 So our next speaker is going to also present a short video clip and I will introduce him as well as the person who made the video clip with him. So Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone together made the video clip that you were about to see. Peter Kuznick is professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He and Oliver Stone co-authored the New York Times bestselling book and Showtime documentary series both titled The Untold History of the United States, the graphic novel of which will be out later this year. Oliver Stone has made many famous movies. Frank believes that his film JFK is the most important American mainstream movie ever made. His film Born on the Fourth of July, The True Story of Ron Kovic is one of the very best anti-war films ever made. He made the important documentary titled South of the Border and he made the 12-part series titled The Untold History of the United States. His film Platoon won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1989. So here is Peter Kuznick to introduce the clip of the film and to discuss it. Hi Rachel, thank you. I was asked today to talk about Henry Wallace and the origins of the Cold War. Wallace, as some of you know, has been largely written out of history. He's an extraordinary man and one of the themes that Oliver and I were pursuing in Untold History was that the Cold War was not inevitable. It was insane but it was not inevitable. So let me talk for a few minutes about Henry Wallace. Wallace was born in Iowa in 1888 to a distinguished farm family. His father was Secretary of Agriculture in the Harding and Coolidge administrations and Roosevelt chose him to be Secretary of Agriculture for the New Deal. When Wallace took over the farm, total farm income in 1932 was one-third of what it had been in 1929. Arthur Schlesinger says that he was a great Secretary of Agriculture, the best we've ever had. So he was also the leading anti-fascist in those New Deal administrations. So when Roosevelt was going to run for a third term in 1940, he wanted Wallace on the ticket as Vice President. He said we need a real anti-fascist, a real progressive as Vice President because we're about to fight a war against fascism. But the problem was that the party bosses did not want Wallace on the ticket because his views were too radical. Roosevelt wrote an extraordinary letter to the Democratic Convention turning down the nomination for President. He said we already have one Wall Street-dominated party in the United States, the Republican Party. If the Democratic Party is not going to be a progressive party, fighting for social justice and it has no reason to exist, and I'm not going to run on that ticket. He was about to send the letter when Eleanor Roosevelt went to the floor of the convention, convinced them that he was serious, and they begrudgingly put Wallace on the ticket as Vice President. He was an extraordinary Vice President from 1941 to 1945. When Henry Luce wrote his editorial that the 20th century must be the American century, that the U.S. will dominate the world in every way, Wallace responded with a famous speech called The Century of the Common Man. He said the 20th century should not be the American century, it should be the Century of the Common Man. And he called for a worldwide people's revolution in the tradition of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution, the Latin American Revolutions. He called for a cooperation between the U.S. and the Soviets, and to imperialism, and to colonialism, and to economic exploitation, and spreading the fruits of science and technology around the world. That was Wallace's vision as Vice President. By 1944, when it looked like Roosevelt was going to run for his fourth term, the party bosses who were much more conservative were very nervous about Wallace being on the ticket because they knew Roosevelt was not going to last another term and that Wallace would become the next president. So they staged with the party treasurer, Edwin Paulie, called Paulie's coup. Paulie was a California oil millionaire who said, I entered politics when I realized it was cheaper to elect a new Congress and to buy up the old Congress. And so he entered politics and they staged this coup to try to get Wallace off the ticket. It looked like it was all set because it was not very democratic at the convention to that point. However, there was one problem. Now Wallace was the second most popular man in America in 1944 behind Roosevelt. Gallup released a poll on July 20th, 1944, the day the Democratic Convention opened in Chicago. According to that poll, 65 percent of Americans said they wanted Wallace back as vice president. Two percent said they wanted Harry Truman as vice president. At the convention, it was all set for Truman. However, Wallace gave the second speech for Roosevelt. The place went wild. An hour-long demonstration led by, among others, Adelaide Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. In the midst of that, Claude Pepper, senator from Florida, nicknamed Red Pepper at the time, knew if he could get to the microphone in the front of the room and get Wallace's name and nomination, he would sweep the convention to fight the bosses. So he starts to fight his way to the microphone. The party bosses led by Mayor Kelly in Chicago saw what was happening. They screamed, adjourned the convention. Immediately it's a fire hazard. Sam Jackson, who was chairing it, said, I have a motion to adjourn. All in favor, say aye. About five percent said aye. All opposed, no. Everybody screamed no. He said motion carried meeting adjourned. At that point, Claude Pepper was five feet from the microphone. What Oliver Stone and I argued untold history is that had Pepper gotten to the microphone five more feet, Wallace would have been back on the ticket as vice president. There would have been certainly no atomic bombing in World War II and likely no Cold War. History can be different. That's one of the things we try to show. Roosevelt asked Wallace to stay on in the cabinet while it shows to be secretary of commerce. Roosevelt dies on April 12, 1945. Truman becomes president. Almost overnight, Truman reverses Roosevelt's policies. Roosevelt's last telegram to Churchill said, I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems in one form or another seem to rise every day and most of them straighten out. But that was not Truman's view. Truman admitted to everybody that he was in way over his head from the beginning, that he shouldn't be president, and he was right. The first day in office, April 13, he meets with acting secretary of state, Statenius, and with Jimmy Burns, who flies up from South Carolina. And they tell Truman that the Russians have broken all of their agreements and can't be trusted. He has a meeting 10 days later with foreign minister Molotov. In that meeting, he berates Molotov. He accused him of having broken all of their agreements made at Yalta. Molotov says, I've never been spoken to that way in my life. Truman says, carry out your agreements and you won't have to be spoken to like that. Stalin telegramed in the next day to try to set him straight on what the agreements were. But from that point on, things are going to start to fall apart. Wallace was fighting against this still in the cabinet, trying to convince Truman what was happening and what needed to happen and what the agreements really were and why the U.S. and the Soviets needed to be friends moving forward in the world. The situation gets further complicated by the use of the atomic bomb. I mean, I spent 12 hours on this topic with my students, but I'll just make it very brief. The Soviets at Yalta agreed to come into the Pacific War three months after the end of the war in Europe. The joint intelligence committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave several reports saying as soon as the Soviets come into the war, the Japanese will realize that continuing to fight is futile, that there is no hope for winning and they will end the war. We knew that. Truman knew that. Truman went to Potsdam and he had lunch with Stalin on July 17th. After that meeting, he writes in his journal, Stalin will be in the Jap War by August 15th, Finney Japs when that occurs. He writes home to his wife Bess the next day, say the Russians are coming in will end the war a year sooner now. Think of all the kids who won't be killed. Truman knew, they all knew that Soviet entry would end the war, but still the United States decided to use the bomb, even though it was militarily unnecessary and morally reprehensible. In fact, the United States had eight five-star officers in 1945, seven of the eight are on the record saying just that, that the use of the bomb was either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both. As Admiral Leahy said, the Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. And being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard, common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. How did the Soviets respond? The Soviets knew better than anybody, the Japanese were desperate to surrender and the bomb was not necessary, because the Japanese were trying to get the Soviets to intervene on their behalf to get better surrender terms. So when the when the US decided to use the bomb, even though it was not necessary, Soviet leaders from Stalin on down interpreted that the bomb was landed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the real target was the Soviet Union. This was America's ruthless warning that there is nothing that's going to stop the US from achieving its goals in Europe and the Pacific. And if the Soviets interfere with this, this is what they're going to get and worse. And I wanted to let you know that we now have the clip. We were having some trouble getting it together, but we now have the clip. Can we move on to that? I mean, just finish one more, two more sentences. Wallace stayed in the cabinet and continued the struggle against the nuclear arms race and against the Cold War. And when he is fired by Truman for speaking out against US policy in September of 1946, that was the last chance for avoiding the Cold War. He was the last spokesperson anywhere near power who was had any influence in trying to stop it. And he warned that night that this is not just mean a problem with in terms of policy, this represents the possibility of the future annihilation of life on this planet. And that's what the Cold War was about. We're lucky to have survived as a species this insanity of the Cold War. And to start over again now with Russia and China is just as insane. So we're going to show the clip the last seven minutes of episode 10 of Untold History, which appeared first on Showtime in 2013, and has been out all over the world. The book is out in 20 languages, the documentaries are available globally. So we're going to show the last seven minutes. Bravo, Peter. Thank you. China may become the first new empire to emerge in this nuclear armed world, but an empire modeled on the US or British versions would be a disaster. Great Han shovinism would be no better than American exceptionalism. Former defense official Joseph Nye observed that the dominant powers failure to integrate the rising powers of Germany and Japan into the 20th century global system resulted into catastrophic world wars. History must not be allowed to repeat itself again. The Chinese must shun the American example and the US must reverse course. Henry Wallace worried that if the US treated the Soviets so badly when the US was riding high economically and militarily, how would the Soviets treat the US when and if the situation was reversed? It never happened. But this race to the bottom he understood would have no winner. As we close out this series, we must ask ourselves humbly in looking back at the American century, have we acted wisely and humanely in our relations to the rest of the world? A world in which the richest few hundred or a thousand or a couple thousand have more wealth than the poorest three billion? Have we been right to police the globe? Have we been a force for good, for understanding, for peace? We must look in the mirror. Have we perhaps in our self love become the angels of our own despair? The claims of victory in the Second World War and justification for the atomic bomb dropped on Japan, though aimed at the Soviet Union, were the founding myths of our domination and national security state. And the nation's elites have benefited from that. The bomb has allowed us to win by any means necessary, which makes us because we win right and because we are right, we are therefore good. Under these conditions there is no morality but our own. As Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, but if we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. Because we can threaten humanity with the bomb, our mistakes are forgiven, and our cruelties justified as benignly motivated aberrations. But domination doesn't last. Five major empires have collapsed in the lifetime of a person born before World War II, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Three more empires earlier in the 20th century, the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman. If history is a barometer, the United States domination will end as well. We wisely resisted becoming a colonial empire, and most Americans would deny all imperial pretensions, perhaps that is why we cling so doggedly to the myth of American exceptionalism, American uniqueness, benevolence, generosity, maybe in that fanciful notion lies the seeds of American redemption. I hope that the United States will live up to that vision which seemed within grasp in 1944 when Wallace almost became president of war, 1953 when Stalin died with a new U.S. president in office, or JFK and Khrushchev in 1963, or Khrushchev and Gorbachev in 1989, or Obama in 2008. History has shown us the curve of the ball could have broken differently. These moments will come again in a different form. Will we be ready? I think back to Franklin Roosevelt on the last day of his life, cabling in Churchill. I would minimize the Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems, one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out. Calming down the situations that occur, letting things happen without overreacting, seeing the world through the eyes of our adversaries. This way lies in sharing in the needs of other countries with true empathy and compassion. Trusting a collective will of this planet to survive the coming period and the neat threats of nuclear annihilation and global warming. Can we not surrender our exceptionalism and our arrogance? Can we not cut out the talk of domination? Can we stop appealing to God to bless America over other nations? Heartliners and nationalists will object, but theirs has proven not to be the way. A young woman said to me in the 1970s, we need to feminize this planet. I thought it strange then, but now I realize there's power in love. Let us find a way back to respect the law, not of the jungle, but the law of civilization by which we first came together and put aside our differences to preserve the things that matter. Herodotus wrote in the fifth century before Christ, the first history was written in the hope of preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have been. And for that reason, the history of man is not only one of blood and death, but one also of honor, achievement, kindness, memory, and civilization. There is a way forward. I remember you start step by step like a baby reaching for the stars. Thank you for that. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Albert.