Many people on both sides of the "aisle" have debated recently about Bush being the worst POTUS. Although W is a strong candidate for that dishonored position, my vote would go to Harry Truman. W is probably psychologically unbalanced and represents the last in a breed of failed post WW II Presidents. But, it was Truman who started this disastrous policy and condemned us to a phony confrontation with the Soviet Union. People talk today about the failed and skewed intelligence concerning the threat of WMD from Iraq in 2002. That pails by comparison to the skewed intelligence that was used to make the Soviet Union our mortal enemy between 1945 and 1950. The National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA was the final "nail in the coffin" concerning our post war relationship with the USSR. And although the Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship, that country was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and they were not a threat to the U.S.
America was at a critical juncture at the end of the war, in terms of its relationship to the Soviet Union. According to Alderman Edwin M. Burke, co-author of a 1996 book with R. Craig Sautter and Richard M. Daley called, Inside the Wigwam, the 1944 Chicago Democratic Convention was the stage on which the very political future of America itself was played.
Burke's book is a history of Chicago Presidential Conventions from 1860-1996. At the Democratic convention of 1944, the party bosses around the country knew FDR was seriously ill and was likely not to finish his fourth term. The idea of Wallace being the next President was a terrifying thought to those in the conservative and southern wing of the Democratic Party. They were strongly anti-Soviet and knew Wallace was disposed towards normalizing relations with the USSR.
Unlike Roosevelt, who was a shrewd politician, Wallace was a true idealist. Although Roosevelt was very progressive in his policies, he knew that the coalition of southern and conservative Democrats was necessary for the Democrats to win a national election. The party bosses in Chicago, including Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly, intervened just as Wallace was about to be re-nominated. Kelly instructed the Chicago Fire Commissioner at the time to close down the convention hall. The party bosses wanted Harry Truman to be nominated because Truman was part of Missouri machine politics and could easily be manipulated in the postwar policy toward the Soviet Union.
The party bosses succeeded in getting Truman to be FDR's running mate in a dramatic and brilliant series of political maneuvers. As Wallace was being nominated, Mayor Kelly had the fire commissioner evacuate the Chicago Stadium. He did it by engineering an artificially created fire hazard. The Chicago Stadium doors were opened to the skid row bums in the neighborhood. People poured into the convention in droves causing the overcrowding of the building, which then had to be evacuated because of fire hazard limits. That nomination was postponed for a day. Party bosses quickly took over the process by "influencing" the delegates to switch their allegiance to Truman. And the nomination of Harry Truman as Vice President and the death of FDR in April, 1945 made it much less likely that Wall Street would be exposed to a scandal that would have exposed their support of Hitler before the War.
It is clear from archival records that Prescott Bush helped finance Germany's military buildup. But, he was not alone. The Dulles brothers were instrumental in representing many firms that did business with the Nazis. Unfortunately, Allen and John Dulles became powerful influences in skewing the intelligence against the Soviet Union. The U.S. had the atomic bomb in 1945 and the Soviets were only interested geo-politically in protecting themselves from another invasion from Germany, something that had happened 3 times in the 20th Century. So the CIA got to work on this and fed the people with skewed intelligence about the Soviet threat. They even kept this up during the Reagan years when all of our real intelligence had shown that the USSR was on the verge of collapse. They just could not out spend us for 50 years militarily.
ALLEN DULLES
In the 50 years that followed WW II, the CIA was busy exporting terrorism throughout the world on the false premise that so-called monolithic Communism was threatening the world. Reagan praised the so-called freedom fighters in Afghanistan who were fighting the USSR. In fact, Reagan's freedom fighters were the extreme Muslims that were responsible for the rise of Muslim extremism and 9/11. At the time, we could not conceive of the idea that the USSR was defending its border with Afghanistan in an attempt to support a secular government there that was aligned with the Soviet Union. When it came to Soviet Russia, an entire generation of Democrats and Republicans supported the idea of containment of the USSR that was expressed in NSC Directive 68.
One of my good friends, John Loftus, was working in the Justice Department in the 1970s. He was assigned to the division that was prosecuting former Nazi war criminals. John has written about this in his book, The Secret War Against The Jews. It is a great read about the intelligence community and the Justice Department's views concerning the Nazi Genocide. John, who is not Jewish, told me that secret intelligence documents showed that the CIA in its pursuit of Soviet confrontation actually used many of the former Nazi war criminals in their anti-soviet covert operations. When it came to a choice between prosecuting war criminals and using Nazis as covert agents, the choice was easy for the Dulles controlled CIA.
Perhaps G.W. Bush will at long last be the end to an era of failed Presidents that have deprived the American citizens with the truth and more importantly the fruits of their labors to make this country so great. Today we honor Truman and his legacy of Cold War Presidents who won the "Cold War." We especially honor Ronald Reagan, the man who armed Saddam Hussein, and the Afghanistan Mujahaden.
The truth be told, the U.S. has been responsible for a post war foreign policy that has caused the death and starvation of millions of people, far more than any other country in the world since 1945. And it all started with a political hack, Harry S. Truman