I read a great passage in a book this morning. I think it captures something essential. I hear right-wingers talk a lot about how people on the left ‘hate-America’, or ‘blame America first’. And I hear a lot of people on the left complain about blind, rah-rah, flag-waving patriotism. The truth is, we’ve done a lot of bad things and we’ve done a lot of good things. But this country doesn’t know its own history. And it is my belief that this country will be a better place when people have a fairer picture of what has been done in our name. I wouldn’t have to point out all these flaws in America’s history if people knew about them from the school textbooks, or if CNN ever bothered to discuss them when answering the question: Why do they hate us? In any case, I think the following pretty much nails the difference between history as a right-winger sees it and a left-winger sees it.
The history of the CIA is the secret history of the Cold War. CIA people are cynical in most ways, but the belief in secrets is almost metaphysical. In their bones they believe they know the answer to that ancient paradox of epistemology which asks: If a tree falls in the forest without witness, is there any sound? The CIA would say no. It would agree with historian David Hackett Fisher that history is not what happened but what the surviving evidence says happened. If you can hide the evidence and keep the secrets, then you write the history.
If no one knows we tried to kill Castro, then we didn’t do it. If ITT’s role in Chile is never revealed, then commercial interests had nothing to do with the Allende affair. If the CIA’s role in overthrowing Mossadegh remains hidden, then the Iranians did it all by themselves. If Operation Chaos remains a secret, the CIA never joined the FBI as a threat to American liberties. If the CIA’s mail-opening program is never exposed, then the mails were sacrosanct. If no one knows how many Free World leaders had to be bribed, then we were something purer than the highest bidder.
So it wasn’t just himself and the CIA which [former DCI, Richard] Helms was protecting when kept the secrets [from Congress]. It was the stability of a quarter-century of political arrangements, the notion of a Free World, a “history” of American response to “aggession,” a stark contrast of American “morality” with Communist “expedience,” an illusion of American rectitude unclouded by reality. The true history is not the antithesis of the child’s history; it is not all crime, greed, and imperial reaching. But the true history is a long way from what we tell ourselves on the Fourth of July.
– Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, pp. 381-2, Pocket Books, New York, 1979.
We are at another point in our history where a quarter century of political arrangements are going to be uprooted. And more men like Richard Helms will be pleading guilty to charges of perjury.
Very well. Country without history attempts to destroy histories of other nations.
One can only hope that perjury is indeed prosecuted. I wish I could be more optimistic, but the precedent is pretty bad. When the Congress had Helms cold in a flat out lie, although they charged him with perjury, they didn’t really follow through. If you want to see the dirty details – you can order the video from the Television News Archive at Vanderbuilt University. Here’s the description:
During the House Select Committee on Assassination’s (HSCA) investigation into the death of President Kennedy, they found that David Atlee Phillips had lied. Who was he and why was this important?
Phillips was in charge of Cuban propaganda operations and more during the early sixties. By the time of the HSCA, he had risen to the third most powerful position in the CIA – Chief of the Western Hemisphere.
Phillips had used an alias “Maurice Bishop”, and a highly credible witness (Antonio Veciana) had told the Church Committee, that he had seen “Bishop” with Oswald in Texas.
The Church committee found enough evidence to connect CIA members to the assassination of President Kennedy that they dropped the issue like a hot potato. Fortunately, the American public, newly incensed by the first public airing of the Zapruder film, kept asking their members of Congress to investigate, and eventually the HSCA was formed. (Jim DiEugenio gives a much more interesting and detailed history in our book “The Assassinations.”)
Phillips was so concerned by the accusation that he had been seen with Oswald that he smoked three cigarettes at once in the presence of Dan Hardway and the others questioning him. Hardway and others had definite proof that Phillips had lied on specific matters and wanted very much to get a perjury charge filed against him. They knew if they could turn the screws on Phillips, he might divulge more details of what had really happened. The whole plot might have unravelled.
Instead, as with Helms, no one had the stomach to go after David Phillips. If these guys had been responsible for the Kennedy assassination, and that was exposed, would that have brought the entire system down? Might it have implicated people still in positions of power or high finance? We’ll never know, because no one dared go through that door.
I hope this time it’s different. But as someone who has seen this pattern repeated several times, and knowing how short our leaders are on moral courage, I’m not holding out any hopes.
If we reward those who don’t respect the law, who won’t prosecute when really, they must – what does that make us? Cowards as well? Co-conspirators in the destruction of our country?
Naivete and laziness are not excuses. We need to call for justice or we will never get it.
Something about David Phillips is wrong. Here’s the email his nephew wrote:
Yep. Most serious researchers on the JFK case believe David Phillips was involved. So now an effort is underway to divorce his involvement from the CIA, predictably. I don’t think that will wash! 😉
And Phillips’ falling out with his brother reminds me of Ruth Paine, the woman who befriended Marina Oswald before the assassination. She had a similar falling out with her daughter, who came to believe her mother was in some way involved in the assassination.
Ruth Paine was, oddly enough, taking notes in peace groups in Nicaragua during the Iran-Contra mess. Others in the group assumed she was spying on them. Ruth, of course, has never admitted to such. But her mother’s friend was Allen Dulles’s lover. Hmmmm.
calvin very highly recommends a book by Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United States,” for those who want to know what really happened, not what corporations want us to remember.
The importance of Zinn’s work cannot be underestimated at this crucial time in our history. For example, we’ve always had class warfare initiated by the wealthy. It goes back to day one.
American history, the truth, not the homogenized version that Hannity, O’Reilly, et al like to pretend actually happened.
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covering the period 1945-1960
It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control. Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Electric Corporation, was so happy about the wartime situation that he suggested a continuing alliance between business and the military for “a permanent war economy.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."…hence Eisenhower’s warning:
One of the many tragedies of our foolhardy pre-emption in Iraq is that it is the catalyst that cause many people around the word to reconsider America’s history over the last 50 years in a less flattering light.
What does it meant that we killed Che Gavara and tried to kill Castro in light of our willingness to invade Iraq? That we supported dictatorships in Greece and tolerated them in Spain in the name of Freedom?
Iraq was an obviously imperialist act and it wiped out what good will was earned two generations ago, and forced supporters of America worldwide to question the actions of our country that they were willing to overlook.
W can’t afford to maintain a whitewashed version of history, it will doom us to future “failure[s] of imagination” and an inability to understand the motivations of our enemies.
I love my country in a way that those who have never lived overseas can really understand, but it is a love that grows strong from knowing our history. Not one that is weaker for fear of exposing our secrets.
You can’t whitewash the neo-conservative experiment as easily as we whitewashed to far-right’s influence during the Cold War. First, the far right’s influence was just that, influence, not power, during the Cold War. Second, we won the Cold War.
But at least some of these “cats” are out of the bag. And yet those on the right still aim to portray the US as pure beyond all reason. Such baseless denial on a mass scale can be a dangerous thing.
If you saw my bookshelves it would do you good. I am a history lover. I love american history. it’s some of the best reading around. You find the books and you become hooked.
the problem is that no one teaches it right. they stuff it full of dry dates and droned on facts but, don’t tell the stories and the people and the events. it’s quite dramatic, funny, ironic and full of humanity. It can read like fiction.
Shelby Footes Civil War is riviting and outstanding.
Page Smith’s 8 vol. history of America is the best around.