Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“it was na?ve to imagine that serious treatment”: John Dower, Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (New York: New Press, 2012), 176.

“was to advance the claim that it did not exist”: Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000), 1.

“a way station in humankind’s attempt”: Robert Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2.

“If we had to choose one word”: Quoted in Alan Brinkley, The Publisher (New York: Knopf, 2010), 312.

“‘toward the anti-Communist cause’”: Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, 211.

“fortified democratic values at home and abroad”: Eric Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2014.

“preoccupied by family and self”: Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 38.

“Today’s creative-writing department”: Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature.”

“The thing to lament”: Ibid.

“the fruits of the free world”: Quoted in Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8.

“not only to produce a profit”: Ibid.

“my parents attended the opening of the hotel”: Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (New York: Knopf, 2009), 101.

“The United States is no longer a spatially distant entity”: Claus Offe, Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), 98.

“an existential debt of gratitude”: Quoted in Offe, ibid., 70.

“a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind”: Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings (New York: Vintage, 2004), 49.

“country where everything is done to prove”: Albert Camus, American Journals (New York: Spear Marlowe, 1995), 43.

“self-assurance and confidence”: Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 21.

“It is impossible to hold back a giant”: Ibid., 219.

“I think the only purpose of military aid”: Saadat Manto, Letters to Uncle Sam, http://www.urduacademy2012.ghazali.net/Manto_Letters_to_Uncle_Sam1.pdf.

“We must embark on a bold new program”: Harry S. Truman, “Inaugural Address: 1949,” Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/50yr_archive/inaugural20jan1949.htm.

“diminish other people by exaggerating”: Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 176.

“irresistible and obviously superior path”: Hemant Shah, The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 1.

“sincerely interested in improving the welfare”: Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 22.

“like the person who measures”: Quoted in Shah, The Production of Modernization, 6.

“The United States is presiding”: Quoted in Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: Free Press, 1958), 43.

“after the fashion of Kemal Atatürk”: Quoted in Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side, 201.

“American advisors wanted to replace”: Nicholas Danforth, “Malleable Modernity: Rethinking the Role of Ideology in American Policy, Aid Programs, and Propaganda in Fifties Turkey,” Diplomatic History, April 2014.

“It was more than a decade”: Ibid.

“U.S. officials believed that wanting to be modern”: Ibid.

“state of noble innocence”: Anatol Lieven, “US/USSR,” London Review of Books, November 16, 2006.

4. BENEVOLENT INTERVENTIONS: GREECE AND TURKEY

“a condition of the soul”: Michael Wood, “Americans on the Prowl,” New York Times, October 10, 1982.

“Wasn’t there a sense”: Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Vintage, 1989), 58.

“I think it’s only in a crisis”: Ibid., 41.

“humor of personal humiliation”: Ibid., 7.

“‘All countries where the United States’”: Ibid., 58.

The streets of central Athens: Suzy Hansen, “A Finance Minister Fit for a Greek Tragedy?” New York Times Magazine, May 20, 2015.

For much of the last century, Greece had been run: Suzy Hansen, “Life Amid the Ruins,” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 2010.

“The flames may die down”: Quoted in Helena Smith, “In Athens, Middle Class Rioters Are Buying Rocks,” Guardian, December 12, 2008.

“‘young’ or ‘immature’ appears throughout”: Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 170.

“national character”: Quoted in Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side, 106.

“disinclination to obey a leader”: Ibid., 106.

“savior of the country”: Ibid., 112.

“The very existence of the Greek state is today”: Quoted in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: 1947 (United States Government Printing Office, 1965), 56.

“We have to stand for decency and for freedom”: Quoted in Kati Marton, The Polk Conspiracy: Murder and Cover-Up in the Case of CBS News Correspondent George Polk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 81.

“American are now so numerous”: Quoted in ibid.

“American officials were given authority”: Quoted in Robert V. Keeley, The Colonels’ Coup and the American Embassy: A Diplomat’s View of the Breakdown of Democracy in Cold War Greece (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011), xvii.

“no cameras to expose the ravaged faces”: Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, 93.

“an omnipotent Communist Party taking orders”: James Becket, Barbarism in Greece (New York: Walker, 1970), 10.

“In the Cold War lexicon”: Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, 143.

“I have come to Guatemala to use the big stick”: Quoted in Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York: Anchor, 2008), 107.

“Public opinion in the U.S.”: Quoted in Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 257.

“a shock wave of anti-American feeling”: Alex Von Tunzelmann, Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011), 56.

“You do not want Walt Whitman”: Quoted in Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

“capitalism”: Von Tunzelmann, Red Heat, 107.

“the obedient army”: Quoted in Von Tunzelmann, ibid., 42.

“Do nothing to offend the dictators”: Quoted in Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side, 185.

“Vietnam is the place”: Quoted in Von Tunzelmann, Red Heat, 229.

“The key question is to pass beyond the facts”: Quoted in Gabriel García Márquez, “The CIA in Latin America,” New York Review of Books, August 7, 1975.

“The kid who owns the ball is usually captain”: Quoted in Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 9.

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