The program at Western Iowa Tech Community College in Sioux City, Iowa had a great turnout. The crowd was engaged and the addition of Liz Garst, grand-daughter of one of the principal players in the event was great.
But the fascinating thing was the stories from the audience remembering the visit. I used footage of Khrushchev visiting Iowa State University and the home economics class, and one of the women at the event last night had been in that class! Her husband had also been at the campus, in his ROTC uniform – and related his experiences later during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
A current newspaper though, asked me the difficult question: what does all this matter?
My overarching goal was to remember the time, but also to search for lessons as we note the differences and similarities between now and then. I pulled up then-current newscasts and articles so they could consider what was ‘news’ then.
It was also interesting to see how the FBI and the State Department distrusted Garst, and how some people accused this extrememly capitalistic business leader of being a ‘commie’ or worse, a ‘commie dupe.’ Yet I contrast that with the fact that those people making that claim were acting from fear of communism, where Garst acted in the belief in capitalism.
In showing the old news clips and the tone of the broadcasts, the key thing to note was the fear came out over, and over and over again. That fear motived those people to consider Garst as a ‘commie dupe.’
Of course, there is nothing of value for today’s world that can be learned by looking at the past, right? Nothing we do today is rooted in newscasts / opinion pieces / rants pushing us a certain direction. It appears that when motivating the public, 50 years ago or today, the easiest method is to ‘scare the hell out of them.’ (Sen. Robert Taft to Pres. Truman when Truman wanted the initial aid money to ‘contain’ communisim in 1947.) We need to understand that ‘manipulation’ is not the same as ’motivating.’
My point is not to say if we should or shouldn’t have been concerned about communism. My only goal is to tell the story of what happened, and look for lessons that we can take home today. Obviously, yes, we had reason to worry about the communists. Of course, history proves they were right to worry about us, too.
So is it significant to look back and ask why the news stories all sounded the same? We called information coming from the Soviet Union ‘propaganda.’ But our news was free and unbiased, right?
Yes, but as Taft was suggesting, the Congress would only act if they had ‘cover’ – that the American people were crying out to spend the money to start this Cold War. But the track taken was to ‘scare them’ not reason with them, and the news reports what it hears. It heard, and reported, the message that sacred the hell out of the American public.
The next lesson that history might hold is that there is a danger in this choice. When people get you to do what they want you to do not by trusting you, but by pulling your strings like a puppet master, aren’t there two risks?
- 1, once started, it becomes almost impossible to ever stop the manipulation. The manipulator, without practice in persuasion, loses the skills needed to reason with you.
- 2, the huge risk of a snapback from the public once they discover or decide they are being manipulated.
Of course, we’ve never seen that happen have we? Doesn’t that describe much of the result and aftermath of the ’60′s?
Lincoln certainly understood this. ‘You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’ For democracy to be a democracy, Americans have to embrace the effort to make informed decisions. But we do not become informed when our choices are made for us. We become informed by knowing enough to base our decisions on reality.
Isn’t it important to realize that rational thought might be more valuable than manipulation? You might well come to the same conclusion, and you might make the same decisions – but they were YOUR decisions, not someone else’s.
Remember, too, that the ability to reach different conclusions based on the same information is not wrong – it is a right, given us by the Constitution. It is called freedom.
Of course, one of the costs of freedom is expending the energy to make an informed decision, not by abdicating the choice to anyone else. Not a politican, a rock star, a newsperson – or a even a teacher. 
