All language subtitles for Turning.point.the.bomb.and.the.cold.war.S01E02.NF.WEBRip.English

WWW.MY-SUBS.CO

Stalin is a man of genius.

He is a great politician,
patriot, and leader.

One notable thing about Russia

is the failure
to really come to terms in a full way

with the crimes and horrors
of its totalitarian past.

Stalin is still venerated in Russia

as the builder of a strong empire,
the Soviet Union,

and as the victor of World War II.

He died but did not leave us.

His great deeds and creations,

his glorious victories
have lived and will live through ages.

His crimes are not nearly
as comprehensively known and understood.

All he did was for the good of the people.

That's why I have
good feelings towards him.

We see a strong revival of Stalinism.

It's the imperialistic dream
that has never died in Russia.

We are not merely close neighbors.

And Putin has very openly
talked about his imperialistic dreams.

We are actually, as I have
pointed out many times, one nation.

Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities.

What are you shy about?

Do I want Stalinist repressions?
Yes, I do.

I think
what we're watching today, in a way,

is the last workings of probably
the most evil person Russian history.

The weaponization
of Soviet history is not about history.

It's about the future.

What made the Cold War
terrifying was not just nuclear weapons.

But the great powers had deep

and irresolvable
ideological conflicts between them.

We were literally out
to destroy each other's way of life

and whole idea of government for 50 years.

The world order of the Cold War

was about this existential struggle
between the capitalist world

and the communist one.

Two systems that were not reconcilable
and did not try to reconcile.

Industrialization in the 19th century

was a period of child labor
in capitalist societies.

Huge disparities of wealth.

And also disparities in life expectancy.

There was a global effort
to regulate capitalism.

The sense is that greed is not good.

Two Germans, Marx and Engels,

came up with a utopian vision of a world
where workers were in control.

An idea that is supposed to bring
together people of any language,

any ethnic background, any race.

They are linked because they are workers.

This was communism.

This was a very seductive approach.

It takes root
in one of the most authoritarian

and unequal countries in the world,
Imperial Russia.

Vladimir Lenin was a visionary.

He was inspired by Marx and Engels,

and thinking about a bright new world,

a future with no exploitation,
where everyone is equal.

Lenin also was a very good politician

who found the moment in 1917,

took advantage of the disarray
of World War I,

and took power...

and proclaimed Russia
as this new state of workers and peasants.

To the surprise of not only the world,
but the Russian radicals themselves,

the Bolsheviks, they take power.

And their sense from the get-go
is that they are besieged.

DEATH TO BOURGEOISIE
AND THEIR HENCHMEN.

LONG LIVE THE RED TERROR.

That was the period
of the Red Terror.

In order to usher a new world,

Lenin ordered whole classes exterminated.

The nobility, the clergy, landowners.

This led to the Civil War
in Russia, a very bloody war.

It was a time of turmoil in Russia
that continued for several years.

And Lenin presided over it.

The leaders of the Bolshevik party
were divided roughly in two groups.

One group were people like Vladimir Lenin,

who were quite well-educated,

were engaged in debates and discussions.

And then there were people
like Joseph Stalin.

His understanding of the outside world
was very limited.

Stalin was basically a gangster.

That's why Lenin liked him so much.

He's born in Georgia,
brought up in a poor family.

A violent family. His father drinks.

He had a lot of traumatic
experiences from early on.

He does all this underground,
crazy, revolutionary stuff.

He organized this huge bank robbery
and sent this money to Lenin,

whom he hadn't even met.

It was very, very audacious.

My grandfather was a communist.

He told me about
his revolutionary activity.

Stalin, who was his colleague
in the Communist Party,

had a bank job.

He killed guards and stole gold and money.

My grandfather received that money

and tried to sell them
on the black market.

Soviet Union
is established in 1922.

Stalin is made
secretary general of the party,

which at that time
is just a technical office.

Lenin dies.

Secret battle for control
of the Kremlin is cold and swift,

but Joseph Stalin is unmistakably
the number-one man in the USSR.

As a result of backstabbing
and real stabbing,

Stalin had taken a position
that had been a nothing position,

general secretary,
and turned that job into the key job.

COMMUNISM

Communism started as a utopia,

the promise people will be equal.

WITHOUT WOMEN, SUFFRAGE IS NOT UNIVERSAL.

There will be no exploitation
of man by man,

something that was an antithesis
of the capitalist world.

And promised, actually,
happiness to people.

But this did not evolve as promised.

1929 was the year
Stalin started the collectivization.

Collectivization was the process
by which, basically,

the entire class of Russian peasants

got eliminated,
or liquidated, as they called it.

Stalin is expropriating, basically,

all privately owned land from peasants.

So-called kulaks.

Kulaks were small farmers
who were more successful than others.

Small landowners, basically.

DOWN WITH KULAKS

My grandparents
were considered kulaks

because they had a small farm.

People who had too much property.

So everything was taken from people
to have collective farms.

My mother was only a six-month-old baby

when my grandparents
were deported to Siberia.

They were young, they had choices,
they had possibilities.

The world was open to them.

And everything was taken.

At that time, the Soviet Union
didn't export oil or gas,

but they had grain.

The problem was that
they were trying to deal with

an extremely inefficient
agricultural sector,

and they couldn't produce grain enough.

Collectivization
couldn't feed the country.

This crazy economic experiment
created, basically, a famine.

Mass starvation, shortage of goods,

a shortage of food on a grandiose scale.

As a result of collectivization,

there was general starvation
and general food shortages

all across the Soviet Union.

In the winter of 1932 and '33,

Stalin decided to take advantage
of that famine and to make it harsher,

and make it even more lethal in Ukraine,
which was a part of the Soviet Union.

Stalin, from the very beginning
of his rule,

particularly feared the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainians had tried
to organize their own state

at the time of the Russian Revolution.

They fought bitterly
against the Bolsheviks.

A special program of food collection
was instigated in Ukraine.

People went house to house
taking away the food from peasants.

Sometimes police forces in Ukraine
would go into somebody's house

and take food out of the oven
so people would have nothing to eat.

In the winter of 1932,
the borders of Ukraine were sealed.

People were unable to leave the Republic.

And they were unable to travel
and get food anywhere else.

The result of it was that people ate rats,
and they ate mice,

and they tried to boil leaves and grass.

There were incidents
of cannibalism as well.

The result of that policy
over the next several months

was that some nearly
four million people died in Ukraine.

It's what's now known
as the Holodomor.

And that's all Stalin.

In the late '30s,

the Soviet Union
becomes truly totalitarian.

The Kremlin runs all elections,
and the outcome is always the same.

All dissent is stamped out.

Leonid Konstantinovich Ramzin,

according to Articles 58-3, 58-4, 58-6,
and 58-11 of the RSFSR Criminal Code,

is sentences to the highest degree
of social protection

by shooting execution
with confiscation of all property.

The verdict is final
and cannot be appealed.

1937 and '38 was the time
of the so-called Great Terror.

Stalin was paranoid.

Concerned those around him were actually
his secret enemies and wanted to kill him.

Those Bolsheviks with whom Stalin began
his struggle against Imperial Russia,

nearly all of them were exterminated.

The country plunged
into an orgy of self-extermination.

EXPOSE THE ENEMY UNDER ANY MASK.

The Soviet Union constructs
a huge system of concentration camps,

known as the gulag.

To which millions
and millions of people are sent.

The gulag was a vast system
of labor camps that, at its height,

stretched all the way across
the Soviet Union

in almost every part of the country.

Stalin is trying
to remove danger.

People that can challenge him potentially,

that have intellectual capacity
of organizing some sort of resistance.

Engineers, teachers, academics.

It was designed both
to punish people and to frighten people.

But it was also created
in order to use slave labor,

in essence, to build the Soviet economy.

These names represent
the victims of communist crimes.

People who were deported to Siberia
or killed during the occupation regimes.

So, there you can see
thousands and thousands of them.

Something like between
15 and 20 million people

went through the camps at some point.

And several million people died there.

The Nazi crimes
were widely condemned across the world.

But the Soviet crimes never were.

The mechanism Stalin created
from the late 1920s,

and the number of people he killed,

had an impact that turned out
to be so much more lasting

than anybody could imagine.

If you imagine the Earth,

Stalin didn't just kill the leaves,

or the flowers, or the trees,

or the first layer of Earth.

He went really deep down.

He ripped out the roots.

A lot of them.

I don't think that any Russian ruler

was as genocidal towards his own people
as Stalin had been.

He really went into the soil.

And then poured
incredibly poisonous stuff,

really toxic material, into the soil

to make sure that whatever he produced

would be different
from what it was before.

After World War II,
President Truman wanted to know,

"What does Stalin want?"

The Americans looked across
the internal borders of Berlin.

They looked east.

What they saw was Joseph Stalin's army,

intending to take what they could

as spoils from Germany,

and perhaps intending
to keep marching west.

The Soviet army stole everything
they could from Eastern Germany,

up to and including trains, coal, wheat.

Anything that could ensure
the survival of a nation.

Just took it.

The West is trying
to re-establish local governments,

re-establish a national government,
introduce a currency,

re-establish democracy.

Stalin says, you know, I didn't just lose
20 million or so of my citizens

to give up control.

There's all kinds of other issues.

Soviet soldiers tragically
had carried out massive numbers of rapes,

and you had health consequences
and pregnancies,

and Stalin was just denying that happened.

In 1945, after the war,

you have Soviet troops
in the Baltic states.

You have Soviet troops in Poland,
in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary,

in Romania, Bulgaria.

All these countries that never chose
to be communist are made, forcibly,

to be communist.

In the Western mainstream discourse,
1945 is the end of the war.

But over here, in this part of the world,
1945 is not the end of anything.

And it's not replacement of war
with peace and normality.

It's the replacement
of one occupation with another,

and one totalitarian system with another.

So, what does Stalin want?

Does he aim to take all of Eastern Europe?

Will he stop there?

There was one person
in the government of the United States,

and really only one,
who could tell President Truman that.

That was a man named George Kennan.

In early 1946, George Kennan
was the Chargé D'affaires

in the American Embassy in Moscow.

What that means
is he was the number-two guy,

and he was running the show.

George Kennan, in the winter of 1946,

begins to write what is known
as "the long telegram."

The thrust of the long telegram
is that Stalin wants more.

He wants more of Europe.
He wants more power.

Our victory signifies, first of all,

that our Soviet social system
was victorious.

That the Soviet social system successfully
passed the test of fire in the war

and proved that it is fully viable.

And he will oppose
America's already strong attempts

to instill American
democratic values in Europe

and stand up against the imposition

of communist and totalitarian societies

throughout the world.

I was actually
George Kennan's last research assistant.

George Kennan defined the Soviet Union
as an adversary,

and provided some sort of clues
as how to handle it.

This is just six months
after the end of World War II.

He's laying out exactly
what the Soviets are going to do,

saying the only thing
that Soviets understand is force

or the threat of force.

This idea that somehow
the wartime alliance with the Soviets

is gonna continue on,
that what's happening in Eastern Europe

is interim,
provisional communist governments,

that somehow
that's going to go by the wayside

and democracy's gonna bloom.

Kennan says that's a crock.
It's not gonna happen.

What Kennan espoused was this idea

that you have to fight fire
with fire, essentially.

George Kennan
is telling the president

that there will be another force
that will oppose America.

And that these two forces

will someday fight
for dominion of the world.

That was the beginning
of that kind of Cold War narrative

that the Soviet Union is an adversary,

and therefore
it needs to be treated as such.

The beginning of the Cold War.

The sense is that
we're going to need a new apparatus

and a new national security state

to protect the country
and to protect freedom

and to protect the West.

That leads, eventually,
to the National Security Act of 1947,

one of the most significant
pieces of legislation

and government restructuring
in American history.

You see, in very quick succession,

the creation of this unified Pentagon

with an Air Force,
with a Navy, with an Army,

all operating under a new
Secretary of Defense.

Then all of these other tools and agencies

come into creation in that same act.

The National Security Council
at the White House.

The Central Intelligence Agency.

You know, it begins to transition
the United States

from a minor peacetime
military and national security state

into the vast military and intelligence
apparatus that we are now used to today.

From Szczecin in the Baltic,

to Trieste in the Adriatic,

an iron curtain has descended
across the continent.

Behind that line lie all the capitals

of the ancient states
of Central and Eastern Europe.

As we move into the Cold War,

the confrontation between East and West

becomes more and more intense.

And it plays out in Berlin.

At the end of the Second World War,

the Allies come to Berlin,

and it's divided into a Soviet,
American, French and British sector.

And it's just one city.

But then as the Cold War freezes,

gradually the line between
the Soviet sector and the Western sectors

becomes the line between
not just East Germany,

but actually the entire Soviet Bloc
and the entire Western Bloc.

It's the front line.

The world was literally divided
into two blocs.

And Germany
was the divided center of that world.

And Berlin was the divided center
of the divided center.

Then the Soviets try to take over
the entirety of West Berlin

in something called the Berlin Blockade.

Access to Berlin
from the main Western zones

was guaranteed by means
of road, rail and air routes.

But the Russians cut this road
and this railway,

and West Berlin faced starvation.

We call out to the world

that Muscovite communism

is guilty of crimes against humanity.

We Berliners
will give everything for our freedom.

Western allies
do something absolutely brilliant.

The airbridge.

The United States,
Great Britain, and France

were embarked upon
the biggest air transport operation

history has ever seen.

The vital necessities,

food, raw materials, even coal,

were brought in by air.

We fly in plane after plane
after plane after plane.

And actually relieve the siege.

And then the Soviets have to give in.

It was a very difficult time,

and one of the children of that moment

was the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, NATO.

NATO was established in 1949

to prevent the Soviet Union
from moving further west.

The main idea of NATO is that,
as long as we stand together,

we are all safe.

After the Western countries

put together the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, or NATO, in 1949,

Moscow decided that it wanted
an alliance of its own.

The Warsaw Pact.

NATO was a voluntary alliance,
and the Warsaw Pact was not.

And that was the Cold War standoff

between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

And the dividing line
between those two alliances

ran right through
the middle of divided Germany.

And then the communist government
in China takes control.

Mao Zedong,
once a lowly party worker,

now assumes the stature
of a dominant figure

in all of Eastern Asia.

Right after Chinese communism took over,

Mao Zedong went to Moscow
in December of 1949.

Long live the friendship and
cooperation of China and the Soviet Union!

Mao stayed in Moscow
for nearly three months,

talking with Stalin
about world revolution,

about division of labor,

and who would be responsible to do what.

The rise
of the communist government in China

becomes one of the major
turning points of the 1940s.

And the sense was
that communism was on the march,

that communism
was expanding around the globe.

In many ways, that loss of China
kicks off the Red hysteria

that we see poison our politics

in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

There was a real sense that we are
already losing the Cold War to communism.

And then in 1949,

a U.S. weather plane over Alaska

picked up the first signs
that a nuclear weapon

had been tested over the Soviet Union.

A test that came much sooner
than Americans had anticipated

that the Soviet Union
would be able to develop it.

We think that Stalin

first learned about the possibility
of an atomic bomb in September 1942.

And he signs a decree
setting up a small project

to investigate whether
a uranium bomb is possible.

Use of the bomb in the war in 1945

was interpreted in Moscow by Stalin

as a way of intimidating the Soviet Union.

"See? We have this powerful bomb.
What do you make of that?"

And that was why it was important
to build a Soviet bomb

as quickly as possible.

This turned into a massive enterprise

within a few years.

There were 600,000 people working on it.

Two hundred thousand
in Eastern Europe mining uranium.

A hundred thousand
looking for uranium in the Soviet Union.

Two hundred thousand
involved in construction.

And then 100,000 working
as scientists or engineers or technicians

in the different plants,

because what the Soviet Union did
was copy the Manhattan Project.

You may be sure
that in the future as well,

I shall spare no effort
to serve the socialist homeland

to carry out the assignments
of Comrade Stalin.

During the war,
the Soviet Union had infiltrated

almost every government agency
in the United States,

including Los Alamos.

They had several spies there.
In particular, there was Klaus Fuchs.

Klaus Fuchs,
a German refugee who had become a member

of the British delegation
in the Manhattan Project,

was an immensely important physicist
at Los Alamos, and was at the heart

of many of the hardest weapons design
problems for the implosion bomb.

The scientists thought
he was the most trustworthy guy.

He was their babysitter
when they had parties.

They literally gave him their children.
This is how much they trusted the guy.

The motives that inspired him
to go to the Soviet Embassy in 1941 were,

well, we're allies,
we're fighting Nazi Germany.

He knew what an awful regime
the Nazi regime was and therefore,

you know, why not help an ally?

Fuchs was able
to move top secret documents

out of Los Alamos with impunity.

Including detailed blueprints
of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

The first Soviet test
was successful.

Right after the button was pressed,

the brightest light
illuminated everything.

The door was already shut by then.

It was evident that the explosion
had been quite powerful.

The idea that
the Soviet Union has broken

the American nuclear monopoly

comes not necessarily as a surprise,

but definitely a shock
to the American people

and to the American government.

This is what they had feared all along.

We must conclude that ten years from now,

Russia will be way ahead of us.

It was discovered
from an analysis of communications

between the Soviet Embassy in the U.S.

and the Soviet Union
that somebody was passing information

to the Soviet Union about the atomic bomb.

Fuchs was approached and he confessed,

and then he was arrested in early 1950

and sentenced to prison.

This just changed everything.

This shook the entire secrecy
and nuclear establishment to the core.

A manhunt started.

By February of 1950,

the United States arrested a man
named Harry Gold,

who was a spy courier.

And he traveled regularly to Los Alamos
to get information,

primarily from Klaus Fuchs.

Then in June of 1950,

the FBI arrested David Greenglass

and claimed that on one occasion,
Harry Gold met David Greenglass,

who was a machinist working at Los Alamos

and also my uncle,
my mother's younger brother.

My name is Robert Meeropol,
but I was born Robert Rosenberg.

I am the younger son
of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

My father was arrested
a month after my third birthday

and charged with conspiracy
to commit espionage.

A month after my father's arrest,

my mother went to testify
before the grand jury.

And she, too, was arrested.

My parents grew up
in the heart of the Depression

on the Lower East Side of Manhattan,

which was a very poor neighborhood
filled with relatively recent immigrants.

Chaos at the New York
Stock Exchange.

On October 29, Black Tuesday,
the bottom dropped out.

After the stock market crash of 1929,

you had a significant percentage
of the people in the country out of work.

You had people lining up for soup lines.

Those who have,
share with those who do not

in the soup kitchens that spring up
across America in 1932.

By the time the Depression
had hit full force,

people saw capitalism,
essentially, as failing the people.

So both my parents were members
of the American Communist Party.

What's a red diaper baby?

Red diaper baby
is somebody whose parents were communists.

That's me. I'm a red diaper baby.

And proud of it.

In the '30s, during Depression times,

the party was its most powerful
in America.

Mostly what they were fighting for
were unions,

to have some real representation
of workers in the system.

And to also stop the kind of brutal
capitalism that was running amok.

In Europe,
even more people became communist,

because the sense was only
Stalin's Soviet Union works.

The image of the Soviet Union
that was being projected

was that it was a system
where people had jobs,

where people had a good wage,
where the standards of living were rising.

There was a misunderstanding

about what was going on
in the Soviet Union.

This was before
the crimes of Stalin

were really fully understood.

So it wasn't the least bit shocking
that people were members of the party.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
were certainly true believers.

Also, they were both Jewish.

So I think the allure
of the Communist Party

was there was a voice that was
speaking out against anti-Semitism.

And as they saw
the rise of fascism in Europe,

and especially the targeting of Jews...

WATCH OUT JEWS

...they looked to the Communist Party

and said, "These are the people
standing up to this."

It's very unpleasant, I think,

for Americans to look back on the 1930s
and realize the level of anti-Semitism

that was prevalent in the United States.

This Los Angeles bookshop
of the Silver Shirts,

dispensing anti-Jewish propaganda,

is one of many that have recently
opened all over the country.

You've got beaches that had signs
that say no Jews or dogs allowed.

And this is the world that they were
living in as a young Jewish family.

It's hard to imagine
the Rosenbergs

getting a fair trial in 1951.

This is the Cold War.

The idea that, at any point,

we could be in a nuclear confrontation
with the Soviet Union,

and everyone wants to know
who handed the bomb to the Soviets.

The government said David Greenglass

handed the secret of the atomic bomb
to Julius Rosenberg.

And Julius Rosenberg wrapped it up
and handed it to the Soviet Union.

From the American people's perspective,

Julius was an atomic spy who gave
the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

I would have said to you,

"Both my parents are totally
and completely innocent."

But, years later, some of the material
that ultimately came out,

showed me that Julius Rosenberg
was probably involved in something.

What's called
military industrial espionage.

This had to do more
with military technology,

particular pieces of military information.

The atomic information
that he's able to pass on is,

by all accounts, negligible,

because that's not the information
he has access to.

My father didn't know anything
about the atomic bomb.

When they first arrest
David Greenglass,

they asked him about Ethel's role.

He says, "No, my sister wasn't involved."

"This was Julius's spy ring."

We get to the trial, and that changes.

We now know that within a week
before the trial,

agents go to David Greenglass and say,

"We need more on Ethel
or we're going to arrest your wife, Ruth."

In the trial, Ruth gets on the stand

and says David Greenglass's
handwriting was bad,

and so Ethel had to type those reports.

David Greenglass corroborated that story.

Years later, we get the release
in the grand jury testimony

that says nothing
about anybody typing anything.

The grand jury testimony indicated
that there was no evidence against Ethel.

Irving Saypol was
the chief prosecutor in my parents' case.

One of his assistant federal prosecutors,

who was very young,
in his 20s at that point,

was Roy Cohn.

The Communist party's
most important work is that of espionage

on behalf of the Soviet Union,

which means that it infiltrates
our government, defense plans,

every important place possible
in order to steal information from us

and give it to the Soviet Union.

The trial
is less than three weeks.

The jury takes eight or nine hours
to come to a decision,

but they do ultimately say
that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

are guilty of conspiracy
to commit espionage.

The judge sentenced them to death
to try to get them to talk.

They kept bringing the sons
to visit their parents

to pull at their heartstrings and say,

"These are the children
you are going to leave behind

if you do not name names,
because you will be killed."

I think they really thought,
"Oh, these folks will crack."

And they still don't talk.

It's very hard to look at that case

and not think,
"This is an appalling lack of justice."

Even Klaus Fuchs, who passed along
crucial atomic bomb information,

got 14 years in Great Britain.

How do they not to say,
"Okay, we need to temper this

because this is looking extreme"?

The executions were set
for Friday, June 19th.

Their 14th wedding anniversary.

Julius and Ethel
have a simple meal.

They sit with each other
with wire between them.

They talk to each other
as long as they can.

And then by about 7:30 or so,
they're sent back to their separate rooms.

They decide to execute Julius first.

And the rabbi says,
"Do you have any names to give?"

And he apparently said virtually nothing.

Went in, was strapped in,

and was, uh, executed.

A few minutes later, Ethel is brought in.

And the rabbi says,

"Julius is gone."

"Do you have any names to give
to save yourself for your children?"

And she says, "I have no names to give.
I'm innocent. I'm prepared to die."

They strap her in

in what is now referred to
as a botched execution.

She died a lot harder.

When it appeared
that she had received enough electricity

to kill an ordinary person,

believing she was dead,
the attendants had taken off

the ghastly strappings,

and electrodes,
and black belts, and so forth.

And these had to be readjusted again, and...

And she was given more electricity.

And then after sunset
on Friday, June 19th, 1953,

they were both dead.

I didn't really understand
life and death at that point.

You know, as a six-year-old,

I think I still had
a bit of that magical thinking.

If you really, really,
really want something to happen,

you can make it happen
because you want it so badly.

My brother reports that

even though he had told me
within 24 or 48 hours

that my parents were killed

and I was never gonna see them again,

that I would occasionally say to him,
"When are we gonna see Mommy and Daddy?"

By the end of the year,

when we were introduced
to Able and Anne Meeropol,

who became our adoptive parents,

I knew that my parents were dead
and I would never see them again.

It's easy to have a moral center
when times are calm.

It's difficult as people and as a country
to have a moral center

when things are so fearful.

The assumption was,
any communist was a potential spy.

And anyone could be a communist.

You have this
Invasion of the Body Snatcher worry

that people who look like me
and sound like me and work with me...

could be a secret communist.

This committee,

under mandate
from the House of Representatives,

has the responsibility of exposing,

and spotlighting subversive elements
wherever they may exist.

The House
of Un-American Activities Committee

was founded to ferret out
subversives in the United States.

In the late '40s, early '50s,

HUAC became far more focused on,

are there Reds
in the entertainment industry?

Is the great medium of cinema
being used to subvert our youth

and subvert our country?

So HUAC subpoenaed actors,
writers, Hollywood filmmakers,

in an attempt to get them to testify
about their communist past

or their communist present.

If you were subpoenaed,
you had two alternatives.

You could cooperate.

Have you ever observed any
communistic information in any scripts?

Well, I have turned down
quite a few scripts

because I thought they were tinged
with communistic ideas.

If you answered those questions,
you were a friendly witness.

If you either refuse to show up,
or didn't answer questions,

or took the Fifth Amendment
against self-incrimination,

then you were an unfriendly witness.

Your purpose is to use this

to disrupt the motion picture industry,
to invade the rights not only of me,

but of the producers,
to their thoughts, their opinions.

And this I will not permit.

I was just, you know,
a New York theater girl.

But you didn't need to do much
to get blacklisted.

I was sent up for Detective Story.

I did the movie of it.

I don't want to inconvenience you.
I'll come back tomorrow.

Come on.

I was nominated for an Oscar.

The nominees
for Best Supporting Actress are

Lee Grant in Detective Story, Paramount.

After Detective Story,
I went to this new play.

And J. Edward Bromberg,

who was a famous
character actor in Hollywood,

was in the play.

And as we were standing
in the wings, he said to me,

"The Un-American Activities Committee
is calling me and they won't let me off."

"I don't know what to do.
And I have a bad heart."

It hits me.

This great actor who I love

is threatened by this
Un-American Activities Committee.

And he left the show to go to London.

And he died.

He died. It was too much.
His heart gave out.

And so they had a memorial for him.

It was a mob.

There were thousands of people there.

And they asked me
as a representative of young actors

to say something about him.

And I said he was afraid
that he was going to have a heart attack

if he went in front
of the Un-American Activities Committee.

And it happened.

And the next day, I was blacklisted.

I went to an Actor's Equity meeting,
and somebody turned around and said,

"Hey, you know, you made the list."

No work in television. No work in film.

The effect of giving names
as well as not giving names,

the effect on yourself.

You know, for people who had morality...

it was a horror.

Couldn't live with themselves.

Why didn't we avoid all this?

Why didn't we answer yes or no,
as the committee demanded?

Because we wanted to challenge the right
of the committee to ask such questions.

Enter Joe McCarthy.

He's a demagogue
and he has a lust for power.

He decides to make a name for himself.

Even if there were only one communist
in the State Department,

even if there were only
one communist in the State Department,

that would still
be one communist too many.

Senator McCarthy's committee
was operating at the same time,

but became eventually more famous

than the House of Un-American
Activities Committee,

and eventually his name just stuck
to any anti-communist investigation.

McCarthy was looking
for spies in the government.

If he couldn't find spies,

he was looking for communists
in the government.

I do have in my hand,

the names of 57 individuals
who are either communists

or are certainly loyal
to the Communist Party.

So if you had ever been
a communist, you came under suspicion.

McCarthy went beyond that.

If you had been a member
of a popular front organization,

progressives who sided with communists
in the 1930s or the 1940s,

you could also be charged.

Then, if you knew a communist,
you could come under suspicion.

People who were called to testify
and whose names appeared in the newspaper,

there were anti-communist slogans
spray-painted on their houses.

People were dismissed from their jobs
without any kind of evidence.

It was devastating for people.

Fellow Americans,

if our civilization is to live,

this groveling and indecision on the part
of this great nation must stop.

This groveling and indecision will stop.

And just about the time
the Red Scare begins,

you have the beginning of
a demographic change in the United States.

World War II had brought immigrants
into the country.

Women were working.

Some people will react to that by fearing

that the world they grew up in
is disappearing.

That all these new people
and all these new ideas

are upsetting the world
that they're comfortable with.

Joe McCarthy understood

that you want to position yourself
as a populist.

You want to take on all the people
who weren't us,

weren't real Americans from the heartland.

Let's put some man with
grassroots common sense in charge

and then watch America go, my friends!

In times of distress, people are looking
for easy people to blame.

Their scapegoat of the moment.

There was another underlying fear
that I think he was also tapping into.

Fear of a whole world
of advanced technology,

represented by everything
from computers to atomic bombs.

People sensed that their life
was being upended,

and Joe McCarthy was saying, "Enough."

"We're gonna fight back
against all those forces you hate,

and we're gonna embody that
in a fight against communism."

If we are to win this fight,
we must use all of the intelligence,

all the courage, all of the skill,

every effort of mind and body.

And if, as is obviously the case,

a rough fight.

A rough fight is the only fight
the communists can understand,

then the Republican Party
will give them a rough fight.

And when Joseph McCarthy
needs a lawyer to work with him,

Roy Cohn is the obvious answer.

Nothing could be stronger
than the guy who says,

"I helped put away the Rosenbergs."

We believe that the free world
is gonna win the Cold War

and win this fight
by one thing, the truth.

At the beginning of 1954,

the Red Scare is at one of its most
fevered pitches.

And Joe McCarthy goes after
the ultimate enemy.

Alleged Reds in our own U.S. Army.

At that time, the so-called
Army McCarthy Hearings

were the most watched hearings
in the history of Congress.

Television, in a sense,
helped to make McCarthy

because he was on it regularly.

But in the end,
television helped to break McCarthy.

He overplayed his hand

because it's hard to look at the U.S. Army
as a communist-supporting organization.

In the glare of the TV cameras,
his bald head was sweating profusely.

He went from looking
like the all-American hero

to looking like a schoolyard bully.

While our friend Sanctimonious Stu,

was advising...

Senator McCarthy,
I resent that reference to my first name.

You better go to a psychiatrist

because I won't take
psychological bribes from you.

Let me tell you something...

The chair believes
that the American people

have had a look at you for six weeks.

You're not fooling anyone either.

By the end of the hearings,
McCarthy's numbers were plummeting

and Joe Welch, the Army's chief lawyer,

asks what may have been
the most famous question

ever uttered in those hearings,

and maybe ever
in any congressional investigation.

Have you
no sense of decency, sir?

At long last,
have you left no sense of decency?

If there is a God in heaven,

it will do neither you
nor your cause any good.

And there's applause
throughout the chamber.

It really shocked
the public opinion of McCarthy.

Really never bounced back.

By December,

the Senate had voted to censure McCarthy.

And he essentially drank himself to death.

Died in 1957
while he was still in his 40s.

McCarthy created a great amount of scare,
but rarely ever finished an investigation.

Rarely ever proved a point.
Never found a spy.

- Never found a spy?
- Right.

One demagogue's lust for power

got translated
into a national moment of intolerance

and disrespect
for constitutional liberties.

He was able to stoke
America's worst fears of communism

at a moment that becomes
incredibly important,

and shapes the remainder of the Cold War.

What happens to Roy Cohn?

Half a century later,

when a young Donald Trump
is trying to make it big

in the New York real estate business,

his father, Fred Trump,

realizes that Donald needs
some schooling in hardball politics,

and he goes out and gets
the ultimate schoolteacher.

Joe McCarthy's protégé, Roy Cohn.

American political culture

has a traditional vulnerability
to demagogues.

There is something about the demagogue
that can stir the pot in dangerous ways.

And in terms of nuclear weapons,
that could be potentially catastrophic.

When the U.S. learned
that a nuclear weapon

had been tested over the Soviet Union,

it was an immediate earthquake
in U.S. national security policy.

This sense that the Soviet Union
would be able to now build up

its own atomic weapons.

But then even more importantly,

the U.S. begins to realize
that the Soviet Union

will surely move ahead
and build a thermonuclear device,

the sort of next level of nuclear weapons.

The weapons kept
getting bigger as the technology evolved.

These were the kind of weapons
that were so destructive

that presidents realized that if we ever
got involved in a nuclear war,

it will be the end of civilization.

There would be nothing left.

I copied the papers on nuclear war plans.

I was one of a handful of civilians

who did see these plans.

And they were strange

and horrible.

They seemed like the worst plans
that had ever existed.

This is institutional insanity.