by I. F. Stone
Right wing radical Republicans had been searching since the Hoover days in the early 1930’s for a war to propel their man Eisenhower along with his like minded cronies Nixon, the Dulles brothers, Earl Butts and their rabble rousing Joe McCarthy spewing anti-communistic hate mongering rhetoric. If you don’t vote Republican you are a commie!
Ironically the Korean War would begin a long string of military defeats making World War Two the last war the Americans would win.
I truly found this fascinating factual historical book an intriguing and enlightening look inside the political forces that moved America with poisonous personalities. NATO and the United Nations locked horns with Soviet Russia and Red China leading the Americans to discover they no longer had military supremacy.
Excerpts:
The major conflicts that the United States has fought since 1945, the Korean War is the least understood, the most likely to be “forgotten,” and the most important one of all. It was the occasion for Pentagon spending to reach its highest point during the Cold War, and for establishing hundreds of American military bases on a world scale; it was the crisis that created the national security state at home and at large, including a permanent standing army for the first time in American history; and the prosecution of the war stabilized a containment doctrine that had been under attack, if only because China intervened and demolished the American attempt to overthrow the North Korean regime. The Korean War is also the longest-lasting of American conflicts. Some twenty-five thousand US combat troops arrived in Korea in September 1945 to set up a three-year military government, and today, nearly seventy years later, twenty-eight thousand American soldiers remain in the South.
The British were curious to know how the Russians got so much more power out of this engine than the British did. “How have the Russians,” the question was put, “obtained such high performance from a centrifugal flow engine?” The Manchester Guardian’s aviation correspondent was quoted as asking how the Russians had managed to “fly at the speed of sound” with such an engine. Aviation Age had warned, in its special Russian survey number, that “the industrial-technical gap between the U.S.A. and the USSR is not as great as some Americans think.”
The subsonic bombers on which the American military had depended for delivery of the atom bomb in a future war against Russia were indefensible against jet interceptors flying at or above the speed of sound.
I. F. Stone (1907-1989) was an American journalist and publisher. After working at the New York Post, the Nation (as editor from 1940-1946), and PM, he started his own journal, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, in 1953. This publication notably covered the New Deal, McCarthyism, the birth of Israel, and the Vietnam War. In 1999, I. F. Stone’s Weekly was voted the second-best print-journalism product of the entire twentieth century in a poll of fellow reporters. Stone also published more than a dozen books and was considered one of the most influential journalists of the post-war period.
