This article was written by Gallup Poll Editor William Lydgate who compared various opinion surveys that were taken shortly after the close of W.W. II with the ones that were created just one year later.
The 1945 poll revealed that the American public generally looked forward to friendly relations with the Soviet Union, shared remarkably high hopes for world peace and believed deeply that the United Nations would be responsible for the creation of a better world. However, the 1946 poll measured an enormous drop in this sunny disposition.
George F. Kennan was an American diplomat who is remembered as being one of the most insightful analysts of Soviet foreign policy during the cold war.
Click here to read about the Cold War prophet who believed that Kennan's containment policy was not tough enough on the Soviets...
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.
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