Transient color.

I have been reading historian William Leuchtenburg’s excellent The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton.  It’s a hefty meaty book and a good read.  I’m purposely taking one president at a time, pausing between them to read something else while considering their individual legacy.  Being born into and raised in the twentieth century, the book covers a good chuck of my lifetime.  So it’s familiar territory put in perspective by an astute observer.  Professor Leuchtenburg, in his vigorous 90s, is hard at work (mostly here in Chapel Hill) on a Washington to McKinley volume.  I look forward to it.

Assessing presidencies is tricky business.  Who were truly the best, who the worst, requires some time and distance. It also involves, even for the historian, a dose of subjectivity.  What strikes me in reading of their collective tenures is how imperfect, even flawed, each of them were.  Faced with momentous decisions, they often made significant steps forward, but at times each also made disastrous mistakes that took decades, if ever, to set right.  We like to think of our leaders, particularly the ones for whom we have voted and supported, as something special.  Some of them are, of course, but always in the context of being human.  They may play on history’s stage with breathtaking brilliance but at times with dazzling ineptness.  Of course, while in hindsight we may see their missteps clearly, they were often far from self-evident at the time.  They could lead us to victory but could also snatch defeat out of a victory that had been it hand.   One prime example was when Harry Truman, after successfully achieving his stated goals in Korea, disastrously extended the war into what remains an unresolved stalemate.  We still suffer the consequences.

To be sure times change and with them our view of things, sometimes leading to some ironic twists even in how we add color to the scene.  Reading about the 1950s under Truman and then Eisenhower brought back especially vivid memories.  They were my formative school years.  For today’s nostalgia buffs, let me tell you that the 50s were not a great time in American.  They were dominated in large measure by an obsessive fear of communism.  That obsession impacted both our foreign and domestic policy for decades to come.  Communism had a color: red. 

Our ears and eyes were exposed to scarlet words, attributes and slogans.  There was red by itself, “the Reds”, “red states” (especially Red China), “red bating”, the “red scare” and, of course, the “red menace”.  The Cold War was in its infancy in 1950 and Truman himself submitted to the hysteria.  The House Committee on Un-American Activities (first established in the 1930s) infamously grew in reckless power running roughshod over individual rights.  Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin became a national largely unchallenged finger-pointing figure.  The lion’s share of this terrible decade was presided over by war hero Dwight Eisenhower supported by fellow Republicans an right wing Southern Democrats (who would switch over to the GOP a decade later).  

That history brings me back to the color red.  It’s no wonder that in reading about those years in a current context I couldn’t help but think of a supreme irony.  While the GOP in the 1950s derisively referred not only to communists as red and liberals as at least “pink”, today’s Republican dominated states are, of all things, labeled red.  They wear the red designation with pride hoping to spread it across the land.  How times change us and how we talk.

I am not of the “history repeats itself” school.  That said, it’s not surprising that echoes of other ages — of human behavior — find their way into the present.   The Soviet Union is no more and the meaning of “red” has clearly taken a sharp attribution turn, but there is something of the 1950s in our present discourse.  And it’s something no less disturbing or, if it gets out of hand, threatening to our democracy.  Today Islamophobia has replaced our 1950s irrational fear of Communism and people who sound increasingly like the purveyors of a “red scare” are seeking to fill us with twenty-first century terror.  The idea of barring Muslims from entering our borders or seeking that citizens who happen to follow Islam should take some kind of loyalty oath or disavow tenants of their faith and practice are chilling reminders of past trumped-up bad times.  Yes, I know what you’re thinking but “trumped-up” is the good English language term to describe what happened during the late Truman and Eisenhower years.  It fits again.

This is the year of an appeal to fear.  It’s what we heard or read about all last week.  And it’s not over.  Just as Trump and the Republicans stoked up fear of the Other whether an implied Islamic “third column” or its equally dangerous Mexican criminal immigrant counterpart, Clinton and the Democrats are sure to invoke the fear of what his presidency would bring.  Now don’t get me wrong.  This isn’t a matter of being even handed — there is no moral equivalency in these two candidates or their present party configurations — but to state how things are likely to go down between now and November.   Objective reasoning will probably go out the window because it simply won’t work in the present national mood.   Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 “Daisy Commercial” was the ultimate presidential election appeal to fear.  It helped bring down Barry Goldwater.  And by the way, don’t let anyone tell you that going viral is something new, the exclusive domain of our digital age.  Daisy aired only once, but its power reverberated to such a degree that it remains controversial more than fifty years on.  Despite a lack of social media and instant communications everyone knew of it and even those who didn’t see it aired in real time can still picture that little girl picking daisy pedals in a countdown that ends in a mushroom cloud.  Some version of Daisy is likely to raise its ugly head during the current campaign.

I know what I’d like some future historian to be writing as the 2016 election.   My only hope is that a majority of Americans feel the same.  I think my hope will be fulfilled, but there is no guarantee.  Absolutely none.  We have had demagogues on the scene throughout our history and some, like Huey Long and Joe McCarthy, were elected to statewide public office.  We’ve had bitter campaigns with poisonous rhetoric since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson contended in the early days.  But we’ve never had the likes of Donald Trump nominated for the presidency by one of our two major parties.  Nothing is sure in elections and his being on the ballot represents a real and meaningful risk.  He appeals to those who want a return to an America that once was.  That’s impossible.  So his big lie is that his victory will almost certainly insure an America that neither they nor we have ever seen before.  And looking at what happened in Cleveland last week, it will be a very dark America.

The color red was considered dangerous to America in the 1950s.  As things have evolved since the 1980s its morphed redness, most especially since John McCain brought the person and ilk of Sarah Palin to the national ticket, seems no less so.  At least that’s how I see it and hope a majority of my fellow citizens will as well.  We’ve taken down the demagogues and fringe politicians in the past.  Hopefully, we will have the will, the courage and most importantly that we will make the required effort, to do so again.

D2+P=C

Who said the individual doesn't count, or make that two individuals.  For sure the times do have an impact on leaders and those who serve them, but I have always believed that the individual makes a difference, often a big difference.  That idea was only reinforced in my reading of Stephen Kinzer's excellent new book, The Brothers: John Foster, Allen Dulles and their Secret World War.  It is a tale centered mostly in the 1950s, one focused on the perhaps the most significant brother act in American history.  John Foster Dulles (known as Foster) served as Eisenhower's secretary of state, Allen Dulles his CIA director.  What that meant can be best expressed in this simple equation: D²+P=C. Take two Dulles' with their multiplier effect (D²) add power (P) and there will be big consequences (C).  Some of those consequences remain evident today, more than five decades on.

To say the Dulles boys were destined to play their roles is hardly an exaggeration.  Born to privilege, their grandfather and uncle both served as secretaries of state — John Watson Foster (Benjamin Harrison) and Robert Lansing (Woodrow Wilson).  Their father, Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles came from a line of missionaries.  A powerful life-long streak of Calvinistic ran especially through Foster's body.  It was a large part of what oriented and moved him during his years of private and public service.  Both brothers were lawyers and not merely so, they were partners at Sullivan and Cromwell, the leading Wall Street firm — Foster its managing partner.  They represented some of America's largest corporations of their day, the likes of Standard Oil, Babcock & Wilcox and United Fruit, connections that played large in their public service.  The policies they drove were business client friendly, sometimes outrageously so, whether in Iran, Central America or Africa.

As to the time as a driving force in what makes the man, Foster and Allen matured in the World Wars and were obsessed with the Cold War that followed.  Their worldview was one of black and white — the absolutely good vs. the totally bad.  And that bad was Communism, especially the Soviets but also any person or place that they deemed dominated or influenced by Moscow.  That rigid view allowed for no nuance and quickly drawn good-bad assessments allowed for no modification.  They listened to only those who agreed with their point of view — they fired naysayers — and indeed listened mostly to each other.  Because they concurrently occupied the two most important foreign policy and action posts of their time, it was a view that prevailed and not necessarily to America's immediate or longer term interests.  To be fair, the Dulles brothers largely acted as the bad cop partners to their good cop boss, Dwight Eisenhower, whose nice guy facade masked a nail-tough inner man.

Kinzer's narrative brings Foster and Allen into vivid relief from cradle to grave.  Despite being exceedingly close, the brothers were as different in personality as two people could be.   Foster was the austere Presbyterian who shunned social occasions and was, if not awkward then certainly reserved with people.  Allen was a womanizer who loved to party, a daredevil whose life in the shadows of clandestine activism suited him well.   To say that their professional life was awash with conflicts of interests would be an understatement.  That they were tone-deaf to the notion that mixing client and public service might be questionable may speak as much to their time — the age of incestuous good old boys — as to their own judgment.  While wrongly attributed to their cabinet colleague Charlie Wilson, the idea that "what's good for General Motors is good for the nation" expresses the mentality of the day, one to which they fully subscribed.

Whether the brothers Dulles or Eisenhower are to blame, the fact is that the turn American policy took coupled with the actions that followed under their watch pretty well set the course for the country's direction.  It impacts and, I'd argue, haunts us still.  We continue to be influenced by large business interests.  In their day that influence was exerted by two lawyers who represented, and made their substantial wealth from, giant corporations.  Today, lobbyists many of whom are former revolving door government officials, play that role.  Perhaps less overt, but the inherent conflict of interest still pertains.  The hostile relationship between the United States and Iran was set in motion by the Dulles led 1953 overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh.  So, too, is our uneasy relationship with Latin America rooted in the mischief of the Dulles brothers, epitomized by the coup against Jocobo Arbenz coup in Guatemala.  They refused to accept or work with Fidel Castro and then Allen's people constructed what became the ill-fated Bay of Pigs mission that so-discredited Eisenhower's successor.  Perhaps most important they set the table for our intervention in Viet Nam.  Kinzer suggests that Forster promoted policy probably prolonged the Cold War, the remnants of which pertain in the Putin era.

Without letting Foster and Allen off the hook, Stephen Kinzer ends on a cautionary note.  The brothers did their thing, but in large measure they reflected what Americans wanted them to do.  As suggested in previous posts, we the people bear substantial responsibility for what our leaders do.  In some cases that's the result of our remaining silent or not voting/participating, but often they are simply giving voice to what we believe.  Constant polling only feeds that syndrome.  And it isn't only the residual effects of Dulles brothers' actions that we feel in 2013; there is something "new" in our world that mirrors theirs.  Communism obsessed them; Islamism plays a similar role in ours.

Just as Foster Dulles painted all his real and imagined foes with a simplistic common brush.  We have a tendency to do the same.  We become unhinged when Islam of any stripe emerges as a major player in a country's government.  Dulles equated Communism with brutal dictatorship even where the two were not in fact aligned.  We seem to think that Islam oriented rule and terrorism are always one and the same.   For Forster an autocratic Christian dictator got a pass while a socialist leader who came to power through democratic vote was deemed a danger.  The 1950s fear of Communism led to an uptick in spying and, albeit enabled by the most primitive technology, surveillance.   What we're doing today is not new; it's just more sophisticated and consequently more pervasive.  By the way, in their day we listened in on foreign leaders and they listened in on ours.  While both Communism and Islamism have their unquestioned dark sides, there was an overreaction and a semblance of irrationality in the Dulles approach and in ours.

The tale of two powerful brothers is both fascinating and disturbing.  We can and should look at it as a cautionary tale.  Cautionary, not because it's something that can happen again, but because it still is happening.  We continue to look at foreign countries through American eyes measured against our sense of ourselves, our presumed exceptionalism.  We are often clueless and worse uncurious about other cultures and ways.  When Foster Dulles refused to grasp Zhou Enlai's outstretched hand, he didn't understand what being dissed means to an Asian.  It was undiplomatic but more so an expression of arrogance and ignorance.  We still send out our representatives with poor or non-existent language skills and knowledge of culture.  Disrespect comes in many forms.  In the end, the Dulles formula probably did us more damage than good.  There were consequences and there should have been lessons.  We've felt the first but I'm not sure we learned from the second.

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My book Transcenders: Living beyond religion and the religion wars is available in print and as an eBook.  Both versions are available at Amazon; the electronic iBooks version can be found at iTunes; a Nook version at Barnes & Noble.