28e: Conclusions

1. Tough to let go
France and Britain were building and acquiring empires centuries before the United States existed. As we know from our own experience today, people tend to be comforted by the strength of their nation's military and the spread of their nation's influence. Not only have the French and British empires fallen, immigrants have moved in to France and Britain from their former colonies. This has brought up the question of what it means to be French, or to be British. Unlike the United States, which has usually prided itself on welcoming all foreigners (some more than others, granted) and serving as a melting pot, France and Britain have traditionally prided themselves on being ethnically French and ethnically British. These sorts of issues have spawned a national insecurity that has caused  events like Britain's 1982 war with Argentina over the Maldive Islands.

2. I Like Ike
In the Army, Dwight D. Eisenhower was considered more a desk chair general than a fighter. As a President, he was thought of as an amiable fellow who cared more about golf than foreign policy. Both assessments were unfair. From his years commanding the Western Allies' forces against Germany and Italy, he knew well the costs of war and was determined to avoid them any way he could. Concerned with the spread of Communism, he was willing to prop up client regimes like South Korea and South Vietnam. But he would not put up with international shenanigans on his allies' part either, as with the Suez Canal Crisis. Despite having devoted his life to the Army, Eisenhower was also a firm believer in civilian control of the military. To my mind he is one of America's grossly underestimated Presidents.

3. The Red Scare, Part 2
The so called Red Scare of the 1950s was not anything new. An earlier Red Scare had seized America right after World War One, complete with scattered terrorist bombs. While the US was deporting supposed Communists to Russia, Communist Russia was deporting Western sympathizers westward. But the rooting out of Communists, real and supposed, reached its absurd and appalling peak during the early 1950s. Individual Communists had done the US government great harm, most notably by passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. But many Americans with no connection to Communism, either American or Soviet, lost their good names and sometimes their livelihoods to this senseless witch hunt.

4. Mutually Assured Destruction
For me and for other aging baby boomers, the threat of nuclear war was always present throughout our childhood.  We had bomb drills in which we were supposed to hide under our desks; why anyone would want to bomb Carrollton Elementary School in Oak Creek, Wisconsin was beyond me but I did as I was told. The Carollton Elementary cafeteria was a designated fallout shelter, as was St. Matthew's Catholic Church two miles away. I was nervous, but had I known how close the world had actually come to mutually assured destruction when I was an infant, I would have been terrified. But I don't mean to bore you with my old coot stories here. Compared to what elementary school kids grow up with today, I'm starting to feel I got off pretty light.