Original subtitles

NARRATOR: History is not an exact science.

It is never set in stone.

As time passes knowledge of the past is refined and evolves...

But by definition existing ideas have thick skins

and are hard to shift.

To understand the realities of the world

you sometimes have to shake them up

and decipher the facts by looking at them another way.

Posterity has made the Soviet Union out

to be the instigator of the cold war...

and yet.

The 14th of April 1945.

America is in mourning.

Its President Franklin Roosevelt has just died.

Elected and re-elected four times in a row,

against all the odds he stood firm against Nazi tyranny,

despite the terrible illness which finally killed him.

(DARK MUSIC)

Attending the ceremonies was a small,

unremarkable looking man who was totally unprepared

to succeed him...

his Vice President, Harry Truman...

You Harry Truman, will solemnly swear...

Ill informed about how the war was going,

he didn't know how to stop it and still had no clear vision

of the world thereafter.

He confided, "Pray for me, my friends.

I feel as though the moon,

the stars and all the planets have just fallen on my head."

In the Spring of 1945, Nazi Germany had just collapsed.

But Japan was holding out and the battles waged

by the Americans in the Pacific could still last for months.

America needed the Red Army to get it over with...

Stalin still ruled over the biggest country in the world,

and claimed the biggest share of the victory in Europe.

With his Marshall's epaulettes and with his triumphant Generals

alongside him the Master of the Kremlin inspired respect...

On the other hand,

Harry Truman was surprisingly humble.

With his easy-going manner, he personified the self-made man,

risen to power by dint of hard work and force of circumstances.

Come late to politics as Senator for Missouri after a career

as a men's tailor,

he soon had to put on a president's suit

if he wanted to command respect.

'The Manhattan Project' gave him the chance.

(DARK MUSIC)

As soon as his advisors informed him that the Atomic bomb was ready,

Truman did everything to crank up the trials

with a view to his first meeting with Stalin in Potsdam

in the Berlin suburbs.

(AIRPLANE WHOOSHES)

The German capital had been destroyed

by hundreds of air raids

whereas one single nuclear explosion could soon produce

the same devastating effect.

On the 16th July 1945,

the first trial of The Bomb was conclusive.

Truman took his British ally into his confidence.

Winston Churchill said as soon as he arrived,

he was a changed man.

He was quick to put the Russians in their place.

Overnight the apprentice President became the most powerful man

in the world.

Stalin remained stone faced.

He had only one thing in his mind,

that Truman should respect his predecessor's promise.

To guarantee that the USSR should have a sphere of influence

in the territories liberated by the Red Army

in exchange for its assistance in defeating the Japanese.

(BOMB EXPLOSION)

But now, the Americans could do without the Soviets.

A short time ago,

and American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima

and destroyed usefulness to the enemy.

In this short speech, criticised when it was broadcast,

the President could barely conceal his elation.

We have spent more than $2 billion

on the greatest scientific gamble in history.

And we have won.

On the 6th and 9th of August

the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

hastened the surrender of the Japanese Empire.

It was clear proof that Truman was not a man to back away.

When he learned of the Japanese disaster,

Stalin was furious, Blackmail by Bomb,

that is American politics!

(INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC)

Three days later, Stalin invited Dwight Eisenhower,

Commander in Chief of the Normandy landings,

to stand at his side, for five hours,

watching the demonstration of Soviet power.

As the good soldier that he was,

Eisenhower submitted to the ceremonial,

a flamboyant production that could so easily

be interpreted as a show of strength.

The march past of a whole people,

disciplined in the extreme and always in battle order,

gave a glimpse of the risks of a split

between the two countries.

After four years fighting against a common enemy,

Americans and Soviets found themselves facing each other

across the divide between the territories

they were occupying, between East and West.

Never had the two powers seemed so close

and yet at the same time so different.

Despite their rivalry,

each of them still wanted to believe in the durability

of that Great Alliance born of the War

and sealed in the blood of battle.

Everyone hoped it would continue after the Victory celebrations.

(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

On 24th October 1945, in San Francisco,

50 countries, including the USSR

gathered behind the United States of America,

to ratify the United Nations Charter.

Convinced of its own messianic destiny,

Truman's America positioned itself at the head

of a world-wide struggle for peace.

War has not failed to address

this supreme chain

to establish a worldwide rule of regime to create,

an enduring peace under the guidance of God.

The USSR was not fooled,

despite the sacrifices of the Red Army,

Peace had finally been achieved thanks to a Bomb that only Truman

had the power to use.

A new world was still to be built.

From the Atlantic to the Urals,

the allied armies were still in occupation.

And Stalin intended to keep his soldiers

as long as possible in the Eastern Europe

that he had liberated.

(INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC)

In his view,

the USA were doing the same thing in all of Western Europe...

Paris had become a gigantic American Base.

Cabaret artist Maurice Chevalier

adapted his repertoire for the occasion.

# If the Sandman Brought me dreams of you

# I'd want to sleep My whole life through

# For you brought A new kind of love to me... #

Never in their history had so many American troops

been in a foreign land for such a long time.

Admired as defenders of the free world,

they were kept in place in France,

Germany, the UK, Austria, Italy,

Czechoslovakia, Korea, China and now in defeated Japan.

Like Asia, Europe danced to the American tune.

Eisenhower inherited a post as Governor of Germany...

the Commander of American troops in the Pacific,

Douglas MacArthur

was in charge of the occupation of Japan.

On the vestiges of the ancient world America stamped its mark.

But Truman feared competition from another philosophy,

communism.

It already held sway in Poland,

Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Yugoslavia.

It occupied part of Germany and of Austria.

It was fomenting civil war in Greece...

And also in China,

where Truman's envoy, General Marshall,

was trying in vain to reconcile Mao's communists

and Tchang Kai-check's nationalists.

(CROWD CHEERING)

The war had already helped communism win its spurs.

It had nourished the dreams of peoples

who wanted a different way of life.

It had given hope to those who suffered.

(RUSSIAN MUSIC)

On 5th January 1946,

exasperated by such expansion,

the American president wrote,

I'm tired of mollycoddling the Russians.

If we don't use them with an iron hand,

another war is on its way.

For Washington the proof was in the portrait of Stalin,

father of the people,

brandished like an icon in every procession.

But Stalin was more concerned with the reconstruction of the USSR,

emerging from its war with Nazis,

bloodless and amputated of a quarter of its resources

and of 20 million of its citizens.

To pick itself up,

the Soviet Union was counting on its planned economy

and the inexhaustible supply of labour from the Gulags.

Countless prisoners, condemned for treason

when they were released from the Nazi camps

simply carried on their captivity in the service of their country.

But on the ruins of Poland or Ukraine,

even though they were in zones under soviet influence,

reconstruction could well be capitalist...

On the verge of famine,

the two countries only survived thanks to food aid

from the United Nations...

70% financed by America.

Stalin took a very dim view of these American presents

as a foretaste of the West's bounty.

In February 1946, at the Bolchoi,

he declared that the URSS didn't need American help

to pick itself up.

Our system is better than any other.

In the film of his speech, all that remains.

is endless applause.

But an American diplomat in post in Moscow

was quick to over-interpret what he said.

In a long telegram he called on the West

to stand together to contain the threat of Russian expansion.

"To contain",

the phrase would become the watchword

of American foreign policy.

# It's better to miss you... #

At the beginning of 1946,

America was patiently awaiting the return of its 'boys'.

These sons, fathers, husbands

were returning in ever greater numbers...

even if there were still millions of them all over the world.

# It's broken down... #

There was peace once more,

the danger from communism was a distant problem,

demobilisation was essential, inevitable.

As after the Great War,

the Americans could go back to their isolationist tradition.

And that worried the American President...

He had to change public opinion...

So, he invited to Fulton Missouri, his former stronghold as senator,

the 3rd man of the Potsdam Conference,

Winston Churchill,

until recently British Prime Minister.

Welcomed as a prophet he was to predict the next war

that would strike America and the free world.

From step in the baltic

to tries in the adriatic,

and I curtain has descended across the continent.

Behind that line,

by all the capitalism of the ancient states of central

and Eastern Europe.

And all our centric

in one form or another, that can travel from Moscow.

We may all have been spared

the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind,

but no one would listen.

One by one, we were all sucked into the awful world war.

We surely, ladies and gentlemen.

I put it to you.

Surely, we must not let that happen again.

(APPLAUSE)

Churchill implied that Stalin was another Hitler.

Truman, seated on the left, applauded...

Strength is the only thing the Russians understand he added.

But not everyone in his entourage shared this view.

The Trade minister, Henry Wallace,

publicly expressed his indignation,

denouncing what he called "this escalation of fear."

Dear Harry, as you requested,

here is my resignation.

I shall continued to fight for peace.

I am sure that you approved

and we'll join me in that great demo.

In January 1947,

Secretary of State James Byrnes,

who had convinced the President to bomb Hiroshima,

resigned in his turn.

He was replaced by a military man, General Marshall.

He had learned the lesson from his failure in China.

With Truman, he worked out a plan to contain communism,

an aid for reconstruction proposed to all of Europe,

including the East.

Why must the United States so great a load

and not the Europe.

The answer is simple.

The United States is the only country

in the world today,

which has the economic power

and productivity to provide this supply

to the people of these countries

to continue to eat, to work, and to survive the winter.

The Marshall Plan was in fact dollar diplomacy,

designed to counteract extreme poverty,

since Washington was convinced that communism was developing

in that very direction.

France, too, received its share under this clumsy scheme.

Mister ambassador,

it gives me great pleasure to be able to hand you these checks.

Which totalled $31,400,000.

Thank you.

Mr Secretariat,

it is with deep emotion

that I received this token of the general

of the American government and people.

It's strengthen the tags which unite our two countries.

In all, the equivalent of 170 billion dollars

in today's money were dedicated to Europe.

The sum might seem colossal,

but America wasn't really paying the bill.

The aid was for the most part provided in the form

of materials 'made in the USA'.

For industrialists with well-filled order books,

for their employees and the families whose income was increasing,

the end of isolationism was bringing in big money.

By fighting with non-military means against the communists,

the country was getting rich and cultivating its image

as a pacific and selfless nation.

The Cold War had just been invented.

The signing of this act is a momentous occasion

in the world's quest for enduring peace.

This measure is America's answer

to the challenge facing the free world today.

America must show the example.

So the president redefined his entire foreign policy

with this in mind.

The Truman doctrine, interventionist, global, messianic,

was formulated on 12th March 1947 and designated an external enemy,

greatly exaggerated at the time, the Red Peril.

Two weeks later,

a parliamentary commission brought the fight within the country.

The all-powerful Director of the FBI,

J Edgar Hoover, opened hostilities.

Communist party of the United States

is a fifth column if they ever loved one.

It is far better organised than where the next is,

in occupied countries prior to their capitulation.

They are seeking to weaken America.

Their goal is the overflow of our government.

Politicians, professional soldiers', intellectuals,

and artists were interviewed from 1947 onwards.

"He said he'd make a dust-bowl out of my plan."

It was an opportunity to settle scores.

Like, Walt Disney, about a union man who called a strike in his studios.

I believe that at that time Mr Sorrell was a communist

because of all the things that I have heard

and...and have seen his name appearing

on a many of the Commie front things.

Association with any organisation. We have to stop.

Hundreds more were put on the black-lists,

like this scriptwriter who was challenged.

Are you a member of the communist party?

Or have you ever been a member of the communist party?

Once rid of these real or imagined communist artistes,

Hollywood could carry on exporting its films all over the world...

rather like the goods distributed by the Marshall Plan.

(CROWD SINGING)

At the instigation of Soviet Big Brother,

all the Eastern European states refused it.

In 1947, the counterattack was organised,

the demonstrators denounced the risk of American colonisation.

(CROWD SINGING)

In France and Italy, strikes broke out.

Anti-communism gave rise to increasingly violent

anti Americanism.

Stalin had his back to the wall.

Up against the diplomacy of the bomb and the dollar,

the time was ripe for him to erect a rampart

against the influence of the West.

In February 1948, Czechoslovakia,

tempted momentarily by the Marshall Plan,

fell into the Communist camp, under pressure from the Kremlin.

There remained one gap in the wall, Berlin.

Since the fall of Nazism,

Germany and its capital were shared by the Allies.

The French, the British and the Americans

were at the gates of the Soviet Union,

which they crossed every day to reach West Berlin.

Adopting an American initiative,

their zones and sectors of occupation

had just been merged.

Two years after Churchill's prophecy,

the "Iron Curtain" became a reality.

Germany and the whole of Europe

then found themselves divided into two blocs,

one of which was under American influence,

the other which rejected it.

In order to consolidate the Western bloc,

Truman issued a new currency,

the Deutschmark...

that the West-German population rushed,

through the rain, to exchange for their old banknotes.

Capitalism was hard up against the Soviet-occupied zone.

For Stalin it was a provocation.

On the 24th June 1948,

he retaliated by closing all land access to the German capital.

Cut off from the world, Berliners suffered shortages.

There were revolts against the Communist authorities,

who retaliated.

For Stalin, this blockade was a test.

Would the Americans react militarily?

Not at all!

The bombers which overflew Berlin dropped only food and coal.

Truman once again showed his determination

to stand up to the USSR.

The "airlift" turned the Americans into saviours.

Recent enemies of the Germans,

their pilots became heroes to the Berliners.

The newspapers popularised the expression "cold war",

a struggle for influence, with no dead and no wounded.

At the end of the year 1948,

the president campaigned for a second term.

The dramatic international situation served

as a backdrop to his re-election.

Carried aloft by the enthusiasm of his supporters,

in spite of his detractors, he won the vote,

but only by a whisker...

One paper even got it wrong.

Here he is waving the newspaper headline,

imitating a radio announcer who predicted his defeat.

Well the president is a million votes ahead in the popular vote,

but we have yet to hear from-

(LAUGHTER)

And we are very sure that when the country vote comes in

Mr Truman will be defeated by another-

(LAUGHTER)

Now, I like to

(LAUGHTER)

This unexpected re-election was the start of a new direction.

Officially, the aim was still to contain communism.

But curbing it was no longer sufficient,

it had to be pushed back.

For Truman, the USSR had to understand

what the Americans were capable of

if the stand-off continued in Berlin.

In April 1949,

the signature of the North Atlantic Treaty

marked a new level in the escalation.

In preparation for the creation of NATO the following year,

the armies of twelve western European countries joined together

under American command.

America puffed out its chest.

Not without good reason.

The following month, after a year of tension

and 3,00,000 airlift sorties,

Stalin reopened access by land and water.

On the 12th of May 1949, the blockade of Berlin was lifted.

While nothing seemed predestined to keep this war cold,

Truman had showed his strength without firing a single shot.

To all appearances, Stalin had thrown in the towel.

Then suddenly...

(BOMB EXPLOSION)

The first Russian atomic bomb exploded in the Kazakhstan desert.

A new balance of power was established.

People thought communism had weakened,

but it had never been so strong.

On the first of October 1949,

it was the turn of China to fall in line.

Mao came to power at the end of a long civil war

which he had waged alone.

(SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

500 million souls joined the communist camp

in a single day.

Even Stalin couldn't believe it.

(CROWD SINGING)

On the occasion of his seventieth birthday,

celebrated with great ceremony,

he invited this man,

to whom he had given such meagre support,

to sit beside him on the rostrum.

(CROWD SINGING)

Only himself and Mao know it.

But appearances are deceptive.

For Washington and all its relations,

it was the alliance of two conspiratorial dictators.

It would take only a spark for everything to go up in flames,

and the finger would point to Stalin as the unique cause.

Productions inspired or ordered by the American government

stigmatised the Soviets, always portrayed as devils.

And watch out for the fog and mist.

It's radioactive packed with poison and it moves fast.

From the nuclear threat, taken very seriously,

to ludicrous scenes of invasion, Hollywood,

America's dream machine made the most of it.

The Communist, rapist and lawbreaker,

was the new bogeyman.

We are the Comms, we are the Comms.

In films like this one,

Oscar winner for the best documentary,

the designated enemy could hold his own

with the diabolical Nazis of yesteryear.

To Germany, the voter had his choice of Hitler?

Hitler?

Or Hitler?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

In communist Russia the same system,

the one party system.

It's either Stalin, Stalin, Stalin, or Stalin.

(FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

America was in a red funk.

The whole country set out on a veritable crusade.

On the first of February 1950,

senator Joseph McCarthy announced the names of 57 so-called communists

who had infiltrated the heart of government.

He accused the president of not doing enough.

He called him weak.

We should remember the practically every issue

which we face today is in extricably interwoven

With the communist issue.

Arrests of militants, sympathisers,

spies, real or imagined, ran into thousands.

The Rosenbergs, accused of sharing intelligence

with the enemy, ended up in the electric chair.

After three years of applying the Truman doctrine,

aimed at containing the propagation of the red peril,

the president was overwhelmed

by the overkill of what he himself had initiated.

His party reproached him for whipping up the paranoia,

whereas other voices called for an even more radical line.

Korea to defend itself.

Peaceful coexistence with Moscow was no longer possible.

From being only European,

the communist menace had become world-wide.

In Asia, a new crisis had just blown up.

United Nations Organisation was on high alert.

On the 25th of June, 1950,

pro-soviet North Korea invaded its Southern neighbour,

which was pro-American.

The presence of Russian weapons was evidence of USSR intervention.

Gentlemen, we face a serious situation.

We'd hope we face it in the cause of peace.

Only reason for the action

which was taken on advice of all the brains that I could muster,

and I was hoping, always hoping

that we finally arrive at the peace in the world,

which we anticipated when we created the United Nations.

That's the only reason for the action.

Thank you very much.

Stalin supported only half-heartedly

the Korean offensive,

mainly by the supply of arms.

But Truman once again suspected him of hegemony.

Straight away, the Western bloc was mobilised.

Bursting with pride under the iron rule of General McCarthy,

the "boys" went back to combat like lambs to the slaughter,

convinced they were fighting a just war,

in the cause of peace.

We are finding in Korea

for our own national security and survival.

The progression is successful in Korea,

we can expect it to spread throughout Asia and Europe

and to this hemisphere.

With the Korean war,

the United States became the legitimate spearhead

of the new world order.

On the initiative of UNO,

NATO and all its western bloc allies,

America mobilised its "defenders of the free world"

in a ruthless battle against the North Koreans

and 3,00,000 Chines sent by Mao.

This time the East-West confrontation

took the form of armed conflict.

In an onslaught of unprecedented violence.

A quagmire into which America was sinking.

On the 30th November 1950,

Truman announced he was ready to take

whatever measures necessary to end the conflict,

including the use of the Bomb.

Called for by Stockholm,

more than 500 million signatures demanded an absolute ban

on this weapon

which had already devastated Japan.

Pablo Picasso united them around a symbol,

the dove of peace.

The communist world had become immense,

dozens of nations wanted to believe in a different future

from the one promised by the Americans.

And never mind if, East of the iron curtain,

under tyrannical regimes,

the promises of a better future were far from being kept.

Stalin had the Bomb

but these pacifists were convinced he would never use it.

At the beginning of 1951, General MacArthur,

anxious to wind up the war in Korea,

put pressure on Truman to carry out

his threat of using the nuclear solution.

But the danger of a Soviet response had become too great.

For the first time, the president drew back, he refused.

MacArthur denounced the climb-down in the newspapers.

Truman fired him without ceremony

and went on television to explain himself.

I fellow Americans,

I wanna to talk to you plainly tonight

about what we're doing in Korea

and about our policy in the far east.

A number of events have made it evidence

that General MacArthur did not agree with that policy.

I have therefore considered it essential

to relive General MacArthur,

so that there would be no daughter confusion

as to the rail purpose, the name of our policy.

In the simplest terms,

what we're doing in Korea is this, we're trying to prevent a third war.

The third world war did not happen.

But the struggle for supremacy would carry on.

Truman tripled the American defence budget

and launched a research programme into the H-bomb,

which was theoretically a thousand times more deadly

than the Hiroshima bomb.

Tested on American soil,

its destructive potential was immense.

The arms race against the USSR ramped up yet again...

Even though the nuclear threat prevented

any direct confrontation.

In the space of four years,

the American propaganda budget leapt from 20 to 115 billion dollars,

the equivalent of the amount mobilised in wartime

In the early fifties,

Hollywood sent out its cowboys to fight off the redskins,

likened to the Soviets in their thirst for conquest.

When soft power is your policy, you have to win hearts and minds.

The Soviet Union did just that.

Tours of the Red Army Choir...

the Bolshoi ballet...

and the Moscow circus sent a message to the West

of a peace-loving Russia.

Sporting competitions became the new arena

for the war of influence waged by the two giants.

In the summer of 1952,

the Helsinki Olympic Games marked the return of a Russian delegation,

for the first time since the Revolution of 1917.

(SUSPENSE MUSIC)

In the same year, 1952,

Truman announced that

he would not contest the next election.

Unpopular, cast aside by his party,

the President had gone too far or not far enough.

He was up against a military man,

General Eisenhower was elected by dint of criticising

the feebleness of his predecessor,

whose legacy he would nevertheless take on.

(APPLAUSE)

And America chose as its president...

a real war leader.

In 1953, the Korean war, with two million victims,

finally came to an end.

The same year, Stalin died.

Around the embalmed body of the dictator

focussed the myth of his sole responsibility

in the declaration of the Cold war...

That idea survives to this day, carefully orchestrated,

by all of Truman's successors.

But Stalin's death did not bring an end

to the East-West confrontation.

The Cold War was to last another 40 years.

Four decades, marked by periods of detente and of stress,

which in the end saw the United States

installed as the world's policeman,

without ever smoothing out the tensions.

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