The Cold War – Page 2 – Old Magazine Articles

The Cold War and Public Opinion
(’47 Magazine, 1947)

This article was written by Gallup Poll Editor William Lydgate who compared various opinion surveys that were taken shortly after the close of W.W. II with the ones that were created just one year later.

The 1945 poll revealed that the American public generally looked forward to friendly relations with the Soviet Union, shared remarkably high hopes for world peace and believed deeply that the United Nations would be responsible for the creation of a better world. However, the 1946 poll measured an enormous drop in this sunny disposition.

Stalin’s ‘Hate-America’ Campaign
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1952)

In 1952 the Soviet hierarchy began publishing an enormous amount of anti-American cartoons in magazines and newspapers throughout the worker’s paradise. As you will see, the Red cartoonists of yore were really big on comparing Americans to bugs and Nazis; they also delighted in making all American senior officers resemble the obese General Walker, who was the American corps commander leading the U.N. Forces in Korea.

The Soviets were very clever in the way in which they used radio to manipulate their people, click here to read about that…

The Book that Shook the Kremlin
(Coronet Magazine, 1959)

How Pasternak’s Russian novel, Doctor Zhivago (1957), came to be published was not your standard bourgeois affair involving manuscripts sent by certified mail to charming book agents who host long, wet lunches – quite the contrary. As the journalist noted in the attached article: It is an intriguing story involving the duplicity of one Italian communist who gleefully deceived a multitude Soviets favoring that the work be buried forever.

Segregation Soviet-Style
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

As the April of 1949 was winding down, 11 members of the Communist Party U.S.A. were standing trial in a Federal courtroom spilling every secret they had in an all-out effort to lighten their load further down the road. Among these classified plots was a 1930s plan to invade the United States and create two separate Soviet republics – one White, the other Black. The region they had in mind for the African-Americans would cover nine of the old Confederate states.

A Quick Read About Soviet-Enforced Atheism Behind the Iron Curtain…

Would Nuking the USSR Have Been an Immoral Act?
(Quick Magazine, 1949)

With the arrival of the atomic bomb came plans for its application. And with these deployment schemes came thoughts of morality and immorality; we have attached a few for your reading pleasure.

The Coup of 1963
(Coronet Magazine, 1964)

The outcome of the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis was seen as a largely tasteless affair by the brass caps in Moscow. They believed Premiere Khrushchev and his diplomatic bungling left the U.S.S.R. in a weaker position and they wanted him out, pronto. Numerous men in the Soviet Army and within the Kremlin united in a plot to force him out. The Premiere proved himself a master at seeing through such intrigue; he stopped the coup dead in its tracks with a boatload of key arrests and executions.

The Bomb in Soviet Hands
(Quick Magazine, 1949)

During the opening week of October, 1949 President Harry Truman announced that the Soviet Union had exploded its own nuclear weapon. Americans were deeply shocked and wondered aloud as to what this would mean – Would the peacetime draft call be doubled?

…Russia had caught the U.S. flatfooted. For the first time in history every American looked straight down the gun barrel of [a] foreign attack.

The pace of the Cold War picked up soon after this event took place.

How Dangerous is Red China
(Coronet Magazine, 1967)

This article concerns the observations of a Japanese diplomat who was privileged to tour a Chinese Army base. He spoke at length about all that he saw during his tour and used his surveillance, mixed with his general knowledge of China, to understand what their general capabilities would be in the event of war. When asked what was most impressive about the Chinses military, the diplomat replied:

The mining. They explained that the antipersonnel mine is their most unusual weapon, developed primarily to sap the enemy’s morale.

Stalin’s Nine Point Plan
(Coronet Magazine, 1951)

Joseph Stalin (1878 – 1953) is credited as the author of the attached article, Russia’s Plan for World Conquest, and it outlines all the various methods Soviet agents can subvert and curry-favor among the various youth and labor groups that are based in the industrialized democracies of the West:

…here is the Russian Dictator’s nine point program for world conquest, taken from his recorded writings, which are now on file in the Stalin Archives of the National War College in Washington, D.C. Italicized sentences have been inserted throughout the article in order to point up Stalin’s plan in the light of today’s crucial events. [ie. the Korean War]

As Lenin has said, a terrible clash between Soviet Russia and the capitalist States must inevitably occur…Therefore we must try to take the enemy by surprise, seize a moment when his forces are dispersed.

Click here to read about Soviet collusion with American communists.

McCarthy and the 1952 Presidential Election
(Quick Magazine, 1952)

A small notice from the closing weeks of the 1952 presidential contest between retired General Eisenhower (R) vs former Governor Adlai Stevenson (D) in which Senator Joseph McCarthy stepped forth to muddy the waters with one of his characteristic insults:

McCarthy charged Stevenson was ‘part and parcel of the Acheson-Hiss-Lattimore group’ and that Stevenson in 1943 (as a State Department official) had a plan to ‘foist Communism’ on Italy when Mussolini fell.

Whether the comment convinced anyone was not recorded, but Eisenhower won the 1952 election by a wide margin, as did all Republican candidates.

Escape from East Berlin
(Pageant Magazine, 1967)

Lenin went to his grave believing that he had established a nation where a worker’s labor would be fairly compensated – a land free from want; but this was not the case. The Soviet Union, and all its assorted satellites, was in actuality, a police state where people longed to get away from all the free stuff that was offered – thousands of people successfully escaped while many others died trying. The countries he created were ones in which the word “escape” was frequently uttered.

Can You Spot a Red?
(People Today Magazine, 1950)

The President has asked all Americans to keep their eyes open for spies and subversives and to report them to the FBI. Who would you start looking for?

American Resolve and the Draft
(Quick Magazine, 1951)

Illustrated with a chart that shows how much the U.S. Navy had shrunk after W.W. II and then expanded anew when faced with the war in Korea, this short article pertains to the various steps Congress was taking to meet the Soviet challenges abroad:

A $2.3 billion ship-building and repair program, just approved by President Truman, will add a 57,800-ton carrier and 172 other new vessels to the fleet. And 291 more are to be demothballed-including 6 carriers, 12 cruisers, 194 destroyers.
[Stalin was incapable of responding to such growth, so he simply ordered the production of additional A-Bombs]

The Soviet Union was the first atheist government…

‘My Two Years In The Red Army”
(American Magazine, 1953)

Is the average soldier in the USSR eager for war with the United States? Here’s the inside story of Russian morale and military spirit, revealed by the first Soviest fighting man to escape his Communist masters and become an American GI.
“Every day my American GI friends throw questions at me. They try to find out what compelled me to leave the reputed Soviet paradise…”

‘A Red Is a Red is a Red”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1947)

The Cold War was not often seen as a subject for poetry – but that didn’t stop a popular versifier like Berton Braley (1882 – 1966). He took a look around at the post-war world and saw plenty subjects that rhymed:

You’ll meet, methinks, a lot of pinks
Whose statements are dogmatic
That Communists are Liberals
And really Democratic;
But when you hear that type of tripe
Keep this fact in your nut
– That Communists are Communists and nothing else but!

His poem went on for three more stanzas…

American Civil Defense
(Weekly News Review, 1953)

Attached is an article about Val Peterson (1903 – 1983), who had been appointed by President Eisenhower to serve as the director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration between 1953 through 1957. Peterson is remembered as the Washington functionary who mobilized graphic designers, copywriters, cartoonists and filmmakers in an effort to shock America’s youth out of their complacency and recognize that nuclear warfare was a genuine possibility.

America has always depended on its youth. The Atomic Age of nuclear weapons has not changed this – it has intensified it.

An American Red Comments on the Cold War
(Masses & Mainstream, 1955)

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called him the most dangerous Communist in the United States – his name was Herbert Aptheker (1915 – 2003) and in this magazine article he explained to his readers that as he traveled the Western states he saw an America that was heartily sick of the Cold War.

Reds in the Government
(Weekly News Review, 1953)

This article makes a passing reference to a Soviet defector who jumped ship in 1937 in order to escape Stalin’s seemingly random purges, his name was General Alexander Barmine (1899 – 1987). In his READER’S DIGEST piece from October, 1944 (the article can be read here) Barmine declared that Soviet spies were rapidly filling up positions within the U.S. Government. His more alarming proclamation was when he wrote that FDR’s administration was protecting them – this implied that Red agents were already perched in the highest positions. When W.W. II ended (along with the Soviet alliance) both political parties in Washington agreed to weed out these moles – but they couldn’t agree as to how deep the infiltration was. The Democrats believed that by 1953 most of the Communists had been found, the Republicans felt otherwise.