Free American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy Page B

addition to the liberal, New Deal–style reforms he had implemented (e.g., universal suffrage, social security, the right to organize unions), he introduced an agrarian reform program that seized about one-seventh of the property owned by the United Fruit Company, a U.S. firm that owned 42 percent of Guatemala’s land. This modest nationalization of fallow land (for which the company was compensated), along with a small shipment of old “Communist weapons” from Czechoslovakia, led Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to declare that Arbenz had begun a “reign of terror.”
    The next thing the American public heard about Guatemala was the wholly fictitious story of a successful “popular uprising” against Arbenz by Guatemalan “patriots.” It was the CIA alone that was responsible for ousting Arbenz and installing Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a brutal dictator who immediately revoked the land reforms, disenfranchised most Guatemalans, banned labor unions, and initiated fifty years of repressive government and civil war that ultimately killed more than 200,000 people. Under Eisenhower, the CIA launched 170 major covert actions in forty-eight nations.
    Eisenhower’s foreign policies thus bear a striking resemblance to those of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Both presidents led war-weary nations reluctant to fight again, especially where there was no compelling goal or clear end point. Yet both men were devout cold warriors. Confronted by the Never Again Club that emerged from Korea and the Vietnam syndrome of the 1970s and 1980s, Eisenhower and Reagan used military force primarily in secret and by proxy.
    A major difference between the two eras, however, is that in the 1950s most Americans trusted their government to carry out foreign policy in ways that were necessary for national security and to advance freedom and democracy. By the 1980s, largely because of the experience of the Vietnam War, many Americans questioned the fundamental premises and execution of U.S. policy. They were far more skeptical when their president claimed to be supporting “freedom fighters” in a righteous struggle against “Communist-controlled revolutionaries.” There was much broader public awareness that Cold War America had supported many dictatorial and repressive regimes to gain their political, strategic, and economic compliance. By the 1980s, many Americans opposed not only major U.S. military interventions, but even the U.S.-backed proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
    The rise of dissent toward Cold War foreign policy can be traced in the history of a phrase. In the 1950s, “Communist aggression” was one of the most common expressions in American political discourse. It tripped off so many tongues and pens it seemed like an unquestioned law of nature, solid and permanent, beyond doubt. It was easy to assume that Communists and Communist nations were, by definition, always the aggressors, always the ones to initiate hostilities, always the ones to favor violence over peaceful negotiation, always the ones to sabotage democratic elections.
    Oddly, if you search the
New York Times
from its first issue in 1851 (three years after Marx and Engels published
The Communist Manifesto
) until 1946, “Communist aggression” appears in only eight articles. From 1946 to 1960, by contrast, as the Cold War and Third World anticolonialism elevated the specter of Communism to the level of national fixation, the expression appeared in 2,714 articles. “Red aggression” adds another 90 results and was especially common in headlines. Communist aggression was the primary ideological justification of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, yet during the key years of combat in Vietnam (1961–1975), its use declined substantially, dropping in the
Times
to 833 articles. Then, from 1976 to 1990, despite the rise of the New Right and its effort to renew Cold War concerns about Soviet power, the number of articles mentioning “Communist aggression ”