What is Johnson’s rationale for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution? How does it change American involvement in Vietnam? What powers does it give Johnson? How strategies and sources do the directors of the documentary The Vietnam War use to convey the history?

_TheColdWar1 xcrashcoursecoldwarasia1 crashcoursecoldwar1

 What is Johnson’s rationale for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution? How does it change American involvement in Vietnam? What powers does it give Johnson? How strategies and sources do the directors of the documentary The Vietnam War use to convey the history? How do the clips add to or complicate the information in the Crash Course videos? What, in the assignment, particularly stands out to you and why? (Such as what interests you, upsets you, confuses you, etc. There is not a wrong answer to this last question, as long as you answer it in your own words.) 

just like last time only use only the pdf given and the video. just answer the question in paragraph form 2 paragraph is enough the doc named The Cold War has some more information such as the videos (If you would rather read the transcriptions of the videos offline than stream the videos, I have uploaded PDFs).

Watch: Burns, Ken and Lynn Novick. “The US Maddox is Attacked.” The Vietnam War. PBS: 2017. https://ny.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/457614e5-9bb5-444c-bde9-ccf31eeaa011/uss-maddox-is-attacked-video-ken-burns-lynn-novick-the-vietnam-war/

Watch: Burns, Ken and Lynn Novick. “The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.” The Vietnam War. PBS: 2017.

https://ny.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/fb9582a2-4c61-42ad-b4c9-9de446045c4a/gulf-of-tonkin-resolution-video-ken-burns-lynn-novick-the-vietnam-war/

What is Johnson’s rationale for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution? How does it change American involvement in Vietnam? What powers does it give Johnson? How strategies and sources do the directors of the documentary The Vietnam War use to convey the history? How do the clips add to or complicate the information in the Crash Course videos? What, in the assignment, particularly stands out to you and why? (Such as what interests you, upsets you, confuses you, etc. There is not a wrong answer to this last question, as long as you answer it in your own words.)

Video 1-

Video 2-

Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course US History, and today we’re going to talk about the Cold
War again. Really less about the “cold,” more about the “war.” As usual, we’re not going to focus
so much on the generals and the tactics, but instead on why the wars were fought and what it all
meant.

And today we get to visit a part of the world that we haven’t seen much on this series: [spins] Asia.
Not my best work.

(Intro)

Korean War (0:28)

So, we’re gonna start today with the place where the Cold War really heated up, at least as far as
America’s concerned.

Mr Green, it’s Vietnam.

Close, Me from the Past, but like all your romantic endeavors, unsuccessful. The correct answer is
of course Korea. Like Me From the Past, many Americans have forgotten about the Korean War,
which lasted three years from 1950 to 1953 and is sometimes called the Forgotten War. But it was
real.

The Korean War was the first real like shooting war that Americans were involved in after World War
II and it was the only time that American troops directly engaged with an honest to goodness
Communist power. I’m referring not to North Korea, but to China, which became communist in
1949 and qualifies as a major world power because it was, and also is, huge. We love you, China.
Just kidding, you’re not watching, because of the Great Firewall!

So the end of WWII left Korea split between a Communist north led by Kim Il “Crazypants” Sung
and an anti-communist but hardly democratic South led by Syngman Rhee. The two were
supposed to reunite, but that was impossible because they were constantly fighting, fighting that
cost around 100,000 lives.

The civil war between the two Koreas turned into a full-fledged international conflict in June of
1950, when Kim Il Sung invaded the South, and the US responded. Truman thought that Kim’s
invasion was being pushed by the Soviets, and that it was a challenge to the “Free World.”

Truman went to the United Nations and he got authorization, but he didn’t go to Congress and
never called the Korean War a “war.” Insisting instead that American troops were leading a UN
“police action”, but that was kind of a misleading statement.

General Douglas MacArthur was in command of this tiny little police force at the start of the war,
because he was the highest ranking general in the region. He was also really popular, at least with
the press, although not so much with other generals, or with the president.

Under MacArthur, UN forces – which basically meant American and South Korean forces — pushed
the North Koreans back past the 38th parallel where the two countries had been divided, and then
Truman made a fateful decision: the United States would try to re-unify Korea as a non-communist
state. Which, if you’ve looked at a map recently, you’ll notice went swimmingly.

America’s allies and the UN all agreed to this idea, so up north they went, all the way to the
northern border with China at the Yalu river. At that point, Chinese forces, feeling that American
forces were a smidge too close to China, counter-attacked on November 1, 1950, and by
Christmas, the two sides were stalemated again at the 38th parallel, right where they started.

The war dragged on for two more years, with the U.S. pursuing a “scorched earth” policy and
dropping more bombs on Korea than had been dropped in the entire Pacific theater during WWII.
The two sides tried to negotiate a peace treaty, but the sticking point was the repatriation of North
Korean and Chinese prisoners who didn’t want to go back to their communist homelands.

Meanwhile, at home, Americans were growing tired of a war that they weren’t winning, which
helped to swing the election of 1952 for Dwight Eisenhower. Also he was also running against
perennial presidential loser Adlai Stevenson, who was perceived as an egghead intellectual
because his name was Adlai Stevenson.

In addition to helping get Ike elected, the Korean War had a number of profound effects. First and
most importantly, it was expensive, both in terms of lives and money. In 3 years of fighting 33,629
Americans were killed, 102,000 were wounded and nearly 4 million Koreans and Chinese were
killed, wounded, or missing. The majority of Korean casualties were civilians.

The Korean War also further strengthened executive power in the United States – Truman went to
war without a declaration, and Congress acquiesced – this doesn’t mean that the war was initially
was unpopular, it wasn’t. People wanted to see America do something about Communism, and
allowing Kim to take the south and possibly threaten Japan was unacceptable.

However, the whole idea that you don’t really need to declare war to go to war, while not new in
America, sure has been important the last 60 years. And the Korean War also strengthened the
Cold War mentality. I mean, this was the height of the Red Scare. Also, the Korean War set the
stage for America’s longer, more destructive, and more well known engagement in Asia, the
Vietnam War.

Mystery Document (4:17)

Oh it’s time for the Mystery Document? The rules here are simple. I guess the author of the Mystery
Document. I’m either right or I get shocked. Alright, let’s see what we’ve got.

The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 states: “All men are born
free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.”
Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the
French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,
have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted
contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have
deprived our people of every democratic liberty.

Well, Stan, that sounds like a Frenchman who really doesn’t want to be French anymore. So it’s
somebody who’s very disappointed by the way the France has been running their colonies. I’m
going to guess that it’s North Vietnamese leader and Crash Course chalk board person: Ho Chi
Minh. Wait, Stan says he needs his real name. It’s Nguyen Sinh Cung. Yes!

So, this document it points out that, at least rhetorically, Ho Chi Minh was fighting for liberation
from a colonial power as much as, if not more than, he was trying to establish a communist
dictatorship in Vietnam. But because of the Cold War and its prevailing theories, the United States
could only see Ho as a communist stooge, a tool of the Kremlin.

Vietnam War Background (5:36)

Under the so-called “domino theory”, Vietnam was just another domino that had to be propped up
or else the rest of South East Asia would fall to communism like a row of, dominoes.

Now, in retrospect, this was a fundamental misunderstanding, but it’s important to remember that
at the time, people felt that they didn’t want the Soviet Union to expand the way that, say, Nazi
Germany had. America’s involvement in Vietnam, like most things Cold War, dates back to World
War II, but it really picked up in the 1950s as we threw our support behind the French in their war to
maintain their colonial empire.

Wait, Stan, how- why would we fight with the French to maintain a colonial empire? Oh right,
because we were blinded by our fear of communism.

Now, Eisenhower wisely refused to send troops or use atomic weapons to help the French. Really
good call. And the Geneva Accords were supposed to set up elections to reunite North and South,
which had been divided after WWII, but then we didn’t let that happen. Because sometimes
democracies don’t vote for our guy.

Instead, the U.S. began supporting the repressive, elitist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem as a bulwark
against communism. Diem was a Catholic in a majority Buddhist country and his support of
landowners didn’t win him any fans. But he was against communism, which was good enough for
us.

American Involvement (6:42)

The first major involvement of American troops, then called advisors, began in the early 1960s.
Technically, their role was to advise the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, also called ARVN. It was
doomed. How did they not know this was doomed? Let’s fight for ARVN. Against this guy. You are
scary. Seriously.

Anyway, pretty quickly, this advising turned into shooting, and the first American advisors were
killed in 1961, during John Kennedy’s presidency. However, most Americans consider Vietnam to
be Lyndon Johnson’s war, and they aren’t wrong. The major escalation of American troops started
under Johnson, especially in 1965 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This is one of the great
incidents in all of American history.

So, in August 1964, North Korean patrol boats attacked US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin. As a
result, Johnson asked Congress to authorize the president to take “all necessary measures to repel
armed attack” in Vietnam, which Congress dutifully did with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

So why is this one of the great incidents in American history? Because the whole patrol boats
attacking warships thing? That didn’t happen. None of that stuff happened, except we did actually
go to war.

Now, in retrospect, this seems like a terrible idea, but it was very popular at the time because, to
quote the historian James Patterson, “Preventing Communism, after all, remained the guiding star
of American policy.”

Wait a second, did I just say to quote historian James Patterson, like the crime novelist? Oh it’s a
different guy apparently. That’s a bummer. He doesn’t write his own books because he’s so busy
with his secret career – being a historian.

So, the number of American troops began a steady increase and so did the bombing. The frightfully
named Operation Rolling Thunder began in the spring of 1965. And in March of that year, two
Marine battalions arrived at Da Nang airbase authorized to attack the enemy. No advising about it.

But, Johnson didn’t actually tell the American public that our troops had this authorization, which
was part of a widening credibility gap between what the government told Americans about the war
and what was really happening. Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

The Vietnam Battleground – Thought Bubble (8:41)

By 1968 there were about half a million American soldiers in Vietnam and the government was
confidently saying that victory was just around the corner. But then in January, Vietnamese forces
launched the Tet Offensive and while it was eventually repelled, the fact that the North Vietnamese
were able to mount such an offensive cast doubts on the claims that U.S. victory was imminent.

The Vietnam War itself was particularly brutal, with much of the ground fighting taking place in
jungles. Rather than large-scale offensives, troops were sent on search and destroy missions and
often it was difficult to tell enemy from civilians. Capturing territory wasn’t meaningful, so
commanders kept track of body counts. Like, if more enemy were killed than Americans, we were
winning.

In addition to jungle fighting, there was a lot of bombing. Like, more bombs were dropped on North
and South Vietnam than both the Axis and Allied powers used in all of World War II. The U.S. used
chemical defoliants like Agent Orange to get rid of that pesky jungle, and also napalm, which was
used to burn trees, homes, and people.

Television coverage meant that Vietnam was the first war brought into American living rooms. And
people were horrified by what they saw. They were especially shocked at the My Lai massacre,
which took place in 1968 but was only reported a year later, in 1969.

These draftees were young, and disproportionately from the lower classes because enrollment in
college or grad school earned you a deferment. So unlike previous American wars, the burden of
fighting did not fall evenly across socioeconomic class. Thanks, Thought Bubble.

Nixon’s Policy (10:05)

So, as Americans at home became increasingly aware of what was going on in Vietnam, protests
started. But it’s important to remember that the majority of Americans were not out in the streets or
on college campuses burning their draft cards. Right up through 1968 and maybe even 1970, most
Americans supported the Vietnam War.

During the 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon promised that he had a secret plan to end
the war and appealed to the silent majority of Americans who weren’t on board with the anti-war
movement. So, the first part of Nixon’s secret plan was “Vietnamization” – gradually withdrawing
American troops and leaving the fighting to the Vietnamese.

The second part involved more bombing and actually escalating the war by sending American
troops into Cambodia in order to cut off the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, named for this guy, a
supply line that connected north to south. Not only did this not work, it also destabilized Cambodia
and helped the Khmer Rouge to come to power.

The Khmer Rouge represented the absolute worst that Communism had to offer, forcing almost all
Cambodians into communes and massacring one third of the country’s population. So, not a great
secret plan.

In the United States, by 1970, the anti-war protests had grown and discontent within the armed
forces was enormous. Vietnam veterans, including future almost-president John Kerry, were
participating in protests. And things got even worse in 1971, when the New York Times published
the Pentagon Papers, classified documents that showed that the government had been misleading
the public about the war for years.

Congress eventually responded by passing the War Powers Act in 1973, which was supposed to
limit the president’s ability to send troops overseas without their approval and prevent another Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution. Oh, how does that work out, Stan?

Stan: Not great.

John: Yeah. I’ll say.

After five years of negotiations, Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger were able to end
America’s involvement in Vietnam. In 1973 the Paris Peace Agreement made it possible for America
to withdraw its troops, although it left North Korea in control of some of South Vietnam.

Outcome (12:03)

The war between North and South Vietnam, however, continued until 1975, when the North finally
conquered the South and created a single, communist Vietnam. The Vietnam War cost the United
States more than $100 billion; 58,000 Americans died as well as between 3 and 4 million
Vietnamese people.

And Vietnam was the first war in America that we definitively lost. We lost it because we didn’t
understand the Vietnamese, and we didn’t understand why they were fighting. To return to the
historian James Patterson, “the unyielding determination of the enemy … wore down the American

commitment, which proved to be far less resolute.”

America expected that its superior technology and wealth would eventually wear down the
Vietnamese, and they’d just give up communism. But the Vietnamese weren’t fighting for
communism. They were fighting for Vietnam. This fundamental misunderstanding, combined with
the government’s dishonesty, changed Americans’ relationship with their leaders.

Before Vietnam, most Americans trusted their government, even when they knew it did horrible
things. But, after the war, and largely because of it, that trust was gone. Thanks for watching. I’ll
see you next week.

Credits (13:09)

Crash Course is made with the assistance of all of these nice people and also through your support
at Subbable. Subbable is a voluntary subscription service that allows you to support Crash Course
at the monthly price of your choice including 0 dollars. So if you enjoy and value Crash Course, I
hope you’ll consider supporting us through Subbable. If you can’t afford to do so, that’s fine. We’re
just glad that you’re watching. You can click my face, or there’s also a link in the video info.

Thanks again for watching Crash Course, and as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be
awesome.

John: Hi, I’m John Green. This is Crash Course US History, and today we’re going to talk about the
Cold War. The Cold War is called “cold” because it supposedly never heated up into actual armed
conflict. Which means, you know, that it wasn’t a war.

Past John: Mr. Green, Mr. Green, but if the war on Christmas is a war and the war on drugs is a
war…

Present John: You’re not going to hear me say this often in your life, me from the past, but that was
a good point. At least the Cold War was not an attempt to make war on a noun, which almost never
works, because nouns are so resilient.

And to be fair, the Cold War did involve quite a lot of actual war, from Korea to Afghanistan as the
world’s two superpowers, the United States and the USSR, sought ideological and strategic
influence throughout the world. So perhaps it’s best to think of the Cold War as an era lasting
roughly from 1945 to 1990.

Discussions of the Cold War tend to center on international and political history, and those are very
important, which is why we’ve talked about them in the past. This, however, is United States
history, so let us heroically gaze, as Americans so often do, at our own navel.

Stan, why did you turn the globe to the green parts of not-America? I mean I guess to be fair, we
were a little bit obsessed with this guy.

So the Cold War gave us great spy novels, independence movements, an arms race, cool movies,
like “Doctor Strange Love” and “War Games”, one of the most evil mustaches in history, but it also
gave us a growing awareness that the greatest existential threat to human beings is ourselves. It
changed the way we imagined the world and humanity’s role in it.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner famously said, “Our tragedy today is a
general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no
longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” So today we’re
going to look at how that came to be the dominant question of human existence and whether we
can ever get past it.

(Intro plays)

So after World War II the US and the USSR were the only two nations with any power left. The
United States was a lot stronger. We had atomic weapons for starters, and also the Soviets had
lost twenty million people in the war, and they were lead by a sociopathic, mustachioed Joseph
Stalin. But the US still had worries, we needed a strong free market oriented Europe and, to a lesser
extent, Asia, so that all the goods we were making could find happy homes.

The Soviets, meanwhile, were concerned with something more immediate, a powerful Germany
invading them, again. Germany, and please do not take this personally Germans, was very, very
slow to learn the central lesson of world history: do not invade Russia, unless you’re the Mongols.
[Mongoltage]

So at the end of World War II, the USSR encouraged the creation of pro communist governments in
Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland, which was a relatively easy thing to encourage, because those
nations were occupied by Soviet troops.

The idea for the Soviets was to create a communist buffer between them and Germany, but to the
US it looked like communism might just keep expanding, and that would be really bad for us
because who would buy all of our sweet, sweet industrial goods?

So America responded with the policy of containment, as introduced in diplomat George F.
Kennan’s famous Long Telegram. Communism could stay where it was, but it would not be allowed
to spread. And ultimately this was why we fought very real wars in both Korea and Vietnam.
As a government report from 1950 put it, the goals of containment were one: block further
expansion of Soviet power, two: expose the falsities of Soviet pretensions, three: induce a
retraction of the Kremlin’s control and influence, and four: in general, foster the seeds of
destruction within the Soviet system.

Harry Truman, who as you’ll recall became president in 1945 after Franklin Delano pres-for-life
Roosevelt died, was a big fan of containment, and the first real test of it came in Greece and Turkey
in 1947.

This was a very strategically valuable region, because it was near the Middle East. And I don’t know
if you’ve noticed this, but the United States has been just like a smidge interested in the Middle
East the last several decades because of oil, glorious oil.

Right, so Truman announced the so called Truman Doctrine, because, you know, why not name a
doctrine after yourself, in which he pledged to support “Freedom loving peoples against
Communist threats.” Which is all fine and good, but who will protect us against “peoples,” the
pluralization of an already plural noun.

Anyway, we eventually sent $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey and we were off to the Cold
War races.

The Truman Doctrine created the language through which Americans would view the world, with
America as “free” and Communists as tyrannical. According to our old friend Eric Foner: “The
speech set a precedent for American assistance to anti-communists regimes throughout the world
no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed
against the Soviet Union.”

It also led to the creation of a new security apparatus: the National Security Council, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, all of which were somewhat immune from
government oversight and definitely not democratically elected. And the Containment Policy and
the Truman Doctrine also lay the foundations for a military build up, an ‘Arms Race’, which would
become a key feature of the Cold War.

But it wasn’t all about the military, at least at first: like the Marshall Plan was first introduced at
Harvard’s commencement address in June 1947 by, get this, George Marshall, in what turned out
to be, like, the second most important commencement address in all of American history.

Yes, yes Stan, okay, it was a great speech, thank you for noticing.

Thought Bubble (5:18)

Alright let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

The Marshall Plan was a response to economic chaos in Europe brought on by a particularly harsh
winter that strengthened support for communism in France and Italy. The plan sought to use US aid
to combat the economic instability that provided fertile fields for communism: as Marshall said,
“Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty,
desperation, and chaos.”

Basically, it was a New Deal for Europe, and it worked. Western Europe was rebuilt so that by 1950
production levels in industry had eclipsed pre-war levels, and Europe was on its way to becoming
a US-style, capitalist, mass-consumer society, which it still is… kind of.

Japan, although not technically part of the Marshall Plan, was also rebuilt. General Douglas
MacArthur was basically the dictator there, forcing Japan to adopt a new constitution, giving
women the vote, and pledging that Japan would forswear war, in exchange for which the United
States effectively became Japan’s defense force. This allowed Japan to spend its money on other
things, like industry, which worked out really well for them.

Meanwhile, Germany was experiencing the first Berlin crisis. At the end of the war, Germany was
divided into East and West, and even though the capital, Berlin, was entirely in the East, it was also
divided into East and West. This meant that West Berlin was dependant on shipments of goods
from West Germany, through East Germany, and then in 1948 Stalin cut off the roads to West
Berlin. So the Americans responded with an 11 month long airlift of supplies that eventually led to
Stalin lifting the blockade in 1948 and building the Berlin Wall which stood until 1991 when the
Kool-Aid Guy – no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that wasn’t when the Berlin Wall was built, that was in
1961, I just wanted to give Thought Bubble the opportunity to make that joke.

Thanks Thought Bubble. So, right, the Wall wasn’t built until 1961, but 1949 did see Germany
officially split into 2 nations, and also the Soviets detonated their first Atomic Bomb, and NATO was
established, and the Chinese Revolution ended in Communist victory.

So by the end of the 1950 the contours of the Cold War had been established; West vs East,
Capitalist freedom vs Communist totalitarianism.

At least from where I’m sitting. Although now apparently I’m gonna change where I’m sitting
because it’s time for the mystery document.

Mystery document (7:23)

The rules here are simple: I guess the author of the mystery document and about 55% of the time I
get shocked by the shock pen.

“We must organize and enlist the energies and resources of the free world in a positive program for
peace which will frustrate the Kremlin design for world domination by creating a situation in the free
world to which the Kremlin will be compelled to adjust. Without such a cooperative effort led by the
United States, we will have to make gradual withdrawals under pressure until we discover one day
that we have sacrificed positions of vital interest. It is imperative that this trend be reversed by a
much more rapid and concerted build-up of the actual strength of both the United States and the
other nations of the free world.”

I mean all I can say about it is that it sounds American and like it was written in like 1951 and it
seems kind of like a policy paper or something really boring, so I… I mean… Yeah I’m just going to

have to take the shock. Ahh!

National Security Council report NSC-68? Are you kidding me Stan? Not-not 64 or 81 – 68?! This is
ridiculous! I call injustice!

Cold War Policy in the US (8:27)

Anyway, as the apparently wildly famous NSC-68 shows: the US government cast the Cold War as
a rather epic struggle between freedom and tyranny, and that led to remarkable political consensus,
both democrats and republicans supported most aspects of Cold War policy, especially the military
buildup part.

Now of course there were some critics like Walter Lippmann who worried that casting foreign policy
in such stark ideological terms would result in the US getting on the wrong side of many conflicts,
especially as former colonies sought to remove the bonds of empire and become independent
nations.

But yeah, no, nothing like that ever happened. It’s not like that happened in Iran, or Nicaragua, or
Argentina, or Brazil, or Guatemala, or – Stan are you really gonna make me list all of them? Fine. Or
Haiti, of Paraguay, or the Philippines, or Chile, or Iraq, or Indonesia, or Zaire – I’m sorry, there are a
lot of them, okay?

But these interventions were viewed as necessary to prevent the spread of communism which was
genuinely terrifying to people and it’s important to understand that. Like, National Security agencies
pushed Hollywood to produce anti-communist movies like The Red Menace which scared
people and the CIA funded magazines, news broadcasts, concerts, art exhibitions, that gave
examples of American freedom. It even supported painters like Jackson Pollock and the Museum of
Modern Art in New York because American expressionism was the vanguard of artistic freedom
and the exact opposite of Soviet socialist realism. I mean have you seen Soviet paintings? Look at
the hardy ankles on these socialist comrade peasants.

Also, because the Soviets were atheists, at least in theory, Congress in 1954 added the
words ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance as a sign of America’s resistance to Communism.

The Cold War also shaped domestic policy. Anti-Communist sentiment, for instance, prevented
Truman from extending the social policies of the New Deal. The program that he dubbed The Fair
Deal would have increased the minimum wage, extended national health insurance, and increased
public housing, social security, and aid to education, but the American Medical Association lobbied
against Truman’s plan for national health insurance calling it ‘socialized medicine,’ and congress
was in no mood to pay money for socialized anything. That problem goes away… [headdesk]

But the government did make some domestic investments as a result of the Cold War. In the name
of national security the government spent money on education, research in science, technology like
computers, and transportation infrastructure. In fact, we largely have the Cold War to thank for our
marvellous interstate highway system, although part of the reason congress approved it was to set
up speedy evacuation routes in the event of nuclear war.

And speaking of nuclear war, it’s worth noting that a big part of reason the Soviets were able to
develop nuclear weapons so quickly was thanks to espionage, like for instance by physicist and

spy Klaus Fuchs – I think I’m pronouncing that right. Fuchs worked on the Manhattan Project and
leaked information to the Soviets and then later helped the Chinese to build their first bomb. Julius
Rosenberg also gave atomic secrets to the Soviets and was eventually executed, as was his less
clearly guilty wife Ethel.

And it’s important to remember all that when thinking about the United States’ obsessive fear that
there were communists in our midst. This began in 1947 with Truman’s loyalty review system which
required government employees to prove their patriotism when accused of disloyalty. How do you
prove your loyalty? Rat out your co-workers as communists. No, seriously though, that program
never found any communists.

This all culminated of course with the Red Scare and the rise of Wisconsin senator Joseph
McCarthy, an inveterate liar who became enormously powerful after announcing in February 1950
that he had a list of 205 communists who worked in the State department. In fact, he had no such
thing and McCarthy never identified a single disloyal American but the fear of Communism
continued. In 1951’s Dennis vs United States, the Supreme court upheld the notion that being a
Communist leader itself was a crime.

In this climate of fear any criticism of the government and its policies or the US in general was seen
as disloyalty. There was only one question: when will I be blown up? And it encouraged loyalty
because only the government could prevent the spread of communism and keep us from being
blown up.

We’ve talked a lot about different ways that Americans have imagined freedom this year, but this
was a new definition of freedom: the government exists in part to keep us free from massive
destruction.

So the Cold War changed America profoundly: the US has remained a leader on the world stage
and continued to build a large, powerful, and expensive national state. But it also changed the way
we imagined what it means to be free, and what it means to be safe.

Thanks for watching, I’ll see you next week.

Credits (12:49)

Crash Course is created by all of these nice people and it is possible because of you and your
support through subbable.com. Subbable is a crowdfunding website that allows you to support
stuff you love on a monthly basis. Our Subbable subscribers make this show possible, thanks to
them. If you value Crash Course please check out our Subbable, there are great perks there. And
thanks to all of you for watching. As we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome.

[Circus music] Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Wait, wait, wait. Stan, is that music copyrighted,
the do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do? Alright, it’s not. Woo. That saved us a thousand dollars.

Questions? Problems? Email barrkj@gmail.com.