A high-powered rifle with sniper’s scope and silencer.  A poisoned cigar.  An exploding pen. An exploding sea shell.  Poisoned toiletries (toothpaste, mouthwash, etc.).  A poisoned scuba diving wet suit.  A poisoned drink.  Mind altering drugs.  Drugs to make facial and scalp hair fall out.  A car bomb.  A house bomb.  An atomic bomb.

No, that wasn’t Theodore “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s Christmas list.  At one time or another every one of the above was proposed or discussed by the CIA, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and/or the White House as a way of ending the rule, and life, of Cuba’s “Maximum Leader,” Fidel Castro. The life began in 1926. The rule began this week (Feb. 17) in 1959 when his rag-tag revolutionary army took power in Havana on the heels of the fleeing former Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Interestingly, President Eisenhower’s first reaction to Castro was mixed. He was wary of this self-proclaimed revolutionary but gratified to have finally been rid of the pro-American, but extremely corrupt, ruthless, despised (and embarrassing) Batista.  And as for Castro, at the time he came to power he held no strong ideological convictions. Unlike his fellow revolutionary, Che Guevara, he was not initially a Marxist-Leninist, although like most good Latin Americans he did have a reflexive dislike of the U.S. But many historians have argued that with more patient and flexible diplomacy, Castro might not have wound up in the arms of the Russians and might even have been lured into the American camp.

Perhaps, but several realities get in the way of this hope. First, Castro had made no secret of his intention, once in power, to “nationalize” (confiscate) millions of dollars worth of American owned property — something no U.S. president could shrug off without political consequences. Second, although Castro’s conversion to Marxism came late, it was probably inevitable given his obsession with holding on to power.  The great thing about being a Marxist-Leninist is that you don’t have to hold elections, or seek consensus with rival parties, or worry about public opinion.

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It isn’t every junior Republican senator from Wisconsin who is accorded an “ism” after his name, but such was the case with Joe McCarthy, who ushered in “McCarthyism” this week (Feb. 9) in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia. There, McCarthy gave a speech in which he claimed that 205 members of the Communist Party worked in the State Department.  With that statement, “Tail Gunner Joe” (a nickname he gave himself while serving as an airman in WW II) took off on a flight that — when it crash landed four years later with McCarthy’s condemnation by the U.S. Senate — left a lot of human debris in its fiery wake.  During the McCarthy era he and his acolytes accused hundreds of innocent people of being Communists, which in many cases ruined their careers and destroyed their lives.

And McCarthyism was basically an accident.  Having spent an undistinguished four years in the Senate, McCarthy had been looking for an issue to run for re-election on in 1952, and anti-Communism seemed as good as any.  But when McCarthy began accusing Democrats of being “soft on Communism,” and “harboring Communists” within the government, he never dreamed he would give voice to a widely shared fear that in the uncertain post-war world America faced a grave threat from “the enemy within” — a phalanx of subversives sympathetic to, if not controlled by, the Communist Party.  It mattered little that McCarthy never proved his accusations, or that the number (and names) of these so-called Communist subversives changed almost daily.  What mattered was that Republicans had an issue with which to regain power, and to the extent that there actually were Communists in the government (and there were — lots of them, in fact), so much the better.

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It was said of Josef Stalin, the ruthless dictator of the Soviet Union during World War II and part of the Cold War, that he would have made a terrific poker player, as evidenced by the fact that, when he chose to, he could make his face a complete mask. One often cited example occurred in 1945 at an Allied war conference in Potsdam, Germany, when President Truman informed Stalin that the United States had successfully tested the world’s first atomic bomb.  Stalin showed no emotion. Indeed, he showed little interest in the news, which surprised Truman.

Actually, thanks to his spy network in the United State, Stalin already knew of America’s work on the atomic bomb. In fact, one of his spies, a German-born scientist named Klaus Fuchs, was part of the scientific team that had been assembled at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build it.  The information Fuchs passed to the Soviets on America’s atomic program even included a blueprint of the atomic bombs that were later dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Of course, Stalin was anything but disinterested in developing an atomic bomb, which he rightly saw as a way to join America as a military “superpower.”  He ordered his own top scientists to focus exclusively on developing a Soviet atomic bomb as quickly as possible, the result of which was the first successful explosion of a Soviet atomic bomb, this week (August 29) in 1949. Code-named “First Lightning,” its explosive power was equivalent to America’s first atomic explosion of five years earlier.

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