He was, as the novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote, willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war.
Until this episode, many Americans had believed that their soldiers were different from others, operating on a higher moral plane because their cause was good.
Americans have always been idealists. They want their country to act for pure motives,
From the 1920s into the 1940s, Britain's standard of living was supported by oil from Iran. British cars, trucks, and buses ran on cheap Iranian oil. Factories throughout Britain were fueled by oil fr...
Life is not shaped by what happens to you but by how you react to what happens to you.
From the vantage point of history, however, it is clear that most of these operations actually weakened American security. They cast whole regions of the world into upheaval, creating whirlpools of in...
The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success. . . . If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can m...
The emergence of markets abroad put Americans to work, but it distorted the economies of poor countries in ways that greatly increased their poverty. As American companies accumulated vast sugar and f...
All that this country desires is that the other republics on this continent shall be happy and prosperous, Theodore Roosevelt declared, and they cannot be happy and prosperous unless they maintain ord...
American leaders clamored for this policy because, they said, the country desperately needed a way to resolve its glut of overproduction. This glut, however, was largely illusory. While wealthy Americ...
Bernays was one of the first masters of modern mass psychology. He liked to describe himself as the father of public relations, and no one disagreed. His specialty was what he called the conscious and...
Countries that have the power to interfere in foreign lands almost always do so.
Exceptionalism—the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations—was to them not a platitude, but...
Expansion presented the United States with a dilemma that has confronted many colonial powers. If it allowed democracy to flower in the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in acc...
In 1984, showing extraordinary courage, a group of Guatemalan wives, mothers and other relatives of disappeared people banded together to form the Mutual Support Group for the Appearance Alive of Our...
Had we to do it over again, he said in an interview sixteen months after the invasion, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success.
Nixon pressed him relentlessly, and also because the anti-Allende project fit perfectly with his view of the world and of America’s place in it.
Nationalists reflexively rebel against governments they perceive as lackeys of foreign power. In the twentieth century, many of these rebels were men and women inspired by American history, American p...
In the mid-1950s Winston Churchill advised his American friends to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was unbeatable, accept his victory, and try to make the best of it. This the Dulles brothers could not do—...
Whatever doubts the Americans had about the wisdom of embracing Zia were overwhelmed by their determination to intensify the rebellion in Afghanistan.
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