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- [00:00]
Mark Gagnon
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The Cold War, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating global conflicts to ever happen. And some say it never truly ended. This is a 45 year pissing contest between the United States and the Soviet Union that implicated almost every country on the planet. And today we will be going through all the details. How it started, what led from World War II into the cold War, why the Berlin Wall was actually built not to keep people out, but to keep the East Germans in. We're gonn the Cuban Missile Crisis and how JFK was effectively able to defuse the world's most dominant nuclear threat that we've ever seen. I mean, the world was 90 seconds away from just basically exploding. And of course, we will talk about the real reason that the United States went into Vietnam, the proxy war that ultimately led to America taking the first L on the global stage. We will talk about how it concluded, what brought the Berlin Wall down, and why did the Soviet Union eventually get dissolved? And of course, the resolution that eventually brought the war to an end. Or did it? Ladies and gentlemen, this is a fascinating episode of history and how the world really works. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp.
- [01:18]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
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- [02:03]
Mark Gagnon
Dr. Benjamin Hett. How are you, sir?
- [02:05]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I'm great, Mark. How are you?
- [02:06]
Mark Gagnon
I'm doing excellent. Thank you so much for joining me on this wonderful, lovely hot summer day here in New York City.
- [02:11]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes, indeed.
- [02:13]
Mark Gagnon
I'm really excited to chat with you. There is a ton of things going on in the world at the present moment as far as conflicts in the Middle east as well as in Russia and Ukraine. And we had spoken a little bit before we started about this idea that there's only ever been one war or that there's only ever been one story of conflict amongst humans. And typically, I've heard people mention the First World War, which we've done an episode on, which creates the stage for the Second World War to start. And once the Second World War ends, we basically enter into a time known as The Cold War, more or less. So I would love to discuss the Cold War as it affects and pertains to, you know, the world that we're in today and the geopolitical position that, you know, we're currently put into, and maybe just briefly, you know, go through the end of World War II and how that creates the events of the Cold War.
- [03:10]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Sure.
- [03:10]
Mark Gagnon
So let's start there.
- [03:11]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. Okay, great. So. Right. So the Cold War is. Is really directly born out of the end of World War II. It's born out of the fact that Germany, Hitler's Germany, had go to war both against the Soviet Union, to Germany's east, and the major democratic powers, especially Britain and America, to Germany's west. And World War II ends basically with the armies of those powers closing in on Germany from East and West. And basically the armies meet at the end, literally in the middle of Germany, literally on the Elbe river, which has always been the kind of symbolic, as well as kind of literal geographic demarcation point between eastern and western Germany, and basically where the armies end up when Germany is beaten. That's going to be the Cold War frontier for roughly 45 years after that. So basically, Europe ends up getting divided between an eastern half that is controlled in one way or another by the Soviet Union and takes on the communist political and economic systems of the Soviet Union. West of that demarcation line on the Elbe river, you have Western Europe, which is under the umbrella of the United States and takes the form of basically capitalist democracies. And for basically 45 years, you have a kind of standoff between these two blocks, defined by geography, defined by ideology, defined by different economic systems, different political systems. And you have competition, rivalry, and at times getting very close to war between them. And at other times, and in other places, you do have war breaking out between proxies of these blocks, basically. But those. The actual wars that happen are basically in Africa or Asia or Latin America, for the most part in Europe. It stays a kind of tense standoff and, you know, then born directly out of how World War II ends. But to the point you made at the outset, there is a longer way to see this, and in some ways, it's also born out of World War I and even out of things that happened before that. So there is a really long narrative of this Cold War.
- [05:15]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of look at things in that broad scope, like sometimes looking at isolated incidents, and you kind of lose the context and the nuance, you know? You know, these people are good. These people are bad because look what happened. But it's like, well, if you go back, you know, it's like an argument with your wife, you know what I mean? It's like, oh, you didn't empty the dishwasher. So I'm mad. But it's like, well, it started back in, you know, when we were 17 and we were just dating. You know what I mean? Like, I think there's a broader narrative that I think adds a lot of nuance. So I'm curious, when you have the Soviet forces descending upon Berlin, Hitler is in his bunker, he escapes to Argentina, Hitler kills himself, and the Americans are approaching from the west, how immediate is all of a sudden this, this standoff, right? Like the US and, you know, Stalin are working together in some capacity almost in some sort of, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Is it the day that it happens? Did they have forewarning leading up? Like, all right, the Russians will take care of it, but that's also going to be a problem.
- [06:15]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So there was definitely forewarning. It's not like the alliance between, on the one hand, Britain and America, and on the other hand the Soviet Union. It's not like that alliance was problem free during the war. I mean, you're exactly right. It was a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The two sides, I mean, the two Allied sides really had nothing in common with each other other than they were in a desperate war with Germany. So there were definitely signs of trouble coming. But at the same time, it was also not clear and it was anticipated by almost nobody, what form this rivalry would in the years after World War II, in 1945, at the end of the war, there's still an assumption really by all sides that some form of this alliance will continue, that relations may be difficult, but it's not going to completely break down. And in fact, to your great analogy to complexity of right and wrong and marital disputes, there are roughly three ways that historians have seen this question of how it does break down, and in particular, who is to blame. Certainly, at least for American historians of this stuff, we typically speak of there being three schools of thought, and the three schools of thought evolve over time. There's what we call the orthodox view, which is what scholars, both historians and people like political scientists, thought almost in real time. When people first started writing about the Cold War as a Cold War, in the late 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, there was a school of thought called the Orthodox school. And the idea of the Orthodox school is America. And Its allies are democracies, freedom loving, peace loving. Nothing wrong with us. But the Soviets are an evil, aggressive dictatorship, just like Nazi Germany. So the breakdown in relations and the coming of the Cold War is their fault. It's clearly the Soviets fault. The Soviets are aggressive, we are defensive. That's the orthodox school. In the 1960s, a new paradigm arose which is called the revisionist school. And it's very 60s. I mean, as you might expect, given that it's the 60s, the scholars of the revisionist school were generally left leaning. And insofar as they were Americans, they were left leaning Americans critical of their own country to some extent. And they argued that it was actually American aggressiveness that had caused the Cold War, especially to serve American business interests, that had frightened the Soviets and the Soviets had reacted kind of defensively. But it was American sort of capitalist aggressiveness that had pushed the Soviets into that. And America really bore the blame for the Cold War. So this idea starts to spring up in the 1960s and then years go by and especially after the end of the Cold war, by the 90s, you've got a third school of thought which typically is called the post revisionist, which basically tells you nothing about its content other than it happens after the revisionist stuff. And the post revisionists are kind of the ones who say it's a little bit of that and a little bit of this. It's a sort of more nuanced view which is, you know, often to look at, there's like a series of perceptions and misperceptions on both sides. There's paranoia on both sides which drives a kind of mutual breakdown in relations between the two sides. That's basically what the post revisionists are about. And so scholars of the Cold War tend to fall into one of those blocks or the other. So, and so there are very different ways to see this. And almost nothing that we could say about this, almost nothing that I could say about this today, will be solidly uncontroversial. There's always room to debate these questions and to see different kinds of nuance.
- [09:45]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, I mean, call me a fence sitter, but it seems like the post revisionists, they got the most data to work with, you know what I mean? You can kind of look at it and be like, all right, it seems like mutual paranoia. Obviously the American capitalist interest is alive and present throughout all conflict. And then the Soviets spent a lot of human casualties in the war and I'm sure they won, wanted to create some sort of security for their border and saw this as an opportunity. And maybe they were aggressive. And that to me seems plausible.
- [10:13]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
It is entirely plausible. And I think it's a decent human instinct that most of us have to think that nothing is simple in black and white. And there's always a little complexity on both sides. And I think that's an admirable way to think about problems. Full disclosure, I personally lean somewhere between the post revisionist and the Orthodox school. I have some Orthodox leanings and no fan of the Soviet Union. And I think there is something to be said for the fact that the Soviet Union really was a threat in that era. But that's just. I mean, these are opinions about which, you know, there's lots of room for evidence. And I'm. I'm not going to try to be dogmatic about that.
- [10:52]
Mark Gagnon
You communist? No, no.
- [10:54]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Me, capitalist. I'm a raving democratic capitalist. If there's truth to truth to tell.
- [11:01]
Mark Gagnon
So I'm curious, immediately after the war ends, you know, evil incarnate has been defeated. Everyone's so happy. But now there's a series of treaties that have to go on and sort of diplomatic discourse to sort of reassemble the region. What does that look like among Stalin and the British and the Americans? And what are the names of those treaties and what ultimately do they kind of decide for the future of Europe?
- [11:24]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Okay, so this is actually a really fun point about the end of World War II. I'm glad you used the word treaty, because one of the fun things about the end of World War II in Europe is that there was no treaty quite different from the end of World War I. I mean, most people, even if they don't know a ton about World War I, a lot of people have heard of the Treaty of Versailles, like the kind of infamous treaty with Germany that ended World War I, about which, you know, there's been endless controversy ever since. There's nothing like that for World War II. And the reason there's nothing like that for World War II is caught up with the onset of the Cold War because it very quickly became apparent that there was no final treaty that west and east could agree on. And so things just kind of drifted. There were a bunch of interim agreements, for sure. So for instance, there were famous conferences during and immediately after World War II between the leaders of what we often call the Big Three, the leaders of Britain, America and the Soviet Union. So for instance, these leaders met at Tehran in late 1943, at which time the war is going well enough for the Allies that they can think about what after the War is going to look like, and they start planning what the occupation of Germany will look like. They carry this on a little over a year later, in early 1945, at the conference at Yalta in the Soviet Union. And here they really specifically plan what occupation zones are going to be for Germany, who's going to take what. They make some agreements about how the occupation will work, importantly, things like how you will move from zone to zone, what, for instance, air corridors will look like around the zones. And this is particularly important because. And here it might actually be handy to have a map of Cold War Germany up here, if we can do that. An important thing to sort of think about with what Germany looks like when it's being occupied is that sort of intuitively, the Soviets occupy a chunk of eastern Germany. The British occupy a chunk of northwestern Germany. The Americans occupy a chunk of southwestern Germany, and those countries agree that France will occupy. Occupy a chunk kind of in the middle. Perfect. That's perfect.
- [13:33]
Mark Gagnon
Thank you. I didn't realize in my mind, it was just like, you know, the American Allied powers have the west and the Soviets have the East. I didn't realize it was.
- [13:41]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
No, initially, it's country by country. But then the complexity is, if you look in the red sector there for eastern Germany, and the little blue dot, that's Berlin. Now, Berlin, of course, having been the capital, Berlin's really important. And the Western allies don't want to agree to have it just entirely in the Soviet sector. So what they do with Berlin is they divide Berlin up and they kind of replicate the zones of occupation within Berlin. So Berlin's kind of this mini pie. Interesting where, again, the Soviets take in Berlin, we call them sectors, not zones. The Soviets take a sector of eastern Berlin. The British, in this case, take a sector of sort of midwestern Berlin. The Americans take southwest Berlin. The French have northwest Berlin. So again, there are these four sectors in Berlin in a way, mirroring the four zones of occupation in the country as a whole. And because Berlin is deep inside the Soviet zone of occupation, the question of how you get to it, if you are the British or the Americans or the French, is important. Hence, there are agreements on air corridors, specific air corridors that you can fly from western zones to Berlin. There's agreement on road access. There are agreements on rail access. There are agreements on canal access. I'm saying this all very deliberately because this is gonna set up a problem later. Yes, the status of Berlin is a fascinating ongoing chapter of the Cold War, and one which, for myself, as a lover of Berlin, I kind of consider it my second home. It's a part of the Cold War that particularly fascinates me. But that's an important part of the story. But it's important to say that in 1945, when they're making these agreements, the various allies, they still think they'll all get along and they'll manage Germany together as a unit. They'll agree on occupation policy, they'll agree on what to do with ex Nazis and that sort of thing. So everybody's still assuming they're going to get along. The few agreements that they do make about these zones of occupation and that sort of thing, it's probably fortunate they made them in 1945, because it's quickly going to become impossible to make any further agreements, and those agreements end up lasting a very long time, much longer.
- [15:44]
Mark Gagnon
Than anyone had expected, up until 89.
- [15:47]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Up until really 1990.
- [15:49]
Mark Gagnon
Interesting. So when they agree on this, it's sort of strange. Like, I guess, you know, the way most compromises work is like, they're a little odd if you don't understand the nuance.
- [15:58]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes, absolutely.
- [15:59]
Mark Gagnon
So looking at this, it's like, okay, you have this split, and then you have the city inside the zone that now is also split. That's agreed on.
- [16:07]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
That's all agreed on. Yeah.
- [16:08]
Mark Gagnon
And everyone's happy or everyone's equally unhappy.
- [16:12]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Everybody's. Yeah, somewhere between happy and equally unhappy. I mean, it's. They all make the deal they can make. I mean, it's important to keep in mind that the thing hovering over all of this and determining how these deals get made is where troops are, where boots are on the ground. I see. So, you know, for instance, there has long been. Ever since this time, there's been a sort of line of critique that comes up in American politics sometimes where the Roosevelt administration is criticized for making these deals and for letting the Soviets, in a sense, come so far west and. And that sort of thing. But the point is, Soviets were there. Like, the Soviet boots on the ground were there.
- [16:49]
Mark Gagnon
They had bases, they had camps. They had everything to.
- [16:51]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
To move the Soviets back out of eastern Germany or out of Poland. Poland became a really emotional flashpoint in the early part of the Cold War. You know, what was going to happen to Poland in terms of a regime to criticize the Roosevelt or the Truman administration for this? I mean, the only alternative was to go to war against the Soviets and push them out.
- [17:13]
Mark Gagnon
It's effectively now a war. It's like, okay, we've both sort of come in the middle here, and now we're going to kick you out, right? And it's like, well, who are you to kick us out? Right, we're going to kick you out.
- [17:22]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
The Soviets have somewhere in order of 300 divisions of troops across Central Europe. So I mean, it would be a full out total war effort to try and move them out of eastern Berlin or Poland. And there was, it's safe to say, zero appetite for that in 1945. So the alternative is to make these agreements. And so the Cold War takes the shape it takes because that's how the war ended, plain and simple. Basically.
- [17:45]
Mark Gagnon
Did people at the time know this was going to be a problem?
- [17:48]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I mean, they didn't see the full extent. I mean, almost no one saw the full extent of the Cold War. One of the few and interesting exceptions is British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who did see this coming fairly accurately in real time. And this is, you know, human beings, I think we're terrible at seeing the future. We always get it wrong. Certainly I myself, I'm, I'm horrible at predictions about politics or anything else. Churchill had a remarkably good record by human standards of anticipating what's coming next. He was on big questions. He was almost always right, even when he didn't want to be like foreseeing the downfall of the British Empire, which he did during World War II. He saw the Cold War coming and as a matter of fact, even before World War II was over, he had asked his military planners to draw up a plan for going to war against the Soviets to push them out of Poland because he felt quite strongly about Polish freedom. Since World War II had of course started as we talked about A While back, World War II had started with Britain declaring war on Germany in order to try and keep Poland free. So Churchill wanted Poland free. So he asked his military planners to draw a plan to militarily force the Russians out. And they draw a plan for an operation that they call, and I'm not making this up, Operation Unthinkable.
- [19:07]
Mark Gagnon
It is unthinkable.
- [19:07]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
It is unthinkable.
- [19:08]
Mark Gagnon
Right? You just go through one of those brutal wars in human history and now.
- [19:11]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
You'Re into another brutal war. And these documents, the planning documents for Operation Unthinkable, were held secret for a long time, but they were declassified in the 1990s. So you can read them on the British National Archives webpage. And they make fascinating reading because it's one of these things where the leader asks you to do something and you're a military planner and you know, it's a horrible idea. But the Prime Minister has asked you to look into this. So you don't. You just can't say prime Minister. That's the dumbest thing ever. So they say that without saying it. So the language of the plan is full of stuff like, I mean, I'm quoting here a phrase. If the Soviets want a total war, they're in a position to have it. And they write things like, the Germans pushed deep into the Soviet Union. The Germans got to Leningrad and Moscow and Stalingrad hundreds and hundreds of miles inside the Soviet Union and they still didn't beat them. So basically they're saying, why should we do this too? It's not going to go any better. So fortunately, Churchill drops the idea, but to the point of what the alternatives were, what was foreseen, what it would have taken to change the geography of the Cold War. That's what it would have taken. So the Cold War lines where the Soviets were in control, where the Americans were in control. That was defined by how the war ended. And there was basically nothing that could change that short of World War three.
- [20:37]
Mark Gagnon
Right now I'm curious if there's war hawks at this time that's like, look, the Soviets lost how many millions of people. They barely got through to Berlin. We have all of America still feeling pretty good. France and Britain obviously is, you know, atrophied, but we still have a little bit more fight. Let's go f these guys up. Did anyone push that theory? Obviously you have Churchill doing unthinkable. Were there other folks that were like, let's, we want full on war to push Russia all the way out?
- [21:05]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
There were some. There were some American military commanders, famously George Patton, who had that idea. There were some German military commanders who were very enthusiastic about getting the Americans and the British to join them in a kind of rematch against the Russians. And I've read, for instance, I've read diaries of a German commander named Ritter von Leb. And as he is a prisoner of war of the Americans after the war, he keeps saying stuff to his American captors like, well, I hope there's another one soon. I hope we beat them next time. You guys come in with us and we'll beat them.
- [21:38]
Mark Gagnon
So there is that NBA Finals mentality. It's like, oh, I hope you guys beat them in the playoffs. You know what I mean?
- [21:46]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, so there is some of that, but it is even among military people, in all fairness, I mean it is a minority taste. I mean, there is no appetite on any widespread scale after this, by far worst war in history. Exhausting struggle Coming after the Great Depression, of course, the world's been through a lot in these decades. There is no appetite for what clearly would be a major war. The other thing is that there are some people, of course, once, a little bit after the end of the war in Europe, when the war against Japan ends with the use of an atomic bomb, there are some American, especially Air Force commanders who think, well, let's use this while we have it. And they don't like, let's use the atomic bomb to beat the Russians because we have a window here that's going to close when they get it, because they'll get it sooner or later. So there are some people advocating that, but again, no one's advocating it very seriously. No one's advocating it very persuasively. There's really no appetite at higher political levels or certainly in public opinion for anything like this.
- [22:43]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, Dropping a nuclear bomb on like a temporary ally.
- [22:46]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah.
- [22:46]
Mark Gagnon
Seems like a sketchy political move, you know what I mean? Like, hey, fight this war with us. And it's like, well, you just bombed your last out. No, we're not doing that. So, yeah, that, I can see that. That's, that's tricky.
- [22:57]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And you know, we don't always like to acknowledge it on this side of the pond, but the, the sort of grim truth I think is that to a very real extent the Soviets won World War II for us. You just have to look at the casualty figures. The Soviet Red army lost between 9 and 9 and 10 million soldiers killed in action fighting the Germans. American losses In World War II, all theaters, were about 400,000 killed. I'm not trying to minimize that. It's a horrible figure in any human scale, but it's not 9 or 10 million. The British losses were about the same as Americans from a smaller population base. Germany lost a little over 5 million soldiers killed in action in World War II, of whom about 80 to 90% were killed fighting the Soviets. So again, you put all these numbers together and kind of spin it around. The narrative here is that it was the Soviet Union that really ground up Hitler's formidable military machine. And for the most part the Western powers, Britain and America kind of came in and cleaned up at the end, right. We actually, mostly we the English speaking countries for most of the war. We fought a naval war and an air war. Not much of a ground war. And it's ground war that really drives up casualties. We fought a ground war for the last 10 months basically from D Day to the end, but the battle of.
- [24:15]
Mark Gagnon
Stalingrad, I Mean is one of the bloodiest battles ever to happen.
- [24:18]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Absolutely.
- [24:19]
Mark Gagnon
Calling it a battle almost seems like diminutive. You know, it's like, yeah, you're exactly right.
- [24:23]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Maybe a million Soviet casualties there, about 400,000 German casualties in Stalingrad. I mean, it's really hard to comprehend.
- [24:30]
Mark Gagnon
In such a short window of time is unthinkable.
- [24:33]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
It is. So, you know, and this is also, this is definitely part of the context for the Cold War because the Soviets have suffered, they've suffered damage and loss to an extent that is really almost impossible to comprehend. And, you know, they expect the post war world should take some account of that. And it's hard to get a comprehension of that from. Or some of the. It's hard to get comprehension of some of the implications of that in American and British political leadership.
- [25:03]
Mark Gagnon
Right. The old saying, Right. Is like, the war was won with British intelligence, American manufacturing and Soviet blood.
- [25:09]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
That's pretty much it.
- [25:10]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah. So I can see why the Soviets think, you know, they feel that they have a claim. They're like, we did this whole thing, we did all the work.
- [25:16]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes.
- [25:16]
Mark Gagnon
And now we're going to, you know, take our peace and prepare ourselves. So.
- [25:20]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. And so, you know, when we're talking about the geography of the Cold War, Stalin in particular, the leader of the Soviet Union, has a particular attitude about the security of his country for the future. The attitude is he wants a lot of buffer space. He is convinced that Germany will be a threat again to the Soviet Union. He wants a lot of space between him and Germany.
- [25:41]
Mark Gagnon
Right.
- [25:41]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So this is where, where places like Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, this is where they come into play. Because that space between the Soviet Union and what Stalin thinks is the once and future threat. So his idea of security is space. And as far as Stalin is concerned, there is no way, there is no way that there are not going to be regimes friendly to the Soviet Union in those buffer spaces. And in Stalin's way of thinking, a regime friendly to the Soviet Union is a communist regime. So there's no way that he is going to allow anything that's not a communist regime in those spaces where the Soviets have marched, you know, to get to Berlin at the end of the war. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
- [26:22]
Mark Gagnon
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Dr. Benjamin Hett
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Mark Gagnon
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Dr. Benjamin Hett
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Mark Gagnon
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Dr. Benjamin Hett
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Mark Gagnon
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- [26:49]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
See mintmobile.com Right.
- [26:51]
Mark Gagnon
This is a fundamental problem with Soviet geography that has persisted basically the entirety of their existence, even until today.
- [26:57]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And definitely a legacy in Putin's Russia today. Absolutely.
- [26:59]
Mark Gagnon
Is that, you know, you have protection from the north, the east and the south, but on the west you have these vast open plains straight to potentially hostile nations.
- [27:08]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes, that's exactly right. And that's a good point too, because the geography of sort of northern and central Europe, it is one big plane from kind of northern France through the Ukraine, all the way to Moscow. Yeah. And with a little bit of hiccup around the Pripyat marshes. But yeah, so that's a good country to roll a tank or a lot of tanks over. And so that is a contributing factor to the Soviet paranoia, you know, and there's that famous saying, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies. Right. It's entirely understandable for the Soviets really to be paranoid at this juncture in history.
- [27:43]
Mark Gagnon
And so communism is, you know, I'm sure the. I'm actually curious because communism in Soviet Russia at the time or Soviet Union is so pervasive. Were they spreading communism because they thought this was the ideal for how the world should operate, or was it done as a political and military tool in order to create allegiance with the surrounding nations?
- [28:07]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, that's a great question. And it's one of those, you know, it's the kind of thing that it's most important for us to understand, that we most want to understand. And all of those things in history are actually the things that are hardest to actually have solid knowledge on. So, like, that's something that is debated quite a lot, I suspect, to give a kind of wishy washy answer. I suspect the answer is it's a bit of both. Sure, that certainly in the mind of somebody like Stalin, Communism serves an instrumental purpose, kind of, as you're saying, as a tool of control. But I think he also, in his way, was a sincere ideologue. And I think lots of people in the Soviet hierarchy were sincere ideologues, and they did think their system was a better path. So there's sort of both aspects. And this was an era too, all the while since the Russian Revolution or the consolidation of The Soviet Union in the early 1920s, you know, there were Communist parties all around the world. They all literally took their orders from Moscow at this point, because Russia, the Soviet Union, is seen as kind of the senior communist country, its Communist Party and leadership is definitive. So Communist parties everywhere basically do what Moscow tells them. That is also something which Stalin very much instrumentalizes for political reasons. But again, it's hard to separate from the fact that he probably also ideologically believes in it. So it's definitely a bit of both.
- [29:28]
Mark Gagnon
Right. It's similar to religion in some capacity, right? Like if you have theocracy, are you spreading your religion because you believe in that specific version of God, or are you doing it because it's a way to sort of, sort of acquiesce, you know, different populations and ethnic groups into one ideology, that then there'll be a little bit more social cohesion. And I imagine, like with most things, as you said, it's probably both that you probably have true ideologues and you have sort of political operatives and then you have many people that kind of overlap.
- [29:58]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And some scholars have suggested, famously George Kennan, a famous American diplomat who had a big influence on the early part of the Cold War, his analysis was that Communism had kind of overlaid an older Russian tradition of a certain kind of messianic Christianity. And so they sort of fused together. So very much to your point about religion, that for the Soviet leadership, there really are elements of both here. There's a kind of way of thinking about belief that they're sort of culturally drawing from their own religious issue. But now it's kind of fused onto Communism.
- [30:31]
Mark Gagnon
So the stage is set basically right. World War II ends, everything's good, both sides agree on the borders and we should have peace for the next hundred years. Everything's fine. What goes wrong.
- [30:43]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So the relations between east and west start to break down even before the end of the war. The first place really is Poland. What's going to happen with Poland? There was an exile Polish government based in London, which was basically drawn from the pre war Polish government. It's conservative and nationalistic and anti communist and anti Russian. So needless to say, Stalin is not excited about what we call the London Poles. He's got his own crew of Polish Communists who he wants to put in power. And as the Soviet armies move into Poland, Stalin does exactly that. He puts his own people. They're known as the Lublin, for town. In Poland, they're known as the Lublin regime. And this now causes a lot of grief for the British And Americans who are not happy that this communist system is being set up in Poland. When, as I was saying before, Churchill feels very strongly the British had gone to war for Polish freedom. They want to restore Polish freedom. At the end, this doesn't look like Polish freedom. So there's starting to be tension over what to do about Poland. Stalin kind of grudgingly allows a. A couple of representatives of the London polls to join the Lublin government. But it's clearly kind of tokenism. It's clearly that, you know, he is going to. He and the Soviets are going to call the shots. So this is already starting to darken relations a little bit, even before the Germans are beaten. And then the next big thing that comes up is the question of getting reparations. Now, reparations had been a big theme after World War I. They were famously a part of the controversial Treaty of Versailles. The idea that Germany should pay the countries that had beaten it, compensate them for all the damage Germany had done. It seems kind of on a basic level, sort of just, I mean, after all the Germans had, World War II is the least ambiguous war in history. I think morally there's just no doubt whose fault that was. So it seems intuitive that maybe Germany should pay for it. But there are problems here. The British and the Americans look back to the history post World War I, and they say, oh, wait a minute, this actually went badly after World War I because A, we didn't actually get much benefit out of the reparations, and B, all it did is make the Germans really mad. And it sort of, they think, at least fueled the rise of Hitler. And we got this blowback, so why should we do this again? It would be better not to do reparations. Let Germany rebuild quickly to be prosperous again, and then they'll be happy and they'll be democratic and they'll be peaceful, and we won't get fascist blowback. That makes sense if you're Britain and America having come through the war relatively unscathed, different degrees. America actually not only unscathed, but actually much richer than it had been going in. Britain suffering a lot from the war, but not like the Soviet Union. So it makes sense that they think this way. But if you're the Soviet Union, kind of going back to what we were saying a few minutes ago, the Soviets have lost not only incomprehensible numbers of lives, but they've also suffered enormous property, physical, economic damage. And since they had paid heavily in terms of blood and treasure to beat the Germans, it's not crazy for Them to think they want some direct material compensation. And the British Americans say to them, no, no, no, that didn't work last time, let's not do that. And of course you can imagine how the Russians are going to hear that. It's like, you hypocritical, wealthy capitalist, they say, we paid for this, we're going to get our peace. So this really starts to sour the relations because the Soviets now feel they are being really sort of directly screwed by their allies. And not incidentally, of course. Franklin Delano Roosevelt dies in April 1945, just before the end of the war in Europe. He's replaced by Harry Truman, who hasn't had all the experiences that Roosevelt has had with Stalin. And Truman's sort of a tougher, blunter guy and Stalin doesn't trust him and they don't like each other. So there's this real personal factor too, that the wartime leaders had met each other a number of times and they had built up a sort of, of rough camaraderie at least. And now that's starting to break down. And it breaks down even more as a matter of fact, when to the shock of basically everybody, Churchill loses a British election right after the end of the war. Not just loses it, but gets pasted in a landslide defeat.
- [35:19]
Mark Gagnon
I didn't know this.
- [35:19]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. The Labour Party under the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, In July of 45, they win one of the huge election landslides in British history. Churchill just gets hammered for what reason I think the British voters felt, and I think they were actually right to feel this. Churchill had been, of course, an unparalleled wartime leader. No one thinks, including all the labor people, everyone's fully happy to say he's the hero, saved our country, well done. But they also think he will be a terrible peacetime prime minister. And they were right, by the way, because. And Churchill proved this because he did come back into office in the early 50s and he was a terrible peacetime prime minister. So they think great for wartime, but the emergency is over. We want someone different for peacetime.
- [36:03]
Mark Gagnon
Wow. So Truman's now in.
- [36:05]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So now Truman, Clement, Attlee and Stalin still. And when they meet the last of the sort of big conferences, the immediate post war conference at Potsdam in July 1945, now it's a very different atmosphere because that personal factor is different. Like this sort of wartime camaraderie is gone. And Stalin looks at these two new guys and thinks, who the hell are you? And you're not giving me reparations. And you know, so you start starting to get this kind of downward spiral of relations.
- [36:33]
Mark Gagnon
Fascinating.
- [36:33]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah.
- [36:34]
Mark Gagnon
All righty. Don't skip forward, guys, because I am on the road. World's fastest ad read coming at you. I'm going to be at Fort Worth, Texas, Austin, Texas, Stanford, Philly, Levittown, Chandler, Arizona, San Diego. I'm also going to be adding Toronto, Montreal, as well as Washington D.C. and a bunch of other dates. Dates are in the description, also in probably the comments of this episode. Go see me on the road. Come hang out. I'll be hanging out with everyone after the show. Come shake my hand, call me an idiot, whatever you want to do, I will be there. Additionally, I will be doing my one hour of standup comedy. I'm very proud of this hour. I'm really excited to share with you guys and it would mean the world if everyone could come on out. And what do you wear to a show on the road? That's a great question. You can go to Camp Goods co. That's right. We got merch, we got Camp Merch. We got hats, hoodies, T shirts. A lot of stuff is out of stock. Things have been selling like hot cakes. But we're going to be restocking everything in all the sizes. So you can go there right now, get all the merch, get all the coolest clothing in the podcast game. We're going to be updating that site regularly. And if you come out to a show, I'd love to see you sport some of the threads that we got up online. I'll see you guys there. Let's get back to the show. So what ends up happening with Poland immediately after they obviously get this new regime from the Soviets and that sustains for a long period of time. Or is that.
- [37:47]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I mean, basically. Yeah, I mean, the Soviets, there's a sort of process across what we sometimes call the satellite states, the sort of central East European countries that come under Soviet control. There's a process where somewhat stealthily, the Soviets gradually get basically dictatorial control of all them, or to put this more accurately, Communist parties from those countries sort of stealthily get control. They have a sort of bag of techniques. Technique number one is get into a coalition, get communists into a coalition, like a democratic coalition government with non communist parties. But then get the bits that matter in terms of power. Get control of the Interior Ministry, which in European countries always controls the police, get control of the police, get control of the army, bit by bit, sort of push the non communist parties out. And basically in most of these countries, you see some sort of coup happening in the years just after the war. So, for instance, In Hungary in 1947, in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Communist Party is basically staged coups. They push out the parties they've been in coalition with, they take dictatorial control. So this is happening sort of gradually across the region.
- [39:01]
Mark Gagnon
This, to me makes McCarthyism make much more sense.
- [39:04]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes, there's actually, you know, there's so much about this which is action and reaction. There's so much about this which is mirroring on both sides. And one of the things I think is really interesting about McCarthyism.
- [39:15]
Mark Gagnon
Could you explain that for people that don't know?
- [39:17]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Sure. Okay. So we use the word McCarthyism to refer to a period in American history where there's a lot of paranoia about communists. And, you know, famously, there are, you know, super famously, there are screenwriters and directors and actors getting blacklisted in Hollywood because they had ties to the Communist Party or allegedly did, or to left wing movements. And now they're seen as disloyal and dangerous to have in a medium like Hollywood or all kinds of other. There are some spies that get caught, feeds the paranoia. There's this sense that not only is the Soviet Union a threat in Europe, but it's communist agents, spies, fellow travelers, as they say, people who believe in the ideology but who are normal people in America, that they are somehow carrying out this agenda to subvert American democracy and make the country communist. And this paranoia sort of blows up. In the late 40s and early 50s, we attached the name McCarthy to it for the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. But actually the thing McCarthyism came before McCarthy and endured after him. He was sort of an obvious symbol to it because of his way of, you know, he would give a speech and he would say, I have a list here of 200 names of people in the State Department who are communists. And this would cause a sensation if people challenged him and said, what's your evidence? What are the names? He would always sort of back away from it because he was usually mostly lying. But the allegation would get out there and it would do damage. And certainly people were hurt by the things that he did. But there was a lot more to it than this. There had been in the House of Representatives, there had been famously huac, the House of Un American, House Committee on Un American Activities, Sorry, which had been operating since the late 30s. Initially it was supposed to go after sort of both fascist and communist, any kind of anti democratic movement in the United States. But HUAC pretty soon on forgotten about fascists, basically, and worried mostly about Communists. This is even before World War II. And after World War II, it kind of revives. And so you've got this committee, Richard Nixon famously was a member for a while in the 1940s. You've got this committee going after what they perceive to be communists and security threats in America. So that's happening. And it is in the 40s, a reaction to the Cold War. But it had been there before you had huac and you had that stuff happening even before America was in World War II. And then on the other side, as this process of kind of communist crackdown is happening in the Soviet satellite states of Central East Europe, you have a kind of McCarthyism there too, where again, out of paranoia, the Soviets are sort of purging often their own too. There are people who are communist activists in places like Czechoslovakia or Hungary or Poland who get accused of not being loyal enough and put on trial. They almost always show trials and convicted and in the Soviet system, usually executed because Stalin thinks they're not loyal enough. So you have these kind of weirdly parallel things happening.
- [42:17]
Mark Gagnon
Were they being accused of being, you know, Republicans or people that wanted a republic or a democracy? Were they being accused of being capitalists or were they just accused of being not loyal?
- [42:27]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes, really. And there's certain, you know, there's certain kind of typically Stalinist things here too. So one of the kind of subplots in that region in the Cold War was that Yugoslavia was not liberated by the Soviet Red Army. It had been occupied by the Germans. But the Yugoslavs drove the Germans out themselves. They had a partisan movement with several different wings to it. But the most famous wing of the partisan movement that drove out the Germans was led by a communist activist named Joseph Tito. And then Tito became the dictator of a communist Yugoslavia after the war. And because Yugoslavia had self liberated, Tito didn't feel beholden to the Soviets. He admired Stalin and he wanted to emulate them, but he also wasn't really going to take orders from them. And Stalin didn't like that. Stalin didn't care if you agreed with him or not. He wanted you to obey him. That's all that mattered to Stalin. So Tito's independence bothered Stalin, and in 1948, they broke. And so one of the things that a Soviet communist would allege against an enemy, real or imagined, is you are a Titoist. Oh, wow. So often in these trials in places like Czechoslovakia, the people who are being purged and tried and usually executed, one of the allegations they face is that they are Titoists, they are communists, but they are disloyal, supposedly treasonous communists. But usually they weren't picky about their allegations. They would also be called Western spies, capitalist spies, pro American spies. There's also often an anti Semitic element to this. Often the people who get got singled out in these communist purse trials, often they were Jewish, at least by family background, if not by religion. So there would be sort of vaguely, maybe coded, maybe not so coded, anti Semitic allegations about them. They'd be called, you know, rootless cosmopolitans. That's a kind of standard sort of dog whistle, anti Semitic slur. If you're called a rootless cosmopolitan, what you're being called is a Jewish person that the person calling you that doesn't like a rootless, rootless cosmopolitan.
- [44:33]
Mark Gagnon
Like a wandering person that lives in the city.
- [44:35]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, you're not rooted. You're not really of this country. Like, if I'm saying this to you and we're in Czechoslovakia, what I'm saying is you're not Czech. You're not of this people.
- [44:43]
Mark Gagnon
You're one of these wandering Jewish people that lives in a city and wow.
- [44:47]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So all these allegations would sort of get bundled together and in a weird way, it's the kind of Soviet analog to McCarthyism in America, with a Venmo.
- [44:56]
Mark Gagnon
Debit card, you can Venmo more than just your friends. You can use your balance in so many ways. You can Venmo everything.
- [45:02]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Need gas? You can Venmo this. How about snacks?
- [45:05]
Mark Gagnon
You can Venmo that. Your favorite band's merch.
- [45:08]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
You can Venmo this.
- [45:09]
Mark Gagnon
Or their next show. You can Venmo that. Visit Venmo me debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp bank and I, pursuant to license.
- [45:22]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
By Mastercard International Incorporated card may be used everywhere.
- [45:24]
Mark Gagnon
MasterCard is accepted.
- [45:24]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Venmo purchase restrictions apply.
- [45:26]
Mark Gagnon
Oh, that is fascinating. I had no idea. And I remember even, like hearing about McCarthyism and it's almost sort of said like, you know, it was sort of absurd. It was kind of satanic panic and it was blown out of proportion. But even hearing how much, you know, the unameric the House of UN American Committees was like, how much influence that had priority. And then how we're seeing the Soviets sort of doing these silent coups in these nations by putting communists in power, I can understand where that fear comes from where like, this could happen in America. What if they put in a senator that's a communist and he's American, but he's a Communist. What if they put in a president that's a communist? Then America becomes. That's interesting.
- [46:08]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Right. And you know, there had been, to be fair, there had been some people at sort of mid levels of the Roosevelt administration who were in fact communist spies. I mean, this clearly did happen, you know, that America was ever in any danger of being subverted into a communist state. No, not remotely, not by a wild stretch. But the paranoia was there. And to a certain extent, I mean, I always think it's important in history. It's easy enough to laugh at people in the past. It's easy enough, I think, to laugh at ourselves, or it should be. But I think you have to understand that in that time the atomic bomb is a new thing. It's scary as heck. The Soviet Union now looks kind of scary, I think, if you're American. So there are real reasons to be frightened. I mean, in retrospect the paranoia is foolish and the harm done to people's lives by People like McCarthy was terrible. But it's not coming totally out of nowhere. There are reasons why this is there.
- [47:08]
Mark Gagnon
That's fascinating. So you have these regimes in the region that are sort of being now co opted by communists and I'm sort of using communists in tandem with Soviet sympathizer because they're essentially one of the.
- [47:20]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Same in that time. They're one and the same.
- [47:23]
Mark Gagnon
So what are. Obviously there's the regions that we know of as the USSR that are effectively becoming these proxies or effectively part of the nation of the Soviet Union. When do they start kind of moving towards Korea? When do they start sort of trying to game in Cuba? Like when do those things, like what is the next step as far as expansion of communist ideals?
- [47:49]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. Okay, so let me actually start. It's time to introduce the word containment. So I mentioned a few moments ago, I mentioned the American diplomat George Cannon. Kennan was posted to the US embassy in Moscow in the late 40s. And as he's watching the Cold War start to take shape, these relations break down, these regimes start to harden in Eastern Europe and so on. He writes a couple of things. He writes a document known as the Long Telegram. It's capital L, capital T, so called because it was several thousand words. You're not supposed to send several thousand words by telegraph, telegram. But he did. And then a version of the Long Telegram gets published as an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs. And basically what Kennan sets out here is the idea that's going to take hold of American thinking really for the rest of The Cold War, it's the concept of containment. So what Kennan basically says is the Soviet Union is inherently aggressive and sort of for the reasons I was saying before, their ideology, but also kind of Russian traditions make them aggressive. So they are a threat. And they are a threat sort of generally to the global order. So how does the United States respond? Well, what Kennan says is there's basically in terms of strategic power, like military strength, economic strength, there's five parts of the world that matter. There's the Soviet Union, there's the United States, there's Germany, there's Britain, there's Japan. Nothing else really matters, he says. So the thing to do is to keep the areas that matter out of the control of the Soviet Union. Obviously the Soviet Union has control of the Soviet Union. There's not much we can do about that. The thing we have to do to contain the Soviet Union is to keep them from getting control of Germany, Britain, Japan or us. That's what we need to do. Nothing else matters. If they want Africa, fine because strategically it doesn't matter. If they want Asia, fine, because strategically it doesn't matter. So you see, it's a very, in some ways quite cold blooded take on strategy. I think it could probably be criticized as being a bit short sighted because even in strategic terms, some of those other parts of the world are going to matter soon as we'll see. Even if they don't in 1947 or 48. However, the upside to what Kennan was saying was it would not have induced America into getting into, as it turned out, fruitless proxy wars in places like Korea or Vietnam. Or we could go down a long list of these things. Kennan, for various sort of complicated reasons, ended up leaving the diplomatic service and his voice sort of got quieted. But the idea of containment, so the idea that containment means to stop the Soviet Union from going anywhere. The problem is it started to morph. The idea of containment started to morph onto the parts of the world that Kennan had thought didn't matter that much. And I think the real turning point here, certainly for American thinking, comes with the successful takeover of power in China by Mao Zedong and the Communists, which happens in 1949. China had had a long running civil war. This goes way back pre World War II era. There'd been a civil war between Mao and his Communists and the the Nationalist regime led by Shanghai Check, who had been an American ally during World War II. To the shock of most observers. After World War II, Mao fairly speedily beat Chiang Kai Shek's nationalist regime drove them into exile on the island of Taiwan, which leaves us a situation we still have, in a sense, and China becomes a communist regime. To Americans, but I think especially to American conservatives, this is a massive, massive shock. I think I've recently. I've read a lot about this sort of moment in history, and it fascinates me just what a shock it was. And there's all kinds of horrified talk in America about, we lost China, we lost China, as if China was ours, which I think it actually wasn't. But this is the thing you hear over and over again, especially from conservatives. We lost China. And then the sort of quick next thought is, we lost China. Because the administration, by this time, the administration of Harry Truman, they failed, or maybe more so, they betrayed us. They're traitors. They're actually communists. And some of the people in Truman's administration, some of the people who I think actually are among the most admirable Americans in history, the Secretary of State, George Marshall, for instance, responsible for the famous Marshall Plan, he starts getting denounced as a communist sympathizer by the right, or his successor as Secretary of State under Truman, Dean Acheson, getting denounced as a Communist. These guys are coming straight from the center, right. These are establishment figures. There is nobody less communist than General Marshall or Dean Acheson. But this is the kind of hysteria of the time, right, that people will say this stuff. And so this becomes a very emotional issue in American politics, this loss of China, which for many people, again, mostly on the right, has to do with the incompetence or the treason of the Truman administration.
- [53:24]
Mark Gagnon
Now, not to deviate too much, but as far as Mao's ideology and his sort of ascension, is he working closely with Stalin? Are they buddy buddy, or are they sort of two leaders in the region that happen to like the same ideology.
- [53:37]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
For different reasons at this time, they're basically working closely. Although Stalin had played a tricky game, Stalin had actually been kind of friendly with Chiang Kai Shek's nationalist regime. This is Stalin being a realist. And at the time when Chiang is in power, Stalin basically figures he's in power. It's useful to have an alliance with.
- [53:54]
Mark Gagnon
Them like he did with the Americans.
- [53:55]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Right? Yeah, we'll go with that. However, once Mao comes in, for a while, they are allies. Basically, through the 50s, they're allies. They will split to foreshadow a little bit. There's the famous split between Mao and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. And then they become actually rather bitter enemies in the 1960s. But from the successful revolution in 1949 through the 50s, they are basically allies. They see themselves as being basically on the same page. Although of course, Mao does have his own distinctive take on communist ideology, which is also nothing new, by the way. Just as a slight aside, you know, communist ideology as articulated by Karl Marx was an ideology that was supposed to apply to advanced industrial countries where you would get a workers revolution because workers were eventually completely driven into misery and despair by advanced industrial capitalism. For Marx, that's like a law of nature. You have to have advanced industrial capitalism to have a communist revolution. So where does it happen? First, Russia, which is a really backward country in 1917 when it has a communist revolution. The revolution doesn't happen in Germany or Britain or America that are advanced capitalist industrial countries. No, it comes in Russia. And then in 1949 it comes in China, which is even more backward from a technological, economic standpoint. So these guys have to spin the ideology a little bit. And Mao's got his own distinctive spin on the ideology to sort of adapt it to a basically agrarian, non industrial country country. But that aside, they are basically allies. And so then the next shoe that drops here just very soon after the Chinese communist victory in 1949, is in June of 1950. North Korea, which is another, has become, under Russian auspices, a communist dictatorship, a little bit comparable to East Germany backstory, as Korea had been under Japanese control. So after the war, the Soviets occupied some of Korea the same way they occupied some of Germany. And like in Germany, they put their own communist state in the bit of Korea they occupied. So that's the North Korean regime which invades the pro Western, though certainly not democratic South Korean regime in June of 1950. Stalin okayed it, which he later regretted, but he sort of said to North Korea, okay, go ahead, you can do this. That. And then now the United States feeling a little bit driven back to the wall by what has happened in China. And now this move from North Korea into South Korea, this looks very threatening partly because of the sequence of events from China to Korea, but also very much because the analogy from Korea to Germany, because Korea, like Germany, is divided into two parts, a pro Communist part and a pro Western part of. And there are many people who feel that the North Korean attack on South Korea is just a prequel to an East German attack or, you know, Soviet East German attack on West Germany.
- [56:57]
Mark Gagnon
Interesting. And so was that agreed upon, the separation in Korea?
- [57:00]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes.
- [57:00]
Mark Gagnon
And so that was a part of.
- [57:01]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
One of these, one of the agreements coming out of World War II. And setting occupation zones.
- [57:05]
Mark Gagnon
Got it. Okay. Which does seem like Communist Soviet aggression in that.
- [57:10]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
In that regard, it's unquestionably. This one is not arguable. It's unquestionably aggression. Yes. So the United States responds fairly cleverly, I think, by going to the United nations to get a Security Council resolution to take some action in Korea. And the Soviets blow it then as now. I mean, now Russia has a seat on the permanent council of the Security Council, which they inherited from the Soviet Union. But in 1950, it's Soviet Union there, but the Soviet representative doesn't go to the meeting. So the United States is able to get a Security Council resolution to take actual military action to defend South Korea.
- [57:53]
Mark Gagnon
Why doesn't he go to the meeting?
- [57:55]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
It's a blunder. The Soviets think it's not necessary to do this. Wow. So this is why the Korean War, which now fully blows up and lasts as a hot war for three years. The Korean War is technically a United nations operation. The United States supplies the lion's share of troops, but it is actually United nations. They call it a police action. And there are troops from many other countries there as well. Canada, Greece, the uk. Other countries send troops. So it's a very multinational force that fights initially against the North Koreans. And then as that war progresses foolishly, United States forces advanced beyond a point that the Chinese considered essential to their security. So then the Chinese sent troops and they joined in the war. So now you've got this war where an American backed army is actually fighting not only the North Koreans, but the Chinese militarily on the Korean peninsula.
- [58:56]
Mark Gagnon
And the Russians by proxy.
- [58:57]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And the Russians by proxy. So this did have the potential to develop into a much bigger deal. I mean, it was already a fairly bloody, nasty war. I'm not minimizing it, but it could have become World War iii.
- [59:09]
Mark Gagnon
Right.
- [59:10]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Especially since I'm trying to find a synonym for dumb, but I'm not getting there. Dumb American commanders, like famously MacArthur, are pushing to use nuclear weapons against China to force them out, which would, I think have been a bad move.
- [59:26]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, I mean, that certainly would have. I mean, I don't. It's difficult to say, but it certainly would have exacerbated the issue issue.
- [59:33]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Fortunately, I think Truman, President Truman sort of road heard on the instincts of commanders like MacArthur. And obviously we didn't use nuclear weapons in Korea. Eventually, the war ground into a stalemate and in 1953, there was an armistice. So just like the end of World War I, the Korean War is oddly like World War I, in the ways in which it was fought. It became a trench warfare. Grinding trench warfare warfare. It became a grinding trench war. Sorry. Like World War I. And then it ended with an armistice, like World War I. The point of that is an armistice is a truce. It's not a permanent solution. So the armistice came in 1953, still in effect.
- [60:13]
Mark Gagnon
Really, it's still under the same armistice.
- [60:15]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Legally speaking, the Korean War is still on. We're just in this truce as we have been since 1953.
- [60:21]
Mark Gagnon
Oh, wow. And why was it trench warfare if, you know, militarily, Things had advanced so much, were with weapons of aggression in World War II.
- [60:29]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I think it has a lot to do with the landscape of Korea, which is quite hilly and mountainous. Indeed. And the technology that had advanced, it hadn't advanced so much. And in some ways, you see in Ukraine today, it still hasn't advanced so much that you can't have that kind of war. Ultimately. There's certain kinds of ground combat operations which are going to take certain forms in certain landforms. And so Korea ended up unfolding in a way that looked a lot like World War I in terms of how it was actually conducted.
- [60:59]
Mark Gagnon
Wow. And that would you say, is a first real conflict of the Cold War?
- [61:05]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I think. Yeah. The first really significant scale military operation.
- [61:11]
Mark Gagnon
Now, the U.N. you mentioned, obviously the U.N. forces are operating in Korea. When is the U.N. officially sort of solidified?
- [61:20]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So the U.N. was solidified in 1945, coming out of World War II, initially at a conference in San Francisco and then established here in New York. As a matter of fact, as an aside, before the UN building that we all know on the east river was built, the UN met in my college where I teach, Hunter College, served as the first UN headquarters.
- [61:42]
Mark Gagnon
That's awesome.
- [61:43]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. Interesting little claim to fame.
- [61:44]
Mark Gagnon
Oh, that's interesting.
- [61:47]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
The concept here. Prior to World War II, there had been a thing called the League of Nations, which had been developed coming out of World War I. The idea being if you had a forum in which the nations of the world could all meet, they could negotiate differences instead of fighting them out. And also, there's another idea in some tension with that, the idea of collective security. And that idea is, if there is one country that is aggressive, if all of the other countries band together collectively, they can stop that aggression. And the League of Nations and then the United nations were supposed to provide a forum where that could happen. The League of Nations was judged certainly a failure because it didn't Prevent World War II. It's actually sort of hard to argue that point, although there are scholars recently who have said there were some things the League of Nations did that were effective, but basically it failed at the thing it was really supposed to do, which was prevent another world war. So it is hoped that the UN will. Will be more successful, will. Will work more effectively, although it's actually organized remarkably similarly to the League of Nations. But for a while in that era, in the late 40s, in the 50s, in the 60s, I think most historians feel the UN had an importance which it doesn't have in the world today. It had an importance and a respect. The secretary generals of the UN were really major world figures who were respected and their word counted a lot. And the UN did play an important role in a lot of the crises of the early Cold War era. And Korea is certainly a Prime example.
- [63:26]
Mark Gagnon
On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this. So whether you're sharing the streaming password in the family chat or trading those late night voice messages, that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends, and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Right? I mean, Korea. I didn't realize how complex that entire conflict was, having the UN pushing up from one side, North Koreans, the Chinese and the Russians pushing down from the other side. I had seen a map, like a time lapse of the way that the forces moved and how the line moved. And at one point it was, you know, the North Korean forces were pushed into just such a small area. Was that in retrospect, was that a tactical blunder to be so aggressive from the American side? Was there a way that they could have pushed a little less than maybe negotiated?
- [64:28]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I mean, in retrospect, yes. I mean, one of the things that's crazy about the Korean War is how much it seesawed back and forth. When the North Koreans first attacked, they drove the South Koreans almost all the way down the peninsula. Americans come in, drive them almost all the way back up the peninsula. And then this, to your point, having kind of won, they pushed it too far. Like the Chinese said, don't cross X line. And then they crossed the line, and then the Chinese came in. And then when the Chinese came in, they drove the United nations forces back down the peninsula quite a bit. So there's a lot of movement on this. Basically, it ended up kind of where the border is now. So again, it's a little Bit like World War II ending. And you got the Cold War boundary.
- [65:14]
Mark Gagnon
So in the way that Ukraine is important to Russian security, North Korea is important to Chinese security. Yes, that makes sense. Now, I don't want to go too far back, but. So I'm not sure if this would even fit here. But as far as the Marshall Plan goes, what exactly was that in brief?
- [65:30]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. Okay, so it's a good question. This is important. I think that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the American government operated in the world with a wisdom that is almost without historical precedent and almost without historical successor. I think there was a moment there where we really got it right. And the Marshall Plan is one piece of that, that the idea behind the Marshall Plan, named, of course, for Secretary of State George Marshall. The idea was an American view, which I think is basically right, that political extremism grows in the soil of economic despair. And Europe in the late forties was a mess. And what was starting to alarm people, including Secretary Marshall, by 1947 is there didn't seem to be much recovery. If you traveled through Europe, you know, in 1947, you would see a lot of areas with destroyed cities, destroyed infrastructure, bridges, you know, crops not doing that well, people hungry. You know, that's very fertile soil for either communism or fascism or both. But it's, you know, democracy. Democracy seems to need stability and prosperity to do well. So the American idea was, was, well, let's pour a lot of money into Europe, let's build it up economically, and then we'll get democracy. And as a matter of fact, they were willing, I mean, they were willing kind of on a dare to extend aid to the Soviet side of Europe as well. So the countries behind what was already being called the Iron Curtain, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etcetera, they were also offered Marshall Plan aid. This actually, by the way, became a moment in the sort of steady escalation of the Cold War. But let me get to that in a sec. So the point of the Marshall Plan was the United States gave, I believe the figure was $12 billion altogether in $1947, which, off the top of my head, I don't know what the equivalent would be now, but it would be a lot. It's a lot of money. And countries could decide what they did with it. And different countries did different things with the money they got from Marshall Plan aid. But the point was to do something to develop infrastructure or that would make their societies more prosperous and hence more stable. Some of the Soviet satellite states, notably Czechoslovakia, when they heard about this, they're right Keen. And the Czech government says, oh, yeah, there's going to be a meeting in Paris to discuss this. They said, we're coming to Paris. Yep, we want our share of Marshall Plan aid. And this is when the Soviets said, nope, nope, you don't. Because again, if you think about the mutual perceptions, the action and reaction thing, from the United States standpoint, this is a fairly, I think, wise effort to create political stability using the tools of economic aid. But from the Soviet standpoint, this is America using its capitalist wealth as aggression. This is America using its wealth to kind of subvert.
- [68:39]
Mark Gagnon
From a Soviet standpoint, they're buying influence, they're buying leadership.
- [68:42]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Right. So to the Soviets, this is a clear threat. And from their standpoint, you can see how that would be. So the coming of Marshall Plan aid is actually something that stimulates the sois to push for coups in places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia to solidify communist control there as a kind of defensive move against what they see as the threat of Marshall Planning. So this becomes part of that pattern of action, reaction, reaction, action that is very characteristic of the breakdown of relations between the two sides in the Cold War.
- [69:14]
Mark Gagnon
Oh, that's really, really insightful because you can see it from the American side. There's multiple ways. I'm sure you could view it, but perhaps there's an altruistic way to say, hey, we want stable nations that have economies that flourish, and they're likely doing it because they can be democratic, which maybe is more favorable to the United States. But it also might, in their opinion, ideologically, this is what benefits the most people. So let's just altruistically help them.
- [69:38]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Right. I would call it enlightened self interest. I mean, the United States wasn't a babe in the woods. I mean, there's also an element here of when they're prosperous, they'll buy our stuff. So there's an economic angle there, but I do think that's America doing what it does in its better moments, using American strength and wealth to make people in other countries as well as ours, prosperous and free. And it was also partly a lesson that. That the Truman administration had taken from the experiences of the 20s and 30s when America's response had been exactly the opposite. America's response had been to isolate and to not get involved in the world. And in fact, to have committees called, things like America first running around saying America shouldn't be involved in the world. And then look what had happened. There had been fascism, there had been war, there had been threats to the United States. It will blow back at you if you don't fix it. So the Truman administration thought before that happens is let's use our resources to fix it and let's create freedom and prosperity, which is, it'll be good for those people, but it's good for us too. You know, I think that's, that's America doing what it does in its better moments, being wise about how to relate to the world.
- [70:48]
Mark Gagnon
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- [74:06]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
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- [75:06]
Mark Gagnon
Want to get back to the timeline of sort of how things progress. But first, in looking at communism as it props up in China and Soviet Union far before that, and as we'll see in other countries in the region, you make a really interesting point that Marx sort of outlines that this needs to be in an industrialized nation which these countries were not. They're largely aggressive. Why does it take hold of the leadership and I guess later the people in that time. Is it because they're so economically destitute that they hear this philosophy and they go, this is what's going to save us, this is what we need. Do they have an aversion to capitalism because it's an American ideal? And they felt that that was against their interest and will subvert them. What ultimately, from kind of like a philosophical standpoint makes them say this is what we need?
- [75:53]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, that's a great question. And I, I think your suggested answers are actually basically right. What most historians think, looking at this, and this is something that most American administrations in the Cold War had trouble grasping, is that often the fact that people in sort of poor and agrarian countries seem to embrace communism. It wasn't so much that they're really embracing communism as Marx had articulated it, but instead they're embracing an ideology which the people they don't like. Don't like, if you follow me. So for one thing, there's often an element of nationalism in a lot of Third World. I shouldn't say Third World, that's the old term in Global South. Let me correct myself. There's an element of nationalism in Global south communist movements. This is very true of the Chinese. It's very true of communist movements in a lot of African countries or other Asian countries where it's not just an adherence to Marx itself, which is supposed to be an internationalist and non national ideology as Marx articulated it, but it takes on a nationalist flavor. So they kind of see it as nationalism more than anything else. And then there's the fact that it's often anti imperial and often these movements are taking hold in countries that have gotten the sharp end from imperial countries, whether directly, whether in African countries, for instance. If they were colonies of France or Britain or Portugal, then communism becomes a sort of way to articulate an anti colonial opposition to those colonial regimes, many of which still exist in the early Cold War. I mean, we sort of forget this, but the British still have an extensive empire into the early 60s. France is famously fighting anti colonial wars in places like Vietnam and Algeria through the 40s and 50s and into the early 60s. So the colonial relations are still a big thing. And communism looks like an ideology that is anti colonial. So it takes on a lot of appeal for that reason. And then as you said, often, usually these are cuties where people are poor. And it looks like the Soviet Union has maybe been a successful model of how you can take a backward industrial country and industrialize it rapidly and become more prosperous. So it looks like maybe that's the recipe. There are a lot of people around the world in the years after World War II who feel that that is true. Not just people in global south countries. There are a lot of people who think maybe the lesson of the Soviet Union and its performance in World War II is that this is actually a path to the future, that a planned economy is going to be better than the kind of anarchy, a capitalist economy. I, going back to something I said right at the outset, I in fact, as a grouchy old capitalist, think that was wrong and that in fact capitalism often isn't pretty, but it gets the job done that it's supposed to do, whereas Soviet style communism doesn't. But historically speaking, I can understand why people would have thought differently in that time. It looked like maybe the path to the future involves planning, orderly economic planning that seems sort of to make sense on some level. And the success of the Soviet Union seemed like a good advertisement for that to many people.
- [79:13]
Mark Gagnon
Interesting, I guess, yeah. Growing up you would hear a lot of the cynical American perspective that Communism is just a fraudulent economic ideology put forth by autocrats and tyrants in order to control and dominate their entire population. Were there any countries that we have talked about or will talk about that adopted communism purely on grounds of control and dictatorship leadership.
- [79:39]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So I think the answer to that is that to a significant degree, the satellite states of Eastern Europe, and there's a significant degree to which that is true because they didn't have much choice about it. And they became communist states ultimately because the Soviet Union wanted them to become communist states. That doesn't mean there weren't true believers in those countries because there were in the 40s and 50s, there were lots of people in those Eastern European Countries who were activists and communist parties who did genuinely believe in the ideology, that tended to die off fairly quickly, though. And there's a sort of narrative of Soviet crackdowns on those countries that reinforce the dying off of idealism. So, for instance, there was an uprising in East Germany, especially in east Berlin in 1953, of workers rising up against their communist system. And that uprising got crushed by Soviet tanks. There's a famous picture, a little bit like the picture folks might know from the Tiananmen Square thing many years later. But there's a sort of forerunner where in 1953 there's this picture of like a Soviet tank bearing down on a East Berlin worker who's breaking up paving stones and he's got a paving stone in his hand. So you see the tank coming at this guy, and this guy, young man has a paving stone, he's playing at the tank. And I always want to say, I mean, if I could speak to the picture, I want to say, dude, you're not going to win this one.
- [81:06]
Mark Gagnon
But it does stand as sort of a symbolic sort of image of.
- [81:11]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
But the thing about the Soviet tank coming in and crushing the uprising. And so this happens then three years later in Hungary. Hungary had a sort of reform movement within its communist regime, led by a guy named Imre Nagy. And Imre Nagy wanted, as the saying was socialism with the human face. He wanted, wanted a freer communism, even a pluralistic communism, that he wanted to sort of go back to multi party democracy. And he talked about Hungary leaving the Soviet military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. And once he started saying these things, the Soviets basically said no. And again they sent tanks and troops into Hungary and they crushed Nagy's government and eventually they had him executed. And that's a real turning point. The 56. So Soviet move into Hungary is a moment at which you can practically hear the idealism dying around the world. And after that, there are not many people who freely believe in the Soviet brand of communism who don't have to because they're stuck in one of those countries.
- [82:10]
Mark Gagnon
Interesting.
- [82:11]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And in case you needed a punctuation on this, 12 years later in Prague, well, in Czechoslovakia generally, but especially in Prague in 1968, there's kind of a replay of the Imre Nagy thing in Hungary where there's a reform communist movement, in this case led by a guy named Alexander Dubek. And he also wants a sort of more humane, freer kind of communism. And he starts making moves in that direction. And once again, the Soviets come in with military Force and they crush it. It's known as the Prague Spring and the Soviet crushing of Prague Spring. And so they crush it with military force. And that's the end of the Prague Spring experiment. And after 1968, there's basically literally nobody left in the whole sort of Soviet sphere who actually really believes in the ideology in their heart. It's become purely at that point, an instrument of power.
- [83:00]
Mark Gagnon
That I think is just really important context to understand that each country specifically after World War II, kind of had a different interest in communism, that there's ideologues and then the ideologues kind of spread it, and then there's politicians that kind of take it, that then spread it into the surrounding nation nations and then they need it to create buffer zones. And then there's anti colonial nations that are being, for lack of a better word, just being dominated by Western countries and they reject the west and say, screw you guys. Does anyone have another offer? And then these guys are like, oh, we'll take you and here's our offer. And they go, well, this sounds pretty good and you guys are doing all right, so let's give it a shot. And then slowly things start to erode because it's either a, a fraught ideology or it's implemented incorrectly, whatever the reason may be. And then slowly people kind of start to see it for what it actually is, which is a tyrannical sort of regime, sort of utilizing communism as a way to, you know, take control.
- [84:01]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, that's absolutely right. And you know, one of the problems that America often has in, through this whole era or American governments often have, is American governments struggle, to put it politely, they struggle to see the other sort of shades within support for communism in a lot of countries. I mean, the outstanding example is Vietnam. So there's an American tendency to think communism is all one thing. It's monolithic. It's one monolithic system, one monolithic ideology. The Soviet Union is behind everything, or eventually the Soviet Union and China are behind everything. But they don't see Americans struggle to see the kind of regional variations or the ways in which somebody say in North Vietnam might see communism as a sort of path to national liberation, not necessarily to a Marx and English utopia. And so America tends to respond to these things. American governments tend to respond to communist movements everywhere as if they are some manifestation of the Soviet Union, which of course always, all through the Cold War, Soviet Union's the main point. That's America's main adversary. That's what they're really worried about. They're only worried about Vietnam to the extent that they see North Vietnamese communism as an adjunct of Soviet communism. In fact, it was always more complicated than that. But one of the tensions and problems of the Cold War is that we struggled to see that.
- [85:28]
Mark Gagnon
Interesting. And, yeah, I guess the Vietnamese at that time had been dealing with French occupations, and they're like, screw these guys. Yeah, let's get them out of here and see what else we got.
- [85:37]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Right. And they do. Eventually they succeed militarily in getting the French out. Very brutal war there ends finally in 1954 with the French defeat at the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu. And then what happens? America steps right in. So, like, we pick it up and we run with it for almost another. Well, for about another 20 years. Wow.
- [85:53]
Mark Gagnon
I mean, yeah, this is actually really helpful context. And just as, like, another sort of definitional point. People talk about fascism all the time. They talk about it today. They talk about it in this time. I've never. I haven't heard a really great definition of fascism. It seems like no one really knows what it is.
- [86:08]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, no one does. There is no great definition.
- [86:10]
Mark Gagnon
And I've one definition that I've heard that I kind of seem to like. And I'm curious what you think is effectively a dictatorial or autocratic regime that utilizes whatever social force is present in a nation in order to sort of carry out their power. So if they're. There's economic instability, they will use the economy as their tool to take over power, or they will use Christianity or religion to take on power. They will use communism, and they will utilize whatever is present in order to take over control. And so fascism is not this thing or that thing. It is sort of autocratic control using an ideology, whatever it may be. Is that decent?
- [86:52]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, I would say. I mean, I think you're absolutely right that fascism is really amorphous. Trying to define it is, like the saying goes, trying to nail jelly to the wall. And there are about as many definitions of it as there are people who have studied it. That said, the scholar who I like the best in the sense of the one whose definition, I think is most kind of on point, and his definition is very long. But there's a great historian, absolutely brilliant historian, named Robert Paxton, who became famous studying the Vichy regime in France during World War II. And then I think maybe his last book was called the Anatomy of fascism, published about 20 years ago. It's a really brilliant book. And I won't sort of give the whole definition that he gives, but I'll suggest kind of the main elements. I mean, he would say what you've said and then he would add a few things on. Because there are certain things that do tend to come up with fascism. So there's always a racial component, for one thing. And this actually, it's important because it distinguishes fascism from some other kinds of ideologies that might lead you to an authoritarian or dictatorial government. There are some things about fascism that are different. There's always a racism involved somewhere. Very commonly anti Semitism. I mean, the Nazis are the prime example for that. But it doesn't have to be that. It could be, you know, for Mussolini and the Italian fascists, it was as much anti African racism. But there's always some racial component. And actually set against that, there's always a nationalistic component. There's always an idea that the people of our country, whatever it might be, we are racially better than everybody else. There's always some element of that blood and soil argument. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And then there's always, as always with fascism, there's always a kind of fear and despair about decline. So there's always this idea that, that it might be the racial other, whoever it is, but somebody is really threatening our community. So we have to fight back. And because of the threat, our fight needs to be violent. And then, at least historically, in the moment that it developed, if you want to say there's fascism around the world today, this might look different, but fascism in the 20s and 30s and 40s was also always anti communist. And you see this in how it grows up. So like fascism in Italy basically gets born when Mussolini is a discharged war vet, has his gang of thugs and he starts to find that factory owners are happy to sort of hire his gangs of thugs to beat up their workers and their union organizers, who are usually mostly communists. And that starts to orient the movement into being anti communist. And then Hitler picks that up in Germany. He talks about a lot of things, but he's always really anti communist. And that sort of becomes an element in the other arguably fascist movements that you see in interwar Europe, in places like Romania or Hungary or France or Spain, Portugal. So it's sort of those elements tend to come up in fascists fascism. I always hesitate to call anybody in the world today a fascist because I don't know how much this tracks. I mean, there's some things that track from the fascisms of back then to some political things you can see in the world in 2025, but it never tracks all that Well, I think so. There's plenty of authoritarian politics around in our world, but whether it's fascism is really a question for debate.
- [90:35]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, it seems difficult to, to pin an individual as a fascist. It seems like it is a confluence of environmental things occurring all simultaneously, and then an autocrat to kind of take over. For it to be fascism, it's almost like calling a person like an economy, you know what I mean? It's like they operate within that and the racial animosity must exist and, and the nationalism and the fear of decline, those things have to be present for the fascists to then take over.
- [91:08]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. And as a matter of fact, I mean, to your point, Robert Paxton, in this book I was mentioning, he makes the point that one of the reasons why fascism is hard to define is that it happens in time and fascisms are different at different moments of the revolution. He actually has this elaborate theory where he says there are five phases of fascism, but there's only one fascist regime that made it all the way to phase five, and that's the Nazis, because he says phase five is like full on genocide, like the Holocaust. There's a lot of steps that can lead you up to that. Most other, well, every other fascist regime, he says, got stuck somewhere around, you know, phase two, phase three, phase four. So there's fascisms look different depending where they are in power, basically.
- [91:54]
Mark Gagnon
Right. And that's, I guess, important to recognize that there is a developmental element. So, like, you can't call like a caterpillar a butterfly, you know, but like it is sort of, but it's not there yet.
- [92:05]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes.
- [92:06]
Mark Gagnon
And so it depends on where in.
- [92:08]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
The, the right conditions, the right leaf to be on, it'll become a butterfly.
- [92:11]
Mark Gagnon
Right. That's really interesting. Okay, so now back to the timeline. Korea is more or less wrapping up in like 53.
- [92:18]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
53, yeah.
- [92:19]
Mark Gagnon
And what then comes from this? Obviously, people have seen this bloody war. Americans die. UN nation, soldiers die. Chinese, Russia and everyone else involved. There's this big hot conflict. We avoid World War iii, which is good. Cooler heads prevail.
- [92:34]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
No.
- [92:34]
Mark Gagnon
No nuclear weapons. Weapons. Then what?
- [92:37]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So actually, the other thing that's really important, that happens in 1953, and it's not a coincidence that the Korean War gets negotiated to an end after this other thing happens. The other thing is the death of Stalin in March of 1953. This is really important because Stalin, going back to the different types of Cold War scholars, my orthodox heart does think that Stalin had more than half of the blame for the development of the Cold War. Him dying is a major turning point in how the Cold War sort of develops. He was clearly, in a sense, more aggressive and more dangerous to the world than the people who came immediately after him. And it's kind of like in the Soviet Union. It's kind of like the situation in a gang when the Godfather dies. It's like there's no succession plan here. Regimes like that don't do that.
- [93:31]
Mark Gagnon
There's chaos.
- [93:32]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So there's like. There's like. There's three powerful guys who are kind of understand, who are now fighting it out. And technically they're working together.
- [93:40]
Mark Gagnon
They.
- [93:40]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
They form a sort of, you know, collective leadership for a few years. But obviously they're jockeying for power, of course. And actually one of them gets whacked by the others and, you know. But eventually is that Trotsky. Actually Berea. Berea had been like the head of the secret police.
- [93:56]
Mark Gagnon
So who are the three guys?
- [93:57]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So there's. So there's Berea, there's a guy called Malenkov, and there's Nikita Khrushchev.
- [94:04]
Mark Gagnon
Oh, I'm completely off. Who dies in a bathtub with an ice pick.
- [94:09]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
That is Trotsky. That was earlier, though. This way before. Yeah, that was in 1940. He was in Mexico. Whoops. He'd been out of power for a long time. Eventually Khrushchev sort of wins out. And that's happened by 1956. Khrushchev has clearly kind of moved into the front side spot. And why that matters in kind of world historical terms is Khrushchev brings in what's called the thaw. He talks a lot about having better relations with the west of kind of calming down the Cold War in a sense. He kind of announces his arrival as the leader by giving a speech in 1956. It's known as his secret speech, although it's not secret for very long, in which he denounces Stalin. He denounces some of the crimes and murders and so on that Stalin had committed. By no means all of them. And by the way, Khrushchev had been up to his neck and all of that stuff. But never mind. It's sort of significant that a Soviet leader is now denouncing Stalin. And that's sort of setting the tone. There are a lot of writers and artists whose stuff got censored who now can kind of come back and do stuff and there's a little more freedom. Khrushchev is a guy, sort of interesting fellow who probably could have gotten elected in a Western democracy. He's kind of good at pressing the flesh and slapping backs. And famously, he comes to the United States and does a tourist where he's sort of popular and the press likes him and he's kind of funny. And so going into the second half of the 50s, it seems like there's a possibility for better relations between east and West. However, Khrushchev is also aggressive in his way about pushing the interests of the Soviet Union forward. And he's a sort of weird, almost contradictory figure where on the one hand, he sort of talks about peace and he seems a lot friendlier than Stalin, and there's this thaw that happens under him. But he's also, in some ways, in power terms, he's kind of pushing the envelope. And this actually does lead to a crisis. Well, it leads to a crisis in two places. It leads to a crisis in Berlin and in Cuba. And this is where the Cold War probably gets to its most dangerous part. And it's largely because of Khrushchev kind of pushing the envelope. Berlin is the one that comes first. And as a kind of semi Berliner, it's the one that I particularly love to talk about. So we go back to the situation of Berlin in 1958. We are kind of where we'd been in 1945, except those zones of occupation that we talked about have now been solidified into two Germanies that are technically independent. There's West Germany and there's East Germany. They're their own countries. The Allies, the British and Americans and so on are still there. They have military force. Russians are still there on their side. But now their occupation has kind of morphed into now. They're there because each other is there. So those are Cold War defense forces. The occupation is very real in Berlin. Now, the situation in Berlin is insanely complicated. And I'll try and not to go on forever on the complications. But the gist of it is you've got those four sectors. And the weird thing about Berlin is in the Cold War, it doesn't belong to either east or West Germany. This is the weird thing. Berlin is an international city that belongs to the four occupying powers. It belongs to Britain, France, America and the Soviet Union. West Berlin doesn't belong to West Germany. East Berlin doesn't belong to East Germany, Germany. Berlin's kind of its own thing. The thing is, Khrushchev doesn't like that, and he doesn't like it for a bunch of reasons. By 1958, West Berlin is becoming really visibly prosperous, and it's a show window for the west, and the west is very conscious of that. East Berlin is not. Because under the Communist system, you don't get the same kind of consumer prosperity that you get under Western capitalism. And by 58, Germany and Berlin have recovered enough from the war that in West Berlin, people are living with cars and TVs and all that. Not so much in. In the East. So that's embarrassing for the East. The other thing is Berlin's an escape hatch. So if you are East German, you can't go to West Germany. As of 1951, the border between West Germany and East Germany is fortified all the way along. You can't get across it, but you can go to Berlin. And remember, Berlin doesn't belong to east or West Germany. Berlin belongs to the Allies. If you're in East Germany German, you can go to East Berlin. Just got to kind of walk down the street. Oh. So casually cross one of the famous checkpoints, like Checkpoint Charlie, into another sector, maybe the American sector, and you can do that. And then you can go to an airport and you can get on a plane and you can fly to West Germany. It wouldn't be a good idea to drive or take a train because they might snap you in the bit of East Germany that's between Berlin and West Germany. But you can fly, and that's fine. And if you're an East German, you fly to West Germany, the West German government considers you its citizen, so you have an automatic citizenship, right to live there, right to work. So Berlin is an escape hatch for East Germans, and lots of them are taking that escape hatch. On an average, about 100,000 people every year leave East Germany through Berlin.
- [99:22]
Mark Gagnon
That seems like a massive leak.
- [99:23]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
It's a massive leak and it's disastrous for the East Germans because the people who leave, leave tend to be young, they tend to be educated, they tend to be skilled. They're exactly what you want to build up your country. But they're. You're hemorrhaging them and you're sort of being left with your pensioners. Right. So from an economic standpoint, it kind of bites.
- [99:40]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah. There's a brain drain. And on top of that, they seem like a ideal propaganda tool.
- [99:44]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Absolutely.
- [99:45]
Mark Gagnon
They go over there and they say, hey, how's it going over there? And they're like, oh, it's terrible, it sucks.
- [99:48]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And we left. So, you know, wow.
- [99:50]
Mark Gagnon
And so it was that easy because that is. You're saying Berlin is. Is broken up in these quads quadrants. One of them belongs to the Soviets.
- [99:57]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes.
- [99:58]
Mark Gagnon
So they would Go from East Germany into the Soviet quadrant and then just walk over.
- [100:03]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
You can just walk over. You can walk through. There are people who actually, in this time in the 50s, there are people who live in East Berlin, but their job is in West Berlin. And you can live like a king if you do that, because wages are higher in West Berlin, so you can get paid in, like, West Berlin. Marx. Go back to East Berlin. You can live like a king because under the communist system, everything's kind of subsidized and cheap.
- [100:24]
Mark Gagnon
That's best of both worlds.
- [100:25]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah.
- [100:25]
Mark Gagnon
You know what I mean?
- [100:26]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
They have a word for it in German. They're called border walkers. Grenzkenger. Who go back and forth.
- [100:30]
Mark Gagnon
So you get capitalist wages.
- [100:32]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yep.
- [100:33]
Mark Gagnon
But at Communist prices.
- [100:34]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. Communist rent. Communist groceries. Yeah.
- [100:36]
Mark Gagnon
Wow. And what did they think? Did they think like, oh, we're not going to stop them because we are superior. They wouldn't leave. Or if we put.
- [100:44]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Well, they can't. I mean, they can't, because why not.
- [100:47]
Mark Gagnon
Just wall off their coin quadrant?
- [100:49]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Well, we're getting there, but we're not there yet.
- [100:50]
Mark Gagnon
Oh, I think that's the thing that everyone.
- [100:52]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Oh, whoa. Why? Yes. So. Dumbass. I'm like, so for. For. For all of these reasons. You've really hit on somebody here. For all of these reasons. You know, Khrushchev and the East German leadership are. Are super unhappy about Berlin, and they want to stop this somehow, with maybe a wall, in fact, but they technically can't, because there are these agreements that we talked about coming out of World War II that this is a global city, determine the status of. So basically, they fret about this for a while. So in 1958, Khrushchev gives a speech. It's actually right on Thanksgiving in the American calendar, he gives a speech in which he says the Western Allies have to get out of Berlin. Berlin's on East German soil. It should belong to East Germany. The war is over. They need to get out. And if they don't get out, I'll sign a peace treaty with East Germany and the East Germans can take over, and we'll move away from these wartime agreements and for really complicated reasons that I won't thresh out here. There's a kind of political symbolism to him signing a treaty with East Germany and handing over East Berlin to the East Germans. That is unacceptable to the West. It's really technical, but just take my word for it, it's unacceptable to the West. So the west basically says, no, we're staying in West Berlin. We're there because of the war and we're not leaving. And there is now a three year crisis. For three years, kind of the focus of world politics is on this crisis over the status of Berlin, which always has behind it the threat and the fear that this will blow up into World War iii. That eventually the conflict over what to do with the status of Berlin will be such that east and west will get into a war with each other.
- [102:30]
Mark Gagnon
And it's existing as like a little experiment of capitalism and communism, of America and Soviet Union. I mean that because I didn't understand the extent.
- [102:40]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, we've sort of forgotten this. But there was almost as much chance of a nuclear war over Berlin in that three year period as a year later in the famous crisis over Cuba. What happens then? In the spring of 1960, there's about to be an international summit conference where the leaders will meet and try and talk about what to do with Berlin. And right before that happens, I bet you've heard of this event. Event the U2 spy plane gets shot down over the Soviet Union. You know, Francis Gary powers flying a U2. And this pilot, the CIA pilot, Francis Gary Powers, survives and he's taken prisoner by the Soviets and he's put on trial, you know, show trial in Moscow. And it's very embarrassing. President Eisenhower, he's still President, he didn't really like these U2 overflights to the Soviet Union, but the CIA kind of persuaded him to do just one more and they thought the plane was invulnerable, vulnerable. And then the Soviets figured out how to shoot it down. So it's, it's a very embarrassing thing. Khrushchev is really mad, or at least he pretends he's really mad. He says, I'm not going to meet with Eisenhower to talk about Berlin. The hell with it. I'll wait for his Successor because it's 1960, there's going to be an election, you know, I'll wait for his successor. So then the crisis is kind of on hold.
- [103:51]
Mark Gagnon
What happens to Gary Powers? Just as I get.
- [103:52]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
He eventually gets. If you check out the movie Bridge of Spies that came out a few years ago, that's what happens to him. He gets repatriated. Created eventually in an exchange for a Soviet spy who'd been caught in America named Abel. Abel, something like that. They exchanged on a bridge, famous bridge in Berlin called the Glienicke Bridge, where one spy goes that way across the bridge. The bridge is on the sector boundary. The other spy comes this way. And this established a ritual by the way, one of the kind of great rituals of the Cold War became these spy exchanges on the Glienica Bridge in Berlin. Wow.
- [104:25]
Mark Gagnon
And they just high five on the way and just be like, good game.
- [104:28]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Pretty much, yeah.
- [104:28]
Mark Gagnon
That is wild. Okay, so.
- [104:30]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So. So then there's an election, of course, in November 1960, very young John F. Kennedy gets elected President of the United States, comes into office, and his first year in office is like one disaster after another. You know, famous Bay of Pigs thing where the CIA organizes an attack on Cuba. It's a disaster, and Kennedy had okayed it. And it's super embarrassing for him. Just the way he's shooting down the U2 was super embarrassing for Eisenhower. And this is how he's starting. And then he arranges to meet Khrushchev at a summit in Vienna, where they'll meet for a few days and talk about things. Kennedy is, I think by this time, he's 44 years old, the youngest president ever. He's very smart, but he's very inexperienced. Khrushchev is a tough guy who came up with Stalin and sort of thinks Kennedy looks. Looks like a nice tempting morsel of a little boy.
- [105:22]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, I'm just gonna walk all over him.
- [105:23]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. And he kind of does. I mean, for three days, they meet and talk. And a lot of the talk is about Berlin and what to do about Berlin. And to quote Kennedy, who said after one of these meetings, he just beat hell out of me. Khrushchev was really aggressive, you know, wouldn't give Kennedy any ground. Kennedy hadn't been expecting this. He knew Khrushchev was an adversary, but he hadn't expected this sort of degree of hostility and aggression. He actually said, kind of said to one of his advisors, I think, is it always like this?
- [105:54]
Mark Gagnon
No way.
- [105:55]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Dealing with the Russians.
- [105:56]
Mark Gagnon
Poor guy.
- [106:00]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And so the crisis of Berlin coming out of this is not only not resolved, it's sort of getting worse. And in the wake of this meeting, Kennedy calls up a lot of reserves because it's starting to look like there's going to be a war over Berlin. And then something really interesting happens. All right, so the thing about Berlin, the thing about the legal arrangements with Berlin is that the four powers run it jointly. They have their sectors, but in some sense, all of Berlin belongs to all of them. It's not like the American sector belongs to the United States, but not the rest of it. The whole city is supposed to belong to all four of these occupying powers. But Kennedy, he's young and inexperienced, but he's Very, very, very smart. And he learns quickly. And he does something in his speech, which historians debate how intentional this was, but I think it was intentional. Kennedy gives a speech in which he says the United States will insist on preserving its right of access to West Berlin. It's very important that he says West Berlin. He doesn't say Berlin. He says West Berlin. Why is that important? Because he's telegraphing to Khrushchev to come back to your great idea. Idea. He's telegraphing, if you build a wall, I won't be super bent out of shape. That's really what he's saying. And this message gets heard. So Khrushchev and the East German leaders, they decide, okay, a wall will solve our problems. That will enable us to keep people in West Berlin or in East Berlin, keep them from escaping. It will hide the embarrassment of the prosperity of West Berlin from our peace people. A wall is the way to go. So over a period of a few weeks, they really covertly sneak building materials into East Berlin so, like, air reconnaissance can't see it. They hide it in warehouses. And then in the very wee hours of August 13, 1961, without much warning, suddenly border guards and police come out and start putting up bricks and stringing barbed wire around the sector back boundaries and cutting people off. This is the first iteration of what's going to be the Berlin Wall. And then over the weeks and months that follow, a much more elaborate wall is built. Eventually, by the 1980s, it's actually a very sophisticated system where for East Berliners, you had a sort of preliminary wall that defined as far as you could go. And then there was what they called the death strip, which had a whole bunch of features like. Like sand that they kept raked so it would show footprints. There were guns that would be triggered by sensors if someone's trying to cross this death strip. There were Dobermans who were trained to go for the throat. There are guards and guard towers with guns. So to get from East Berlin, you know, over the initial wall that they have and into this death strip and then to the wall, you get over that and you're in West Berlin, you're not likely going to do that and survive.
- [108:50]
Mark Gagnon
I mean, this sounds like an evil villain trap. Like, I didn't realize there was all these booby traps on the wall.
- [108:55]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, no, it was really not nasty. It was really, really nasty.
- [108:57]
Mark Gagnon
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- [110:19]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
This is the channel.
- [110:20]
Mark Gagnon
We're going to be exploring the most interesting, fascinating, controversial topics from all time throughout all history. Right. You probably know about Benjamin Franklin, I don't know, Thomas Jefferson, Nikola Tesla. Interesting figures from history and you probably learned about in school. And they were pretty boring. But not here. No. As you know, I was raised by a conspiracy theorist. So I'm going to be diving deep into all of the interesting, strange, occult and secretive societal relationships that all of these famous, influential men from our shared past have. So if you're interested, please go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube channel. It will be pinned in the description as well as the comments. And if you're on Spotify, this doesn't really apply to you, but these episodes will be dropping as well. Just go ahead and give us a high rating because it really helps the show. Now let's get back to it.
- [111:03]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
The East German story, they call it the anti Fascist Protection Wall. Their story is they put this up to protect their people against aggressive aggression from the nasty fascist Westerners, as they call them. But in fact, there's no doubt that it was to keep their own people in. And it became this very nasty, rather sophisticated way of keeping their own people in. And Kennedy had telegraphed that this, the United States would accept it, and he did, to a fair amount of rage from West Berliners. West Berliners were quite unhappy with Kennedy for allowing that. And not like sort of sending in troops and bulldozers and taking it down. But as Kennedy himself said, it's not pretty, but a wall is better than a war. And I think he was right about that, probably given the way the crisis was. I think actually this is where Kennedy, I think, started to show signs that he was going to be, in my view, a great president. Like how quickly he learned and how smart he was. I think he handled that situation actually very well.
- [112:02]
Mark Gagnon
Wow. I did not realize all the pretense that went into building the Berlin Wall. I mean, I'm. Maybe this is a, an indication of my, you know, European history, but I just thought it was like World War II. All right, let's split it east and west because it's, you know, the capital. So, you know, you have the east and the west of the country, east and the west of the capital, and then put a wall up and we'll call it a day. I didn't realize it was such a progression.
- [112:25]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
No, no. Yeah, the wall. I think most, I think most people sort of assume that. It's sort of intuitive to assume that. But in fact the wall comes, you know, quite a bit later. And Berlin had been this weird space for a long time time or the one space in the Cold War where you could kind of move easily between sectors.
- [112:39]
Mark Gagnon
Now I'm curious, like the feeling amongst Berliners at the time, because these people are all still ethnic Germans.
- [112:44]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Oh, absolutely. Well, there's a fair about a fair bit of. In migration by this point. There are people coming from Turkey and so on, but. But most of them are old stock Germans. Yeah.
- [112:55]
Mark Gagnon
Many of which were under the Third Reich, were potentially Nazis themselves.
- [113:00]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [113:01]
Mark Gagnon
Living in this place now occupied by these other countries. So if this is broken up into quadrants and actually maybe that'd be helpful. Would it be possible to see the quadrants that Berlin was broken into? Because if you have these four quadrants but then all of a sudden you have a wall down the middle, one of the quadrants had to give in to the Soviets. Or was it not exactly delineated that way? I might be oversimplifying it so there.
- [113:24]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Is the Wall, basically. Yeah. So the wall kind of, if you see.
- [113:31]
Mark Gagnon
Oh, I see, I see, I see. It's not, you know, northeast, southwest.
- [113:35]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Well, it sort of is. You can see where the flags are.
- [113:37]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, yeah.
- [113:38]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
This is. Gives you an idea of like, who's, you know, whose sector is being run by which power. And Berlin Wall. The wall went around like the blue bit is West Berlin. Right. So the wall went all the way around West Berlin.
- [113:48]
Mark Gagnon
I understand. Okay. I thought it was like, you know, the northeast, northwest, north, south or southwest. Yeah, Et cetera.
- [113:54]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
No, no, this makes a lot more sense.
- [113:55]
Mark Gagnon
Ah, okay.
- [113:56]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Somebody said, I think some artists said West Berlin was this weird kind of surrealist prison. The people inside are free, the people.
- [114:05]
Mark Gagnon
Outside are not, and they can't freely cross the border in any direction.
- [114:10]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Well, that was complicated and changed a bit over time. East Berliners basically could not freely cross into the West. East Germans could not freely cross into the West. After some years, it was fairly easy for West Berliners to cross into the eas. You could do that. So, like people from West Berlin or people from West Germany, indeed, if they had relatives in the east, they could travel to Berlin and they could get through and they could see their family. Their family couldn't come to see them.
- [114:35]
Mark Gagnon
Interesting. Now, I'm actually curious how this affects modern day Berlin. There's no doubt the, you know, I understand the architecture. I went to Berlin once as a young kid. But I understand the architecture of Berlin to this day looks very different. Is it even different amongst the French, English and American section sectors? Or is that sort of just like European UN Berlin?
- [114:57]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
As far as I can think, I know Berlin quite well. I never sort of thought about that. But I don't think you see a difference between at least the Western sectors. If they look different, it's sort of more for sort of historical or city reasons of themselves, or it may have to do with, you know, which areas got particularly pasted during World War II and which relatively survived. Survived. But I don't, as far as I can think, there aren't huge differences there. There are in some cases counterintuitive differences from west to East. So when I first started going to Berlin a lot in the 90s, East Berlin was still East Berlin. It was still rough and kind of run down and gritty, whereas West Berlin was kind of prosperous Western European place. I feel what's changed in the 30 or so years, 35 years, 36 years since the fall of the Wall is that a lot of old West Berlin has actually become A little bit seedy. And a lot of the sort of energy and development has been in the former East Berlin. So now I think there are a lot of neighborhoods of former East Berlin. If you walk around, they seem quite kind of slick and lots of new buildings and quite prosperous. Prosperous. Whereas some of the Old west looks a little seedy. So there's that slightly counterintuitive thing.
- [116:21]
Mark Gagnon
And I wonder if you have, like, you know, maybe because there's a lack of development throughout the 70s and 80s that now you all of a sudden you have this thing that opens up in the 90s and developers come in and say, oh, yeah, let's develop this place into a new city. Whereas you have the western part that is more antiquated. It's been there forever, so it kind of stays how it is. And then.
- [116:40]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
That's exactly right. Plus there's a sort of weird demographic thing that's kind of funny. So this comes back to how West Berlin legally didn't belong to West Germany. Okay, so the thing here is, all through the Cold War, and actually up until 2011, West Germany had a draft for its army. So technically, if you're a young man, you're subject to a draft for the army. But because West Berlin didn't belong, technically it didn't belong. I mean, in practice, it sort of did, but technically, it didn't belong to West Germany. Young men from West Berlin couldn't be drafted for the army. Army. So what this meant was, you know, especially in the 60s and 70s, West Berlin became a great place for the counterculture, because if you want to, you know, sort of drop out and all the rest of that 60s stuff and you don't want to be in the army, West Berlin's the place for you. So you start to get a particular milieu in West Berlin. And this is somewhat enhanced by the fact that because it's surrounded, because it's in the middle of East Germany, and it's always, even after the Wall, potentially vulnerable, a eastern attack. West Berlin is a place that businesses tend to see as risky. So a lot of the big companies who had, you know, for a long time being active in Berlin, it was a major industrial and economic center historically, but a lot of them move out in the Cold War. So West Berlin is actually a fairly poor place on its own. Resources kept going by infusions of cash from the West German government so that it looks good up against the East. But it's like a city that's kind of living on welfare, so to speak, with this population that runs heavily to counterculture dropouts who don't want to get drafted and the kind of people who are going to hang out with countercultural types who don't want to get drafted. So in a funny way Cold War Berlin becomes this kind of slacker city. Whereas East Berlin is the capital city of its country. And so it's a kind of strivers city. It's where you go if you're, if you're East German, if you're East German, East Berlin is where you go if you're a ambitious. This doesn't matter too much until the wall falls and it's all one city. And you've got these kind of ambitious striving people in East Berlin that are Russian serious. Yeah, yeah, totally. And you got these kind of slacker dudes in West Berlin that like rock.
- [118:55]
Mark Gagnon
Music and do drugs.
- [118:56]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah.
- [118:57]
Mark Gagnon
Oh, that's so funny.
- [118:58]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So this is actually again maybe slightly counterintuitive, weird cultural thing that happens that in some ways the East Berliners are better poised for the unified city than the West Berlin.
- [119:07]
Mark Gagnon
That's so funny that in West Berlin you have some like, you know, sort of like the, you know, punk rock American influenced Germans that like, you know, to do American things and they're probably even going extra because they want to prove to the world like yo, we are so we're the most American, we do the most drugs, we listen to the most rock music.
- [119:25]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
There is actually something to that.
- [119:26]
Mark Gagnon
And then they're being subsidized by the west, they kind of become communist.
- [119:32]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Well, I mean, I mean in some sense that's literally true in Berlin. Berlin has always been a fairly left leaning city and Cold War West Berlin was on the whole a pretty left leaning place, especially among the student population.
- [119:46]
Mark Gagnon
Sure.
- [119:47]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So I mean there's a literal and figurative sense in which that's true.
- [119:51]
Mark Gagnon
Now I don't know if you'll know this. You can punt on this question because it's going to be a little dicey here. I have many friends that go to Berlin and for Berlin in particular there are all these like sort of strange like deviant sex clubs and like there's like this like the Kit KitKat Club and these different places that are like meant for like social outcasts and strange figures that go in the night and the parties go till 8am and it's sort of just like Bacalian sort of love fests. And there's many of them in Berlin that are all very famous, famous and all very exclusive. Do you know if they occur in a Specific part of Berlin, I imagine the west is this sort of coming out of, like, this stalemate of the Cold War that creates this sort of environment where people are interested in hedonism. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on this?
- [120:44]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So, you know, I mean, I'm a boring old professor, so I don't. It's not really my world. I, I, I, yeah, honest. My wife's watching. Honest. I've heard some tell that that world very definitely still exists where it is geographically. Honestly, I don't know. If I had to guess, I would say, I mean, it would certainly historically have been completely in the west and not in the East. I would guess since the early 90s, as with a lot of things in Berlin, some of that might have moved east into the newer developing spaces, but I'm afraid that exceeds my knowledge.
- [121:18]
Mark Gagnon
That's fair.
- [121:19]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
- [121:22]
Mark Gagnon
That's a solid alibi. Okay, you passed on this one. Okay, this is fascinating. So now, what year does Berlin Wall go up? And it now is, like, fortified, and it exists.
- [121:31]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So the initial version goes up in August of 1961. And then it gradually gets developed, you know, over the months that follow. And eventually over the years that follow, it gets developed into this, you know, very complex system that we were talking about.
- [121:44]
Mark Gagnon
Now, quickly thereafter, it seems like Cuba kind of comes into the fray.
- [121:48]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes, absolutely, yes. So, again, Khrushchev being kind of in some ways reckless in pushing the envelope. He pushed it on Berlin and pushed it at least to the point where now there's this kind of solution with Berlin. And one of the interesting things about the Cold War, as a matter of fact, I think, is that up until the sort of resolution of the Berlin crisis with the building of the wall in 61, if there was going to be a World War III, it probably would have been about Berlin, and it would have been initially a European war. The weird thing that the building of the Berlin Wall does is kind of stabilize the European part of the Cold War. And I think often, I think actually we talked about this when we talked about World War II, but I think wars happen, I think, in large part when the rules are not agreed upon by all sides. And the Cold War was developing rules in the sense that the Soviet bloc belonged to the Soviet bloc, and the west kind of acknowledged, acknowledge that, at least tacitly and vice versa. But Berlin was the place where the rules weren't clear because of the weird legal ambiguity of the situation. But then when the Wall goes up, Then the rules are clear. And then, like, the rules of Berlin are kind of the same as the rules for the rest of the European Cold War. And that eventually kind of stabilizes the situation. Both sides basically accept, okay, you got that part. I got that part. We'll go with that interest.
- [123:08]
Mark Gagnon
Interesting.
- [123:10]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So then what happens from, like, you know, late 61, early 62, let's say, until 1991, is a lot of the energy, the Cold War, almost all of it sort of moves away from Europe, and the Cold War starts to become a story that's actually really about Asia and Africa and Latin America, which brings us to Cuba. So Cuba is another place where Khrushchev sees a chance to push the envelope a little bit. And there's a, you know, there's a prehistory to this. Castro and his forces. Forces had overthrown the previously existing Batista regime, which was basically a corrupt dictatorship, super friendly to the mob. Anyone who, like me, has watched the Godfather movies a bunch of times knows this. Well, whether or not you read the history.
- [123:53]
Mark Gagnon
The Havana casinos.
- [123:54]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, exactly. So Castro's regime comes in in 1959. It's not initially clear if he's a communist. He sort of says he's not. He says he's just a nationalist freedom fighter wanting to get rid of the awful Batista regime. Initially, he seems to be trying for good relations with the United States. The Eisenhower administration is fairly cold to that and not interested. And then they start. Gradually, the relations kind of break down. And the Eisenhower administration in its last months is planning this assault on the Bay of Pigs, which then when Kennedy comes in, he takes over and to his regret, does not veto. And so once it's clear to all the world that, you know, these Cuban emigres who are anti Castro have tried to invade the island and beat Cuba, and they've clearly had American backing, and that's failed. That's a big black eye for Kennedy. But it's also, you know, if you're Castro, you're obviously going to be worried about your security visa via the United States. And if you're Khrushchev, you're seeing an opportunity. So Khrushchev sees an opportunity, especially as Castro is already sort of gravitating to communism. Krush Gustav really reels them in and basically offers military protection, and specifically offers military protection in the form of stationing nuclear missiles on Cuba, which could reach the United States. Now, this is important because in 1962, the Soviets had very, very few nuclear missiles that could reach the United States from Soviet territory. The United States had a lot that could go the other way. You know, ironically, Kennedy had in part campaigned to beat Nixon in 1960 on the concept of a missile gap. He alleged that the Eisenhower administration had let the Soviets get way ahead on intercontinental ballistic missiles, which, in fact, was completely untrue. It was the other way. I mean, there was a missile gap, but it was massively in America's favor. And so the Soviets had very few missiles that could reach the United States. And the ones that they had had to be kind of sitting out on a tarmac with the fuel getting ready for a long time. So kind of easy to tell that they're coming. So whereas the United States had missiles stationed in Turkey and in Italy that could easily reach the Soviet Union. So there is a kind of strategic imbalance there, which Khrushchev is worried about. And so he sort of puts this all together and says, well, if we put missiles on Cuba, then we have some balance with the United States for the missiles that are in Turkey and Italy. Plus, the United States will not attack Cuba now if they know that there's nuclear missiles there. So he tells Castro, we'll put nuclear mission missiles on Cuba.
- [126:20]
Mark Gagnon
Castro seeing the threat of the Americans is like, sure, I'll put on the jersey. Like, I'm down to take sides.
- [126:26]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Castro is. Is way too keen on this. As a matter of fact, how keen Castro is on a war with the United States, including a nuclear war, actually becomes a problem for Khrushchev down the line. Khrushchev has to sort of calm him down, really. Yeah. Oh, I didn't realize. Yeah. But Castro. Castro is super keen on this for all reasons.
- [126:44]
Mark Gagnon
Is there a simple reason why Castro ideologically is so anti American? Obviously, the Bay of Pigs is a massive.
- [126:49]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I think his personal experience probably with having had the United States try to overthrow his regime, and famously, the CIA always kind of toyed with ways to assassinate him.
- [126:59]
Mark Gagnon
I mean, how many times? It was like 500 attempts or something. Crazy.
- [127:02]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah.
- [127:03]
Mark Gagnon
I mean, maybe apocryphal, but there are certainly very many attempts.
- [127:06]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Stories about exploding cigars. I'm not sure what the current scholarly consensus is on the actual validity of.
- [127:11]
Mark Gagnon
Trying to make his beard fall out, hired the mobile mob to take him out, all sorts of stuff.
- [127:15]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
There is something there. I mean, they clearly were trying to overthrow him. So, you know, he took it a bit personally. Plus, I mean, he did have. I think he actually was. From what I know about Castro, he actually always had been a Communist. He didn't admit it at first, but he did have that. So he had a kind of ideological hostility to the American system. And I think he had a kind of, you know, a sort of version of an anti colonialist hostility to the country that had backed the Batista regime and was now trying to overthrow him. So all these things I think kind of got go together. So the Soviets send people from their rocket forces, start building rocket launchers on Cuba and they start sending missiles. And in the summer of 1962 this gets, or actually in the early fall this gets discovered by American air reconnaissance. Again, U2 over flights, they get pictures of what look like missile installations relations. Once this gets discovered and it comes to Kennedy's attention, it had been rumored for a while before that there were people in Congress who had been saying through the summer of 62, Castro's probably putting missiles on Cuba and this is something we should worry about. And the Kennedy administration had been denying it because they didn't want panic. But then in October it becomes clear from the U2 overflights that this is indeed happening. And so now they feel they have a really full on cross crisis. And so then this leads to a period famously described as 13 days in which the Kennedy administration makes it clear to the Soviets that they won't accept nuclear missiles on Cuba, that they'll do whatever needs to be done militarily to keep that from happening. This opens up the possibility that the Soviets might respond with the nuclear attack. Or there's all kinds of variants. Some of the military command commanders are pushing Kennedy to allow airstrikes on the missile installations. And you know, Kennedy intelligently says can you guarantee that you take them all out? And they say no, meaning they could attack and bomb Cuba. There might still be missiles that could be fired at the United States. Nuclear presumably. So this is a less than ideal solution.
- [129:25]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, when you come with the King, you best not miss.
- [129:28]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Exactly.
- [129:28]
Mark Gagnon
People say all of them out or not of them. Right.
- [129:32]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And they think in any case this would probably have to be followed by a ground invasion which the United States would be able to do, but it would be high casualty and you know, there's, there's sort of nothing good about.
- [129:41]
Mark Gagnon
And also who knows how it triggers or instigates the Russians.
- [129:43]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Well, and that's the other thing. And so Kennedy, Kennedy is very, this is always tied to Berlin in the mind of Kennedy and other American leaders. Kennedy figures if we move on Cuba, they'll move on Berlin. So in other words, they'll take over West Berlin and they'll drive us out of There and maybe that will escalate, escalate into an attack on Western Germany and Western Europe. So maybe we're like fully on into World War III here. All of these scenarios were possibilities that were being discussed. There are now tapes of this that have come out. The regular daily meetings with Kennedy and what he called his EXCOMM Executive committee. Top people in his administration that were meeting every day to talk about how to handle this. And the reading of the EXCOMM transcripts is fascinating because. Because it shows a lot of things. I think it shows a very smart president who's also very self confident. Both of those things are important. Sort of dealing with this crisis, but sort of managing it. And I think it's important that Kennedy had the self confidence. When the military guys said to him, well, we'll do airstrikes and then we'll invade, he said no. Not many presidents even much older than Kennedy would have the confidence to stand up to what seems like bad advice from their senior military command. The military commander's view had prevailed, we would probably have been into World War iii and actually we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now because our parents would have been radiated back then. So, you know, we were in Canada.
- [131:10]
Mark Gagnon
So it would have been fine. Our parents would have been.
- [131:12]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Well, my parents were in the United States at that time.
- [131:14]
Mark Gagnon
Oh, really?
- [131:14]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah.
- [131:15]
Mark Gagnon
Tough to be done.
- [131:16]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I wouldn't be. You'd be talking to yourself. Yeah. My parents had just gotten married. My mother told me she, she thought it was really a bummer that she had just gotten married and she was starting her new life. They got married in August of 62 and now they're going to get new. They were living in New York State at the time.
- [131:32]
Mark Gagnon
Oh my goodness. I mean, even just hearing it, I'm like, the stakes and the pressure for Kennedy. I always heard about the Cuban Missile Crisis and I read a little about it, but I didn't realize just how tense it is.
- [131:41]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Awe inspiring in a way, because I think about that all the time. I've actually just recently gone through a phase where I've been reading every book I can find on the Cuban Missile Crisis and thinking about Kennedy in that moment with so much on his shoulders and so much responsibility and he felt it. You know, I mean, there are presidents, I won't name any names. There are presidents who I don't think feel the responsibility of their job, but Kennedy felt it and he was smart and he was self confident and him dealing with this crisis is I think, a really instructive Moment in what good presidential leadership looks like. So what Kenny decides to do, and again, I think it's a smart move, is he decides to blockade Cuba to keep Soviet ships carrying the missiles from being able to get to the island. And he's even clever about what he calls it. They discuss this in the EXCOMM meetings and they say, well, a blockade is actually an act of war. We don't want to sort of be accelerating things by doing an act of war. So we'll call it a quarantine. We're going to quarantine Cuba. They choose this word very deliberately, so they do that, and Soviet ships, which appear to be carrying missiles, come to the quarantine line and actually turn around. This happens on the Thursday of the week where all this is happening. And so this is a big moment where everybody thinks, oh my God, is actually it's going to be okay, maybe that's Thursday. Then Saturday, all hell breaks loose. There's this one disaster after another. On this amazing Saturday. There's an American YouTube plane that's flying in the Arctic, sort of towards the Soviet coast. And the pilot gets lost and he flies over Soviet territory, which the Soviets interpret, and it's reasonable from their standpoint as maybe a preliminary to an attack, because in this very tense environment of this crisis, this looks like an aggressive move by the Americans. Actually. It's just the pilot's gotten lost. They're able to sort of get the pilot to turn around. And so with Radio 20 traffic, get him back to his base in Alaska shadowed by Soviet fighters all the way that that bit ends. Okay, then an American U2 flying over Cuba gets shot down by a Soviet air defense missile base. That could have been an escalation. And then the real kicker here, and this is something that we didn't really know about until decades later when this information came out, but there was a Soviet nuclear submarine, submarine off the coast of Cuba that was being shadowed by American destroyers. And they were sort of playing the games that military forces play in these situations. The Americans were sort of hassling the submarine by dropping kind of fake charges on it. They weren't real, but they were sort of like dummy depth charges, but they would sort of explode and create an effect that looked like an explosion. So the Soviet submarine crew thinks it's being legit attacked and they. They're under the water, they can't have radio communications with Moscow. So they think, oh, I guess the war has started. I guess we better launch our nuclear missile. And in the chain of command, there is one Officer who says, no, let's not do that. Let's surface and see what's going on. And so they surface and see what's going on. And then there's some radio communications where the Americans kind of apologize for giving the Soviet. The idea that they were attacking, saying, we're not really attacking. Attacking you. And the Soviet submarine captain says, oh, yeah, okay. Doesn't launch his missile. But right at that moment, if they had. If they had launched their missile, then that would have probably started World War III right there.
- [135:09]
Mark Gagnon
Do you remember his name?
- [135:10]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I do not remember the name of the Soviet.
- [135:12]
Mark Gagnon
I mean, I mean, shout out to him.
- [135:14]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. Oh, totally.
- [135:15]
Mark Gagnon
Right. Like, like being like, all right, let's just see.
- [135:17]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, right.
- [135:18]
Mark Gagnon
Let's just see what kind of war we got going on.
- [135:20]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
He did. I, I, I feel bad that I can't remember his name. He did become. He became sort of a celebrated figure for this later. Like, he sor. Credit that he does deserve for this. Right.
- [135:31]
Mark Gagnon
I mean, so many close calls.
- [135:33]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes. And then as all this, you know, incredible mess on Saturday is happening. Is that him?
- [135:41]
Mark Gagnon
Vasali Arkhipov?
- [135:42]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
That sounds right. Okay.
- [135:43]
Mark Gagnon
Wow.
- [135:45]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
As all this is happening, there's some letters going back and forth between Kennedy and Khrushchev, which actually the Russians put forward two different conditions for how they will sort of back down and take missiles off Cuba and deescalate the situation. They're slightly contradictory. Kennedy decides to pick the one that he likes with better terms, and he sort of writes back to Khrushchev and says, okay, we like these terms. We'll do that. And then there's sort of tense moment while they're waiting, and then Khrushchev agrees. So they go into the sun Sunday, and it seems like it's over. Kennedy goes to mass, a good Catholic boy, and one of his Advisors says, You're 10ft tall today, Mr. President. And that was sort of the resolution of the crisis. And the deal that they had agreed on was that Khrushchev would pull out the missiles that were in Cuba and not stationed anymore, the United States would promise not to invade Cuba, and the United States would pull out those missiles in Turkey. But the interesting thing about that is that would be secret that the United States would pull out those missiles, but they wouldn't make it public that they were pulling out those missiles to not indicate weakness. Yeah. So it's kind of amazing that Khrushchev made this deal, because publicly, I mean, the deal that they actually made is fairly equal, but publicly, it looks like a Complete Soviet backdown. It's remarkable that Khrushchev agreed to that. The fact that he agreed to to it, coupled with the fact that he had gotten them into this position in the first place, probably agrees. Why his comrades in the Politburo overthrew him a couple of years later. They thought, this guy's too dangerous. Get him out. Wow. But at the very least, this very dramatic moment, in a way, this climax of the Cold War, I think the Cuban Missile Crisis, it did end in such a way that there wasn't World War iii. We were, as a species and a planet, insanely lucky that it was John F. Kennedy who was president at that moment. And to give credit where it's due, that Khrushchev, as crazy as he could be, was not so crazy that he didn't back down when Kennedy kind of offered him away. And Kennedy was very clever. Kennedy understood that he couldn't humiliate Khrushchev, that he had to give him a kind of honorable way out so he could back down without too much PR damage. That those two men managed this the way they did. It didn't have to be that way, you know. And so, as a species, we were fortunate.
- [138:08]
Mark Gagnon
Do we know what LBJ's record on the missile crisis was?
- [138:13]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, I mean, he shows up in those EXCOMM meetings, and he sort of straddled the line in terms of being hawkish and not hawkish, actually. And a lot of people around Kennedy switched back and forth. His brother Bobby switched back and forth between being kind of hawkish and. And then being willing to seek a more moderate settlement.
- [138:32]
Mark Gagnon
I mean, I guess the situation was changing day to day.
- [138:35]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
It was so.
- [138:35]
Mark Gagnon
It was like, oh, they're going to attack us. Oh, they're turning around.
- [138:38]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yep. And, you know, all of these guys, not just Kennedy, but all of these guys are dealing with a situation where obviously the stakes are the highest they could possibly be. They have imperfect information. You know, I think all of us would feel conflicted in this situation. I mean, there is an imperative to not back down and look weak up against a regime that you can legitimately feel conflicted is not a good one. But there's also an imperative not to get the planet, you know, nuked. And there's a funny line where I think it was the Air Force commander says to Kennedy, in the early stage of this crisis, you're in a heck of a fix, Mr. President. And Kennedy, being Kennedy, shoots right back. You're right in here with me. That's one of the things about Kennedy I like that. That's sort of that quickness and that sort of toughness that he had way beyond his years.
- [139:32]
Mark Gagnon
I think it's also, you know, indicative of, like, a good leader. Like, yeah, absolutely. It's us. I know I'm the President, but you're. It's. We're. It's the whole thing.
- [139:40]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah.
- [139:41]
Mark Gagnon
Wow. I mean, that is. I mean, such a tense moment. I never appreciated what his diplomacy and sort of strategy looked like in that moment.
- [139:50]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
There's a famous story you read a lot. So the famous book on the outbreak of World War I by Barbara Tuchman had just come out called the Guns of August. And Kennedy had read it, and he was very impressed by it. And he thought he wanted all his military commanders to read it. And he ordered all his officers to read this book because he felt it showed. The lesson was that World War I had broken out because of mutual misperceptions by leaders, and no one had wanted it. And if they had communicated better, it could have been prevented. So this is the lesson he applied to the Cuban Missile Crisis. So far, so good. The funny thing, though, is that that wasn't really what Barbara Tuchman said in her book. In her book, she's actually pretty clear that World War I happens because of German aggression. She's not really telling a story of. No one wanted it. It was mutual misperception. Somehow Kennedy got that point from it. But we should be grateful that he did because it was for the guy who was going to handle the Cuban Missile Crisis. Excuse me. It was a great point to be getting.
- [140:49]
Mark Gagnon
I mean, that is so funny. Thank goodness he doesn't have the best reading comprehension. He's smart enough to understand and want to read a book, but not perfect to where he gets every detail.
- [140:57]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Well, he was a voracious reader, famously a speed reader, and maybe he read that one a little too fast. I don't know.
- [141:03]
Mark Gagnon
He was skimming and he was like, ah, yeah, everyone is miscre communication.
- [141:08]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yep.
- [141:09]
Mark Gagnon
That is so funny. So after the Cuban Missile Crisis settles, do all the necessary forces kind of chill for a little?
- [141:17]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So there is. There is a legacy to this. Maybe the most important thing that happens is that Kennedy and Khrushchev agree soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis to a test ban treaty, meaning they agree on a treaty to limit testing of atomic weapons as a kind of step. Step, a cautious, tentative step towards a kind of nuclear disarmament that would reduce the threat of something like the Cuban Missile Crisis happening again.
- [141:43]
Mark Gagnon
Right.
- [141:43]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And the other thing that happens is they install the famous hotline, the direct telephone connection between the White House and the Kremlin so that in the event of a crisis, they can get on the phone directly to each other, which they hadn't had before. They were sort of communicating by press releases and by diplomatic cables during the Cuban Missile crisis. But this speeds up the communication process. So these are two things that happen. There's definitely. There's will on both sides. You know, having been through this really scary thing. There's definitely will on both sides to reduce the threat level and reduce the risk level of this kind of crisis.
- [142:17]
Mark Gagnon
Okay, so now the leader of the USSR at this time, remind how you pronounce his name.
- [142:22]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Khrushchev. Nikita. The real Russian way to say it is like, Khrushchev. Like that. Khrushchev. Normally in American English, we say Khrushchev.
- [142:30]
Mark Gagnon
Khrushchev. He gets deposed shortly after he gets.
- [142:32]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Deposed in 1960, 64.
- [142:34]
Mark Gagnon
Okay.
- [142:34]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And a duo, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin come in as the leaders. Alexei Kosygin eventually sort of gets eclipsed. And Leonid Brezhnev then really remains the leader of the Soviet Union for almost 20 years. He remains leader until 1982.
- [142:52]
Mark Gagnon
Okay.
- [142:53]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
When I was a kid, he was the leader. And it was always kind of of. In. In my kid years, when I was first becoming aware of world politics, he was this old decrepit guy. Seemed in some ways emblematic of the country because this really shaky old guy would get kind of wheeled out for the mayday parades, and you'd see him in this sort of, you know, the fur hats that those dudes wear in the coat and kind of waving like that from the podium of the mayday parade.
- [143:21]
Mark Gagnon
And so why was he the guy that they wanted?
- [143:23]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
He seemed like a, you know, a steady pair of hands, more moderate, cautious guy. And he was. He was, on the whole, fairly moderate and cautious. He was not someone who really wanted to aggressively push the Cold War. In the wake of the Cuban missile crisis and especially into the early 70s, there's a period of what we call detente in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in which he fully played a part to try and keep the tensions of the Cold War down.
- [143:51]
Mark Gagnon
So now, when does North Vietnam start engaging?
- [143:55]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So, all right, so the Vietnam War had been on the boil really, since the late 40s. At first, it's the French against a Vietnamese independence movement. When the French get defeated, the United States starts to step in, at first very cautiously, kind of supporting the regime in South Vietnam, north and South Vietnam have been set up again. This is sort of World War II occupation legacy. North and South Vietnam. Sorry. So the United States is sort of backing the South Vietnamese system. They are sending in military advisors and economic resources, not committing a lot of troops. The situation sort of boils along until in the early 60s, it starts to sort of blow up a little bit more weirdly in South Vietnam. In the early 60s, 60s, the president was a Catholic. That's not a religious group. That's super numerous in South Vietnam. But the President Diem was a Catholic. His family sort of dominated the regime. And like a lot of authoritarian countries with a family in power, they're really corrupt and they siphon off money from everything. They're very unpopular. And it's sort of a challenge for the Kennedy administration to sort of think about. They know that he is not good, you know, figurehead for the regime. He's not good, he's not popular. He's not good for political stability. They're not quite sure what to do about him. And then eventually the CIA does its sort of CIA thing, and in the fall of 1963, they assassinate. Diem, ironically, is a bit of a, you know, harbinger of Kennedy getting assassinated later that autumn. And things are getting sort of worse and worse as a North Vietnamese movement of sort of subversion of the south, sending in weapons and guerrilla fighters and so on. And the United States is getting sort of stuck into this pattern of sending more and more troops. What eventually happens to shift forward a little bit is, of course, Lyndon Johnson becomes president when Kennedy is killed, is resoundingly reelected in 1964 in one of the big landslides in presidential history. Johnson didn't want too much to happen in Vietnam before he was resoundingly revolving reelected. But in 1965, he feels kind of safe to start deploying troops. And so In July of 1965, as a matter of fact, on the day I was born, In July of 1965, apart from my birth, the lesser story that was happening in the world was that it was the day that Johnson decided to send really large numbers, like hundreds of thousands of American troops to Vietnam in an effort to stop the. The insurgency into the south and to defeat the North. And then we're into a situation where it's hard to defeat an insurgency if you are a conventional military power. We've seen this problem more recently in American history, and it was a problem back in the 60s. There was relatively little fighting in the Vietnam War that was kind of traditional army against army, quite different from Korea in that sense, which had been a.
- [147:03]
Mark Gagnon
Line that moves up and down, down.
- [147:05]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. And you have like organized troops here in a uniform and organized troops there in a uniform. And you know, what's. What Vietnam was, was something that looked a lot more like what we've seen in more recent times in Iraq or Afghanistan. It's. It's really a counterinsurgency kind of situation which the United States tries to win by deploying ultimately very large numbers of troops. There are upwards of half a million US soldiers there, like through the second half of the 60s. So it's a big deployment, but it basically doesn't work because it's really hard to beat an insurgency if the insurgency is willing to take casualties and keep going.
- [147:40]
Mark Gagnon
Now, we know that obviously the invasion of Vietnam is extremely multifaceted and complex, but is containment still another major factor?
- [147:48]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, I mean, containment is definitely part of the thinking here because that containment idea that we talked about had taken hold in the late 40s with George Kennan, and then it had sort of morphed onto being applied to parts of the world that Kennan hadn't meant to apply it to. So the idea is, well, you have to stop Communists in Vietnam because if you don't, they'll be in Australia and then they'll be in America. So part of this thinking too is a legacy of the experience of the run up to World War II, because it's always easy to misapply historical lessons. I think about this a lot as a history professor, but coming out of World War II, a lot of political leaders thought I said, when you're up against an aggressive dictatorship, the thing is, don't appease. Because we saw how this worked with Hitler, he took Poland. Neville Chamberlain and other Western leaders said, okay, we don't mind if you move soldiers into the Rhineland part of Germany. That's yours. And okay, we don't mind if you take over Germany because they're all Germans anyway, so what the hell? And okay, we don't mind if you take over the German speaking part of Czechoslovakia, because that's your people too. And oh wait, you just took the other part of Czechoslovakia where there are Czechs. That's not awesome.
- [148:58]
Mark Gagnon
It's very passive and diplomatic in the face of a tyrant. We can't do this.
- [149:03]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Right? So then the lesson coming out of World War II is, well, we can't do this. Like, we have to stop them at the Rhineland or they'll be in Austria. So, you know, we applied this thinking in Korea. We got to stop them there. Or they'll be in Japan, and then they'll be in Australia, et cetera, et cetera. Always Australia.
- [149:17]
Mark Gagnon
We got to stop Australia becoming Communist.
- [149:19]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
You know, I like Australia, too. And, you know, same deal with Vietnam. It's that thinking. In fact, there's a quote from Kennedy when Vietnam was first emerging as a problem in his administration. And he said something like, when he was discussing this with his national security people, he said all the talk was of Munich, meaning all the talk was of the famous Munich conference, where famously, Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler by allowing him to take a chunk of Czechoslovakia. So this is their paradigm. This is what they're thinking about. It was their paradigm with Cuba, too, and with the Berlin crisis in the Cold War, it's always the paradigm. You can't give in to a totalitarian, aggressive threat at the first step. You give in at the first step, you'll just be giving in later. And Vietnam is one of many places in the Cold War that looks like that first step. So that's a lot of the thinking. Once they're in with a large commitment of troops, then it's kind of the sunk cost fallacy. Well, we've gone this far. We got to win. And Lyndon Johnson would famously say stuff like, I'm not going to be the first president who loses a war. And so he would keep, you know, keep making the military commitments. Of course, there have been famous stories like the generals would send back fake kill counts about how many North Vietnamese insurgents or guerrilla fighters they had killed. In fact, it was always inflated. As I said, there was relatively little, like conventional army to army fighting in the Vietnam War when there was, the Americans won, you know, because that kind of thing our forces could do.
- [150:50]
Mark Gagnon
It's the dude jumping out of a hole in the ground cover and leaving thieves, or it's fallen into, like, a booby trap of spikes underneath a net.
- [150:59]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
And to that, there just really seemed to be no solution other than to draft more young Americans and send them over. Yeah. So this is why ultimately we had 57,000 soldiers killed over there, you know, much higher figure than our recent wars. And really, that has to do with the much higher deployment levels. Again, the hundreds of thousands of troops that were being sent over there, product of a draft that was. Was still operative, had been operative since.
- [151:26]
Mark Gagnon
World War II, and generally ends in kind of a failure that looks like a black eye on the face of the US Government.
- [151:34]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, I mean, basically no different from Afghanistan. After 20 years in Afghanistan and a lot of sacrifices there, we ultimately pulled out a terrible regime came in, and that's that somewhat similar in Vietnam. I think probably the Vietnamese Communist regime is not as terrible as the Taiwan Taliban, but it wasn't great. And after, you know, depending how you want to measure it, X number of years, I mean, the American commitment changed a lot over time. But after, in some ways, 20 years or so of involvement in Vietnam, in one way or another, the United States famously pulled out the helicopter at the embassy in Saigon, you know, the symbol of it, and all of Vietnam then fell to the North Vietnamese Communist regime.
- [152:19]
Mark Gagnon
So now, when does that end, roughly?
- [152:21]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
So the war ended in 1975.
- [152:23]
Mark Gagnon
So by 1975, Cuba is quarantined and generally stable. Korea has this demilitarized zone, generally stable. Vietnam is now lost, technically, to the communist regime. China is still under Mao at this point.
- [152:40]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, Mao died in 1976, so he's still there. And of course, there was an interesting wrinkle with China because going back a step in the early 60s, China and the Soviet Union split and they became actually very bitter adversaries. And eventually the United States did what, in I would say in diplomatic terms was a clever kind of Machiavellian move. We were talking about Machiavelli a little while ago. This is a clever move again, kind of if the enemy of my enemy is my friend trend. Maybe it's a good move politically to make an opening to China. So famously, the Nixon administration did this in the early 1970s, giving us, among other things, a famous phrase in American politics. Only Nixon can go to China. And the point of this is that Nixon's credentials as an anti communist were so clear. He had been kind of at McCarthy's right hand in the late 40s and 50s. 50s. There was no question that Richard Nixon was a militant anti communist. So that meant he had kind of the insulation to do something like try to improve relations with a communist country. No one's going to say, oh, Richard Nixon, you're soft on commies. No one's going to say that to him. So he had the space and his. Famously, his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had the space to open up a negotiation process with Mao's regime. So from 1972 on, relations between the United States and China are actually very much on the mend. They're starting to move closer.
- [154:14]
Mark Gagnon
And what leads to the schism between Russia and China?
- [154:17]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
A lot of things. A different degree of radicalism is a part of it. The side of Khrushchev that was talking about peaceful cohabitation with the west and trying to reduce Cold War tensions that didn't go down well with Mao, who was much more aggressive and much more willing to sort of contemplate a war with the west, even at the cost of catastrophic casualties for China or what have you, plus a lot of just kind of general geopolitical rivalry. I think all of that goes into the mix.
- [154:49]
Mark Gagnon
I see. Okay. So now they're basically not. In speaking terms, they're pissed. And America is now cozying up with China.
- [154:55]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
America's cozying up with China as a way. Way of, in a sense, getting leverage against the Soviet Union.
- [155:00]
Mark Gagnon
And does that relationship blossom at that point, or is it just still sort of enemies of enemies or friends with China and America? Yeah, yeah.
- [155:09]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
I think for a while there, it did pretty much blossom. And the United States was willing to take such steps as up until 1979, the United States had not diplomatically recognized the People's Republic of China. As far as far as the United States was concerned, diplomatically, the Chinese government was the government on Taiwan, which was the government of the Nationalists, who had been pushed out. And in 1979, the Carter administration switched that and recognized China diplomatically. So that's a pretty big step.
- [155:41]
Mark Gagnon
An interesting strategic move.
- [155:43]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yes, yes.
- [155:44]
Mark Gagnon
Which I can imagine is marred with controversy.
- [155:46]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Absolutely. Certainly a very unpopular move with conservatives at that time. And not that, as we see down to this day. Not that the United States abandoned Taiwan necessarily at this point. If there's going to be World War three, it might very well be about Taiwan, because the United States might end up defending it against the Chinese attack. But in the 70s, the whole context looked different. It looked like better relations with China were much more viable. China didn't seem quite so aggressive, and the drift seemed to be. Be it just made sense to recognize the Communist regime in Beijing.
- [156:20]
Mark Gagnon
And have the famines under Mao at this point really ravaged China? Were they in a bad political and economic position?
- [156:27]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah. So in the 1960s, Mao had introduced something in China which he called the Cultural Revolution. This was part of his ideology that a revolution should sort of be permanent and ongoing, or you get a kind of calcified regime, as he saw it, like the Soviet Union, where the power elite has kind of settled down and they're old men and they're comfortable and they don't want more revolution. So Mao would sort of stimulate young people getting involved in communist groups to sort of take over, and there'd be a rapid turnover of power. And this might sound sort of nice as a thought experiment, but it's actually not a great way to Run an economy. So basically, as a result of all this turbulence of the Cultural Revolution Revolution, there were catastrophic famines in which it is estimated tens of millions of people died. And eventually by the 70s, Mao was starting to sort of settle down. He's getting older. He was in bad health. After he died in 1976, people who had been associated with him and especially with his Cultural Revolution policies end up getting put on trial. Famously, there was a trial of people called the Gang of Four, who. Who were people close to Mao, including his widow. But covertly or semi covertly, a lot of Chinese officials would speak of the Gang of Five, meaning including Mao. They were sort of kind of blaming him too, as they should have done. But politically, it's a bold step for all the famines and the chaos that had happened under the Cultural Revolution. And so by the late 70s, China is, in a sense, turning right politically. And the guy who became the leader after Mao, you know, famously said, communist cat, capitalist cat, I don't care. I want it to catch a mouse. And so you start getting a China, which is, in effect, without quite admitting it, opening itself up to capitalist economics and industrial development on the capitalist model, which has gone on to this day. And it's really why China now is the major economic power that it is, because they sort of allowed that to happen.
- [158:36]
Mark Gagnon
Interesting. Okay, so now, after, I guess, Vietnam, how does the rest of the Cold War progress to the point where the Berlin Wall ultimately comes down?
- [158:48]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, so there's a lot of factors that go into this. So we talked about how after things like the Soviet crackdown in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia, there's a steady process of disillusionment that happens. So at the very latest, after 68, after the crackdown in Prague, there's really no one left in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe who really believes in the idea of Communism. That's one factor. Second factor is the economic system is starting to really visibly fail. By the 1970s, the Soviet economic model had certain attributes. One was centralized planning of just about everything. So, you know, there has to be an office in Moscow, and in other has to be an office in. In Warsaw and in Prague and so on. That's planning everything that's going to happen economically, every paperclip. Right. And that's a recipe for having big bureaucracies and limited productivity and most importantly, no innovation. How are you going to get technological innovation when that's your economic model? It just kills innovation, especially in a.
- [159:54]
Mark Gagnon
Time of technological innovation.
- [159:56]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Well, that's the thing, you know, by the 70s, we're now we're starting to get into to what some people call the third Industrial revolution, which is the revolution of tech, computer technology and everything that we so much live with now. And the Soviet world just cannot catch that bus. They are not equipped for that. The Soviet economic model was basically designed to take an agricultural country and turn it into an outstanding 1890s economy. In other words, an outstanding economy based on smokestack industries. Coal, steel, that kind of thing. By the 1970s, that's not the action. By the 1970s, in even the advanced industrial countries, coal mining is dying. Steel production is moving offshore. So places like South Korea or Taiwan or China, they're making steel, but Britain, Germany, they're not making so much steel. That's not where the action is now. They're certainly not mining coal, or at least it's a dying industry. Um, the advanced economies are moving away from the old smokestack industries. The Soviet Union is not. That's the only thing it can do. So it can't innovate. The other thing it can't do, the plan just doesn't call for this. It's not good at producing a civilian consumer economy. So it's really not designed to. Because it's designed to build up heavy industry. It's not designed to make the stuff that you and I buy for daily life. It's not designed to make clothes, it's not designed to make personal radios, TVs, stereos.
- [161:21]
Mark Gagnon
And they can't buy.
- [161:23]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Right. So by the 70s, it's becoming clear to most people in Eastern Europe, the people in Western Europe or America have this stuff and they don't. And they don't because of their system. So there's starting to be a level of dissatisfaction. And coming out of the 68 crackdown on Czechoslovakia, what the Soviet leadership knows and what the other, other East European satellite states know is that they can't really sell the ideology to their people anymore. They can't get people inspired by saying, yay Communism, better future, because it's manifestly not happening. So basically what they have to do is buy their people. And they can't do it with their own economic resources because they don't produce the stuff that people want. So what they do is borrow money. They borrow money from Western banks and Western governments. Governments. And they use that to buy consumer goods built in the west and provide them to their people as a kind of minimum insurance policy against popular discontent which will lead to uprisings. The problem with this is, I mean, it's really, it's like living on your credit card. It's okay at first, but the problem is because these economies are not productive and very especially because they do not produce goods that anyone who doesn't have to buy them will, would buy, meaning they can't export normally as a country, basically. I'm sure my economics is simplistic to an economist, but I think this is basically right. If you are borrowing money and bringing stuff in, and if you're importing goods in, you have to pay for that by exporting stuff out so that the economic flow is basically balanced. The thing is, the Eastern bloc countries can't export stuff out because no one will buy their stuff because they make lousy stuff.
- [163:04]
Mark Gagnon
They have oil maybe, but they have oil.
- [163:06]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
That's the one thing they do have. The Soviets especially have oil, but other than that, no, no one's going to buy a Polish truck or a Soviet tractor or whatever. So basically, they're getting deeper and deeper and deeper into debt. And all these governments have a sort of rising debt crisis which their leaders kind of try to ignore because they have no alternative. There's a famous story that the leader of East Germany at that time, erich Honecker in 1972, has an economist working for him who shows him some calculations, relations, what their debt is and what it's going to be in the 80s if they keep going like this. And Hanuker says, destroy that and don't ever talk to me about this again, because it's an inconvenient truth and he just doesn't want to hear about it. So these countries are being afflicted by a bunch of problems at once. Their economies are dysfunctional, their governments are getting deeper and deeper into a debt that they can't fix. Their people are sort of disillusioned and unhappy with both sort of the ideology and the material standard that their country provides. Another reason why you might stay loyal to a regime or a government you don't love is that it's protecting you from something worse. But here again, the worst thing that these people had been afraid of in the 40s and 50s was generally Germany. But that's not scary anymore. In fact, West Germany looks pretty good. It's again a prosperous, democratic country. If you happen to live in East Germany, you can get West German tv. This is one of the funny things about life in communist East Germany that they couldn't see the country by and large, but they could see it on tv because the TV signals could be sent over and sometimes they would be jammed. But you could often get it? People would have elaborate antennas on their house to get the West German tv. And you know what TV gives you, right? I mean, tv, especially with the advertising, but even with the shows, gives you actually a quite exaggerated idea of what the standard of living is. You know, think about the apartment that the kids have and friends, right? Like, what New Yorker on their level has that apartment? No, but, but. So the same kind of thing. So East Germans have this, like, crazy idea of what the prosperity of West Germany is. I mean, it is more prosperous than they are, but by orders, but by tv. Yeah. And to some extent, that applies to other East European countries as well. So all of this is sort of moving towards a crisis. Crisis. There's a couple of other elements. In the 70s, there started to be a sort of human rights movement around the world. And a lot of governments, including the Soviet government, signed on to something called the Helsinki Accords, which committed them to all kinds of human rights, which, in fact, they never had any intention of observing. But it's a funny thing. Sometimes when you sign on to something, it starts to take on reality that you didn't expect. And so there start to be activists in some of these countries who say, well, you signed this. I should have the right to free speech. You said, you signed a thing that said, I have the right to free speech.
- [165:58]
Mark Gagnon
They're like, yeah, we're bluffing. Idiot, we're lying.
- [166:01]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Right. But, you know, so people like Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia became famous as a playwright, and then he became famous as a political activist. And this was kind of his thing. It's like, you, my government, you signed this thing that said, I have freedom of speech. So I'm going to exercise some freedom of speech here and tell you what I think. And you start to get some of these movements springing up. It's a big deal when John Paul II becomes Pope in 1979, because he's Polish and he's anti communist, and he is an absolute rock star in Poland. When he first travels to Poland, the Communist regime in Poland is like, what do we do? Because they feel they can't stop him. But everywhere he goes, he has hundreds of thousands of people coming to see him speak or to preach. And his message is unambiguously antiquated communist, and he's Polish and it's a very Catholic country, and he's a rock star. So this is starting to sort of drive another wedge. So there's starting to be all these kind of wedges coming into the communist system. And then what my professor in Grassley used to say is. And then you get ingredient X. An ingredient X is Mikhail Gorbachev, who becomes leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 after Leonid Brezhnev we talked about had died after being in poor health for years. He died in 1980. He gets succeeded by a guy called Yuri Andropov, who's an old man in poor health and dies a year later. And then Andropov is succeeded by, wait for it, another old man in ill health, Konstantin Chernenko, who dies a year later. So it's like these old men just can't stay alive. And then finally, in 85, Gorbachev comes in. And by the standards of Soviet leaders, Gorbachev is a kid. He's in his mid-50s. He's healthy, he's vigorous, he's idealistic and energetic. Energetic. And he wants to get the Soviet Union moving again. When I said no one believed in the ideology anymore, there is one exception. It seems that, charmingly enough, Mikhail Gorbachev was like the last guy anywhere in the Soviet bloc who believed in the ideas of Lenin and that that could be made to work. And he wants to make it work. So that means the Soviet Union needs to be a freer country, it needs to be economically more innovative and so on. So he starts introducing his famous franchise reforms, famously glasnost and perestroika. Glasnost means a sort of freer climate for speech and for the arts and so on. And perestroika means economic restructuring, which basically means bringing market elements into the rigid Soviet planning system. All this goes along. And then there's a sort of foreign policy component too, that Gorbachev wants better relations with Western countries. He starts talking about ending the Cold War in Europe, and he starts talking about our common European home when he speaks to Europeans leaders. And then a big moment comes in 1988 when a person in Gorbachev's administration gives a speech in which he says, our policy now, it's not the Brezhnev doctrine anymore, it's the Sinatra doctrine. I need to explain this a bit. The Brezhnev doctrine was the principle that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had articulated in 1968 when they sent troops into Czechoslovakia to crush that army uprising. And what Brezhnev said is communist countries have the right to intervene in other communist countries if there is an insurgency trying to get rid of the communist regime there. That was the kind of formal articulation.
- [169:21]
Mark Gagnon
It's like their own un. Like if someone tries to stand up we'll all crush it.
- [169:24]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Right. That was the kind of formal articulation of it. He put it more bluntly to the Czechs. He said, what we have, we will keep for Soviet power. They will hang on to these things. So that's the bread Brezhnev doctrine. So in 1988, this Gorbachev official says, we're done with the Brezhnev Doctrine now. It's the Sinatra Doctrine. Sinatra Doctrine means you can do it your way.
- [169:45]
Mark Gagnon
Like the song no way.
- [169:47]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, yeah. He knows to make that very Western kind of reference. Wow. So he's speaking to the Eastern European countries. He's saying, you can do it your way, meaning, and this is an earthquake, meaning if you want to move away from communism, you can, and we won't send in tanks. So all of these places, like Poland, you know, et cetera, who have been unhappy with having the Russians there for 40 years by this point, now suddenly they see a path out. And the governments, the communist governments of those countries are now, in a sense, trapped with their own people. Because at the end of the day, those communist regimes in places like Poland or Czechoslovakia or East Germany, they knew that they could, at the end of the day, rely on the Soviets to backstop them them. Now that's been cut off. So they're stuck with their own people, and their own people are not happy. So you start getting movements to change. The first is in Poland, which had always been the most turbulent of these countries for all kinds of reasons. Through the 80s, there had been a movement called Solidarity, which started with shipyard workers in the city of Gdansk, famously led by Lech Wasa. And then there were. So there was this sort of ironically, a labor unit union against a worker state. A labor union looking for freedom in a state that's supposed to be all about workers. But the labor union is the freedom movement here. And by the late 80s, the debt thing for Poland is getting catastrophic. The government needs to deal with its debt to Western banks and so on, and they can't do that without negotiating with their political opposition. So in early 89, they start having negotiations which result in an agreement that they'll have more or less free labor elections. And this will be basically the dismantling of the communist system. So Poland's already going this way in 89. Then the next up, in a sense, is Hungary. Hungary also has. Or Hungary has a sort of reform communist administration which wants to sort of move in the direction of Gorbachev or of Poland to sort of liberalizing the system. What we didn't know for years later this came out years later is they made a covert deal with the West German government. The COVID deal was West Germany would give them money to help them with their reforms if in return they would open their border to Austria. Why is this important? It's because people from the Eastern bloc, including East Germany, could get out through that border. They could go to Hungary, and then they could cross to Austria. You were allowed to travel within the Eastern bloc, but all Eastern Bloc countries had agreements that they wouldn't let each other's citizens out through their own border.
- [172:15]
Mark Gagnon
But also now border. They open it up.
- [172:18]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
What happens now? There's starting to be a protest movement in East Germany. And as this is going on, a lot of East Germans, instead of protesting at home, they decide, let's just cut to the chase. And they decide to take a vacation in Hungary. And then it just happened across the border into Austria. And then you can go around up into West Germany. And there's starting to be a flow out here. So eventually the East German government feels forced to cut that off. They won't let their people go to, to Hungary. Similar things had happened. People had gone from East Germany to embassies in Warsaw, in Poland, and in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and they were sort of camped out at West German embassies there. So the East German government cuts off travel to those places too. So then they are really stuck with their own people, cooped up, unable to go anywhere but East Germany and mad at their government. Protests get bigger and bigger and bigger. There's a very fateful moment in October, October in the city of Leipzig where the protests were the biggest, where everybody knows there's going to be a huge protest. It might be hundreds of thousands of people at this point, the regime is ready to strike back. Just a few months before that, the Chinese government had done Tiananmen Square. They had sent in troops and they had fired on demonstrators in Beijing and killed probably thousands of people. We don't know exactly how many. The East German government is starting to talk about what they call a Chinese solution, that they'll send their forces, forces in and just wipe out these protesters and put a stop to all this. What happens is some prominent citizens in Leipzig get together with the Communist leaders and say, we don't want a bloodbath. Let's agree. The protests stay peaceful. You keep the security forces out. One of the prominent Leipzig citizens who did that, interestingly, was a famous orchestra conductor named Werner Mazur, who later came here. He was conductor of the New York Phil for a While. Wow. But at that time he was conductor of the famous Leipzig orchestra, the Gewandhaus, one of the great classical orchestras of Europe. So he plays this role and this is what happens. The demonstrations unfold peacefully. Hundreds of thousands of people are out. The security forces don't shoot. So at this point, it's kind of blood in the water. There's a huge demonstration in Berlin on 4 November at Alexanderplatz, which is the kind of main square of East Berlin. 400,000 people are out, and it's clear the regime is hanging by thread. So then an almost funny thing happens. Funny but important. They've started having regular press conferences in East Berlin. Western media is there, and the government does what governments do and gives them information about what's going on. And on the 9th of November, the East German leaders meet and they're talking about how they're going to handle this crisis. And they decide, I can guess, we'll open the Wall. We'll let people out through the Wall. This will calm them down. And so the Berlin party boss is sent to the press conference to deliver this announcement. What they had decided in the meeting was they'll open the Wall, but not right away. What they'll do is they'll allow people to get a visa. You can go to the police station, get a visa, and then you can go to a Wall crossing point. You can go out. But the Berlin Communist Party boss hadn't been at this meeting. They said, tim, you go do the press conference announcement, this thing. And so it's like the last item on the press conference when he says, there will now be this process for going through the Wall. And one of the foreign reporters, it's actually oddly not clear who it was, but one of the foreign reporters asked a question, when will this take effect? And you can actually see this on the video. The poor guy is there with his nose, and he doesn't know the answer to that question. He doesn't know the answer to when will it take effect? And as a professor, professor, I see my students do this all the time. You ask them a question and they don't know the answer. They look at their notes. You see the guy desperately flipping. The answer has to be in here somewhere. And he doesn't find it. So then he looks up again and he says, effective immediately. In German, Absofort, Absofut. Effective immediately. That wasn't the plan. But now this has gone out on national and indeed global tv, that the Wall is open, effective immediately. So now hundreds of thousands of super excited East Berliners are moving to the the Wall and no one's told the border guards this. So this is another situation that could have been really bad. You could imagine a panicky border guard with thousands of people coming who weren't authorized to cross. You could imagine what might happen. Fortunately, after a lot of back and forth telephoning at about midnight, they agree to just open the crossing points. And so people stream out of the west into the east, into West Berlin. So this is the really massive, massive historical moment of what we call the Fall of the Wall, really more the opening of the wall on the 9th of November 1989. And we now take this to be the kind of symbolic moment at which the Cold War ends, which has some justice, because it's fairly clear at this point that the communist regime in East Germany is probably not going to survive. The Polish one and the Hungarian one are already on the skids. By the end of that year, all the communist regimes other than the Soviet Union Union have all collapsed or are about to collapse, and they're being replaced by something more democratic when it comes really quickly. That fall of 1989 was a moment of incredibly fast and incredibly profound historical change.
- [177:35]
Mark Gagnon
And that is ultimately the conclusion of.
- [177:38]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
The Cold War with the epilogue. But then the Soviet Union sort of meets its 1989, but two years later. And then there's a sort of complicated sequence here too. Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union is now in a position he's not the first and probably not the last in history. When reformers of bad regimes try to reform their regime, they immediately have the problem that they've got the old guard saying, I don't want you doing that. But they've also got a new guard saying, I want you to go faster. And Gorbachev is sort of stuck between these two sides. And he tries to navigate for a couple of years between these sides. Eventually, in 1991, he's negotiating a kind of reimagining of the Soviet Union, which will be a new treaty between the component Republics. There are 15 republics of the Soviet Union, Russia is one of them, but there's 14 others in a context in which the Baltic states are declaring their independence and Ukraine is trying to sort of move that way as well. So the old guard fears that this new treaty will just mean the breakup of the Soviet Union Union eventually. Their fears lead them to stage a coup against Gorbachev in August of 1991. And it's one of the most inept coups in history. It's really Interesting. These old guard Communist guys, they give a press conference and they're visibly nervous. One of them has a toupee and he's sweating and his toupee is like slipping off his head. I mean, that's kind of a metaphor for how these guys didn't have the nerve and the ruthlessness that you need if you want to really pull out a coup. And meanwhile, one of those people who was to Gorbachev's left, so to speak, saying, go faster, go faster. Boris Yeltsin, who had gotten elected president of the Russian Federation within the Soviet Union the year before, famously rallies people around him against the coup and stands up on a tank in Moscow and gives a speech. And Yeltsin becomes sort of the focal point of opposition to this coup. Eventually, the couple leaders fail. They back down, they give up. And Yeltsin now really asserts his authority as president of Russia, sort of humiliates Gorbachev, forces Gorbachev to dissolve the Communist Party, and eventually forces him to break up the Soviet Union altogether. And so what had been the Soviet Union of 15 republics now breaks up into 15 separate states, of which Russia is the biggest, but there's 14 others with all kinds of complex problems. Now, in many cases, in those other 14 republics, there are big ethnic Russian diasporas, which, you know, spoiler alert, might become the source of political and military trouble in the future.
- [180:15]
Mark Gagnon
Dr. Benjamin Hepp, thank you so much for the time. I mean, this has been awesome.
- [180:20]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Thank you.
- [180:21]
Mark Gagnon
I could talk to you all day about his. And maybe we should do it one time again soon.
- [180:25]
Dr. Benjamin Hett
Yeah, it's a pleasure, Mark.
- [180:27]
Mark Gagnon
Thank you so much. If you've made it to the end of this episode, that's because you rock with us. And for that, we rock with you. You are sophisticated. You enjoy honest, true communication. A highbrowed type of person that understands this. History is not just dates and names. It is a tapestry of human triumph and tragedy. From the day Nostradamus made his first prophecy to the morning Paul Revere took his midnight ride from ancient oracles to modern revolutionaries. That is why I need you. If you have not already, please sign up for Today in History. Our free newsletter. Today in History brings you the stories that matter, the moments that changed everything, and the secrets hidden in time. Join thousands of history enthusiasts who get their daily journey through time. Don't let another day of history pass you by. Take the conversation to your inbox. Sign up up now through the QR code or link in the description Today in History. Because history's stories shape tomorrow's World. Thank you for watching the episode. We'll see you next time.