#93 - The X Article

What this episode covers

* The X Article. * George Kennan, the Soviet expert who wrote the Long Telegram, wrote another piece, but this time published publicly and anonymously, in July 1947, just after Truman’s “Truman Doctrine” speech. * The actual title of the article was "The Sources of Soviet Conduct”. * It was published in Foreign Affairs magazine. * He used the pseudonym “Mr X” and so it’s known as the X Article. * It began as a private report prepared for Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in January 1947. * It was never intended as a public document. * But Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, urged Kennan to publish it, so he obtained permission from Forrestal to publish the article under the pseudonym “X”. * Whereas The Long Telegram was a review of how the Soviet Union saw the world - and The Clifford-Elsey Report took those facts and interpreted how they affected the world and what the United States should do about it - The X Article took the information presented in the two prior reports and constructed a road map for the Cold War. * The first sections of the article provide a potted history of Leninist and Stalinst ideology and the current political reality of the Soviet Union under Stalin. * His conclusion is kind of interesting. * As you might expect, he talks about containing the expansion of the Soviets. * "confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world." * He says Soviet power "moves inexorably along a prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force." * Unfortunately he didn’t concentrate at all on how US power and expansion acted as contributing factors to Soviet behavior. * As Thomas Paterson wrote in Meeting The Communist Threat: * Too simply, he applied one interpretive model to Russia and another to the United States: Russia's foreign policy derived from a response to internal needs not external threats; America's foreign policy derived from a response to external challenges. * Mostly he talks about America providing a good example to the world. * He said that if America has internal fighting, if it struggles economically, if it doesn’t look after its own people, if it embarks on global wars, then it is playing right into the hands of the Communists. * Because that what they predict the U.S. will do. * However - if the U.S. keeps its nose clean, looks after its people, and doesn’t take an aggressive global stance, then the Leninist ideology will look stupid and will struggle to keep the faith of the people. * And here we are, 71 years later, and I hate to tell you - the Russians were right! * Anyway, back to Walter Lippman, The right-leaning influential journalist and one of the fathers of modern propaganda. * He took issue with the X article - at the time, he didn’t know who the author was - and wrote a series of articles about it, which ended up as a book called “The Cold War”. * Which popularised the term. * It’s usually said that the term was first coined by Herbert Bayard Swope, another Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. * called the greatest reporter of his time by Lord Northcliffe * He is known for saying, "I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time." * He did publicity work for Bernard Baruch in 1947. * Swope wrote a speech for Baruch, which he delivered to Congress on 16 April 1947. * The line was: "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." * HOWEVER * On 19 October 1945, George Orwell published an essay "You and the Atomic Bomb” in which he wrote: Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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