Hello, and welcome to Western SIV. I've got a wonderful author interview for
you here today. I'm sitting down with historian Nicholas Morton. We're going to
be talking about everyone's favorite topic, the Crusades, Crusader warfare, Crusader States,
the misconceptions about the Crusades, everything that matters. Because his book The
Crusader States and their Neighbors, a Military History is actually out on paperback right
now. I've got a link to it in the show notes if you'd like
to pick it up. It's an excellent coverage. But I also think this
topic is just really pertinent right now because we're going through another period of what
seems to be endemic conflict in the Middle East. And as I mentioned in
the interview, people always seem to want to harken back to the Crusades as
some sort of grandfather of all of the problems that come out of the Middle
East, and there's so so many issues with doing that, and so I
think it's relevant to have this conversation again. And also it's just it's important
and it's interesting, and who doesn't like talking about the assassins and the Crusader
States and the leper King and all of that. I mean, there's just
so many cool names from the Crusades, am I Right, So without further
Ado, let's get to the interview. All right, welcome back. As
I mentioned moments ago, I'm sitting down with historian Nick Bunker. We're going
to be talking about his latest book, In the Shadow of Fear America in
the World in nineteen fifty. As someone who teaches this period of history every
single year, I found the book to be particularly interesting. You start the
book in Labor Day nineteen forty nine. I'm kind of interested in that date
because I found the beginning of the book fascinating in a lot of ways,
and I was hoping you could explain to those who are listening, why did
you choose to start the book there, and how is that, in so
many ways the perfect starting point for the historical narrative that follows. Well,
Adam, Well, thank you very much for having me on the podcast.
Well, you know, this is my fourth book, and what I always
do in my books is I try to start with a very visual picture of
what I'm talking about, cinematic presentation of the events and the issues. And
Labor Day September fifth, ninety forty nine is ideal for that because Labor Day
is always a day with a great deal going on in the United States.
Baseball marches in those days Heyday, the labor Unions, marches by labor Unions
in Detroit, and so on, all kinds of are other events, rodeos,
new films being released. So it's an opportunity to present a kind of
portrait of America at that moment, not taken at random, but with a
view to kind of displaying all the kind of forces at work. But the
other thing is that September ninety forty nine is a very interesting moment, partly
because of things that were happening overseas. For example, Great Britain was going
through one of its economic crises, one of its many economic crises, and
looking for help from the United States. In addition to that, the Soviets
have just tested their first atomic bomb on August the twenty ninth, ninety forty
nine, just a few days earlier, and that's an important moment too,
which I think will discuss later on. But also for Harry Truman, it
was an important day. Now. Harry Truman's situation of the moment was this,
Now he was sixty five years old, but still a man who retained
all his energy and his enthusiasm and his idealism. And of course he'd won
a great victory in the presidential election the year before, in ninety forty eight,
but by the time it got to September ninety forty nine, he was
only a difficulty. Now. Truman's popularity had always swung up and down quite
wildly. I've look at a chart of his popularity ratings right throughout his presidency
from ninety forty five to fifty two. You'll see his popul ratings swinging up
wildly, up and down. Now, the problem he had in ninety forty
nine was partly to do with the economy, which was always a problem for
Truman. First half of ninety forty nine there was a recession, five million
unemployed. The recession had probably more or less ended by September, but people
weren't sure of that yet. That had contributed to a fall in his popularity
ratings. In addition, he was having a lot of trouble with Congress.
Now technically speaking at the Democratic Party. Truman's party controlled both houses of Congress,
but in fact they were being very difficult reobstructive towards his legislative agenda.
Now, Truman had come back into office at the beginning of nineteen forty nine
with a very ambitious program of liberal reforms known as a Fair Deal. But
Congress were essentially refusing to enact all but a handful of his measures. And
so Labor Day, September fifth, ninety forty nine, Truman decides to kind
of relaunch himself, and he gave two big speeches, one in Pittsburgh and
one in Dai Moin in Iowa, which were intended to kind of really mount
a kind of rousing defense of his program. And obviously those places were chosen
for very good reasons. Pittsburgh because of course it's the capital of the steel
industry and cover one of the heartlands of the of the labor unions. And
Dai moine Ire because of course it's the corn belt and that was where you
found farmers and labor and farmers were the people that Truman saw as the heart
of his electoral coalition. And so Labor Day, September fifth, he goes
to those two pa is to try and make sure that he's he's fully on
top of that situation and try to rally their support behind him for a new
push for his legislative agenda. But it's almost interesting if we look at this
part of the book, Truman seems to fail to understand the way that America
is changing in nineteen forty nine, as we're sort of transitioning away from the
New Deal and FDR and his liberal revolution and into a sort of new America.
And one of the things that I think is always interesting to show people
is the electoral maps from these times, because as you look, you'll notice
a lot of states that are we say red and blue in America, A
lot of states that are red here are blue then right, And so you
have this sort of I don't want to say, maybe an uneasy alliance between
sort of Dixiecrat, other Democrats and then other labor party individuals throughout sort of
what we would call the rust belt here today. And so I wanted to
ask, is nineteen forty nine sort of the beginning of the end of this
sort of FDR here, this New Deal period, when labor sort of at
its height and we see this sort of growth in liberalism in America. Is
this sort of high tide and it's kind of downhill? For Truman from here,
Well, it's not truth in that. Now with regard to the New
Deal. Now, the New Deal institutions and the creations of the New Deal
was still in place, and they would remain in price for a very long
time. Social Security, which Roosevelt had created nineteen thirty five, that was
still in place, and in fact it was a system that was still developing
and growing. The federal agencies that Roosevelt had created, the Security, an
Exchange Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration, they were still in place.
They weren't going to disappear. Even the Deal were definitely there, and
it was a kind of a permanent change in the way that America function But
there was a sense, yes, in which the kind of energy and the
drive and the enthusiasm of Roosevelt's period had a really come to an end.
It was possible to argue and found that the Democratic Party was really quite an
old man's party by the stage. It's quite striking when you look at the
leading figures in the Democratic Party at this period in Congress, for example,
this had to be much older generation. And that was actually true of Truman
himself. There was a new breed of insurgent Republicans. So there were young
men. The most famous, a most notorious is obviously Senator Joseph McCarthy.
He was only in his early forties. There were other people too, though,
Richard Dixon, who was only thirty seven, and he was now a
rising star. Barry gold Order, for example, now Barry gold or are
not yet in national politics, that he won his first seat on the Phoenix
City Council in Phoenix, Arizona, in November ninety forty nine. So there
was a sense, yes, in which the liberal tide had kind of peaked
and there was an opportunity for the Republicans if you'd like to reinvent themselves.
And I think that was what was actually occurring. That's interesting, and you
know, one of the things that we have to also keep in mind is
that, you know, none of this happens in a bubble, because the
United States is still operating in a world that's emerging from the destruction of the
Second World War, you know, and in Europe, particularly in Western Europe.
You know, America is trying to sell Western Europe on this idea of
an economic and political system that's supposed to you know, keep Western Europe and
the American orbit going forward. And you talk about two gentlemen in particular,
Benjamin Franklin Ferless and Philip Murray, as people who are trying to make this
happen. And in what ways were those two gentlemen? And I like the
way that you focus on them in the book sort of an excellent microcosm of
the future that America had in mind for its Western European allies. There's two
characters that you mentioned, Benjamin Fairlis and phil Murray are completely forgotten today.
But if you had been making a list in ninety forty nine of the twenty
or thirty most powerful people in America, you would have put those two men
on the list. But this is often the case. Some of the most
powerful, interesting people in a period has just become forgotten in the years to
come. Now, Benjamin Fairless was the president and chief executive of US Steel,
and US Steel at the times a huge company. It still exists today,
of course, under a different name, but US still was a huge
company. It wasn't just the biggest steel company in America. It actually produced
more steel than the entirety of France and West Germany combined. And that was
the company that failis led. Now on the other side of the industrial divide
was Phil Murray. Now Phil Murray wasn't actually American. He was a Scotsman.
He was a Scotsman who had emigrated with his father to America when Phil
Murray was in his teens. He was a coal miner, first went down
to pid in Scotland when he was ten years old. And at this point
he was the president of the United steel Workers and he was also the president
of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which was a huge kind of umbrella organization
for many labor unions and still exist today as part of the AFLCIO. So
here were these two characters on either side of the industrial divide, and in
fact, at this moment they were locked in a dispute. They were locked
in a big dispute within the steel industry between management and the unions, essentially
because the unions wanted pensions and healthcare benefits post retirements and the management didn't want
to give them to them. So here are these two men. But the
curious thing is that although they were on opposite sides of divide, these two
powerful characters, they actually were very similar in anyways. Both of them were
men who had risen from the bottom. And that's against something interesting that when
you look at corporate managers in American companies in the fourties and fifties, you'll
often find they were people who came from very humble circumstances and didn't even have
a college degree. Now, Benjamin Fairlis son of a coal miner from Ohio,
he had got his start in the sinistry as a construction work of building
a steel mill, and then he rose by diligence from flare and so on
to get to the top of the company. Murray, as I said,
went down a pit in Scotland at ten years old. Again he had risen
from the bottom. But the two men had not only their social mobility in
common, but also the kind of confidence and vision of the future. You
see, both of them really believed in what they thought as being the kind
of the American industrial system, which involved very big companies investing very heavily in
new plant and equipment, continually investing, continually investing in mechanization, automation,
applying science technology, operating on a very big scale, and achieving high proxivity
and high wages. And both Murray and Fairless in their different ways believed that
this system could end up producing an ever improving standard for both the shareholders of
the company and for the workers. Corporate managers would be happy too. That
was the kind of vision of the American industrial system. Although, as I
say, they're on different sides of the divide in this particular dispute. Now,
the relevant of that to what was going on in Europe is simply this.
Now, this was the period when the Marshall Plan was at its peak.
I mean, the Marshall Plan had been launched in nineteen forty seven.
By the end of nineteen forty nine it was already getting well into its stride
in Europe. And of course the Marshall Plan was a huge economic and financial
measure for the United States to help rebuild the kind of shattered economies of Western
Europe. Not just the shadow one was also Great Britain too, because Great
Britain received actually the largest share of the aid. Now, the Marshall Plan
wasn't just about money, although that was very important. It was about It
wasn't important about money because they had to Essentially they were giving America giving Europe
dollars which Europe could use then to buy products from America. That was really
one of the goals of it. There was also kind of a philosophical thing
what they were trying to do. They were trying to take the American industrial
model, which Murray and fail Is believed in, and export it to you
Europe. They were kind of wanted to turn Europe into something like the United
States, in other words, a huge single market. And by the way,
that's an issue, the European Single Market, which has been a very
big political issue here in the UK in the last five years or so.
They wanted to turn Europe into a huge single market with no barriers between the
countries, with trade flying freely, so that in Europe companies and individuals could
achieve the kind of standards of productivity and the kind of standard living that America
already had. And there was a political issue aside to this, of course,
partly was a way of ensuring that the Western Europe remained stout against the
Soviet Union, but also it was a way of trying to prevent the recurrency
what to occurage in the nineteen thirties. There was an enormous amount of looking
back to the nineteen thirties of this period, politicians thinkers of all kinds.
We're always looking at the nineteen thirties and saying, how can we ensure that
we don't see the terrible things happening in the Ninefots happen again? How can
we ensure that Europe does not veer towards extremist politics, whether fascism or communism.
And by creating a kind of American style economy in Europe, they believe
they could do that because the countries of europ wouldn't want to fight each other
if they were trading with each other and achieving an American kind of stamp of
living. Yeah, that's so interesting, and I think it's it's interesting because
I still think it's to an extent true today when when you talk to individuals,
there's there's still so much retrospective thinking about the nineteen thirties. And when
you talk about the fear of history repeating itself, the example that constantly comes
up is the rise of Hitler and fascism in history. And it's just constant.
It's being transposed over and over and over again. You know, when
you know, when we talk about things like appeasement, appeasement is the word
that always comes up. Well, we can't ever appease a dictator because of
what happened in the nineteen thirties. So if we do this again, then
this dictator is going to ask for more and more and more, and we're
going to have another World war. That's what's going to happen. And it's
fascinating the way that was happening constantly in the nineteen fifties and still happens today
to a large extent, especially in the United States. I'll say for my
part, but there is and I like the use of the word shadow in
the book on the cover, because there is, of course this huge shadow
that's looming over everything in the United States, and that is not the potential
resurrection of Nazi Germany. That is the Soviet Union. You know, everything
as we enter what we call the Cold War is going to be focused around
this competition with the Soviet Union. So I think it is important to set
the stage. And if we're starting in nineteen forty nine with the Soviet Union
still under the control of aging Joseph Stalin, rapidly aging Joseph Stalin, but
what was that like where were they at that point? As we're looking at
nineteen forty nine well, first of all, I entirely agree with you about
the way people still look back to the nineteen thirties continually. Whenever people are
discussing any aspect of foreign policy in our Securia at the moment, whether it
be do with Ukraine or many other issues, they'll frequently returned to the issue
of appeasement and the rise of dictators. I mean, I personally, I
think maybe there are a president or to sign an executive order maybe banning anybody
from talking about in the Munich crisis because it doesn't necessarily help. My feeling
is that the much more relevant period is the one I talk about in this
book, which is the late forties and thirty fifties. Now, in terms
of where the Soviet Union was in ninety forty nine, as you say,
Stalin was approaching his seventieth birthday. Not in good shape physically, of course,
Stalin a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, all kinds of health problems which
would eventually kill him in ninety fifty three, but still exceptionally effective as a
politician. Now, Russia itself was in economically not the best place in the
world. Of course, they had some tremendous losses of human beings and of
capital and of buildings and so on. In World War Two, there had
been a famine starting in ninety forty six that had lasted a couple of years.
Hardly surprising because of course, they had lost such a huge chunk of
their male labor force on the land. They'd been unable to invest in the
productivity of the land, and Stalin hadn't helped with his policies towards towards Soviet
agriculture, so Soviet Union could barely feed itself. They were also trying to
maintain an enormous war machine. They were spending something like fifteen or fifteen percent
or more of the economy on war production to maintain their huge army in Eastern
Europe and to build aircraft, ships and so on, and that was pretty
a huge strain on the Soviet economy. In addition to that, style at
that time was revisiting some of the tactics he'd use in the nineteen thirties.
Now, the ninety thirties had been the era of the so called Great Terror.
Between ninety thirty six and ninety thirty nine, show trials, purges,
the creation of the huge labor camps of the Goo Lag and all very public.
Actually, the West was fully aware of what was going on in the
Soviet In the nineteen thirties now ninety forty nine ninety fifty was the period of
what was known as Stein's Little Terror, and this was much less known about
in the West because it was much It wasn't so secret, but Stalin didn't
hold show Charles, for example, and the Little Terror involved a series of
purges of parts of the Communist Party, purges of intellectuals, strictly Jewish intellectuals,
all intended to allow Stalin to continue to maintain his extremely firm grip on
the country. For example, there was a thing called the Leningrad Affair.
He essentially purged the entire Communist Party in Leningrad. No one in the Western
kew anything about this, but it was it was great issue in the Soviet
Union of the time. Full details didn't really become available until the nineteen eighties
and the nineteen nineties when the Soviet Union collapsed, But that was really what
Stinin was up to. In addition to that, though, there was something
very ominous going on, which was not only did he did he now have
the atom bomb, but also the Soviet press and Soviet States when we were
making speeches and coming out with writings, which was starning to hint at something
involving Asia. They were start to hint at the fact that they wanted to
see an arms struggle in Asia, an armed struggle against what they called Western
imperialism. That arms struggle was already starting to some extent. There was an
armed insurgency in Malaya. There was the situation in Vietnam, of course,
where the Vietnam there by Ho Chi Minh were fighting against the French. And
there were hints in other places too at this kind of armed struggle. So
the Soviet Union was, to say, economically still weak, but very firmly
under the grip of Stalin. And there were suggestions, there were hints that
they were turning their attention more and more towards towards the East, towards Asia.
Yeah, and I think that there's two really important points here to sort
of keep in mind. And I like the in the book how you do
talk about the Soviet Union in terms of its domestic issues and not just its
international outlook. And the reason for that is particularly I think in the United
States. I suppose that's the only country I can speak of in this regard.
We have a tendency to assume that everyone else in every other country in
the world is just hyper focused on us, the United States. Everything is
about us, and that everything that the Soviet Union was doing was geared towards
the United States, when in reality, many countries, I suppose you would
say China is the example today are just as interested in domestic issues and other
issues going on. The other point that I think is important is and even
if you look in the nineteen fifties and again if you want to talk about
what's an important period of history for politicians to be aware of today, we
have this tendency in the United States to really play up the strengths of whatever
our chief adversary is at the moment and downplay the weaknesses, when in reality,
the Soviet Union was weak economically coming out of the Second World War.
That's something that you don't see, you know, a lot of discussions of
which is an important thing to keep in mind. But sort of moving on
here, one of those real strengths of this book that I really enjoy is
that you do talk about a lot of the important figures who aren't just the
people who you would see in a if you picked up a United States textbook.
Okay, it's not all about Truman. It's not all about Joseph McCarthy.
Later on, in fact, in chapter one, you're right Dean Atchison,
and I'm not sure I forgot that right was the right person at the
right time, and I found him to be a fascinating character. So it's
hoping you could tell the listeners who was Dean Atchinson and how did his formative
years prepare him for what he was going to do, and why is he
such an important figure at this period in history? Atchison he was Secretive State
Harry Truman at this point. He'd remained Secretive State until the end of the
Truman reministration at the end of nineteen fifty two, ninety forty nine. He
was fifty six years old, and he was a very capable, competent individual.
I mean, he was a graduate of both of Yale and Harvard Harvard
Law School, very experienced lawyer, very experienced government official in a number of
different roles. Now, as a lawyer, what had happened was that after
he left Harvard Law School, he had become a clerk to the Supreme Court
Justice Lewis Brandeis, who was also happens to be was also quite a great
friend of Harry Truman. And working for Brandeys, Attison had really picked up
two things. First of all, it had picked up the same kind of
democratic politics as Brandeis and Wilson had. That was important because Addison and Wilson,
Ashlon and Truman really became very very good friends. They were very very
firm allies. Really both believed in each other. But also what Addison had
done is he'd mastered a kind of a technique of how to be a lawyer
which really stood him in good stead. Working for brand Eyes at the Supreme
Court, what Adison was doing was he was given very complicated cases, cases
with a lot of facts involved, especially case to do with labor relations or
labor law, which is something that action was preoccupied with. And what Addison
learned how to do is how to take an extremely complicated fact, actual situation,
get to the essentials of it, draw out the basic principles, and
then come out with a definite course of action. In the case of working
for the Supreme Court justice, he was helping to draft the opinion in a
particular Supreme court case, but later On had helped him to in his negotiating
style, and Acton really became an excellent negotiator now. He it also worked
in the US Treasure Department in the early nineteen thirties, where he kind of
fell out with Franklin Roosevelt. The two men didn't really like each other.
And then he worked in the State Department. And again he'd worked particularly during
World War Two, he'd worked on big economic issues. I mean, he
was essentially one of the master minds of the famous Brestonwoods Agreement for managing the
international currency system, which to some extent was to Vidal way into the nineteen
seventies. So that's the kind of man he was. He wasn't He didn't
see himself as a great thinker about geopolitics. He didn't see it was the
original idea in that line. But he was firmly committed to belief in the
West Alliance, first of all against Adlfit and then against the Soviet Union.
And also he was exceptionally good at taking political policy ideas and gett him into
practice. One of his big achievements in ninety forty nine was the creation of
West Germany. Is what became the Federal Republic of West Germany that had to
be created out of what had existed before, which was the division of West
Germany into occupation zones Britain, France, and the United States. And he
essentially got into place the mechanism for turning West Germany action to a new federal
republic, and they had their first election of the forty ninety forty nine and
that was a really big deal. The problem, of course, was that
although that was a very big achievement by Atchison, creating the Federal Republic of
West Germany wasn't really something that really resonated with an American audience at home,
and so Acton always had this problem that although he was very popular with the
President, it was exceptionally popular and competent, he didn't really have a strong
domestic following at home in the United States of America, and that would come
to some extent to be his undoing. Well, that's interesting, and now
we've sort of talked about We've talked about the United States, we've talked about
the Soviet Union, We've talked a little bit about Great Britain. But Great
Britain has a major role to play throughout the late late nineteen forties, early
and throughout the nineteen fifties in terms of the international scene, in particularly what's
going to happen in Western Europe. And I think it's worth pointing out that
Great Britain wins two World wars. They're on the winning side of two World
wars, and yet they come out of it losing their empire and with essentially
a shattered economy, which is, you know, winning a war isn't quite
the boot doggle. I suppose that it once was, I guess is the
message to out of those two things. But I thought, let's set the
stage as well, like, how did Great Britain stand in nineteen forty nine,
particularly its economy, and how did that play into America's international plans?
Well, and I'm having to say you're being a little unfair to us British
there actually, because he wasn't quite as simple as that. Yeah, Britain
hadn't yet lost its empire. It was in the process of losing it.
Now they had definitely lost one big chunk of the empire, which was the
Indian subcontinent. When India and Pakistan became independent in August nineteen forty seven,
Am but the rest of it was still pretty much intact. The way the
British saw it was that they were not losing their empire, they were transforming
into something new, a British Commonwealth. And the key character here was Maguldernist
Bevin, who was the British Foreign Secretary, who, in other words,
he was the equivalent in Britain of Denatus and the Sector state in the United
States. And Bevin because was a socialist, he had been a Laby Union
leader himself for a long time. He wasn't member of the British Labor government,
but he wanted to turn the British Empire into commonwealth, a voluntary association
of independent states. His intention was over time they would all become independent,
a volunte associate of independent states which would stand together and cooperate, and it
would cooperate economically, and that was very important to the British, because the
British did to some degree, in fact to a large degree, depend on
certain parts of the empire, particularly West Africa and Malaysia, and in other
other parts too, but those were really two the most important. So it's
going to be economic decoperating with each other. It was going to be a
military alliance. It was also going to be an alliance that was stowed against
the Soviets, and it was going to be an alliance of countries, voluntary
associated countries who would be committed to democracy, the rule of law, all
the things the British thought that they had given to the Empire, and it
was going to be important another region which was geopolitically because of course the British
Empire or the British commn author now was included all these really important strategic locations
straight of Gibraltar, for example, controlling the anenters of Mediterranean, controlling the
other end of the Mediterranean and providing the route not only to India, but
also to something that was becoming more and more important at this moment, which
was the oil wells of Iraq and Iran. Those were becoming really really crucial
to British foreign policy. Two or three years later they started to become really
crucial to American foreign policy too, that was just starting at this period,
but also got Singapore for example. Just look at them out and see why
Singapore is so important to the British Empire. Turning itself into this British Commonwealth,
hoping to sort of hold together in some way or other and also maintaining
control of all these rate strategic choke points. Now, this then changed sometime
later, from about ninety fifty five to fifty six, Homers, the British
actually really did begin to seriously dismantle the empire. But in ninety fourty nine
to ninety fifty they really thought that they could actually hold it together. Well,
that's interesting, it's more of a transition at this point. The next
part that I wanted to ask about is that we we rarely talk about senators
in US history, which is a little bit remarkable, give and how important
of an institution that that actually is. But again, if you open a
US history textbook, you know, from beginning to end you could probably count
on two hands the number of times that a senator is actually named. You
talk about Walter George, and I found him to be particularly interesting, Like
why was Walter George so important? And particularly how does he represent the changing
nature of the Democratic Party after the Second World War, and then how the
changing nature of that party will impact Truman's agenda. Well, I totally agree.
In America there is a tendency to neglect Congress by historians. Historian to
spend an enormous amount of time on presidential history. They liked a great presidents
out of ten and and put them in kind of an order of who is
the greatest president, who was the best president? And Congressman of senaces is
simply often get forgotten. And I'm a rather different personally. I think Congress
is actually the most fascinating part of the American system because Congress is the place
where a lot of power for characters collide with each other, and they collide
with each other in these debates that are actually really very important everything for example,
in America, and one ray or another, every issue America is grappling
with, always a ends up in the federal budget, and Congress is the
place where the federal budget gets taken to pieces, dissected, put back together,
and or sometimes they really can't reach any agreement at all, which is
obviously what's happening at the moment in the at this moment in twenty twenty three.
So I find congressm fascinating. Now you mentioned Walter George now senator or
to George again completely forgotten figure now, But if I could give you a
kind of modern equivalent you have a senator at the moment in the United States
who's sort of the equivalent, and that's Joe Manchin. You know, Joe
Manson in the Democratic Party now is not unlike Walter George in those days,
Mansion is more famous. He's more of a household name wall of George wasn't
so much of a house and name, but still sort of the same sort
of situation. A Democrat, but a conservative Democrat, a skeptical Democrat,
and a bit of an awkward Democrat where the president's concerned. In Mansion's coast,
President Biden, and in the case of Water Georgia was Harry Truan.
Now George Water George was quite an old man by now, he was in
his seventies. He'd actually been in the Senate since nineteen twenty two as the
senior Senator for Georgia. And of course that man actually often didn't have to
find elections because in Georgia at the time, Georgia was so democratic that very
often the Republicans didn't even put up candidates, whether for Congress or for the
Senate. There really was absolutely no prospected victory. And of course that's a
very different scenario now, so he was senior Senator for Georgia and fiscal conservative
and very powerful because he was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in the
late nineteen forties and it had been that since ninety forty one. Later he
would get him more powerful nineteen fifties when he was the chairmder of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, and water George became an essential ally of Dwight the Eisenhower.
The relationship between Eisenhower and water George became very import didn't do that in
the middle period of the nineteen fifties anyway. In ninety forty nine, Water
George was in his heyday chair of the Senate Finance Committee and according all sorts
of problems for Harry. Basically, the problem was that George, being a
fiscal conservative, was trying to hold Harry Truman to the goal of a balanced
budget, which really wasn't achievable, which meant that Water George was imposing all
kinds of limitations on what Truman could do, basically, for example, the
military budget they were holding now the military budget. In addition to that,
Water George was skeptical about NATO. Now it's a very interesting point because today.
You know, we used to thinking of NATO as this as this great
organization that has been there for seventy years or so, and we like to
think that it's always some as commanded a great deal of support, and that
it came into being kind of triumphant in ninety forty nine. But there were
a great many skeptics about NATO in these early years, including water George,
as were Republicans. The problem with NATO at the time was that NATO was
like a great big donut with a hole in the middle, and the hole
in the middle was was Germany. Because at this point the French refused to
allow West Germany to rearm. The British weren't very happy either of out West
Joermany rearming, but the French ra absolutely they would not have to hear a
word of it, for obviously, because they'd thought three wars with Germany in
the preceding eighty years. If you didn't have Germany in NATO, and if
you didn't have all the Western powers France, Italy, the Netherlands, Britains
on all contributing by way of serious armed forces, then it really was a
question mark what whether really NATO made any sense at all, and wall of
George one of those people. Harry Truman wanted to send a billion dollars of
military aid to NATO at the end of ninety forty nine. Wall of George
was very uhappy about this. He thought America couldn't afford it. He was
worried that the money would be wasted. He was worried that if you did
rearm Europe and the Soviets invaded, all the arms were all of Soviet hands.
So that was the kind of person water George was. And he's emblematic
and important because he just shows you the extent which Harry Truman had trouble with
Congress, and he shows you, I think, one of the nuances and
subtleties of attitudes. At the time. There were many Democrats who frankly were
more conservative than some Republicans. That was the situation that Harry Tchuman had to
deal with. And finally, of course water George was a segregationist. Being
a senator from Georgia, he firmly believed in segregate. He was determined to
maintain, to preserve, and continue. He was what I call a silent
segregation is in a sense you tried not to talk about the issue, and
that was characteristic at the time. Many politicians wanted to maintain segregation. They
were dead against any form of civil rights legislation, but they tried to avoid
talking about it because they thought the less you talked about it, the less
likely is it would become an issue. And eventually, of course, it
did become a huge issue. I mean, like Walter George are the kind
of people who prevented it from being abolished, maybe a lot earlier than it
should have been. It's going to become a huge issue, and it's going
to become the you know, one of the major issues that's going to ultimately
you know, break that Democratic Party. And you know that's why, you
know, you see that massive flip between you know, nineteen the election of
John F. Kennedy in nineteen sixty and then you know, the election of
Richard Nixon later on in nineteen sixty eight. So that's those states are all
going to flip. And you could just you can go look at the electoral
maps right now if you want to. But yeah, we don't talk about
the Senate enough in the United States, and I don't I don't particularly know
why that is. I guess maybe it's just easier to talk about presidents because
there's more of them. But I'm just going to throw out another name that
you know, some of the listeners may be familiar with, but he's in
Congress right now. His name is Chuck Grassley's a Republican from Iowa. It's
been there for I believe forty seven years. That's a long time, folks.
So if you want to talk about the concentration of power in some people's
hands, like, we don't have term limits for senators, right, and
we do for presidents. So yes, we do focus a lot on those.
And it's also worth pointing out that please, by all means, if
you're listening to this, pull up the United States Constitution, you know the
first article is Congress because that was the most important from their perspective. And
that also explains why a Congress that suffers periods of paralysis, which ours tends
to now is so problematic because it hoists the response ability for accomplishing tasks and
the other two branches that really weren't intended to do it from their perspective,
and that causes constitutional problems. Okay, but all this aside, that was
just a little soapbox there. But all this aside, I want to talk
about the nuclear weapons because obviously the other shadow that is cast over the nineteen
fifties is the prospect of nuclear war and essentially nuclear annihilation. When did Truman
find out that the Soviets had successfully tested a nuclear weapon? And like I
mean, obviously it changes the balance of power in Europe and around the world.
But give us a sense for what we're talking about here, for what
it means for the Soviets harnessing that power. Just say, on this subject
term limits and Congress before I talk about Adam Bum. Of course, in
Britain we had this bizarre institution knows the House of Lords within Parliament, and
as you know, in the House of more than eight hundred members of it,
you can be appointed at the House of Lords at the age of twenty
five or thirty and you're a man there till you die. So you know,
we can't really talk. I think your problem actually is a bit less
than ours. But on the subject of the atom bomb, well, now,
as I was saying earlier, the Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb
test on August the twenty ninth, ninety forty nine, just a few days
before the book begins. Now, what happened was two three days later,
some of the radioactive dust from the explosion was picked up by an American B
twenty nine bomber which was flying over the sea to the north of Japan.
Now, the news of that, or the readings from the radioactive monitor were
immediately transmitted to Washington by teleprinter, So the news a media arrived in Washington.
But of course they didn't know yet whether or it really was a Soviet
atom bomb. It might simply been dust from an explosion, for example,
accident in a Soviet nuclear reactor. I mean the followed a period of really
intense activity, lasting for several weeks, and altogether ninety aircraft were sent up
both by the US Air Force and by the Royal Air Force from Great Britain
to monitor this radioactive duscloud as it kind of drifted from Japan over Alaska,
over Canada, over the Atlantic, and eventually over Great Britain. I think
some of the dusts actually ended up in Scotland. They had to analyze it
very carefully. Now, it took a little while. Truman was told about
this on about September the tenth, five days after Labor Day. But what
he was told about was the fact that the tests were being conducted because there
was no confirmation yet. About a week later they got the confirmation through that
it was definitely an an atom bomb test. And the reason they able to
do that was because by analyzing the nature of the radioactivity, they could tell
that it must have come from nuclear fission, which is what happens when you
have an atom bomb goes off. Now, Truman decided to tell the American
people, and not everybody agreed in his administration about that, that he s'uld
actually make a public announcement. But Truman decided to do so, which he
did on September the twenty third, And he did that, as far as
we can see, for three three reasons. First of all, he was
worried that there would be a leak, but somebody in the Pentagon of the
Air Force or the scientific world would lead this to the press and there would
be a kind of sensation and a panic and sign. So true was worried
about that. He was also worried that the Soviets might get their first an
announcement, so he wanted to make sure the Soviets didn't announce it in such
a way that it again it would become a propaganda coup for the Soviet Union.
And Thirdly, I think he just felt the American people ought to know,
so he made this announcement seventy twenty. Third, the strange thing is
that the announcement didn't actually cause a panic. And I think the reason it
didn't cause a panic in the nation was because for years now it had been
expected that at some point the Soviets would get the autom bomb, because the
Soviets had been dropping heavy hints about it in ninety forty seven, their foreign
minister Molotov had already more or less said that they had the science, which
they probably did at that stage. So it didn't cause a terrible panic.
What it did do was it caused a lot of consequences inside the government and
inside the military'st option in Washington, and those turned out to be quite faithful.
And then you might ask me what they were well on that threat a
little bit, because I do want to know. I mean, America essentially
has this you know, this ace in the hall, because they have this
huge advantage with this weapon, and obviously this is going to result in military
changes. So what happened within the Pentagon as a result, Well, the
Soviets had got the bomb, probably about two or three years earlier than the
Americans had been expecting. The scientists in US had thought it would take them
maybe about nineteen fifty two or fifty three did actually get the bomb. Now,
in terms of the military balance of power, the acquisition of the bomb
by the Serbian didn't actually make an immediate great difference because they didn't have an
aircraft which would be capable of delivering it to the United States. They wouldn't
have that for some years to come. In addition, they didn't have missiles.
For example, they did not even have the international intercontinental polsting missiles that
became such an issue in the mid to late ninety fifties. They didn't have
that. So it didn't make an enormous difference to the balance of military power
immediately, but it was clear that it was going to at some stage in
the not too distant future. By the mid fifties, there was going to
be a big issue. Now, the most born effects in the near term
in the United States of the announcement of the Soviet bomb was the issue of
the hydrogen bomb. Now, I'm sure many people have seen the film Oppenheimer,
which appeared a few months ago, and it really an excellent film actually,
I mean, given how difficult it is to put history on the screen,
on the cinema screen, I think that does a fantastic Jobbert, and
much of what the film says is entirely accurate. The problem was that it
had been known for some time from a theoretical point of view, that it
ought to be possible to create a new kind of weapon, the hydrogen bomb,
based on thom nuclear fusion, that had been known in principles since about
nineteen forty one or forty two. The science was there, it wasn't a
talk clear whether it was actually practically feasible, how it would be done,
and how it would work, and how dangerous and so on it would be.
But it was known that work could be done, and so the immediate
impact of the Soviet bombs as was to generate a huge wave of pressure and
support within national security circles in Washington, with Indepentagon within Congress to get the
hydrogen bomb built by the United States before the Russians did. And that's essentially
what happened. There was one particular individual for two particlar inividuals. One was
Lewis Strauss, who is portrayed in the film in the Oppenheimer film, who
was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. He pushed very heavily for the
building of the of the hydrogen bomb. There was another man called Senator Brah
McMann, and another senator, a very interesting senator, Senator Brian McMahon,
who was a leading Democrat. He was somebody who actually if he hadn't died,
he died just very young a couple of years later. If he had
not died, he might actually have been the Democratic candidate for president in nine
fifty two instead of Adelaide Stevenson. The history might have been different, actually,
But but Mahn was very, very keen to push for the building of
the hydrogen bomb, and they gathered around them a grade deal support in Congress.
They had supported the military as well, and the Joint Tature staff wanted
to build the hydrogen bomb, and so a kind of unstoppable menum build up,
which meant that in the end of January nineteen fifty when Harry Truman had
to had to make a decision on this issue, there was really no decision
that Harry Tchruman could take other van to go ahead with the research and development
build the h bomb, which of course eventually was was tested the end of
ninety fifty two, and then tested much more thoroughly and in a usual form
in ninety fifty four with a huge test of Bikini Atoll. It became normously
controversial around the world. So the hydrogen bomb development program was already kind of
flowed from what was happening with the Soviet bomb in the fall of ninety forty
nine, and that sort of it's it's interesting because you know, the Soviets
get the atomic bomb, the pressure then becomes to get a more powerful weapon,
which is the hydrogen bomb. And that plays into my next question because
it becomes clear at some point, and I think you write in the book
no one expected Harry Truman to win the Cold War at a stroke, which
is another way of sort of saying that, like, this was clearly going
to be a long term conflict, and you can see this developing later on.
So I had two questions about that. One was, okay, so
if this is going to be a long term conflict, what was the strategy
that was being talked about as we start to focus in on Truman's administration in
the early nineteen fifties. And two, did people understand and I'm going to
use that term broadly, you know, both within the administration and then you
know, maybe even regular Americans people understand that this was going to be this
long term struggle that could drag on for decades. Well, they certainly understood
that. Yes, there were many, many observers who predicted there would be
a long struggle of going for decades. But nevertheless, the Cold War was
reading very much in early stages, and a lot of thinking about issues of
national security and so on was in its very early stages. It was kind
of uninformed. It's a bit kind of incoated. It really hadn't sort of
congealed together. Now you can argue about the date when the Cold War began,
and there's a lot of argument about that, but one key date,
obviously was the Truman Doctrine speech, which he gave to Congress in the spring
of nineteen forty seven. And the part about that speech was essentially what he
was saying was that America would stand alone, alongside and support any country that
was resisting aggression from outside, which essentially meant aggression from the Soviet Union or
as allies. Now, the Truman doctrine you can see, is kind of
one of the founding moments of the Cold War, but it was a doctrine,
It wasn't actually a strategy. The key word in terms of strategy is
containment. The word containment which will forever be associated with with the American diplomat
and historian and thinker George Kennon who was talking about containment in ninety forty six
and ninety forty seven, the idea of containing the Soviet Union, of preventing
the Soviet Union from spinning over out of its borders and projecting its to power
all across the globe. Now, the problem with containment and kname was of
the heart of the strategy of Harry Truman towards the Cold War. The problem
is was it mean. The word containment is the key word, but it
can in practical terms, you can have lots of different kinds of interpretations,
and it can mean all sorts of different things. One possibility for container is
what they called perimeter defense, where essentially you put armed forces all the way
around the borders of the Servant Union in Russia as you hem them in so
they can't escape outside their borders. Well that's not really practical. That was
totally impractical with the resources available. Another possibility was called what he called on
harb or strong point containment, where what you do is you defend the really
important places good example, the German ruler for example, because the German ruler
is a great war making complex of West Germany is certainly under Hitler and then
terribly important toll after World War Two. If you defend things like that,
or you defend places like Japan because Japan has its own bornt strategically, So
that's another form of containment. Another form of containment is cultural containment, is
doing your absolute best to present America's way of life and to present the British
way of life, say the Democratic word, as being the ideal way of
life, the way of life they should aspire to. So all kinds of
things that containment could mean, and containment was something that had to be debated
endlessly. Really only in the mid fifties really do agyize and how that the
kind of Cold War strategy really settled down into its definite form that would would
be maintained right up until the collapse of the Son Union in the mid nineteen
eighties. And also, of course the problem was that whatever Harry Truman or
Dean Asherson or drightly, I don't have all about containment, for Russians had
ideas of their own. And one of the great problems of this period was
the fact that Stalin was a lot more flexible than people gave him credit for.
Now. Stalin absolutely fascinating character, you know, a central character in
my book, a central character in many books, a character you know,
difficult to interpret, but absolutely the person you have to get to grips with.
And Starr had one particular characteristic which I think was a real problem for
everybody, which was that he was in terms of his ideology, his political
views, they were always fixed. He was always a Marxist Leninist, but
in terms of his strategy and tactics from months to months, from year to
year, he was prepared to be very flexible big make U terms and that's
what essentially did when he authorized the invasion of Korea in June nineteen and fifty
ninety forty nine. He did not want Kimmelsung from from North creator to invade
the South. Suddenly changes his mind in January nineteen fifty and gives the go
ahead from came Alsumcum by the South, And that was home with Stalin.
Stin was a man who was prepared to change. He's made u turns.
He was strategically very very flexible, very devious, and that was one of
the reasons which made Stalin such a kind of formidable competitor and a formidable opponent.
Yeah, and I think it's worth pointing out here that, you know,
while we kind of retroactively look back on this period and again, this
is another America, maybe some characteristic of America that you know, we see
America as, oh, it's the superpower, it's always been a superpower in
the world. But that's not it's not actually historically accurate, you know,
in terms of when we go back and we think about, well, no,
I mean we didn't. You know, I honestly have had people in
the past day well we want independence from the British and were immediately the great
superpower of the world. And it's like, no, not at all,
that's that's not true. But so this was new, This was this was
new for the people in the Truman administration sort of thinking about because you talk
about like, well, what is containment mean? And this was these were
questions that they had to rapple with in terms of, Okay, well,
how are we going to contain the Soviet Union? And yeah, it doesn't
settle into it sort of permanent characteristics until later like this was this was an
era where there was very much a debate about how to do these sorts of
things. And I think it's really important and I wish it was a part
of history that was talked about a little bit more or we're coming up on
time. But I did want to ask one last question because I didn't know
very much about this, and I thought it was a really interesting part of
the book. Everybody start of the B twenty nine bombers, but there's there's
this controversy over the B thirty six. You know that you that you talk
about the book because the other thing that's going on in the nineteen fifties in
the United States, something that Eisenhower will sort of famously talk about, is
these growing concerns over the rise of what we call the military industrial complex and
the changing nature of warfare and of how we come up with new weapons.
Because you know, we talk about the need to create the hydrogen bomb because
the Russians get the atomic bomb, and then you need ways to distribute this
firepower ever changing ways, and so but the B thirty six was a really
interesting story, and I thought it'd be a great way to end today if
you could tell us a little bit about that and how it ill how sort
of plays into those two aspects. The B thirty six bomber was the bomber
that would eventually be superseded a few years later by the B fifty two,
The B fifty two, which is still with us and still, you know,
an important part of America's arsenal and obviously very famous from its role in
Vietnam and swam. Now, the B thirty six was a lumbering monstrosity of
an aeroplane. It wasn't a jet. It was powered by six great,
big piston engines, and it had the longest wingspan of any combat aircraft ever
built before or since. Huge thing. It had an enormous range. It'd
fly ten thousand miles, and that was the important thing about it, which
was the fact that it was intended to be the primary mechanism for delivering the
atom bomb against the Sovietian or maybe one day China. So it was the
core of America's strategic nuclear defense or another as Strategic Air Command as it was
known. Trouble with the B thirty six was that, as I say,
it was a lumbering monsoss even aircraft. It was slow, it was comebersome,
and the realities it was never used in action. It couldn't have been
used in action because if it had been used in action, it would have
been shot down by the Soviets almost immediately. The Soviets already had a fighter
called the Mid fifteen, which they were testing in ninety forty nine and nineteen
fifty, which is just about to enter service, and the mid fifteen would
have shot the B thirty six out of the sky almost immediately. So the
thirty six was a bit useless. Actually, in fact we used called it
Elemon, but it had almost expensive and the controversy about it in the fall
of nineteen forty nine was a huge feud in public between the United States Navy
and the United States Air Force. Now, and it wasn't just the kind
of usual interservice rivalry that you get in the Pentagon. It was already serious
argument. The point was this. The United States Navy believe in the aircraft
carrier because it would have happened in World War Two, because of the Battle
of Midway, because of the Battle of the other Great Battles of World War
Two, because of the role of the aircraft carriers in the defeat of Japan.
The United States Navy believed in the aircraft carrier as a huge and almost
the primary mechas and proper projecting American power around the world. The Air Force,
of course, didn't believe in the aircraft craft carry and the aircraft believed
in the B thirty six and one day the B fifty two of Strategi Air
Command based in Omaha, Nebraskrons on. They believe that was the essential,
the core component of America's defensive arsenal, and the two clashed in public in
the fall of ninety forty nine, very public. Indeed, various admirals,
the chad of the US Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations gouged Admiral Dental
actually end up getting fired for this by Truman earlier the following year. Basically,
the argument on the part of the Navy was, well, if you
rely entirely on the aircraft of B sixty thirty six and on the atom bombs
they carry. First of all, you may make atomic warfare more likely.
You're going to make yourself very inflexible. You're going to be over committed to
that arm and you're going to leave the way open for the Soviets door kinds
of things which you didn't want to respond to with atom bombs, and they'll
be free to kind of take over parts of the world because you haven't got
aircraft carriers, so you can send the Air Force the Navy off to meet
them. The Air Force, on the other hands, said oh, yes,
but we've got to have these aircraft because the Soviet is going to get
them. And also the Air Force pointed out, well, actually it's cheaper.
The argument on part of the Air Force was that having a defense based
on great, big strategic bombers carrying atom bombs will end up being a lot
cheaper in terms of the federal budget than having huge conventional forces navian army and
so on. And that argument, of course was designed to appeal to people
like the fiscal conservatives in Congress, people like Walter George we mentioned earlier,
who were fiscal consertis who didn't want to spend too much on the armed forces,
and therefore they were much more interested in having an expensive but not as
expensive air force, an air force not as expensive as the Navy and the
Army, because that would be the economical way of running America's defense. And
this argument at me thirty six, it was very public, but it had
one very important impact politically in his Doorcally and he had you with President Eisenhower
or the future President Eisenhow, because Eisenhow at this point in ninety forty nine,
was out of military service. He was still a general because of coause
you can't retire. You're always at once a generally, always a general in
America, he was still a general, but he was actually president of the
university, President of Columbia, University of New York. But what they would
do is they would summon him back to Washington whenever there was a problem to
try and help out and try and smooth things over and come with a solution.
And so he was involved in Congress and giving testimony at the time of
these hearings during this great big feud between the Army and the Navy. And
one of the things that happened was that Eisenhower became of this period more and
more exascerbated with the Truman administration. He was more and more unhappy with the
way the Truan administration was treating the armed forces. He was more and more
unhappy with the budget limitations that were putting on them. He's more and more
uhappy with what he saw was the damage to military and naval morales occurring during
this great big row between the Navy and the eir foros So, this was
one of the peerers in which Eisenhower started to think seriously about becoming or running
for president in nineteen fifty two, he was gradually inching towards that decision.
And this period and then again the period reading up to and during the Korean
Religi started the Korean War, was when he really kind of clinched his view
that he should run for president at some stage. Wouldn't decide for a long
time yet in a definitive way, But during this situation in the fall of
ninety forty nine, he was entering into that period of kind of preparation for
becoming a presidential candidate. Well, and it's fascinating the way that sometimes what
looks like a relatively small aspect of history turns into something enormous because Eisenhower's presidency
is obviously going to usher and watershed moments of its own. It's, i
mean, maybe the first time a Republican had seized control of the presidency in
decades, So you know, and the fact that you know, and the
other thing that is worth pointing out here is again it all kind of comes
back to this idea of how important Congress is and the changing nature of all
that because Congress sets the budget and Congress is the one that decides what gets
made. And of course another aspect that every Congressman and senator is going to
think about as well, where is this getting made? Is this getting made
in my district? Is part of this is going to help me out?
And those are questions that don't necessarily have immediate military strategic implications, and that's
important as well. But well, this has been great, it's been a
wonderful interview. We have barely scratched the surface of the book. I don't
think we made it past nineteen fifty four at any point, and barely even
talked about that. So there's obviously worlds more. We only hardly mentioned favorite
Senator from my home state of Wisconsin. Joseph McCarthy is an interesting character in
and of himself, and you know, there's just a lot more to do
here. So I hope people pick up the book. But thank you so
much for the talk. It's been illuminating.