Free The Deep State by Mike Lofgren Page A

as well as numerous small incidents between U.S. and Soviet forces. Nevertheless, the universal use of the term “cold war” implied that the United States and the USSR wereat war in all senses save for shots being fired; this way of thinking fed periodic national panics such as the McCarthyite hysteria over internal subversion and the frenzy over
Sputnik
. Present-day Democrats who are tired of being perpetually accused by Republicans of being weak on defense would do well to remember that the shoe was sometimes on the other foot during the 1950s. Some Democrats charged the Eisenhower administration with allowing a “bomber gap” with the Soviet Union, and in 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy accused Eisenhower of presiding over a “missile gap.” * Both gaps were wholly imaginary, since the United States was well ahead both in numbers and quality of both types of weapons. It is one of those conveniently disremembered ironies of American history that Kennedy, the darling of American liberalism, should have accused the chief organizer of American victory in Europe during World War II of being weak on defense.
    President Eisenhower already recognized the danger of the permanent war mentality, and in his January 1961 farewell address he presciently warned about the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” of a new “military-industrial complex” on American soil. By the middle of the 1960s, the twin neuroses of paranoia and hubris that exemplified the mentality of the national security state led us into the mud of Vietnam. The Deep State, with the military-industrial complex at its core, was well on its way to crystallization by the 1960s, but Vietnam and the attendant domestic tumult showed that such an outcome was neither inevitable nor irreversible. Popular protests compelled even hawks like Richard Nixon to campaign on the pretext that they could end the war, forced an end to the draft, exposed and limited the extensive domestic spying on U.S. citizens opposed to the war (code-named COINTELPRO), and fueled therevelation (in the Pentagon Papers) of the heretofore secret and mysterious world of national security policy. Nixon’s criminal overreaction to the leak of the Pentagon Papers led inexorably to the first-ever resignation of an American president.
    The political changes of the 1970s—reform of the CIA as a result of the Church Committee hearings, reining in the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover’s four decades of autocratic directorship, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) placing domestic national security surveillance under supervision of a court—appeared to blunt the advance of the national security state and in some cases to reverse it. In retrospect, however, the 1970s were a temporary detour from the upward trajectory of the Deep State. The same social currents that caused massive popular rejection of the Vietnam War also led to the rise of a far more powerful and longer-lasting domestic countermovement.
    This countermovement considered itself the bedrock of American patriotism and American values—the core of what Sarah Palin took to calling “real America.” It perceived itself to be under siege by the same groups of suspect Americans who attacked the Vietnam War and the national security state: dissidents, malcontents, flag-burners, antipatriots. This countermovement, which composed much of corporate America that had nothing to do with the military, had been contained and tamed since the New Deal. It was now feeling beleaguered by the wave of health, safety, environmental, and proconsumer legislation that was a legacy of the 1960s and early 1970s. It is worth recalling that Richard Nixon, the arch-ogre of Watergate, was behind the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and other domestic initiatives that would be unthinkable for a Republican president of today.
    This business-led countermovement was something of a