Henry Wallace (1888 – 1965) was FDR's second Vice President (1941 - 1945) and as a seasoned Washington politician he must have known that his political career was coming to an end when the attached editorial hit the newsstands in early October of 1948. Written by William L. Chenery, publisher of Collier's Magazine, one of the most staid, middle class news and fiction organs around - it was not the sort of organization that looked upon libel lightly; Chenery meant what he wrote when he slandered the former vice president as "the spokesman of Russia".
Wallace, who at the time was taking a licking as the Progressive Party nominee for president in the 1948 race, left politics shortly afterward. In 1952 he wrote a book in which he admitted how wrong he was to have ever trusted Joseph Stalin. On the twenty-first of March, 1947, President Harry Truman signed into law Executive Order 9835 which was intended to remove communists and their assorted apologists from working in the Federal Government.
Unfortunately the President hadn't issued a working definition as to what was "loyal" and what was "disloyal" and the results of the decree were predictable. The attached editorial was penned by a seasoned Washington journalist who had collected an agglomeration of anecdotal evidence during the first year of its enforcement in order to illustrate the inherent difficulties created as a result of the order. He pointed out that Truman's order simply granted carte blanche to the F.B.I., called into question the rights of government workers and created a "Loyalty Review Board" that was cumbersome and bureaucratic.
Here are seven stories about the freedom-craving rebels who made life difficult for the Soviet overseers who commanded the slave states in Eastern Europe.
Click here to read a Cold War editorial by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
How Pasternak's Russian novel, Doctor Zhivago (1957), came to be published was not your standard bourgeois affair involving manuscripts sent by certified mail to charming book agents who host long, wet lunches - quite the contrary. As the journalist noted in the attached article: It is an intriguing story involving the duplicity of one Italian communist who gleefully deceived a multitude Soviets favoring that the work be buried forever.
The Berlin Blockade was already six weeks old when this article appeared proclaiming that peace with the Soviet Union was still possible:
"Russia and the U.S. are in the midst of another showdown on peace. Odds favor a settlement, not war."
"Peace terms are shifting closer to compromise. Russia is more interested in seeking peace, less interested in stalling... Each side is out to get the best possible terms. But prospects for easing the tension of cold war are good."
Click here to read about the Berlin Blockade. Shortly after the Soviet Union successfully tested their first atomic bomb, the brass hats who work in the Pentagon saw fit to take the first step in preparing to fight an atomic war: they gave the order to create a subterranean headquarters to house a military command and control center for the U.S. and her allies.
"The finished chamber, according to local observers, will be 3,100 feet long, contain four suites for the top brass (the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others), and provide operational quarters for some 1,200 technicians in peacetime, or 5,000 if atomic bombing threatens the Washington command."
Commonly known as "Site R", it is located not terribly far from the presidential retreat, Camp David, and in the subsequent years since this article first appeared, the complex has grown considerably larger than when it was first envisioned. Today, Site R maintains more than thirty-eight military communications systems and it has been said that it was one of "undisclosed locations" that hosted Vice President Dick Cheney (b. 1941) shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
A related article can be read here...
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