Thread by @RealLoriSpencer

Do you agree or disagree with Ambassador Chip Bohlen’s statement that #Russia was unwilling to be a good neighbor in the global community after #WWII?

Did the Soviets start the #ColdWar, as Bohlen claimed?

Or was the West the aggressor?

Please comment below 👇🏼

Declassified documents I’ve seen from both British and American intelligence indicate that WE were the aggressors.

OPERATION UNTHINKABLE shows us that even before the war was over, in April 1945, the Cold War had already begun — and Winston Churchill started it. Not Stalin!

https://twitter.com/RealLoriSpencer/status/1625374118769041410

Link to the declassified documents from the UK National Archives:

https://twitter.com/RealLoriSpencer/status/1610142820634853377

Of course it’s likely that Chip Bohlen was unaware of OPERATION UNTHINKABLE at Potsdam (it was at the time a closely-held secret known only to Churchill and his top military advisers) but Stalin was aware of the plan through spies he had placed inside the British government!

Consider what Stalin told FDR’s son Elliott Roosevelt a year after the war.

https://twitter.com/reallorispencer/status/1651528650318045185

Bohlen, a key adviser to FDR, Truman, and George Marshall, co-authored the Marshall Plan.

Bohlen had enjoyed a good relationship with Stalin since his time at the US Embassy in Moscow during the 1930’s and in wartime.

On January 20, 1953, Dwight Eisenhower became US President, and wanted Bohlen to be his Ambassador to Moscow.

When Stalin died in March 1953, the post of ambassador was still vacant, as Bohlen’s confirmation hearings had turned into a prolonged shitshow led by Sen. McCarthy.

Joseph McCarthy accused Chip Bohlen of #communist sympathies: “we want no part of this Chip off the old block of Yalta!”

McCarthy also falsely implied that Bohlen & his brother Thayer were not only commies but homosexuals. As a result Thayer was fired from the State Department.

Bohlen later served as ambassador to France from 1962 to 1968 under Presidents John F. #Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Bohlen, an expert on the Soviet Union and a skilled diplomat, famously skedaddled during the 1962 showdown with the Soviets!

This story comes from Ted Sorensen:

In these excerpts from his 1968 oral history, Bohlen discusses the plague of McCarthyism, the Cold War, his dislike of summits, Vietnam, revisionist history, and the role of the U.S. in the world. Fascinating read… 👀

adst.org/oral-history/f…

Bohlen stuck to his guns in this 1968 oral history, reflecting back on his wartime diplomatic service in Soviet Russia.

He claims here that it was the Soviets who looked at America as the enemy, even as early as 1944 — when we were officially allies.

So who WAS the aggressor?

The oral history interviewer asked Ambassador Bohlen to elaborate on the revisionist history about Yalta — and explain his views on why the Cold War started.

Bohlen once again blamed the Soviets.

Bohlen’s answer:

Bohlen dismissed out of hand the argument made by American leftists that the Cold War was — if not caused by, was certainly exacerbated by — the paranoia of Western leaders about growing Communist influence in the postwar world.

The elderly Bohlen reflected in this oral history recorded by the #LBJ presidential library 5 years before his death that it was the Russians who were the aggressors, not the West.

He then contradicted himself in the next paragraph, saying that the Soviets would rather get along with the U.S. than have a Cold War. 🤷‍♂️

Bohlen concluded that our system of democracy was simply incompatible with a communist nation’s; therefore, cooperation was impossible.

Ambassador Bohlen’s final words of wisdom on what he called the revision of history. ⬇️

Was he right? Was he wrong?

History is the judge.

For further study, I highly recommend this article about Bohlen’s war with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Sen. Joe McCarthy during the Eisenhower administration.

Bohlen was an anti-communist, but tame in comparison to the fervor of McCarthy!

afsa.org/victory-agains…

Chip Bohlen at Potsdam, 1945, standing next to his friend Stalin.

One wonders if Stalin later felt betrayed by Bohlen. Stalin’s thoughts on Bohlen appear to have gone unrecorded by history.

Ambassador Bohlen’s 26 page oral history, recorded for the #JFK Library a few months after the president’s assassination, gives great insight to JFK’s dealings with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, and #JFK’s sentiments towards communism:

jfklibrary.org/sites/default/…

As he told historian Arthur Schlesinger in his 1964 oral history interview, Bohlen had known John F. #Kennedy since 1939, when young JFK visited Moscow on a diplomatic trip with his father Joseph P. Kennedy, then FDR’s Ambassador to Great Britain on the eve of #WWII.

Early in Kennedy’s presidency, it was Bohlen who persuaded #JFK to have a face-to-face meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, hoping it would help ease tensions between the superpowers at the height of the Cold War.

Schlesinger asked Bohlen what JFK thought of the Soviet Union:

As well-read and astute as Kennedy was on international affairs, Bohlen told Schlesinger that the reason the Vienna summit with Khrushchev failed was because #JFK had no real understanding of communist ideology, having never seriously studied Marx and Lenin.

Regardless of which side started the Cold War, #Kennedy tried to end it in the final year of his presidency.

#JFK found — much to his unexpected surprise — that #Khrushchev was not hostile to this, but rather a co-conspirator in the quest for #peace.

Perhaps, if historians can be honest, we might acknowledge that the Cold War was in fact born out of Western imperialism, aggression, and anti-communist fanaticism.

Since 1945 the Soviets were fervently calling for peace and nuclear disarmament while the U.S. built more nukes.

Evidently we couldn’t build bombs fast enough to vaporize more than 100 Soviet cities in 1946.

Truman’s insane plan only fell apart for lack of bombs!

This information was kept secret from the American people for decades.

https://twitter.com/reallorispencer/status/1610177941001887744

During the Korean War, the Soviets called out American hypocrisy and accused us of “all the horrors of the fascist atrocities that came up at the Nuremberg trial.”

Declassified documents that have emerged in the post-Cold War period confirm that the Soviet charges were correct.

In conclusion, after years spent reviewing documents declassified in the late 1990’s by the U.S., former Soviet Union, and the British, the historical record makes clear who the aggressor in the Cold War was.

The truth was the opposite of what we were told for half a century.

https://twitter.com/reallorispencer/status/1611612163709304834

If you enjoyed this thread, please consider buying me a book. 📕 (who knows? Your book just might inspire me to write another mega-thread!)

You can also drop a 💰 tip or pick a gift from my Wishlist!

GiftApp.com/RealLoriSpencer

Thanks to the Anonymous donor who purchased the book that provided the initial inspiration for this thread:

“Ike and McCarthy” by David A. Nichols — a fascinating read!

Credit must also be given to an historical essay published by the Wilson Center in 2000.

“When the Cold War did not End: The Soviet Peace Offensive of 1953 and the American Response” by Jeffrey Brooks.

wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/…