Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Citation: Crouse, Eric R. An American Stand: Senator Margaret Chase Smith and the Communist Menace, 1948-1972. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010. ***** Begin Content ****** TYNDALE UNIVERSITY 3377 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M2M 3S4 TEL: 416.226.6620 www.tyndale.ca Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Crouse, Eric R. An American Stand: Senator Margaret Chase Smith and the Communist Menace, 1948-1972. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010. [ Citation Page ] An American Stand Senator Margaret Chase Smith and the Communist Menace, 1948-1972 Eric R. Crouse LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK [ Title Page ] Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books First paperback edition 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloqinq-in-Publication Data The harback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows: Crouse, Eric Robert, 1960- An American stand : Senator Margaret Chase Smith and the communist menace, 1948-1972 / Eric R. Crouse. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Smith, Margaret Chase, 1897-1995. 2. Anti-communist movements—United States—History. 3. Women legislators—United States—Biography. 4. United States. Congress. Senate—Biography. 5. United States—Politics and government—1945-1989. 6. Maine—Politics and government—1865-1950. 7. Maine—Politics and government—1951-1. Tide. E748.S667C76 2010 328.73’092—dc22 [B] 2010013831 ISBN: 978-0-7391-4442-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-0-7391-8184-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-0-7391-4444-2 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America [ Title Page Verso ] Table of Contents Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Rise to Political Standing Chapter 2: Red Menace Chapter 3: Korean War Chapter 4: Nuclear Credibility Chapter 5: Vietnam War Conclusion Bibliography About the Author [ Table of Contents Page ] Introduction For one and one half hours on the steps of a college library in May 1970, Senator Margaret Chase Smith stood before the angry and curious faces of mostly college students in the manner she knew and had exercised in her twenty plus years as a senator. Her character exemplified moral absolutism or misguided self-righteousness; she would stay as long as the students wanted to challenge her support for Richard Nixon’s Vietnam War policy, notably the American troop “incursion” in Cambodia. The college audience mattered because the Vietnam War had touched the lives of students in graphic or subtle ways, because she herself had no college education, and because she believed that the students could learn from older Americans, particularly from a woman who in a man’s world had taken a stand on many major Cold War issues. And why should they not listen to the first woman in American history to be elected in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the first politician to take a public stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s wild accusations, the first woman seriously considered as a vice president, the first woman of a major political party to run for president of the United States, and the only woman to serve a long term on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee? Had she not proven herself in the eyes of the “greatest generation,” those men and women who “were participants in and witness to sacrifices of the highest order” in the Great Depression and World War II years?1 Should not young people also trust her for choosing the best path for America? This study is not a biography and there is no attempt to offer a fuller treatment of Smith’s relations with Republican leadership and her links to constituents concerned with many issues beyond national security.2 The focus is on the major anticommunist episodes of her years in the Senate, especially her rhetoric and beliefs and the coast-to-coast response of mostly ordinary Americans, many of whom defined the Cold War as mainly a fight between good and evil. The book’s central argument is that America’s confrontation with global communism, at great sacrifice of lives and money, continued to make sense to Smith and other like-minded people because they never lost their belief that communism was a sinister system that did not properly respect human life and the freedoms and values held dear by Americans. Many appeared to embrace the notion of the grand narrative of American exceptionalism which assumed the United States was “a divinely favored nation with unique freedoms.” Protection of “the blessings of liberty” was paramount and what unfolded in the minds of some was a theology of anticommunism that saw evil behind the actions of communist leaders.3 For those inclined to view communism as evil or even the Cold War as a “spiritual war,” there were abundant stories of communist repression and terror in newspapers and magazines throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Recent scholarship on the crimes of communism claims that communist regimes were “criminal enterprises in their very essence” carrying out the planned [ Page 1 ] killing of at least 85 million people in the twentieth century. The argument goes that communism was not a benign system that took a mythical “wrong turn” under the direction of any particularly brutal leader. Rather, its goal from start to finish was to crush all “class enemies.”4 Given that she was one of few women in Congress and that she earned the reputation as a moderate on most issues, her position on national security makes for an especially interesting case. If she did not fully embrace an “inherently evil” argument, she came close. A recent study on foreign policy and religion claims that many American political leaders of the early Cold War years “perceived communism to be evil” because of its “dogmatic atheism”; America’s mission was to oppose communism and the feared spread of “godless materialism around the world.”5 Discussing the power of communist governments in her newspaper column “Washington and You,” Smith wrote that communism “defends violence and evil force as a means of grabbing and keeping such ownership and control by dictators. It is anti-religious and a relentless foe of the church” and anyone could see “the evil of it and to reject it vigorously.” On many occasions, she publicly stated that communist leaders were “evil men.”6 Singling out the Soviet Union, she wrote that its “leaders may change but they all continue the same policy of hate and dreams of world conquest.”7 With communism “human life is worth nothing” and even the lives of earlier communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin “meant nothing,” since “they are now merely names which their evil followers use only” to ensure enslavement of the people.8 As she saw it, “the very creed of communism is to ruthlessly kill anything that stands in its path toward world domination and slavery.”9 To be sure, such rhetoric voiced in the early 1950s with America at war in Korea was not unusual for the times, but Smith did offer similar statements throughout the 1960s and her zealous opposition to the “extreme Leftists” in the United States, in her final years in the Senate, reveals a broadened fear that communist forces were successful in inciting civil disorder at home. She had always been aware of the potential danger of communism within America, but it was late in her political career before she saw left radicalism as a threat approaching the seriousness of any external communist threat.10 Her focus was mainly on elite communist leadership abroad. The important point for her was that the main driving force behind communism was a heinous ideology rather than geopolitics or the flawed character of a particular communist leader.11 Simply put, communist leaders were sinister because communism was sinister. From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, Smith faced the challenges of a woman, with ordinary and modest beginnings, placed in the center of political power. Recent scholarship exploring gender in foreign policymaking identifies a brotherhood of warrior intellectuals who upheld an ideology of masculinity and conformed to Cold War orthodoxy that had no room for talk of appeasement. Establishment males who entered national security circles (politicians and bureaucrats) drew on the “masculine code of strength, loyalty, stoic service, and engagement in struggle” modeled in elite boarding schools, Ivy League fraternities, and the military.12 This was not Smith’s world, but she did embrace the manly traits of toughness and courage in the fight against communism no less so than the male brotherhood of elite anticommunists. As a [ Page 2 ] woman often employing a masculine disposition, she stands out as one of the more captivating anticommunists of the Cold War years. If Harry S. Truman was the first Cold Warrior who saw the Cold War “as nothing less than a religious war,” Smith was the first female Cold Warrior.13 In addition to gender considerations, her stand on communism offers a particularly fascinating view on the importance of ideas and beliefs in motivating people to fight communism14 She first gained intense nationwide attention after June 1, 1950, when she confronted McCarthy for his irresponsible methods of attacking communism in the United States and the government’s complacency in fighting the red menace. Twelve days later she was on the cover of Newsweek with the story line, “Senator Smith: A Woman Vice President?” Moderate Republicans, Democrats, and other progressive Americans responded to her “heroic” confrontation with appreciation and praise, believing she represented a more appropriate and honorable anticommunism devoid of selfish political opportunism However, it is important to note that she shared many of the goals of the most fervent anticommunists, a confusing fact in light of her opposition to McCarthy’s methods. Delighted that Smith visited Tree China at a volatile time in 1955, Madame Chiang Kai- shek acknowledged the senator’s “courageous and gallant stand” against communism as many Americans likewise did throughout her Senate career.15 Further evidence of her intense anticommunism is clear in her position on the Korean War, the nuclear arms race, and America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. When a growing number of Americans could not comprehend America’s commitment in Vietnam, where young men were dying and where the government was spending billions of dollars, Smith and her supporters maintained that the United States could not choose “appeasement” to the forces of Ho Chi Minh. For her, it was simple: the communists desired to control the world and the United States had to stop them If antiwar Americans found government arguments for the domino theory nonsense, there were others unwilling to take any chances with a sinister force. In Cold War rhetoric, the communist menace was more than a manufactured concept brimming with emotional sway.16 The reality and examples of communist repression were ubiquitous and Smith wanted America to hit back hard to stop communists’ violent plan to destroy the free world. Stalin did abandon Lenin’s prediction of revolutions arising in advanced industrial countries, but he did not discard the goal of world revolution in favor of “socialism in one country.”17 Unconvinced that the Soviet Union desired “peaceful coexistence,” Smith believed that the Soviet leaders expected and worked toward the destruction of capitalism The arguments of critics who opposed hard-line Cold War views rang hollow to others greatly troubled by the repressiveness of atheistic communism In her final years in Washington, she found the Vietnam War frustrating and longed for its completion, but she had little sympathy for the position that highlighted the injustices of American society, that viewed the nuclear arms race as immoral, and that understood America’s involvement in Vietnam as an injudicious venture that prevented the self-determination of the Vietnamese people. If her worldview was too simplistic, it was, nevertheless, commanding in its clarity. Repeatedly taking a “stand,” Smith embodied the degree of power and purpose that some thought was necessary to combat communist “slavery.” [ Page 3 ] Communist leaders were willing to sacrifice the lives of massive numbers of citizens and soldiers to realize their military and political goals. For North Vietnam’s foremost military figure (Vo Nguyen Giap), the war was not a tragedy but “a noble sacrifice.”18 In wars, there are evil acts committed on all sides. The antiwar movement viewed the devastation caused by American bombing as immoral and there were incidents of American ground troops perpetrating horrific criminal acts in Southeast Asia.19 Still, only a small number of Americans saw the United States as an evil and lawless nation that had no interest in bringing to justice those identified as committing a crime. In contrast, the record for human justice in twentieth century communist regimes is a catastrophic one. There were Americans in communist circles with sincere and noble ideals who were unaware of the horrific murders and evil acts carried out by the communist leadership in the Soviet Union.20 The exodus of communists breaking from the Party after Nikita Khrushchev’s famous February 1956 speech that exposed the murderous crimes of Stalin bears this out. But as the sixties unfolded, leftists and some liberals increasingly challenged Cold War thinking and lost to them was the belief that violence was the defining characteristic of communism. Their focus was on a war conducted by deceitful politicians, a war they described as categoricallv meaningless. The major arguments put forward by opponents of the Vietnam War were good ones: the United States was culturally ignorant of Vietnamese society and history; American policymakers incorrectly viewed Vietnam as “a Cold War crucible” or, in other words, a front in the conflict between communist powerhouses and the United States; Southeast Asia did not warrant being central in American strategic and economic thinking; it was wrong to claim that American credibility would suffer if the communists prevailed; other options beyond American military intervention existed; and the United States should have allowed Vietnamese nationalism to take its natural course along communist revolutionary lines.21 For a small number of radical antiwar activists, the Vietnam War did the most in casting communism as a system that offered a better option than the capitalistic imperialism that they argued was the practice of the United States. In their eyes, it certainly was not the malignant system that some estimate had murdered approximately 70 million Asians, mostly by the “deliberate policy” of using famine as a weapon.22 As influential as various antiwar arguments were for a significant number of Americans in the late 1960s, they had far less resonance with conservative Christians fixated on the belief that communism was an atheistic and aggressive system that had no or few redeeming qualities. America’s surprisingly high level of religiosity made it an oddity among other modern- industrial Western nations; church membership from the years 1950 to 1970 ranged between 55 and 69 percent of the population.23 In particular, there were the evangelicals composing as much as one third of the population, who grew up hearing stories of pious missionaries donating most of their lives in Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.24 Nelson Bell, Billy Graham’s father-in-law, was a passionate Cold Warrior who drew on his many years in Asia as a missionary in arguing for greater military action to defeat communism. Were not the experiences and knowledge of missionaries of Southeast Asia as valid as that of other voices, [ Page 4 ] including those Asian experts removed from the State Department during the McCarthy hysteria?25 In their view of communism, conservative Catholics and Protestants had an intense awareness of Original Sin and spiritual darkness, a worldview that mystified some secular humanists. In literature, radio, film, and revival campaigns, Billy Graham warned Americans that communism “is master-minded by Satan.”26 Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York spoke for coundess Catholics when he declared that “Christ-hating communists” pledged their allegiance to Satan.27 Popular books by Catholics such as Thomas Dooley’s Deliver Us From Evil: The Story of Viet Nam's Flight to Freedom (1956) revealed the evils of “Communist terror.”28 Our Sunday Visitor, The Brooklyn Tablet, and The Tidings were among the Catholic publications filled with heroic tales of martyrs who opposed communist evil.29 There are always exceptions, but conservative Catholic and Protestant leaders were less likely to question America’s conflict with aggressive communism, be it in Korea, Southeast Asia, or anywhere else in the world. They recognized evil when they saw it, and their message reached far beyond their church constituents. Actually, most Americans did not require churches to instruct them on the ways of communist leaders. There were the events of the Hungarian Revolution (1956), the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961), and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), to name only three. Americans without any consistent adherence to formal religious traditions were vigilant foes of communism In newspaper and magazine reports, rhetorical texts laden with powerful images and symbols concerning Cold War conflicts enlisted the sympathies of ordinary Americans for the defeat of the evil “other.” In the early Cold War years, there were numerous Americans quick to challenge any force seeking to destroy their cherished freedoms and, in fact, missed by strident McCarthyites was the breadth of the anticommunist movement. There were liberal anticommunists no less committed to fighting communism than McCarthyites; even most American socialists had no love for revolutionary communism30 Smith’s understanding was better than some and she viewed a communist as “a black-sheep cousin of a Socialist.”31 Although not a religious leader she appeared to be a woman of integrity for those seeking leaders they could trust to protect Americanism from communist assaults. She did believe that “an extremely strong factor in meeting the communist challenge is religion,” yet she kept spiritual language general and to a minimum and thus she did not offend broader America.32 She was more a toned-down Moses guiding the people on what she believed was the right path.33 As one biographer argues, “Cold War morality, not raw meat, motivated Smith.”34 One study of anticommunism in America mistakenly claims that “anticommunism at the populist level is an ideology of unhappiness. It is not, in this sense, the voice of the ‘real’ America.”35 But if understood as an “orientational metaphor,” a “stand” is positive and representative of something that is inspiring.36 Upholding duty and action against forces that might weaken American values, Smith was one who took a “stand” against global communism in a manner that attracted praise from the press and ordinary people in every region of the nation. Of course, she had weaknesses. For example, usually quiet in the Senate, her political visibility was spotty and when she did go on record a parochial and impatient tone [ Page 5 ] occasionally surfaced. Nonetheless, she remained a credible source to a wide spectrum of “real” Americans, even if they did not always agree with her. There were liberals who appreciated her stand against McCarthy and conservatives who supported her consistent anticommunist hard-line stand on foreign policy. Smith encouraged newspaper mythmaking that portrayed her as a consistent and principled Cold Warrior who appealed to grassroots Americans. In the long run, her opposition to communism was an enduring theme that garnered a high degree of attention, for better or worse, coast to coast. Rarely using explicit spiritual rhetoric, but getting a Manichean-type message out nonetheless, she made it clear that communism was a dangerous force that threatened goodness. How Smith rose to political standing is the focus of chapter 1. From a working-class family and with no college education, she reached high and won a Senate seat in 1948. Making the cover of U.S. News and World Report, she was a bright spot for the Republican Party that witnessed the defeat of Thomas Dewey to Harry S. Truman and the loss of seventy-four seats in the House and nine seats in the Senate.37 What is striking is her emergence as a Cold Warrior who concentrated on the serious and “masculine” issue of national security in the wake of the red menace. Her credibility as one who was not soft on communism is the main theme covered in chapter 2. How did she survive her stand against McCarthyism when almost all of her male colleagues ducked for cover? Certainly, the reaction to her “Declaration of Conscience” speech, which sought to protect the freedoms dear to the American people, underscored the contested terrain of what was an appropriate response to communism. Many liberals took the communist threat seriously, but the excesses of McCarthy were unacceptable. Chapter 3 centers on Smith’s assessments of the Korean War published in her syndicated column “Washington and You.” Clarifying her Cold War credentials, she voiced hard-line rhetoric and stimulating views that generated good discussion at a time when there was an information vacuum from the White House. Chapter 4 examines why leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev described her as “the devil in a disguise of a woman” and why many Americans supported her views on the nuclear arms race. For her, the credibility of a massive nuclear response to any attacks was essential. Given the rarity of female senators, it is ironic and revealing that there were few male politicians as rigid as Smith on articulating a clear message of deterrence. Chapter 5 pays particular attention to the divide among Americans on the nation’s involvement in Southeast Asia. In response to the antiwar movement, she repeatedly argued that the United States was in Vietnam “to stop the communists from conquering the world.” Difficult to comprehend for some, she continued to believe that war against the communist menace was a righteous cause. In her eyes, the communist system had not softened to the point that American and communist leaders could sit down and reconcile their differences. Smith did lose political ground when she failed to offer a judicious response to those opposing the war and when Nixon’s visits to Beijing and Moscow in early 1972 appeared to undercut her long-standing position on “evil” communist leaders. All in all, Smith’s anticommunist beliefs were not irrational notions based mainly on ignorance. Even if she and other supporters embraced a different position from that of intellectuals and pundits opposed to the war, they still used their minds for a critical [ Page 6 ] examination of what they perceived was ultimately of greater importance in defending America. In such thinking, there were traces of a just war theory that justified a level of destruction if it prevented greater evil.38 Smith would have supported much of revisionist scholarship that views America’s involvement in Southeast Asia as a noble cause.39 She wanted the military to do whatever it took to finish the job of defeating the communists, meaning more bombs and no half measures, so that the American troops could return home sooner rather than later. Praised or condemned, she remained true to a clear stand against communist expansion by aggression. However, this apparently winning formula that had served her well in the past was not enough to secure her victory in 1972. And yet Smith’s Cold Warrior stand was not the main reason for her political loss. Even as Nixon carried out detente with communist leaders, the perceived brutal nature of communism allowed a long shelf life for Cold Warriors.40 After the experiences of the sixties, America in the 1970s and beyond was more conservative than many thought possible. As one sixties radical put it, “The Right took over the government, the Left took over the English department.”41 Smith lost due to a number of mistakes, including a failure to offer constituents a vision or plan to justify her place in Washington for six more years. Rather than forward- looking and inspiring, her memoirs released at the beginning of the campaign had an angry and defensive tone which seemed to substantiate accusations that she easily took offense with those who allegedly slighted her. An unfavorable assessor of the memoirs, wrote of “a world sharply divided into friends, traitors and enemies, with the lady senator always vindicated (occasionally vindictive) and triumphant.”42 This certainly hurt her case. But even more significant, Smith simply lacked the energy to stand forcefully in a stirring manner, as she had in key moments throughout her political career, in order to remain credible in the male domain of Washington politics. While she and executive assistant William C. Lewis pondered the devastating loss in November 1972, Nixon, another earlier Cold Warrior (who scored high marks with his visits to China and the Soviet Union), basked in the glory of an overwhelming victory over George McGovern, who represented the hope of antiwar liberals and others on the left. The position of Smith’s public statements and her correspondence with ordinary Americans is unmistakable. On the issue of communism, she rarely unmasked any political calculations, subdeties, or contradictions that probably existed behind her Cold War thinking. By opposing communism forcefully, she believed she could help protect the United States for all present and future Americans. Her consistent masculine Cold War stand against the apparent evil nature of communism, stark in its simplicity, was consistent with the ideal that great sacrifices sprung from moral duty. She did her part by rejecting any elusion or sanitization of the ruthless and murderous actions of communists, but her anticommunist stand that worked in the 1950s and early 1960s received greater scrutiny after 1965 when Americans responded to the battles being fought both in Southeast Asia and on the home front. NOTES 1. Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998), 11. [ Page 7 ] 2. For a full biographical treatment of Smith, see Janann Sherman, No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith (New Brunswick. N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 2000). 3. On exceptionalism, see Frank Costigliola and Thomas G. Paterson, “Defining and Doing the History of United States Foreign Relations: A Primer,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed., ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11-13. My use of the term “theology” is from Ernest R. May’s comments on Robert McNamara’s Vietnam War book. May writes: “There was a theology at the time, or at least a set of beliefs, that the book does not capture.” See Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 422. Also, see ‘“Cold War’ Termed a Spiritual Clash,” New York Times, 16 June 1952 and “World Seen Split by Two Ideologies,” New York Times, 18 July 1949. For a discussion on the communist threat to American values in the early twentieth century, see Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 14-15. For a study that focuses on the core values of policymakers as they relate to economic and technological superiority, see Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security. the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1992). 4. Séphance Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), x, xvii-xviii, 4. 5. William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4. 6. “Important to Know What Communism Is,” “Washington and You” (W&Y), 28 January 1953, Margaret Chase Smith Library (MCSL). The best source for Smith’s usage of the term “evil” is her newspaper column, particularly the years 1950- 1953. 7. World Trip Report, 18 April 1955, World Trip 1954-1955 Folder, MCSL. 8. “We Should Use Stalin’s Death as a Weapon,” W&Y, 17 March 1953, MCSL. 9. W&Y, 26 January 1953, MCSL. 10. Elaine Tyler May argues that many Americans believed that “the real dangers to America were internal ones” and one could find refuge in the family and home. See May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 9. 11. Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis writes that it was not clear whether any other Soviet would have implemented collectivization of agriculture and industrialization “with the brutality Stalin relied upon, or that they would have followed them with massive purges against mostly imaginary enemies.” See John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8. Gaddis cites that Stalin’s policies before World War II resulted in at least 17 million deaths. 12. Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 4-5, 19. 13. On Truman, see Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006); and on Truman and “religious war,” see Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960, 1. On Smith, see Patricia Ward Wallace, Politics of Conscience: A Biography of Margaret Chase Smith (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), 131. Wallace writes, “In her long-nurtured role as military expert she decided to confront the evil of world communism and became the nation’s first female cold warrior.” 14. In We Now Know, Gaddis writes that “historians of the Cold War need to look quite carefully at what those who saw distinctions between good and evil thought and did about them.” As historians, “we have to take seriously what they at the time believed ” (287). Helpful is Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” The American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 501-24. 15. Madame Chiang Kai-shek to MCS, 9 May 1955, World Trip Folder, MCSL. 16. For more on language and emotion, see Frank Costigliola, “The Creation of Memory and Myth,” in Critical Reflections on the Cold War: Linking Rhetoric and History, ed. Martin J. Medhurst and H. W. Brands (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000), 38-54. 17. Gaddis, We Now Know, 13-14. 18. Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Viking, 2003), 43. 19. In 1970, a Citizens Commission of Inquiry into U.S. War Crimes began hearings. See Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 307. 20. Like virtually every human being, the leftist Americans of these years wanted their lives to have meaning. Many communists and others on the left did do good works for the working class, African Americans, and others exploited in an often harsh urban-industrial environment; left-wing social action in the United States improved the lot of a considerable number of Americans. 21. These themes are discussed in Andrew J. Rotter, “Chronicle of a War Foretold: The United States and Vietnam, 1945- [ Page 8 ] 1954,” in The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis, ed. Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 282-306. 22. Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism, xviii, 4. 23. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 83. 24. For example, see Wayne Flynt and Gerald W. Berkley, Taking Christianity to China: Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1850-1950 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997). 25. McNamara. In Retrospect, 33. 26. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 81. In the fifties, Graham referred to the evil of communism in many of his sermons. In one of his popular books, he warned: “Motivated by such a fanatical, burning desire to win, the Communists find no sacrifice too great to make for their cause.” See Billy Graham, World Aflame (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965), 7. 27. Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 82-83. 28. Thomas A. Dooley, Deliver Us from Evil: The Story of Viet Nam’s Flight to Freedom (New York: Signet Books, 1962), 118. For the opinion of another Catholic who had viewed the Vietnam struggle as between good and evil, but who was critical of Deliver Us from Evil. see. Appy. Patriots. 47-50. 29. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 104-5. 30. For an overview of the various categories of anticommunists, see Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: The Free Press, 1995). 31. W&Y, 28 January 1953, MCSL. 32. Senator Margaret Chase Smith Public Speech, 25 July 1960, MCSL. 33. One critic in 1950 referred to her as “a Moses in nylons.” See “Senator Smith! How Could You?” Scrapbook, vol. 88, 41, MCSL. 34. Wallace, Politics of Conscience, 142. 35. Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (London: Cassell, 1997), 118. 36. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 14-21. 37. Sherman, No Place for a Woman, 88-89. 38. Professor of religion at Princeton University, Paul Ramsey was one who articulated such thinking in the 1960s. See Paul Ramsey, The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2002). 39. The most recent and forceful revisionist study is Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On Vietnam War historiography, see David Anderson, “The Vietnam War,” in A Companion to American Foreign Relations, ed. Robert D. Schulzinger (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 309- 29. A helpful review of earlier scholarship is Gary R. Hess, “The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 18, Issue 2 (1994): 239-64. Critical of a revisionist perspective is Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. Also of significance is the rift in how academics perceive communism. See John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003). 40. One historian writes: “There is no reason to believe that the American people as a whole ever changed their ideas about communism or, indeed (judging by Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972), ever turned en masse against the war.” See Powers, Not Without Honor, 319. 41. Todd Gitlin quoted in Kenneth J. Heineman, God is a Conservative: Religion, Politics, and Morality in Contemporary America (New York: New York University Press 1998), 5. Also, see John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004); Leo Ribuffo, “Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything about it?” The American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (April 1994), 438-49, and Jerome L. Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). On the rise of intellectual conservatism from the lonely days of the 1940s to the more promising 1970s, see George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books. Inc., 1979). 42. Sherman, No Place for a Woman, 216. [ Page 9 ] ***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was brought to you by Tyndale University, J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****