Eight
Things I Miss About the Cold War
Fifty Years Ago, College Was Cheap,
Unions Were Strong, and There Was No Terrorism-Industrial Complex
By Jon Wiener
At a book festival in Los Angeles
recently, some writers (myself included) were making the usual
arguments about the problems with American politics in the 1950s --
until one panelist shocked the audience by declaring, “God, I miss
the Cold War.” His grandmother, he said, had come to California
from Oklahoma with a grade-school education, but found a job in an
aerospace factory in L.A. during World War II, joined the union, got
healthcare and retirement benefits, and prospered in the Cold War
years. She ended up owning a house in the suburbs and sending her
kids to UCLA.
Several older people in the audience
leaped to their feet shouting, “What about McCarthyism?” “The
bomb?” “Vietnam?” “Nixon?”
All good points, of course. After all,
during the Cold War the U.S. did threaten to destroy the world with
nuclear weapons, supported brutal dictators globally because they
were anti-communist, and was responsible for the deaths of several
million people in Korea and Vietnam, all in the name of defending
freedom. And yet it’s not hard to join that writer in feeling a
certain nostalgia for the Cold War era. It couldn’t be a sadder
thing to admit, given what happened in those years, but -- given
what’s happened in these years -- who can doubt that the America of
the 1950s and 1960s was, in some ways, simply a better place than the
one we live in now? Here are eight things (from a prospectively
longer list) we had then and don’t have now.
1. The president didn’t claim the
right to kill American citizens without “the due process of law.”
Last year we learned that President
Obama personally approved the killing-by-drone of an American citizen
living abroad without any prior judicial proceedings. That was in
Yemen, but as Amy Davidson wrote at the New Yorker website, “Why
couldn’t it have been in Paris?” Obama assures us that the
people he orders assassinated are “terrorists.” It would,
however, be more accurate to call them “alleged terrorists,” or
“alleged terrorist associates,” or “people said by some other
government to be terrorists, or at least terroristic.”
Obama’s target in Yemen was Anwar
al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was said to be a senior figure in
al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. According to the book Kill or
Capture by Daniel Klaidman, the president told his advisors, “I
want Awlaki. Don’t let up on him.” Steve Coll of the New Yorker
commented that this appears to be “the first instance in American
history of a sitting president speaking of his intent to kill a
particular U.S. citizen without that citizen having been charged
formally with a crime or convicted at trial.” (Awlaki’s
16-year-old son, whom no one claims was connected to terrorist
activities or terror plots, was also killed in a separate drone
attack.)
The problem, of course, is the
due-process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits “any
person” from being deprived of “life, liberty, or property
without due process of law.” It doesn’t say: "any person
except for those the president believes to be terrorists."
It gets worse: the Justice Department
can keep secret a memorandum providing the supposed “legal”
justification for the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen, according
to a January 2013 decision by a federal judge. Ruling on a Freedom
of Information lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the New York Times,
Judge Colleen McMahon, wrote in her decision, “I can find no way
around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the
executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful
certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our
Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion
a secret.”
It's true that the CIA has admitted it
had an assassination program during the Cold War -- described in the
so-called “family jewels” or “horrors book,” compiled in 1973
under CIA Director James Schlesinger in response to Watergate-era
inquiries and declassified in 2007. But the targets were foreign
leaders, especially Fidel Castro as well as the Congo’s Patrice
Lumumba and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. Still,
presidents preferred “plausible deniability” in such situations,
and certainly no president before Obama publicly claimed the legal
right to order the killing of American citizens. Indeed, before
Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. regularly condemned “targeted killings”
of suspected terrorists by Israel that were quite similar to those
the president is now regularly ordering in the Pakistani tribal
borderlands, Yemen, and possibly elsewhere.
2. We didn’t have a secret
“terrorism-industrial complex.”
That’s the term coined by Dana Priest
and William Arkin in their book Top Secret America to describe the
ever-growing post-9/11 world of government agencies linked to private
contractors charged with fighting terrorism. During the Cold War, we
had a handful of government agencies doing “top secret” work;
today, they found, we have more than 1,200.
For example, Priest and Arkin found 51
federal organizations and military commands that attempt to track the
flow of money to and from terrorist networks. And don’t forget the
nearly 2,000 for-profit corporate contractors that engage in
top-secret work, supposedly hunting terrorists. The official budget
for “intelligence” has increased from around $27 billion in the
last years of the Cold War to $75 billion in 2012. Along with this
massive expansion of government and private security activities has
come a similarly humongous expansion of official secrecy: the number
of classified documents has increased from perhaps 5 million a year
before 1980 to 92 million in 2011, while Obama administration
prosecutions of government whistleblowers have soared.
It’s true that the CIA and the FBI
engaged in significant secret and illegal surveillance that included
American citizens during the Cold War, but the scale was small
compared to the post-9/11 world.
3. Organized labor was accepted as
part of the social landscape.
“Only a fool would try to deprive
working men and women of their right to join the union of their
choice.” That’s what President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1952.
“Workers,” he added, “have a right to organize into unions and
to bargain collectively with their employers,” and he affirmed that
“a strong, free labor movement is an invigorating and necessary
part of our industrial society.” He caught the mood of the moment
this way: “Should any political party attempt to… eliminate labor
laws, you would not hear of that party again in our political
history.” “There is,” he acknowledged, “a tiny splinter
group, of course, that believes you can do these things, but their
number is negligible... And they are stupid.”
You certainly wouldn’t catch Barack
Obama saying anything like that today.
Back then, American unions were, in
part, defended even by Republicans because they were considered a
crucial aspect of the struggle against Communism. Unlike Soviet
workers, American ones, so the argument went, were free to join
independent unions. And amid a wave of productive wealth, union
membership in Eisenhower’s America reached an all-time high: 34% of
wage and salary workers in 1955. In 2011, union membership in the
private sector had fallen under 7%, a level not seen since 1932.
Of course, back in the Cold War era the
government required unions to kick communists out of any leadership
positions they held and unions that refused were driven out of
existence. Unions also repressed wildcat strikes and enforced labor
peace in exchange for multi-year contracts with wage and benefit
increases. But as we’ve learned in the last decades, if you’re a
wageworker, almost any union is better than no union at all.
4. The government had to get a
warrant before it could tap your phone.
Today, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act Amendments Act (yes, that repetitive tongue twister
is its real name) gives the government vast powers to spy on American
citizens -- and it’s just been extended to 2017 in a bill that
Obama enthusiastically signed on December 29th. The current law
allows the monitoring of electronic communications without an
individualized court order, as long as the government claims its
intent is to gather “foreign intelligence.” In recent years,
much that was once illegal has been made the law of the land. Vast
quantities of the emails and phone calls of Americans are being
“data-mined.” Amendments approved by Congress in 2008, for
instance, provided "retroactive immunity to the telecom
companies that assisted the Bush administration in its warrantless
wiretapping program," which was then (or should have been)
illegal, as the website Open Congress notes.
There were several modest congressional
attempts to amend the 2012 FISA extension act, including one that
would have required the director of national intelligence to reveal
how many Americans are being secretly monitored. That amendment
would in no way have limited the government’s actual spying
program. The Senate nevertheless rejected it, 52-43, in a nation
that has locked itself down in a way that would have been
inconceivable in the Cold War years.
It’s true that in the 1950s and 1960s
judges typically gave the police and FBI the wiretap warrants they
sought. But it’s probably also true that having to submit requests
to judges had a chilling effect on the urge of government authorities
to engage in unlimited wiretapping.
5. The infrastructure was being
expanded and strengthened.
Today, our infrastructure is crumbling:
bridges are collapsing, sewer systems are falling apart, power grids
are failing. Many of those systems date from the immediate
post-World War II years. And the supposedly titanic struggle against
communism at home and abroad helped build them. The best-known
example of those Cold War infrastructure construction programs was
the congressionally mandated National Defense Highways Act of 1956,
which led to the construction of 41,000 miles of the Interstate
Highway System. It was the largest public works project in American
history and it was necessary, according to the legislation, to “meet
the requirements of the national defense in time of war.” People
called the new highways “freeways” or “interstates,” but the
official name was "the National System of Interstate and Defense
Highways."
Along with the construction of roads
and bridges came a similar commitment to expanding water delivery
systems and the electrical and telephone grids. Spending on
infrastructure as a share of gross domestic product peaked in the
1960s at 3.1%. In 2007, it was down to 2.4% and is assumedly still
falling.
Today the U.S. has dropped far behind
potential global rivals in infrastructure development. An official
panel of 80 experts noted that China is spending $1 trillion on
high-speed rail, highways, and other infrastructure over the next
five years. The U.S., according to the report, needs to invest $2
trillion simply to rebuild the roads, bridges, water lines, sewage
systems, and dams constructed 40 to 50 years ago, systems that are
now reaching the end of their planned life cycles. But federal
spending cuts mean that the burden of infrastructure repair and
replacement will fall on state and local governments, whose
resources, as everyone knows, are completely inadequate for the task.
Of course, it’s true that the
freeways built in the 1950s made the automobile the essential form of
transportation in America and led to the withering away of public
mass transit, and that the environment suffered as a result. Still,
today’s collapsing bridges and sewers dramatize the loss of any
serious national commitment to the public good.
6. College was cheap.
Tuition and fees at the University of
California system in 1965 totaled $220. That’s the equivalent of
about $1,600 today, and in 1965 you were talking about the best
public university in the world. In 2012, the Regents of the
University of California, presiding over an education system in
crisis, raised tuition and fees for state residents to $13,200. And
American students are now at least $1 trillion in debt, thanks to
college loans that could consign many to lifetimes as debtors in
return for subprime educations.
In 1958, in the panic that followed the
Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik, the first satellite,
public universities got a massive infusion of federal money when the
National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed. The Department of
Education website today explains that the purpose of the NDEA was “to
help ensure that highly trained individuals would be available to
help America compete with the Soviet Union in scientific and
technical fields.” For the first time, government grants became
the major source of university funding for scientific research. The
Act included a generous student-loan program.
With the end of the Cold War, federal
funding was cut and public universities had little choice but to
begin to make up the difference by increasing tuitions and fees,
making students pay more -- a lot more.
True, the NDEA grants in the 1960s
required recipients to sign a demeaning oath swearing that they did
not seek the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and that lots
of government funding then supported Cold War military and strategic
objectives. After all, the University of California operated the
nuclear weapons labs at Livermore and Los Alamos. Still, compare that
to today’s crumbling public education system nationwide and who
wouldn’t feel nostalgia for the Cold War era?
7. We had a president who called for
a “war on poverty.”
In his 1966 State of the Union address,
President Lyndon Baines Johnson argued that “the richest Nation on
earth… people who live in abundance unmatched on this globe”
ought to “bring the most urgent decencies of life to all of your
fellow Americans.” LBJ insisted that it was possible both to fight
communism globally (especially in Vietnam) and to fight poverty at
home. As the phrase then went, he called for guns and butter. In
addition, he was determined not simply to give money to poor people,
but to help build “community action” groups that would organize
them to define and fight for programs they wanted because, the
president said, poor people know what’s best for themselves.
Of course, it’s true that Johnson’s
“War on Poverty,” unlike the Vietnam War, was woefully
underfunded, and that those community action groups were soon
overpowered by local mayors and Democratic political machines. But
it’s also true that President Obama did not even consider poverty
worth mentioning as an issue in his 2012 reelection campaign, despite
the fact that it has spread in ways that would have shocked LBJ, and
that income and wealth inequalities between rich and poor have
reached levels not seen since the late 1920s. Today, it’s still
plenty of guns -- but butter, not so much.
8. We had a president who warned
against “the excessive power of the military-industrial complex.”
In Eisenhower’s “farewell address,”
delivered three days before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, the
departing president warned against the “unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” He
declared that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced
power exists and will persist.” The speech introduced the phrase
“military-industrial complex” into the vernacular. It was a
crucial moment in the Cold War: a president who had also been the
nation’s top military commander in World War II was warning
Americans about the dangers posed by the military he had commanded
and its corporate and political supporters.
Ike was prompted to give the speech
because of his disputes with Congress over the military budget. He
feared nuclear war and firmly opposed all talk about such a war being
fought in a “limited” way. He also knew that, when it came to
the Soviet Union, American power was staggeringly preponderant. And
yet his opponents in the Democratic Party, the arms industry, and
even the military were claiming that he hadn’t done enough for
“defense” -- not enough weapons bought, not enough money spent.
President-elect Kennedy had just won the 1960 election by frightening
Americans about a purely fictitious “missile gap” between the
U.S. and the Soviets.
It’s true that Ike’s warning would
have been far more meaningful had it been in his first or even second
inaugural address, or any of his State of the Union speeches. It’s
also true that he had approved CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala, and
had green-lighted planning for an invasion of Cuba (that would become
Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs disaster). He had also established Mutual
Assured Destruction as the basis for Cold War military strategy,
backed up with B-52s carrying atomic bombs in the air 24/7.
By the end of his second term, however,
Ike had changed his mind. His warning was not just against
unnecessary spending, but also against institutions that were
threatening a crisis he feared would bring the end of individual
liberty. “As one who knows that another war could utterly destroy
this civilization,” the president urged his fellow citizens to
resist the military-industrial complex. None of his successors has
even tried, and in 2013 we’re living with the results.
...But there is one thing I do NOT miss
about the Cold War: nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger alert.
Our Cold War enemy had nuclear weapons
capable of destroying us, and the rest of the planet, many times
over. In 1991, when the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union had more
than 27,000 nuclear weapons. According to the Federation of American
Scientists, these included more than 11,000 strategic nuclear weapons
-- warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles, and weapons on bombers capable
of attacking the US -- along with more than 15,000 warheads for
“tactical” use as artillery shells and short-range “battlefield”
missiles, as well as missile defense interceptors, nuclear torpedoes,
and nuclear weapons for shorter-range aircraft. We learned in 1993
that the USSR at one time possessed almost 45,000 nuclear warheads,
and still had nearly 1,200 tons of bomb-grade uranium. (Of course,
sizeable Russian -- and American -- nuclear arsenals still exist.)
In comparison to all that, the arsenals of al-Qaeda and our other
terrorist enemies are remarkably insignificant.
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