‘50s Redux

Listening to the official explanations of the recent U.S. missile attacks on what are said to be terrorist strongholds and arsenals in Afghanistan and Sudan, we seem to have tuned into a “golden oldie” station--Cold War tunes from the hit parade of diplomatic yesterdays. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright tells us that Osama bin Laden has “basically declared war” on all Americans, anywhere and everywhere, and cautions that this will be a “long-term battle.” President Bill Clinton has spoken of a “long, ongoing struggle between freedom and fanaticism,” and National Security Advisor Samuel R. Berger got right to the point, asserting that the war on terrorism will require the same “sustained effort” the Cold War did. Recouping a string of failures, the Central Intelligence Agency is back in business--80% of the battle, Berger said, will fall to U.S. intelligence.

Like Albright and Berger, Cold War policy-planners were intent on making people understand that the war they were describing, as novel a form of war then as terrorism is today, was (in the words of a key National Security Council document of 1950) “in fact, a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.” Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson warned Americans that the problem of the Cold War wasn’t a headache to be banished by a pill--”all our lives, the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness will be upon us.”

Even the location of the terrorist threat and the U.S. reprisal looks familiar. The Cold War involved a displacement of superpower conflict onto Third World terrain. It’s hard to believe the United States would have struck without warning a site in a European country believed to be aiding terrorists, particularly, as is the case with Sudan, if that country had recently expelled a top terrorist leader at Washington’s request. The fact that there are obvious differences between today’s war on terrorism and yesterday’s Cold War only makes the similarities in rhetoric more striking.

On the domestic front, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s grand jury has taken up where the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC, left off. HUAC, too, was both authorized and irregular, legally constituted yet not a permanent part of the U.S. governing body. HUAC, too, suspended legal process, and invaded individual privacy in its zeal to nail offenders, extract confessions and impose public penance and humiliation. Perjury was the issue on which the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers case turned as well--though sexual irregularities formed a potent subtext. The idea that the personal is the political and the criminalization of sexual behavior it can entail were born in the 1950s. HUAC took on a wider range of suspects, but Starr has compensated by setting his sights higher. Even Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was forced to back down when he took on the Army and, by implication, its commander in chief. As Vice President Richard M. Nixon reminded President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the time, McCarthy had forgotten “you must not strike at a king unless you can kill him”--a feat which, one way or another, Starr may yet achieve.

In the last decade, for many Americans, the Cold War has become a “good war,” a war we fought because we had to, and won because we deserved to, a moment when our national goals and identity were both clear and triumphant. This view was not always dominant. If Clinton has, as his critics charge, seized on a war against terrorism to divert attention from the scandals dogging his presidency, there is much irony in the fact that the first baby-boomer president, the first president in almost 50 years not to be associated with World War II and the armed forces, the first president from the ‘60s generation that defined itself by its opposition to Cold War policy, has been maneuvered into sponsoring the Cold War’s rebirth.

Almost from its inception as a nation, the United States has been a Goliath that insisted on being billed as David, the monster recast as the hero. Hence the often noted gap between American rhetoric and American actions. When it suits us, we act, as superpowers always have, like a bully, trampling and stonewalling opposition, all the while claiming our only aim is the protection of the democratic ideals we ourselves are violating. A latecomer to the ranks of nations, the United States has never taken its existence for granted--it’s always in the process of asserting, comparing, justifying and extending itself.

The 20th century brought two world wars, separated by the most massive economic crisis in U.S. history, then a cold war against an “evil empire” characterized by a hostile ideology and a planned-economy regime that put significant portions of the world economy off limits to what some critics call U.S. free-trade imperialism. The Cold War provided the first workable ideological justification of the global economy that the U.S. has done so much to facilitate and that today’s terrorists--a guerrilla force operating as a World Wide Web, a network of individuals almost as mobile as global capital--seek to meet on its own ground.

The historian William Appleman Williams described U.S. history as “empire as a way of life,” and it’s not clear that we have ever cohered except as a nation-in-crisis. The end of the Cold War, while an apparent political, economic and military triumph for the U.S., has been something like a disaster on the psychological front. By way of substitute for the pseudo-clarity of conflict, after a brief made-for-TV war in the Persian Gulf, we have had years of scandal--first with O.J. Simpson, and now with Clinton. But there have been unpleasant side effects.

Thanks to the Monica S. Lewinsky affair, the American people have discovered that their self-presentation and chosen representatives are at the mercy of forces like the independent counsel and the news media (for whom they reserve their sternest disapproval), that are, as Anthony Lewis put it in the New York Times, “unelected and unelectable.” Americans are often more gullible in the realm of foreign affairs, a subject about which they know they are under-informed, than in daily life, close-at-hand matters like sexual conduct, lying or privacy rights, matters on which they have every reason to believe they are expert.

Clinton defenders and detractors agree that the scandals have diminished the presidency, as well as this particular president. The imperial presidency of the Cold War has become expendable--in part, because the corporations that control the global economy, while still needing a national spokesperson, have less need of state muscle to insure their operations than they did even a few decades ago. Clinton’s only remaining trump card on the domestic front is our shockingly uneven and increasingly volatile prosperity. Whatever presidential prerogative, if any, he manages to resurrect in the next two years, his presidency will be more submissive to economic authority--the presidency now needs rather than bestows protection.

Clinton has managed to catch it both going and coming. The lamentable, unprecedented invasion of presidential privacy and privilege expresses not only the victory of Cold War aims revamped for the 21st century, but a revulsion, albeit a strategically faint-hearted one, against the Cold War legacy. Just as Congress today scapegoats the tobacco industry while ignoring the comparable criminal behavior of other major corporations, so Starr spotlights in its most trivial incarnation the habit of presidential mendacity for which the imperatives of the Cold War served as prescribed Miracle-Gro.

Harry S. Truman and Eisenhower put in place the mechanisms, exemplified by the CIA and the doctrine of “plausible deniability,” that allowed the chief executive to be party to covert coups and undeclared wars. While some of the apparatus was dismantled after Watergate, enough remained for Ronald Reagan, in Iran-Contra, to get away with public lies of the utmost seriousness, involving a clear betrayal of national trust. There’s a certain demented logic to the fact that when presidential lying was finally shoved to the forefront of public attention, the issue should be the laughably minor one of consensual sex between two adults. Microscopes can’t do the work of telescopes or wide-angle cameras.

Freud used the term “screen memory” to describe this process of focusing on the insignificant detail while ignoring the larger picture. You can’t forget a disturbing event or unpleasant fact, but you don’t want to remember it either, so you recall a part instead of the whole--the detail screens from view the phenomenon, the context, that, in fact, defines it. As long as Americans refuse to look honestly at the full legacy of the Cold War, they will not only be likely but eager to repeat it. As long as they refuse to face the pervasiveness and depth of lying in U.S. public life, they will prosecute the amateurs, the small fry of prevarication, while ignoring or rewarding the pros.

If the Cold War was really a war, don’t we need in its wake something like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body whose task it is to examine the crimes of the victors as well as those of the vanquished?*