Gore Vidal: My villain is a perfectly nice little man called Harry S. (for nothing) Truman

A amuse-bouche or two from Gore Vidal’s essay on Truman. Written in 1992.

At no point in the hagiographies of Truman does anyone mention what he actually did to the United States and the world. First he created the National Security State. He institutionalised the Cold War. He placed us on a permanent wartime footing. He started that vast haemorrhage of debt…

Truman and his advisers from both political parties decided that they would, in effect, declare war on a vile religion known as Communism and its homeland, the Soviet Union. The demonisation of the Soviet Union started in 1947, when they were no threat to the American empire and its clients.

Truman’s blueprint made severn points. First, we were never to negotiate with the Soviet Union in any honest way. Two, we were to develop the hydrogen bomb. Three, build up conventional forces and reinstate the draft. Four, increase taxes to pay for this – in 1954 I earned $100.000 and paid 90,000 to the peacetime government of the US. Five. mobilize through the media all Americans to fight Communism – Truman instituted ‘loyalty oaths’ a nice totalitarian gimmick that Joseph McCarthy would have a lot of fun with. Six, control the Allies with NATO, hence our military presence to this day in Europe. Seven, propagandise the Russians through misinformation, and so on. Since 1950 the US has been compulsively at war (hot) in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq; (tepid) Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvadore, Guatemala; and (cold) Iran, Angola, Chile, Grenada. Also, the interference through our secret police in European elections, starting with April 1, 1948, when the CIA ensured the election of the Christian Democrats in Italy, through the harassment of Harold Wilson’s Labor government in the Sixties, to various crimes in every continent….

Gore Wrote “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and a thousand other items, allowing him to us his 4 favorite words, still, beyond the grave -“I told you so”