual foundation for the strategy the United
States—and Great Britain—would follow for over four decades.” 63 George Kennan, the American charge d'affaires in Moscow, sent an 8,000-word telegram to the
Department of State detailing his views on the Soviet Union. According to Gaddis,
Kennan’s telegram “projected fierce self-confidence in clear prose with relentless logic. It qualified nothing, advanced no alternative, and made no apologies for seeing everything in a single snapshot.” Kennan claimed:
At bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with the economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between the Western world and their own, feared what would happen if the Russians learned the truth about the world without or if foreigners learned the truth about the world within. And they have learned to seek security only in a patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of a rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

In addition to a peculiar and paranoid view of the world, the Soviets were poised to take advantage of the collapse of the European overseas empires in the postwar period:
Violent efforts will be made to weaken the power and influence of the Western
Powers [on] colonial backward, or dependent peoples. On this level, no holds will be barred. Mistakes and weaknesses of western colonial administration will be mercilessly exposed and exploited. Liberal opinion in Western countries will be mobilized to weaken colonial policies. Resentment among dependent peoples will be stimulated. And while the latter are being encouraged to seek independence of
Western Powers, Soviet dominated puppet political machines will be undergoing preparation to take over domestic power in respective colonial areas when independence is achieved.
Kennan’s last point cracked the door open to a policy of “containment” with virtually no limits--despite later reversing himself on this point. Anticolonial movements swept throughout Asia and Africa after World War Two. Viewing anti-colonialism in cold war terms would prove disastrous.
In us/them fashion, Kennan argued that the Russians could not be reasoned with, they lacked an objective view of the world. They were not rationale like Americans.
According to Kennan, The Soviet leadership was “seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which their outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived.“
It didn’t matter that Kennan’s depiction did not square with Stalin’s record of diplomacy. Stalin had been extremely logical during and after World War II, understanding the power differential between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. He had demonstrated this by a quick withdrawal of Soviet troops from Iran once Truman threatened a response; he took a hands-off approach to U.S. occupation policy in
Western Europe, particularly in Italy which had a larger, popular communist party after World War II, knowing that U.S. troops occupied these areas. In any event,

Kennan’s telegram struck a cord with the Truman administration. This secret document was widely circulated within the State and Defense departments and among Truman’s foreign policy circle.
64
A year later, Kennan’s views went public. In an anonymous article for Foreign
Affairs, called “the Sources of Soviet Conduct,” under the pseudonym “X”, Kennan closed the door on U.S.-Soviet negotiations of any kind:
It is clear that the United States cannot expect in the foreseeable future to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime. It must continue to regard the Soviet
Union as a rival, not a partner, in the political arena. It must continue to expect that
Soviet policies will reflect no abstract love of peace and stability, no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and capitalist worlds, but rather a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and, weakening of all rival influence and rival power.
Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.
Kennan’s conclusion was in keeping with the American exceptionalist tradition. The
U.S. was a chosen nation, called upon to save the world, a world divided between
“us” and “them”.
The President put Kennan’s ideas into action with the formation of the Truman
Doctrine on March 12, 1947. A civil war in Greece between communists and monarchists and the announcement that the British would be withdrawing financial support from the region prompted the administration:
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one [President Truman declared]. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly

imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. 65
Insinuating that the Greek communists were part of a Soviet plot, Truman asked
Congress for $400 million for Greece and Turkey (Turkey was seen as a strategic asset that the Soviets coveted). The Cold War had begun in earnest. However, The
Truman Doctrine was a departure in U.S. foreign policy. As historian Marc
Selverstone explained:
Several [Truman] officials realized the enormity of the moment: they were starting down a path that no U.S. administration had traveled, committing the nation’s resources and prestige—during an era of nominal peace—to the security and survival of Europe. Because of the program’s novelty and the resistance it would likely meet in Congress, many of them thought it necessary to portray the situation in the most dramatic terms. The president’s address to the nation would therefore employ rhetoric bordering on the apocalyptic and cast the struggle with Moscow in highly Manichean language. 66
Hoping to prod Americans toward an activist foreign policy, Truman’s language obscured some inconvenient facts. The Greek government was far from democratic, but Truman’s us/them framework left little room for unpleasant details (this became a cold-war pattern as the U.S. backed corrupt regimes around the world as long as they claimed to be anticommunists). Other critics questions the “guarantees of individual liberty” that Truman said characterized the “Free World,” pointing to millions of disenfranchised black in the United States, the victims of widespread violence, or the violations of civil liberties at the height of the McCarthy era
(including Truman’s own “loyalty program” that investigated government employees suspected of pro-Soviet sympathies). Such contradictions were ignored.
Officials who called for a more nuanced picture of events departed or were driven out of the Truman administration. FDR’s top advisors, in particular, left the Truman administration one by one (Henry Wallace was forced to resign after making a public statement questioning Truman’s “get tough” approach in 1946). Much like the war years, American officials resorted to black-and-white language to frame

American foreign policy. Truman’s rhetoric would become typical of presidents throughout the Cold War. Soon it would apply to events in every corner of the world.
Although the Truman Doctrine was aimed at European events, by 1949 the Cold
War expanded into Asia. Unfortunately, the Truman administration portrayed events in Asia in the same us/them terms: State Department officials trying to warn
Truman about the situation in China were berated (many of them were later placed on trial by Senator Joseph McCarthy). Here, too, us/them prevailed as the U.S. backed the losing side in China’s civil war, despite warnings from State Department officials like John Service and other China experts. Mao was not a “stooge” of Joseph
Stalin, they warned. His primary goal was to safeguard China’s integrity, to reverse centuries of humiliation as China was craved-up and controlled by the Western powers. Truman clung to a black and white view of Moa and China—depicting the free world versus the communist world in monolithic term. There was no room for gray in the black and white rhetoric that dominated American politics by the late-
1940s and early-1950s. During the Korean War (1950-1953) Truman painted a similar dichotomy, backing Syngman Rhee of South Korea against the Soviet-backed
North Koreans. However, the North Koreans saw Rhee as a U.S. puppet. He had been living in the U.S. during World War II. He was safe in America, while Kim Il Sung, the leader of North Korea, fought Japan. Rhee was never elected. The U.S. appointed him. Also, South Korean forces (the alleged “good guys” in the Korean conflict) committed unspeakable horrors against Left leaning groups, suspected communists and minority groups. The U.S. Army censored American news reporters attempting to photograph mass gravesites and evidence of atrocities. Nevertheless, the conflict was depicted in us/them terms for the American people, as a fight between the
“good” and “evil” and an extension of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry.
Exaggeration was the order of the day. National Security Council document #68,
NSC-68 (or “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”), written in 1950, would take such rhetoric to new heights. Chief architect of Truman’s cold war policies, Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained: “The task of a public officer

seeking to explain and gain support for a major policy is not that of the writer of a doctoral thesis. Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” Referring directly to NSC-68 Acheson later reflected: “If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise . . .”. p.99Ernest
May. Truman was reversing traditional U.S. foreign policy, ignoring George
Washington’s advice to avoid “entangling alliances” or John Quincy Adam’s warning that the United States does not roam the world “in search of monsters to destroy.”
NSC-68 shifted U.S. foreign policy along a military path that it has maintained ever since.
NSC-68 was drafted by the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, a new entity originally headed by George Kennan. Kennan was appointed to this new post shortly after publication of his “X” article made him a national figure. By the time NSC-68 was written, however, Kennan had fallen out of favor. Kennan hoped that containment would be primarily economic and diplomatic in nature (he applauded the Marshall Plan, which helped reconstruct war torn Europe, seeing it as a means of undercutting support for socialists and communists throughout Europe, for example). His successor, Paul Nitze was of a different mind. Prompted by the successful test of a Soviet nuclear bomb, Nitze called for a massive military build-up:
One of the most important ingredients of power is military strength. In the concept of "containment," the maintenance of a strong military posture is deemed to be essential for two reasons: (1) as an ultimate guarantee of our national security and
(2) as an indispensable backdrop to the conduct of the policy of "containment."
Without superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable, a policy of "containment"--which is in effect a policy of calculated and gradual coercion--is no more than a policy of bluff.
Here was a clear disagreement with Kennan’s approach. Nitze advocated what
Eisenhower later called a “military-industrial-complex,” a peace-time military of vast proportions:

It is true that the United States armed forces are now stronger than ever before in other times of apparent peace; it is also true that there exists a sharp disparity between our actual military strength and our commitments. The relationship of our strength to our present commitments, however, is not alone the governing factor.
The world situation, as well as commitments, should govern; hence, our military strength more properly should be related to the world situation confronting us.
When our military strength is related to the world situation and balanced against the likely exigencies of such a situation, it is clear that our military strength is becoming dangerously inadequate.
A more rapid build-up of political, economic, and military strength and thereby of confidence in the free world than is now contemplated is the only course which is consistent with progress toward achieving our fundamental purpose. The frustration of the Kremlin design requires the free world to develop a successfully functioning political and economic system and a vigorous political offensive against the Soviet Union. These, in turn, require an adequate military shield under which they can develop. It is necessary to have the military power to deter, if possible,
Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions of a limited or total character.
By the time the ink had dried on NSC-68, the Korean War erupted. The massive military build up Nitze had called for began. As Robert Higgs explained:
Previously, administration officials had encountered stiff resistance from Congress to their pleas for a substantial buildup along the lines laid out in NSC 68, a landmark document of April 1950. The authors of this internal government report took a
Manichaean view of America's rivalry with the Soviet Union, espoused a permanent role for the United States as world policeman, and envisioned U.S. military expenditures amounting to perhaps 20 percent of GNP. But congressional acceptance of the recommended measures seemed highly unlikely in the absence of a crisis. In 1950 "the fear that [the North Korean] invasion was just the first step in a broad offensive by the Soviets proved highly useful when it came to persuading
Congress to increase the defense budget." As Secretary of State Dean Acheson later said, "Korea saved us." The buildup reached its peak in 1953. The ensuing demobilization took two years and left defense outlays during the next decade at a level about three times higher than that of the late 1940s. Between 1947 and 1950 real annual military spending never exceeded $60 billion; after 1952 it never fell below $143 billion.
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Eisenhower and the Momentum of the Cold War
When Truman left office the Cold War was firmly in place. The world was divided between “us” and “them,” and the U.S. was armed and ready to fight in every corner of the globe. His successor—Dwight Eisenhower —would spend much of his eight years in the White House (1953-1961) trying to curb defense spending and U.S. military commitments around the world with mixed results. He refused to send
American troops into Vietnam to help the beleaguered French hold on to their colonial empire in Southeast Asia in 1954—a trap his successors could not avoid. He squashed an attempt by the British, French and Israelis to take over the Suez Canal in Egypt in 1956. And he used a combination of diplomacy and bluster to easy tensions between Communist China and Taiwan—the island that Chiang Kia-Check and his Nationalists fled to after losing the civil war to Mao’s forces in China.
Despite Eisenhower’s skill as a crisis manager, he failed to end the arms race (his
“New Look” defense program added thousands of nuclear missiles to the nation’s arsenal, for example); he bungled a chance to end the cold war after the death of
Stalin in 1953; and he sowed the seeds of future conflicts with an almost obsessive reliance on covert operations as a tool for subverting Soviet power. (Under
Eisenhower the CIA toppled the democratically elected governments of Iran in 1953,
Guatemala in 1954 and made attempts to overthrow leaders in Laos, Vietnam and
Cuba). All the while, he employed what Chris Tudda calls “rhetorical diplomacy,” not unlike the Truman administration’s—the kind of alarmist language Truman officials

used in order to sell both the Truman Doctrine and a rapid defense build up during the Korean War as outlined in NSC-68. Eisenhower’s (and his Secretary of State,
John Foster Dulles’s) using similar black-and-white pronouncements did much to cement the US/Them framework into place.
Eisenhower’s presidential farewell address, warning against the development of an
“industrial-military-complex,” ranks among the most famous of presidential speeches. On January 17, 1961, Eisenhower ended a fifty-year career in public service, most of that as an officer in the U.S. Army. His speech is ironic given his background—the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe during World
War Two, leader of the D-Day Invasion of France (the largest amphibious assault in history), was sounding a distrustful note regarding the nation’s military and the power of Washington to control it:
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry.
American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and

military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. 68
There is clearly a note of desperation here—and for good reason. The Defense
Department grew exponentially during the Eisenhower years. Despite the president’s best efforts to cut defense, spending went from 5% of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 1950 to 14.2% GDP by Eisenhower’s first year in office— much of this spending was a result of the Korean War. And Eisenhower managed to push that down to 10% of GDP by 1959; but his method of doing so left a dangerous legacy. The president’s “New Look,” which he launched in 1953, cut spending by reducing conventional forces (more expensive to train, supply, and deploy overseas). He made up the difference in fighting capability by increasing America’s nuclear arsenal and investing in technology.
69
However, the arms race soon took on a life of it’s own as did many of the research programs initiated as part of the New Look. As Eisenhower biographer Jean Edward
Smith put it, the New Look led to an “arms race that led to the development of thermonuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the spiral in defense spending that Ike [Eisenhower] had hoped to avoid.” 70 Each new weapons system was countered by a similar Soviet effort. Soon nuclear deterrence became a field of study. It made Henry Kissinger a nation figure, for example, when he published his
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957. Scholars and military leaders talked about the need to withstand a “first strike” by the Soviet Union and still have enough weapons to retaliate. But how much was enough to deter Soviet actions? This game of worst case scenarios lead to thousands of weapons—ICBMs, nuclear submarines, long-range bombers, and the development of so called tactical nuclear weapons that could be used much like conventional artillery. If Truman had opened a Pandora’s box, Eisenhower could not close it. The Department of Defense became the largest agency in government and the world’s largest employer. Former Secretary of

Defense Robert Lovett told president-elect John F. Kennedy that the Defense
Department was “an empire too great for an emperor.
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Bureaucratic inertia is only half the story. Defense spending became a political football throughout the postwar period. John F. Kennedy’s claims of a so called
“missile gap” during the 1960 presidential race is the most famous case. Eisenhower had authorized the U2 program—U2 aircraft could fly at heights of 70,000 feet and take amazingly detailed photographs. Not wanting to reveal this secret program and fearing the effect on world opinion if it became know that the U.S. was violating
Soviet airspace on a regular basis, Eisenhower knew that the U.S. had a massive advantage over the Soviet Union when it came to nuclear firepower. Yet he said nothing to discredit Kennedy. In one of the tightest presidential races in American history, JFK ran as a get-tough cold warrior insisting that the U.S. was vulnerable. It was a technique Ronald Reagan would use to win the White House in 1980. Fear mongering became a way to win elections. This political dimension added to the momentum of the Cold War.
Eisenhower may have fought against the formation of what Julian Zelizer calls a
“permanent national security state,” but he did little to curb the US/Them rhetoric of the Cold War. As Chris Tudda explained in The Truth is Our Weapon: The
Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower used bombastic language in public despite private reservations about antagonizing the Soviet Union and stumbling into a nuclear war. In referring to the 1952 presidential race, Tudda wrote: Eisenhower and his future secretary of state, John
Foster Dulles, “repeatedly pummeled the Democrats for their failure to hold the line against Soviet aggression. They claimed that Truman had allowed the Soviet Union to consolidate its hegemony over Eastern Europe, failed to stabilize Western Europe despite the Marshall Plan and NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance made up of the U.S., Canada and the Western European countries, including West Germany], and had “lost” China to the Communists. Most importantly, Eisenhower and Dulles criticized the Truman administration’s policy of

“containment’ as passive and ultimately futile.” 72 Eisenhower and Dulles claimed that they would “roll back” the Soviet sphere of influence if elected. When the opportunity arose, however, Eisenhower and Dulles did not act. As the New York
Times put it: “But when the tests came, in the anti-Communist Berlin riots in 1953, the French call for help at Dienbienphu in 1954, the Chinese Communist threat to
Quemoy in 1954-55, the Hungarian rising against the Russians in 1956, the United
States did not act. As things worked out, there was a wide margin between Mr.
Dulles' bold words and the United States Government's actions.” 73
During the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, for example, Eisenhower knew a military response was futile given the superiority of Soviet forces in the area. He had concurred with a "Study Prepared for US Army Intelligence Hungary, Resistance
Activities and Potentials" (January 1956)." It concluded that “Hungary is singularly unpromising” as an area for U.S. military intervention 74 . In addition to “rollback,”
Eisenhower and Dulles called for "massive retaliation," as a major component of U.S. foreign policy and hinted that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons to end the Korean
War. They repeated this technique in order to deter Soviet and Chinese aggression in a number of cases during the Eisenhower years. The president also proposed sharing U.S. nuclear weapons with its NATO partners, including West Germany— clearly a provocative policy given Soviet fears of a remilitarized Germany. Dulles explained this policy of what later became known as “brinksmanship,” as "the ability to get to the verge without getting into a war.” Dulles called it a “necessary art."
US/Them Rhetoric, JFK and. Cuban Missile Crisis
Eisenhower managed to avoid war during his tenure. However, brinksmanship came dangerously close to triggering a thermonuclear war under Eisenhower’s successor. Kennedy had run for the presidency as a tough cold warrior. In addition to blaming Eisenhower for a fictitious “missile gap,” he also blamed his predecessor for not ousting Fidel Castro, who had come to power in Cuba in a revolution in 1959.

After appealing to the U.S. for support and getting nowhere, Castro aligned with the
Soviet Union a year after he came to power. Little did Kennedy know, Ike and the
CIA were planning to overthrow Castro and that the ill-fated plan would blow up on
Kennedy’s watch during the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, just months after the new president took office. This blunder would set off a chain of events that brought the world close to destruction in October of 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but also led Kennedy to a fundamental reappraisal of cold war attitudes and a repudiation of the us/them mindset.
As Jeffery D. Sachs argues in, To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace, Kennedy an avid student of history, had drawn conflicting “lessons” about World War I and II.
The First World War Kennedy saw as a warning against miscalculation, accident and unintended consequences, a war sparked by a run-away arms race and mutual suspicion. He was so moved by Barbara Tuckman’s The Guns of August, which depicted the European Powers blundering into war, that he order every officer in the U.S. military to read it. However, Kennedy wanted “no more Munich” as well, he believed that the Allies should have responded to Hitler with a clear show of force early on—as Churchill had advocated at the time. Britain, France and the U.S. could have stop German expansion when Hitler annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia in
1938 and 1939 respectively, before he consolidated these areas into his army, which included a vibrant Czech arms industry and gold reserves. Instead they “appeased”
Hitler at the Munich conference in September of 1938, so the argument goes. This ambivalence—these conflicting lessons about war and peace—haunted the Kennedy administration. One the one hand, Kennedy sponsored the Peace Corp, the Alliance for Progress and the Test Ban Treaty to slow the development of nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, he order a massive military built-up, recklessly backed CIA attempts to overthrow Castro, ordered military “advisors” into Vietnam, and brought the world the closest to nuclear war it’s ever been. The Cuban Missile Crisis drove JFK in one direction, however: it convinced the president that miscalculation
(of the World War I variety) represented the more lethal threat in the nuclear age.
Although JFK did not or could not fundamentally reshape the cold war over the

course of the thirteen months between the crisis and his assassination in Dallas,
Texas in November of 1963, he voiced grave doubts about the simplistic, us/them, outlook that characterized relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the postwar period.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion, four months into the new Kennedy administration, was a disaster. The CIA convinced Kennedy that a little over a thousand Cuban exiles (code named Brigade 2506) could successfully mount an amphibious landing on the beaches of Cuba and that this would, in turn, spark an anti-Castro uprising that would bring down the communist regime. Kennedy, wishing to avoid U.S. culpability, approved the plan but without U.S. air cover—he did not want U.S. forces actively involved. Within three days of the assault, Castro won a complete victory capturing or killing most of the invaders. Kennedy was stunned and humiliated; rumors circulated that he would be impeached. John Kennedy and his brother, Robert, who had been appointed Attorney General and was the president’s closest advisor, became obsessed with getting Castro. They authorized operation
Mongoose, a CIA operation to assassinate the Cuban leader and to carry out covert acts of sabotage on the island of Cuba; they also cut-off U.S. trade with Cuba as well as all diplomatic relations. Castro and his ally and Soviet Primer, Nikita Khrushchev, were convinced that another attempt at a U.S. invasion would be mounted in the not too distant future. The only way to deter the U.S. was by setting up, what they saw as
“defensive” nuclear missile bases on the island of Cuba.
Midway through the construction of these bases, however, American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft detected them and presented photographic evidence to the president. Kennedy reacted with alarm. Round-the-clock meetings with top advisers during the thirteen days of the crisis (October 14-24) were tense: most of the military officers advising the president called for an immediate invasion of Cuba; others, including his brother Robert and the Secretary of Defense, Robert
McNamara, called for negotiations of some kind and eventually the idea of a blockade (or as Kennedy, wishing to avoid the term blockade, an act of war

according to international law, called it a “quarantine”) of the island until the missiles were removed.
Transcripts of JFK’s Executive Committee of the National Security Council meetings
(commonly referred to as the Executive Committee or ExComm) read like a
Hollywood drama. Participants were under tremendous stress; meetings would last for hours; the group would then break and reconvene at night (12-14 hour-days were the norm during the crisis). In addition to these meetings, JFK and Nikita
Khrushchev corresponded throughout the crisis; these direct communications consisted of 1,590 pages of letters, telegrams, and translations passed between John
F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. These Kennedy-Khrushchev letters give historians and scholars a visceral glimpse into the crisis and a unique view of the mindset of the two leaders as they slowly moved away from a confrontation that would have resulted in the immediate loss of millions of humans lives and unforeseeable aftereffects from fallout and the disruptions that would result from a clash of arms on a scale that cannot be imagined. Here there is a clear trend away from the harsh us/them language of the Cold War.
75 In the first letter on Cuba,
Kennedy told Khrushchev that “if certain developments in Cuba took place, the
United States would do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies,” for example. Khrushchev used similar language: “I must say frankly, that the measures indicated in your statement constitute a serious threat to peace and to the security of nations.” As the crisis unfolded, however, the tone of the letters changed. “We must not allow the situation to deteriorate, (but) eliminate hotbeds of tension, and we must see to it that no other conflicts occur which might lead to a world nuclear war. We are ready to continue to exchange views on relations between NATO and the Warsaw Bloc, disarmament, and other issues of peace and war,” Khrushchev wrote on October 28, 1962, toward the end of the crisis. Kennedy wrote in a similar vein a few days after the crisis was over:
In writing to you, I am conscious of the difficulties you and I face in establishing full communication between our two minds. This is not a question of translation but a question of the context in which we hear and respond to what each other has to say.
You and I have already recognized that neither of us will convince the other about

our respective social systems and general philosophies of life. These differences create a great gulf in communication because language cannot mean the same thing on both sides unless it is related to some underlying common purpose. I cannot believe that there are not such common interests between the Soviet and the
American people. Therefore, I am trying to penetrate our ideological differences in order to find some bridge across the gulf on which we could bring our minds together and find some way in which to protect the peace of the world.
76
In a famous speech at American University on June 10, 1963 he spelled out his thinking clearly. It is worth quoting this speech at length in order to capture the extent of Kennedy’s reappraisal of the Cold War and to highlight the damaging effects of the us/them outlook during the early Cold War years:
I have chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived -- and that is the most important topic on earth: peace.
What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax
Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war, not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace -- the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living -- and the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the
Allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them is essential to the keeping of peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles -- which can only destroy and never create -- is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war -- and frequently the words of the pursuers fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.
Some say that it is useless to speak of peace or world law or world disarmament -- and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.

But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitudes -- as individuals and as a nation -- for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward -- by examining his own attitude towards the possibilities of peace, towards the Soviet Union, towards the course of the cold war and towards freedom and peace here at home.
First: Examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible.
Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable -- that mankind is doomed -- that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable -- and we believe they can do it again.
I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concepts of universal peace and goodwill of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.
Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace -- based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions -- on a series of concrete actions and effective agreement which are in the interests of all concerned.
There is no single, simple key to this peace -- no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process -- a way of solving problems.
With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor -- it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.
So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable -- and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly -- by making it seem more manageable and less remote -- we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it and to move irresistibly towards it.
And second: let us re-examine our attitude towards the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write.

It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on military strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims -- such as the allegation that
American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of war... that there is a very real threat of a preventative war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union... (and that) the political aims, -- and I quote, -- of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries... (and) achieve world domination... by means of aggressive war.
Truly, as it was written long ago: The wicked flee when no man pursueth. Yet it is sad to read these Soviet statements -- to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning -- a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.
No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find Communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements -- in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.
Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland -- a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.
Today, should total war ever break out again -- no matter how -- our two countries will be the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the cold war -- which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation's closest allies -- our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could better be devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease.
We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counter-weapons.
In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race.
Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours -- and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations and only those treaty obligations which are in their own interest.

So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.
Third: Let us re-examine our attitude towards the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points.
We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last eighteen years been different.
We must therefore persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. And above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy -- or of a collective deathwish for the world.
77
If the Cuban Missile Crisis shook JFK’s confidence in the us/them logic of the Cold
War, it would take JFK’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, nearly three decades to come to the same conclusions. Belatedly, the tragedy in Vietnam led
McNamara to question many assumptions about the U.S. and its role in the world.
“US” versus “Them” and The Confessions of Robert McNamara
No single figure epitomizes the shift in America’s role in the world more than Robert
S. McNamara, a key policymaker during the Kennedy and Johnson years (1961-
1968), his public life began as member of the Army-Air force Command under
General Curtis E. LeMay during World War II, the command that dropped the first atomic bombs and conducted the fire-bombing campaign that destroyed over a hundred Japanese cities. McNamara went on to become a chief architect of American foreign policy during the most dangerous moments of the Cold War—from the

Cuban Missile Crisis to the Vietnam War. McNamara’s struggles with the ghosts of
Vietnam, in particular, illustrate the grip of us/them thinking and the terrible consequences it has had for the United States and millions of people around the world. McNamara, more than any public figure in recent decades, came to reevaluate the basic foundations of American foreign policy, in doing so he broke a long silence that began on February 28, 1968. On that date, President Lyndon
Johnson honored his out-going Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara with the
Medal of Freedom. The citation read:
For seven years, you have administered our complex Defense establishment-unifying our strength so that we might respond effectively wherever the security of our free world was challenged. A brilliant analyst and modern administrator, you have brought a new dimension to defense planning and decision-making. You have grasped the urgent social crisis of our time--the awakening of hope among the world's poor. You have understood that while freedom depends on strength, strength itself depends on the determination of free people. Your seven long years of unshakeable loyalty to the Republic, to the President, and to all who served beside and under you in the services, is an example for the public servant and an inspiration for your countrymen. May your selfless service--spent in defending freedom--bring even greater rewards in the larger work you now undertake to promote freedom throughout the world [as the newly-appointed President of the
World Bank].
78
Despite the President’s praise, McNamara was speechless; clearing his throat several times, his anguish seemed palpable. At a loss for words and overcome by emotion, he declined comment as the ceremony concluded. It was an inauspicious end for a man who had exuded confidence during his long tenure at the Defense
Department. Called everything from a “whiz kid,” an “IBM machine with legs,” a
“baby burner,” a “murderer” to a “fool”, McNamara was the longest serving and most controversial figure to hold the office of Secretary of Defense. Appointed by John F.
Kennedy in 1961, he orchestrated what at the time was the largest peacetime military build-up in U.S. history--Ronald Reagan presided over a larger build-up during the 1980s. Nevertheless, the Pentagon consumed nearly half the national budget when McNamara took office and employed 3.5 million people--including 2.5 million in uniform, increasing by another million during his tenure. Robert
McNamara was a key adviser during some of the most dangerous crises of the Cold

War--the Berlin Crisis (1961), the Cuban Missile crises (1962) and the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic (1965-6). However, McNamara’s role in the
Vietnam War remains the most contested chapter of his long career, a role that haunted him until his death in 2009, more than four decades after his departure from the Johnson administration.
The Vietnam War was the first war the U.S. had ever lost. It discredited the nation, its leaders, the military and U.S. Cold War policy. 58, 000 Americans and 3.4 million
Vietnamese were killed between 1955 and 1975; during the conflict the U.S. dropped more bombs on the tiny East Asian nation than it did in all of World War
Two in Europe combined; “napalm”, “agent orange” and “friendly fire” become household words. The war tore American society apart as well; protest
(McNamara’s own children among the antiwar activists) grew throughout the late-
60s and early-70s; most dramatically, as the U.S. bombing campaign commenced in
1965 (with operation Rolling Thunder as the military dubbed it), Quaker Norman
Morrison doused himself with gasoline and torched himself to death under
McNamara’s office window at the Pentagon. This long, futile guerilla campaign against North Vietnam cast doubt on many long held certainties—America stood for freedom and was always on the side of “right”(the bombing of innocent civilians in
Vietnam or incidents like the My Lai Massacre seemed to contradict such notions); the idea that monolithic communist aggression had to be confronted everywhere by military force and the “domino theory,” were found wanting; and that the most technologically sophisticated and powerful military in the world could achieve any objective seemed naïve by the 1970s.
Understanding what went wrong has engendered fierce debate and countless studies. Until the publication of his 1995 book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and
Lessons of Vietnam, it was a topic McNamara wished to avoid. In Retrospect began
“this is the book I planned never to write.” Now, toward the end of his life, the principal architect of the Vietnam War felt an obligation to explain: “We of the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam

acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”
As with most things associated with Robert S. McNamara—the book created a firestorm (talk-shows, op-ed columns and discussion forums on McNamara and the war appeared everywhere). “Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” Howell Raines, editor of The New York Times editorial page said in a widely discussed article. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”
Historian Marilyn Young had a similarly visceral reaction. “Watching Robert
McNamara being interviewed by Diane Sawyer, in the first flurry of his book promotion,” she explained, “I surprised myself by what may have been just a gendered reaction: As tears welled in his eyes, my own eyes watered in sympathy.
He seemed, in that moment, so vulnerable, so lost, I had an irresistible, if possibly socially constructed, impulse to protect and comfort him. Then I read his book.” 79
Shortly after the publication of In Retrospect, McNamara embarked on a series of meetings between former enemies held in Vietnam between 1995 and 1998. In addition to McNamara, the American participants included former State Department and CIA officials, retired military officers and scholars of international relations.
Nguyen Co Thach, Foreign Minster, 1980-91, and one of the chief North Vietnamese diplomats headed the Vietnamese delegation during the war. In addition to other former government officials and scholars, the Vietnamese side also included Gen. Vo
Nguyen Giap, commander in chief of the People’s Army of Vietnam throughout the war against the United States.
80 The proceedings of these conferences were published in book form, entitled Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the
Vietnam Tragedy by Robert McNamara, James Blight, Robert Brigham, Thomas
Biersteker and Col. Herbert Schandler. McNamara also agreed to a series of

penetrating interviews by filmmaker Errol Morris, released in 2003, called the Fog
of War. Here, too, McNamara grappled with the difficult questions regarding his time in public life—such as his role in the firebombing of Japan under Curtis E.
LeMay (where he implies that had the U.S. lost the Second World War he and others in LeMay’s command would have been tried as war criminals).
Taken together these two publications—in Retrospect and Argument Without End— and the film, the Fog of War, provide a rare glimpse into the us/them outlook and it’s damaging effects on American foreign policy. Certainly, these works have limitations. As historian Bruce Kuklick has pointed out, despite a great deal of soul searching, “McNamara understood morality as a calculating utilitarianism in which the sorts of mistakes one might make in mathematics should not occur. The mistakes are intellectual in nature. When he said that the United States was ‘wrong, terribly, wrong,’ in Vietnam, he meant that policymakers who had computed costs and benefits erred because some of their assumptions had been flawed. The defect was not of ‘values and intentions but of judgment and capabilities.’”
McNamara also “imposed his own present ideas on the past.” In Argument Without
End he insisted that the key lesson of Vietnam was to understand “lost opportunities,” on both sides—opportunities to compromise and gain national objectives with less loss of life. He went so far as to claim that he and others in the
Kennedy and Johnson administration would have accepted a “neutralization” scheme, like the one adopted to deal with a similar struggle in Laos; yet, McNamara himself is on record as saying that there was not much support for this idea in
Washington. He adopted this view in the 1990s because it would have sustained his
“missed opportunities” thesis—if only there had been more American-Vietnamese dialog the Vietnamese would have realized that “neutralization” could have been established, U.S. troops would have been withdrawn, the bombing stopped and
North Vietnam would have eventually won national elections and unified an independent country without the massive loss of life that occurred. As Kuklick concluded: “The Americans wanted to prevent the south of Vietnam from being

communized. The northerners were determined to unite their country. So fearful was that United States that it used extraordinary military means to achieve its goals,
Vietnamese in both the north and the south fiercely resisted. McNamara could not look squarely at his opposition. As a consumer of the bureaucratic politics model
[where miscommunication is a major driver of conflict and foreign policy problems], he could not admit that basic policy disagreements were at the heart of the conflict.”
Despite such flaws, McNamara’s attempts to reexamine his role in the Vietnam War are notable. What might be called McNamara’s confessions reveal the problem of us/them thinking in stark relief. McNamara and his fellow policymakers in the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations saw the world in terms of “us” versus “them”.
They had very little understanding of the communist movement in the Third World or Vietnamese history and culture; at the same time, they had an exaggerated view of America’s capabilities and good intentions as the defender of the “free world”.
This narrow view did not allow McNamara and his contemporaries to understand that the Vietnamese were fighting for freedom, their own freedom from colonial rule, first and foremost; and, that fighting for their own freedom, the Vietnamese were ready to “pay any price,” to borrow from President Kennedy’s famous inaugural address. Therefore, a gradual escalation of U.S. pressure (increasingly intense aerial bombing and the commitment of more and more troops as the war went on) was unlikely to result in surrender—the U.S. could not “bomb them to the table,” as it were. No amount of bombing was likely to “break the will” of the
Vietnamese as the Pentagon insisted. Moreover, dividing the world along Cold War lines (the free world versus “monolithic” communism) led to the dubious “domino theory,” a view that saw actions everywhere as dictated by The Soviet Union or
Communist China—this view also ignored the realities on the ground. The
Vietnamese had fought China throughout their history and they distrusted any undue foreign control or interference in their affairs. Fighting for independence for centuries, they were unlikely to accept any type of outside dominance—be it
American, Chinese or Soviet sponsored. Knowing more about the history of the

Vietnamese struggle, McNamara and his fellow policymakers would have known or suspected that, one, the Vietnamese would never stop fighting--short of the destruction of their society (negating the stated purpose of U.S. policy of “saving”
Vietnam from communism all together)--and, two, they were not dupes of the
Chinese or the Soviet Union. They had their own history, and their own national interest in Southeast Asia. In short, a better understanding of Vietnamese history and culture might have allowed the U.S. to avoid the war all together or certainly to adopt a different approach to the conflict.
During the conferences for Argument Without End, the Vietnamese participants tried to get this across to McNamara. The Deputy Foreign Minister of Vietnam said:
When you look at this question of the sacrifice made by Vietnam in the war, you must also consider the history of our country. When we gained our independence in
1945 we already had 4, 000 years of history. For 1, 000 years, we were under the feudalist control of the North [of China]. We had to fight in order to regain our independence. And 3,000 years later we had to fight in order to regain our independence again. Then after independence—after the August Revolution—we had to fight the French for nine years in order to protect our independence. Only then came the fight against the U.S.
So, yes, I would agree with what Mr. McNamara has said. The price that we have had to pay is huge. But it far larger, and has been going on for much longer, than Mr.
McNamara referred to—during the three years of the Vietnam War—1965-1968.
And so I am afraid that to understand the Vietnamese attitude or psychology about this issue of sacrifice, it is not enough to just look at the American War. But you must look at the entire process of our history, the way the Vietnamese people look at it.
81
In the Fog of War, McNamara reflected on what he had learned during the conference in Vietnam:
In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the
Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and
North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war.
McNamara went on to quote from the former Foreign Minister of Vietnam, Nguyen
Co Thach:

"Mr. McNamara, You must never have read a history book. If you'd had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn't you know that?
Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us." 82
Chapter 5
US/Them and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era
Rumsfeld Knows and Unknows. 9/11 as surprise= living in a caccoon as Kisohre
Mububani accuses Americans of living in. Chomsky on 9/11. Not surprised. Drain the swamp and kill the misquitos. Malcolm X and the JFK assassination. Contrary voices are marginalized, particlualry in Washington—the same officials give advice for decades Group Think.
Neocons. New twist on US/Them.
Part II.
A New American View of Themselves and Their Role in the World
In progress. . .

1 Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Physics-for-Future-Presidents Visited 17 January, 2012
2 Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 153.
3 Zakaria, The Post-American World, p. 34
4 John M. Murrin, Paul E. Johnson, James M. McPherson, Alice Fahs, Gary Gerstle, Emily S. Rosenberg and Norman L. Rosenberg, L, Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, Thomas
Wardsworth 2008.
5 See Stalin's War: etc
6 America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked, p. 70-1.
7 Zakaraia, The Post-American World, p. 226.
8 Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by Wrangham and Dale
Peterson,
9 E.O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth, p. 54
10 http://worldsciencefestival.com/videos/fighting_ant_foes
11 Allport, 176
12 “The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate?” published in the
Journal of Social Issues , (Vol. 55, No. 3, 1999, pp. 429–444)
13 Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (trans. Robert Savage), Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 4.
14 “Medieval Sourcebook: Urban II (1088-1099): Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095, Five versions of the Speech,” Fordham University <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-
5vers.html#gesta> (Visited 8 July 2012).
15 Steve Newcomb, “Five Hundred Years of Injustice: The Legacy of Fifteenth Century Religious
Prejudice” < http://ili.nativeweb.org/sdrm_art.html> (Visited 7 July 2012).
16 Ibid.
17 Howard Zinn, "The Power and the Glory: The Myth of American Exceptionalism, " The Boston
Review (Summer, 2005) http://bostonreview.net/BR30.3/zinn.php
Visited, 17 January 2012.
18 John Underhill, Nevves from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England:
Containing, a True Relation of their War-like Proceedings these two yeares last past, with a figure of the
Indian fort, or Palizado. (1638). Libraries at University of Nebraska-Linclon, Electonic Texts in
American Studies <http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/> (Visited 8 July 2012).
19 Deuteronomy 13:6-10 King James Bible
20 Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 57.
21 Michael Schaller, Ronald Reagan (Oxford, 2011), p. 8.
22 http://www.newt.org/callistas-canvas/premiere-of-a-city-upon-a-hill
23 Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, 2009), p. 10.
24 Ibid., p. 19.
25 Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York,
1995), p.5.
26 ( http://digital.library.cornell.edu/u/usde/ ).
27 ( http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Top-10-Unforgettable-Editorials.html
)
28 William McKinley, 3 rd Annual Message, December 5, 1899
<http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3771> (Visited 9 March 2012).
29 Woodrow Wilson: "8th Annual Message," December 7, 1920. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T.
Woolley, The American Presidency Project. <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29561>
(Visited 16 March 2012).
Read more at the American Presidency Project: Woodrow Wilson: 8th Annual Message http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29561#ixzz1pHo5tHCg
30 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/bushtext_012803.html
31 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460172

32 Virginia’s Slave Codes, PBS <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p268.html> (Visited 7 July
2012).
33 Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia (1784),” in The Founders’ Constitution, Chapter 15
“Equality” eds. Phillip Kurland and Ralph Learner <http://presspubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s28.html> (Visited 7 July 2012).
34 <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2933t.html> (Visited 9 July 2012).
35 Excerpts from Crania Americana, by Samuel Morton part of the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum <http://www2.facinghistory.org/Campus/rm.nsf/sc/crania> (Visited 10 July 2012).
36 http://books.google.com/books/about/Crania_Americana.html?id=sBBCAAAAcAAJ http://chnm.gmu.edu/exploring/19thcentury/debateoverslavery/pop_morton.html http://instruct.westvalley.edu/kelly/Distance_Learning/History_17B/Lecture02/Lecture02_p07.ht
m
37 James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
(1995), p. 60.
38 Wall Street J http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124753078523935615.html
39 Barbara F. Meltz. “Do Disney Fairy Tales Send Wrong Messages?” The Boston Globe, Monday, April
23, 2001.”
40 In addition to Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of
Innocence (Landham MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,1999) see Elizabeth
Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, eds., From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film,
Gender and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Giroux quote is on p.10, The Mouse that Roared.
41 Benjamin Schwarz, “Walt’s World,” The Atlantic, December 2006, p. 121.
42 Fred Halliday, 100 Myths About the Middle East (Berkeley CA: University of
California Press, 2005) p. 33-34, 151-3.
43 Ibid., p. 153.
44 See Henry A. Giroux, “Animated Youth: the Disnification of Children’s Culture
on line article http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/Giroux/Giroux2.html
45 George Gheverghese Joseph’s The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of
Mathematics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) is a great source of information on the Arab role in the development of mathematics.
46 This passage below, from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, can be found
at http://www.erblist.com/erbmania/novels/toafuchs.html.
But as Tarzan of the Apes sat one day in the cabin of his father delving into the mysteries of a new book, the ancient security of his jungle was broken forever.
At the far eastern confine a strange cavalcade strung, in single file, over the brow of a low hill.
In advance were fifty black warriors armed with slender wooden spears with ends hard baked over slow fires, and long bows and poisoned

arrows. On their backs were oval shields, in their noses huge rings, while from the kinky wool of their heads protruded tufts of gray feathers.
Across their foreheads were tattooed three parallel lines of color, and on each breast three concentric circles. Their yellow teeth were filed to sharp points, and their great protruding lips added still further to the low and bestial brutishness of their appearance.
47 John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (New York: Random House,
1997), p. 265.
48 Ibid. p. 236.
49 http://rt.com/news/prime-time/indiana-jones-and-the-propaganda-machine/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7418727.stm
50 Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, p. 1.
51 Armando Jose Prats, Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western, p. 2.
52 See the controversy over the Turkish film “Valley of the Wolves” that depicts
Americans as the “bad guys” during the occupation of Iraq, for example. New York
Times, Monday, 2/18/13. Visited 2/18/13
< http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/343832/Valley-of-the-Wolves-
Iraq/overview >
Or the South Korean movie The Host. See “ Kevin Lee, (Trans. Ina Park and Mina
Park) “The Han River Horror Show: An Interview with Bong Joon-ho,” Cineaste, Vol.
32 No.2 (Spring 2007).
53 The "Good War" in American Memory historian John Bodnar, p. 8
54 (Terkel p. 13).
55 Charles Krauthammer called the September 11 th terrorist attacks of 2001 our generation's Pearl
Harbor, for example. See Charles Krauthammer, "Voices of Moral Obtuseness," The Washington Post,
September 21, 2001. Reprinted in The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions eds. Micah Sifry and Christopher Cerf (New York, 2003), p. 217–219.
56
57
Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, p. 380
John Hersey, p. 10.
58
A. Squires to J. Balderston, AORES IX, 7 Sept. 1946, p. 2. Quoted by Alice Kimball
Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America: 1945- 47 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 80- 81.
59 http://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/YaltaConf
60 Walter LaFaber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1966, p. 12.

61 Offner, p. 90
62 Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953,
63 John Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York, 2011).
64 http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm
65 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp
66 Marc J. Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith, p. 55
67 http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa114.html
U.S. Military Spending In The Cold War Era:
Opportunity Costs, Foreign Crises, and Domestic Constraints
68 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp
69 Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—from World War II to the
War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 10.
70 Smith, Eisenhower, p. 646
71 Bruce Geelhoed, Charles E. Wilson and the Controversy at the Pentagon, 1953 to 1957 (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1979), p.34.
72 Tudda, P. 9
73 http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0225.html
74 The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, A History in Documents. George Washington University: The
National Security Archive. 2002-11-04
75 Correspondence between President John Kennedy and Chairman Nikita
Khrushchev. October 22, 1962 to November 15, 1962," https://www2.stetson.edu/secure/history/hy10430/kennedykhrushchev.html
76 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963
Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 25.
77 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/jfk-university/
78 For film footage of President Johnson’s presentation of the Medal of Freedom and Robert
McNamara’s response, see “The President: February 1968 (MP893). The LBJ Library Video
Collection on Youtube. (Visited March 14, 2013) <http://youtu.be/39Fa6rl9NF8>
79 Tim Weiner, “Robert S. McNamara, Architect of a Futile War, Dies at 93,” The New York Times, July
6, 2009. Marilyn Young, “The Closest of Hindsight,” Diplomatic History, Volume 20, Issue 3, p. 440-
444.
80 The participants were: Francis M. Bator, deputy national security adviser from 1965 to 1967,
Chester L. Cooper, a veteran C.I.A. analyst, Nicholas Katzenbach, Under Secretary of State from 1966 to 1969, Gen. William Y. Smith, U.S. Air Force Ret, Lieut. Gen. Dale Vesser, U.S. Army Ret., Col. Herbert
Schandler, U.S. Army Ret., and scholars James Blight, Robert Brigham, George Herring, James
Hershberg, Charles Neu, John Prados, and David Welch. The Vietnamesse delegation was headed by
Nguyen Co Thach, and included Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, as well as Bui Thanh Son, Gen. Dang Vu Hiep,

Dao Huy Ngoc, Dinh Nho Liem, Gen. Doan Chuong, Luu Doan Huynh, Luu Van Loi, Nguyen Dinh
Phuong, Gen. Nguyen Dinh Uoc, Nguyen Khac Huynh, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, Col. Quach Hai
Luong, Tran Ngoc Kha, Tran Quang Co, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap.
81 Argument Without End, (p. 256)
82 http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html