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.