The Concise Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone

Author:Oliver Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2016-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

Eisenhower and Dulles greet South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem at Washington National Airport. American leaders had maneuvered to replace the French puppet Bao Dai with Diem, who wasted no time in crushing his rivals and unleashing a wave of repression against former Viet Minh members in the south, thousands of whom were executed.

America’s capacity for massive retaliation might keep the balance of power with the Soviets, but it would prove useless in preventing the revolutionary upsurge in the developing world, which wished to steer a nonaligned course between capitalist and socialist blocs and thought it obscene to spend billions of dollars on arms when money for development was in short supply.

From the nonaligned point of view, the American Cold War on Eisenhower’s watch was not really a war against communism as much as it was a war against the poor peoples of the earth for the resources of the earth.

Twenty-nine Asian and African leaders met in 1955 at Bandung in Indonesia. The host was Indonesia’s Sukarno, who had led the fight against Dutch colonialism. The stars were Yugoslavia’s renegade leader Marshal Tito, who had, despite several assassination attempts, freed himself from Stalin’s grip, along with Nasser of Egypt, who had taken on the British Empire; Nehru, independent India’s first leader; Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah; and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh.

Israel, perceived as a U.S. ally, was not invited. Communist China was. They met on the beautiful island of Java in Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest nation, which combined the world’s largest Muslim community and the third-largest Communist Party.

Dulles proclaimed neutrality an obsolete conception—immoral and shortsighted. And in one of the strangest and least-known episodes of this time period, the prime minister of China, Zhou Enlai, was targeted by Jiang Jieshi’s nationalist government in Taiwan, secretly abetted by the CIA. A detonator and bomb were placed on his plane. But Zhou survived when he changed planes, although the sixteen people aboard were blown out of the sky under mysterious circumstances. Zhou maintained an enigmatic silence and the conference was considered a great success. But many of these independent leaders would, in time, be toppled by the U.S.

The Soviet Union was beginning to confront its own past. Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who like Eisenhower had come from humble origins and seen the worst of World War II up close as a political organizer at the Battle of Stalingrad, shocked the communist world in February 1956, emotionally giving voice to the darkest truths about his country’s recent past. He detailed Stalin’s murderous terror, which had killed millions and left his society frightened into a conformity far worse than that which had engulfed the U.S. He decried Stalin’s cult of personality and initiated a much-needed policy of de-Stalinization.

The reaction across the communist world was incendiary—many were stunned. Mao in China was furious. Unrest swept much of Eastern Europe. Crowds gathered outside the parliament in Hungary and toppled the enormous statue of Stalin, lynching secret police officers in the streets.

Khrushchev allowed the revolt to take its course, but

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