Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (32 page)

Having ignored why the federal government acts as it does, textbooks proceed to ignore much of what the government does. Textbook authors portray the U.S. government's actions as agreeable and nice, even when U.S. government officials have admitted motives and intentions of a quite different nature. Among the less savory examples are various attempts by U.S. officials and agencies to assassinate leaders or bring down governments of other countries. The United States has indulged in activities of this sort at least since the Wilson administration, which hired two Japanese-Mexicans to try to poison Pancho Villa,' I surveyed the twelve textbooks to see how they treated six more recent US, attempts to subvert foreign governments. To ensure that the events were adequately covered in the historical literature, I examined only incidents that occurred before 1973, well before any of these textbooks went to press. The episodes are:

1. our assistance to the shah's faction in Iran in deposing Prime Minister Mussadegh and returning the shah to the throne in 1953;

2, our role in bringing down the elected government of Guatemala in 1954;

3. our rigging of the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the Christians on top and led to the Muslim revolt and civil war the next year;

4. our involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire in 1961;

5, our repeated attempts to murder Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba and bring down his government by terror and sabotage; and 6, our role in bringing down the elected government of Chile in 1973.

The U.S. government caJls actions such as these “state-sponsored terrorism” when other countries do them to us. We would be indignant to learn of Cuban or Libyan attempts to influence our politics or destabilize our economy. Our government expressed outrage at Iraq's Saddam Hussein for trying to arrange the assassination of former President Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993 and retaliated with a bombing attack on Baghdad, yet the United States has repeatedly orchestrated similar assassination attempts.

In 1990 Warren Cohen resigned from the historical committee that he headed at the State Department to protest the government's deletion from its official history of U.S. foreign relations of “all mention of the C.I.A. coup that put Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi in power in Iran in 1953.”3¡ Eight of the twelve textbooks I reviewed would side with the U.S. government against Cohen: they too say nothing about our overthrow of Mussadegh. The American Pageant and Life and Liberty stand out with far and away the most accurate accounts. Here is the paragraph from Life and Liberty:

The United Slates had been a long-time friend of the ruler of Iran, Shah Reza Pahlevi. In fact, the United States had helped him to his throne by overthrowing a democratically elected government in 1953, which the United States felt was too leftist. America supplied the shah with large numbers of arms, and also trained the shah's army and police. Unfortunately, the shah used the army and police to form a police state.

Triumph of the American Nation and Land of Promise mention that the United States deposed Mussadegh but justify the act as anticommunist. In the words of Promise, “In 1953, a Communist-backed political party seized control of the government and attempted to assert control over Iran's oil resources.” This will not do: Mussadegh himself had led the drive to expel the Soviets from northern Iran after World War II. And his party did not “seize control” any more than parties do in other parliamentary democracies such as Canada or Great Britain. Indeed, the shah himself had appointed Mussadegh prime minister because of his immense popularity in parliament and among the people.

The other eight textbooks say nothing about our government's actions in prerevolutionary Iran. The only specific U.S. action in Iran that A History ofthe Republic reports, for example, is our assistance in wiping out malaria! When these textbooks' authors later describe the successful attempt in 1979 by the people of Iran to overthrow the shah, their accounts cannot explain why Iranians might be so upset with the United States. Of the twelve textbooks, only Lift and Liberty and The American Pageant explain the shah's unpopularity as a ruler imposed from without and America's unpopularity owing to our identification with the shah and his policies. Thus only two books give students a basis for understanding why Iranians held Americans hostage for more than a year during the Carter administration.

In Guatemala in 1954, the CIA threatened the government of Jacobo Arbenz with an armed invasion, Arbenz had antagonized the United Fruit Company by proposing land reform and planning a highway and railroad that might break their trade monopoly. The United States chose an obscure army colonel as the new president, and when Arbenz panicked and sought asylum in the Mexican embassy, we flew our man to the capital aboard the US. ambassador's private plane. Only one textbook, The American Tradition, mentions the incident:

In the 195s the United States, concerned with stopping the spread of communism, directed its attention to Latin America once again. In 1954 the CIA helped to overthrow the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala. In following years, in order to prevent communist takeovers, the United States continued to support unpopular conservative or military governments in Latin America.

Here, as with Promise's account of Iran, Tradition offers anticommunism as the sole motive for U.S. policies. Bear in mind that this incident took place at the height of McCarthyism, when, as Lewis Lapham has pointed out, the United States saw communism everywhere; “When the duly elected Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz, began to talk too much like a democrat, the United States accused him of communism.”21 Thirty years later The American Tradition maintains the US. government's McCarthyist rhetoric as fact.

Not one textbook includes a word about how the United States helped the Christians in Lebanon fix the 1957 parliamentary election in that then tenuously balanced country. The next year, denied a fair share of power by electoral means, the Muslims took to armed combat, and President Eisenhower sent in the marines on the Christians' behalf Five books discuss that 1958 intervention. Land of Promise offers the fullest treatment;

Next, chaos broke out in Lebanon, and the Lebanese President, Camille Chamoun, fearing a leftist coup, asked for American help. Although reluctant to interfere, in July 1958 Eisenhower sent 15,000 United States marines into Lebanon. Order was soon restored, and the marines were withdrawn.

This is standard textbook rhetoric: chaos seems always to be breaking out or about to break out. Other than communism, “chaos” is what textbooks usually offer to explain the actions of the other side. Communism offers no real explanation either. Kwitny points out that the United States has often behaved so badly in the Third World that some governments and independence movements saw no alternative but to turn to the USSR.23 Since textbook authors are unwilling to criticize the U.S. government, they present opponents ofthe United States that are not intelligible. Only by disclosing our actions can textbooks provide readers with rational accounts of our adversaries.

Promise goes on to tell the happy results of our intervention: “Although there was no immediate Communist threat to Lebanon, Eisenhower demonstrated that the United States could react quickly. As a result, tensions in the region receded.” In reality, the civil war in Lebanon lasted until the 1980s, with mounting destruction in Beirut and throughout the nation. In 1983 a whole lot of chaos broke out, so President Reagan sent in our marines again. A truck bomb then killed more than two hundred marines in their barracks, and three textbooks treat that intervention. Two of them say nothing about our involvement in either 1957 or 1958, and the remaining textbook, The American Pageant. tells of Eisenhower's 1958 intervention in even rosier terms than Land of Promise. So not one of twelve textbooks offers students anything of substance about the continuity of conflict in Lebanon or our role in causing it.

“ZaYre” or “the Congo” appears in the index of just two textbooks, The American Pageant and Triumph ofthe American Nation, Neither book mentions that the CIA urged the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961.“ Pageant offers an accurate account of the beginning of the strife: ”The African Congo received its independence from Belgium in 1960 and immediately exploded into violence. The United Nations sent in a peacekeeping force, to which Washington contributed much money but no manpower.“ There Pageant stops. The account in Triumph of the American Nation mentions Lumumba by name: ”A new crisis developed in 1961 when Patrice Lumumba, leader of the pro-Communist faction, was assassinated.“ Triumph says nothing about U.S. involvement with the assassination, however, and concludes with the happiest of endings: ”By the late 1960s, most scars of the civil war seemed healed. The Congo (Zaire) became one of the most prosperous African nations.“ Would that it were! The CIA helped bring to power Joseph Mobutu, a former army sergeant. By the end of the 1960s, Triumph to the contrary, Zaire under Mobutu had become one of the most wretched African nations, economically and politically. As of 1993, Mobutu had yet to hold an election, allow the free functioning of political parties, or condone a free press. The New York Times noted that starvation was growing in Zaire and called the problems ”self-inflicted, the result of nearly 30 years of Government corruption.“24 While per capita income in Zaire fell by more than two-thirds, Mobutu himself became one of the richest persons on the planet and perhaps the most hated person in the country.25 As I write in 1994, Zaire is ripe for a ”new“ crisis to ”develop," quite possibly with anti-American overtones. If it does, we can be sure, textbooks will be just as surprised as our students when “chaos breaks out.” Ali twelve textbooks are silent about our repeated attempts to assassinate Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba. The federal government had tried to kill Castro eight times by 1965, according to testimony before the US. Senate; by 1975 Castro had thwarted twenty-four attempts, according Ç_Cuba. These undertakings ranged from a botched effort to get Castro to light an exploding cigar to a contract with the Mafia to murder him. Since Pres. John F, Kennedy probably ordered several of the earlier attempts on Castro's life personally, including the Mafia contract, Kennedy's own assassination might be explained as a revenge slaying. Because no textbook tells how Kennedy tried to kill Castro, however, none can logically suggest a Cuban or Mafia connection in discussing Kennedy's death,i6 The Kennedy administration also lied about its sponsorship of the Bay of Pigs invasion; immediately after that failed, Kennedy launched Operation Mongoose, “a vast covert program” to destabilize Cuba. Pierre Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary, has written that JFK even planned to invade Cuba with U.S. armed forces until forestalled by the Cuban missile crisis.27 No textbook tells about Operation Mongoose.

Undaunted by its failures in Cuba, the CIA turned its attention farther south. Only three textbooks, Life and Liberty, The American Adventure, and Triumph of the American Nation, mention Chile. “President Nixon helped the Chilean army overthrow Chile's elected government because he did not like its radical socialist policies,” Lift and Liberty says bluntly This single sentence, which is all that Life and Liberty offers, lies buried in a section about President Carter's human rights record, but it is far and away the best account in any of the textbooks. According to Triumph, Nixon approved “the secret use offunds by the CIA to try to prevent a socialist-communist election victory in Chile. The CIA later made it difficult for the Marxist government elected by these parties to govern.” Since the “difficulties” President Allende faced included his own murder, perhaps this is the ultimate euphemism! TheAmericanAdventureoffers a fuller account:

Some people, in the United States and abroad, said that the United States arranged the overthrow of Allende. Indeed, in 1974, Pres. Ford admitted that the United States CIA had given help to the opposition to Allende. However, he denied that the United States encouraged or knew ofthe revolutionary plan.

Why leave our involvement open to question? Historians know that the CIA had earlier joined with ITT to try to defeat Allende in the 1970 elections. Failing this, the United States sought to disrupt the Chilean economy and bring down Allende's government. The United States blocked international loans to Chile, subsidized opposition newspapers, labor unions, and political parties, denied spare parts to industries, paid for and fomented a nationwide truckers' strike that paralyzed the Chilean economy, and trained and financed the military that staged the bloody coup in 1973 in which Allende was killed. The next year, CIA Director William Colby testified that “a secret high-level intelligence committee led by Kissinger himself had authorized CIA expenditures of over $8,000,000 during the period 1970-73 to 'destabilize' the government of Pres. Allende.“28 Secretary of State Kissinger himself later explained, ”I don't see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.“29 Since the Chilean people's ”irresponsibility” consisted of voting for Allende, here Kissinger openly says that the United States should not and will not respect the electoral process or sovereignty of another country if the results do not please us. With this attitude and policy in place in our government, whether the CIA or its Chilean allies pulled the trigger on Allende amounts to a nitpicking detail. The American Adventure at least mentions our action in Chile; however, nine books overlook it entirely.

Do textbooks need to include all government skullduggery? Certainly not. I am not arguing in favor of what Paul Gagnon calls “relentless mentioning.”31 Textbooks do need to analyze at least one ofour interventions in depth, however, for they raise important issues. To defend these acts on moral grounds is not easy. The acts diminish U.S. foreign policy to the level of Mafia thuggery, strip the United States ofits claim to lawful conduct, and reduce our prestige around the world. To be sure, covert violence may be defensible on tealpolitik grounds as an appropriate way to deal with international problems. It can be argued that the United States should be destabilizing governments in other countries, assassinating leaders unfriendly to us, and fighting undeclared unpublicized wars. The six cloak-and-dagger operations recounted here do not support this view, however. In Cuba, for instance, the CIA's “pointless sabotage operations,” in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's words, “only increased Castro's popularity.” Even when they succeed, these covert acts provide only a short-term fix, keeping people who worry us out of power for a time, but identifying the United States with repressive, undemocratic, unpopular regimes, hence undermining our long-term interests. The historian Ronald Kessler relates that a CIA officer responsible for engineering Arbenz's downfall in Guatemala agreed later that overthrowing elected leaders is a short-sighted policy.“ ”Was it desirable to trade Mossadegh for the Ayatollah Khomeni?“ asks the historian Charles Ameringer about our ”success“ in Iran. When covert attacks fail, like the Bay of Pigs landing in 1961, they leave the U.S. government with no viable next step short of embarrassed withdrawal or oven military intervention. If instead of covert action we had had a public debate about how to handle Mussadegh or Castro, we might have avoided Khomeni or the Bay of Pigs debacle. Unless we become more open to nationalist governments that embody the dreams of their people, Robert F. Smith believes we will face ”crisis after crisis.