Ted Does the Cold War
by Rick Perlstein, In These Times, October 18, 1998 (p. 38)
This is how it all must have come about. First, in 1994, media baron Ted Turner, looking to fill a programming hole on his flagship network, CNN, green-lighted the epic 25-part documentary Cold War.
Then came the extraordinary ingathering of the anonymous dozens before director Sir Jeremy Isaacs' cameras: the "candy bomber" of the Berlin Airlift of 1946; the wizened Greek dirt-farmer who gratefully received a mule from the Marshall Plan in 1947; the matron whose Communist fiance was excommunicated by the Catholic Church before the U.S.-rigged Italian general elections of 1948 -- and on and on, all the way up to the astonished CIA clerk who looked up from the water-cooler in 1991 to learn that her mild-mannered officemate Aldrich Ames was the most audacious spy since Mata Hari.
Then came the interviews with every president and premier and master spy and four-star general still standing -- and even, after marathon negotiations, a marathon interview with Fidel Castro.
Then came the burrowings in yard after yard of just-now-opened and just-yesterday-declassified footage to find the flame-licked ghosts fleeing from an engine fire in a Soviet ICBM plant; the priceless shots from the Stasi's all-seeing toiletcam; Times Square, deserted, two minutes after the air-horn blows for an apocalyptic fire drill.
Then came the bills. Lots of bills. So before paying, Ted Turner took the time to do what I have just done now: Sit down and watch, back to back, the 25 episodes of the show that will own the next seven months of Sundays on CNN. And then he tore off one more check: A billion dollars for the United Nations. Muttering, dazedly: "There has to be a better way to run a world."
Watch Cold War. Get past the utter conventionality of its format -- talking heads, newsreels, stock footage of a bustling Wall Street trading floor to let you know it's the '20s followed by the soup line that lets you know it's the '30s -- because it is nuanced, deep and opinionated, and because its pre-eminent conclusion, unimpregnable, is also mine: one should feel nostalgia for the Cold War as one feels nostalgia for a grease fire.
Cold War's opening shot (typical of the dogged industry of these documentarians, I don't think it has been seen before) is of an underground amphitheater, deep beneath a palatial Washington hostelry, where members of Congress were to assemble in the event of nuclear war. The camera pans over the bunk beds they were to sleep in, then over an entire magazine of small arms set aside to keep order should the august legislators' nerves snap. Consider it an allegory of the inexorable logic to be ground out in the 25 episodes to follow: Security becomes by turns a higher law than the lawmakers.
There is good and evil in this Cold War, not just inexorable logic: It is fitting and proper that we should see that what we did in Berlin was good and what the Soviet Union did in Berlin was evil. The USSR punished the population of the eastern sector of the city by attempting to starve the entire city. Thirteen years later, they punished Berliners with a wall. In both cases, Americans took heroic risks for their freedom. Everyone knows this, but here you feel it. Who knew that pilots transporting coal for the Berlin Airlift had to fly with their hatches open to keep the coal dust from gumming their instruments? Or that kids who visited their grandparents in East Berlin in the summer of 1961 didn't get back to West Berlin the next fall?
But from good and evil emerged the dialectic. Berlin made it easier for American militarists to tell themselves they were American idealists. The same year of the Berlin Airlift, the CIA rigged its first election (in Italy, where the Communist Party's sin was finding itself the most popular partner in the left's coalition). The same year of Kennedy's ringing rhetorical defense of Berlin, our embassy didn't need the help of the CIA to oversee an assassination (in South Vietnam, where President Diem's sin was ineffectual management of our $ 1 million a day in aid). Berlin made it reasonable for us to believe that if Russia or China took over anywhere else, children would be starved and no one would be able to leave again.
In truth, the Soviets in Cold War look less the octopus than a skittish eel: Isaacs depicts the Kremlin slithering away from delegation after delegation of supplicating satellites and would-be satellites by telling them to come back for assistance when they become more hard-line, or more soft-line, or when they're worse off, or better off.
Anyway, neither Russia nor China looks in fit shape to take over much of anything. We see a Siberian cornfield ringed with flames as weeping peasants struggle to keep alive the "miracle" strain of trost-resistant corn they have been ordered to plant. We hear of a Beijing glowing with fire as every backyard furnace smelts worthless "iron" to fulfill the Great Leap Forward.
Idealism suggested we rescue these most miserable lands from tyranny. The dialectic -- since the Soviet Union, China and the United States possessed nuclear weapons -- demanded we rescue South Vietnam. Not because it was an especially miserable or important place but because it was an unimportant place. Under the sign of Mutually Assured Destruction, our "credibility" could only be earned in lands so distant that their "loss" would not be "strategic" enough to warrant nuclear retaliation (read: Armageddon).
So the dialectic demands lies. A joke to tell at your next cocktail party: Two B-52 bombers collided in midair in 1966. Three missiles land in Spain, yielding no nuclear explosions, but the conventional devices designed to induce nuclear explosions go off, scattering enough radioactive plutonium to fill 3,500 barrels with contaminated Spanish soil. A fourth bomb is rescued, with the assistance of the entire Sixth Fleet, from the bottom of the sea. American Ambassador Biddle Duke reassures the Spanish public by cavorting in the sun-dappled waters for reporters: "If this is radioactivity," he exclaims, "I love it!"
And the dialectic, as its consummation, demands Afghanistan. (They needed their land war in Asia.)
A witness to the fighting in Vietnam: "You would go out, you would secure a piece of terrain during the daylight hours . . . the helicopters would pick you up at night and fly you back to the security of your base camp." The next morning, it would be as if there had been no battle.
A witness to the fighting in Afghanistan: The Soviets would secure a piece of terrain during the daylight hours. "The next morning we'd have the same situation, as if there had been no battle."
We see the infamous 1965 report from Vietnam on the "Zippo raid": 150 huts burned to the ground because, from one of them, someone had heard gunfire.
We hear testimony from a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan: They rounded up the occupants of one village, poured kerosene over them and set them aflame. "There was no such thing as a peaceful population," he explains. "Yes, it was cruel. Yes, we did it. But those kids were torturing our wounded soldiers with knives."
We learn that Andropov was ready for a withdrawal negotiated through the United Nations, then hear the CIA dismissing the possibility as inconceivable. After all, we had only considered negotiated withdrawal in Vietnam after an extended indiscriminate bombing campaign. So we stepped up our support for the fundamentalist Mujahedeen, who we see Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski addressing in a windswept valley. He points to the mountains -- "That land over there is yours. You'll go back to it one day" -- and he points skyward -- "because your cause is right, and God is on your side." Next we see battlefield footage of a soldier from one bickering faction of God's chosen people berating a soldier from another. The subtitle appears thus: "Move your fat ass and shoot the f*ing rocket!" Soon, the Soviets inaugurate an indiscriminate bombing campaign.
Years later, one or another of those factions may or may not have joined forces with Osama bin Laden in a more discriminating bombing campaign, this one against American embassies in Africa. Years later, reconstituted as the Taliban, one or more of those factions would wreak savage Islamic Holy War in Afghanistan, with considerable more command of the Stinger missiles they had beta-tested for us a decade earlier.
And when the Cold War was over, American militarists like Frank Anderson, head of the CIA's Afghanistan Task Force -- casting his gaze in the direction of the one million Afghan dead and the five million Afghan wounded or forced to flee their homes since 1979, but somehow seeing only the children no longer trapped across the wall in East Berlin -- would style themselves idealists.
"I haven't had a bad night. It's not because I'm not without feeling, or without understanding of how much agony goes along with war. It's just that this was such a contribution to the end of what was otherwise an evil that inflicted other kinds of pain on so many other people that, on balance, it was worth it."
I sympathize with your position, Frank, I really do. But I can't agree. This is not a better world you have made by "winning" the Cold War. It is only a different one.
Rick Perlstein, a contributing editor to Lingua Franca, is writing a book about the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign.