This may bore some of you. It may enlighten others, so please bear with me here. See if you can find the pattern in how past presidents reacted to the threat of Communism.
The first major manifestation of anti-communism in the United States occurred in 1919 and 1920, during the First Red Scare, led by Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer. Palmer was a Democrat, and held the AG office between March 4, 1909 – March 3, 1915, serving under President Woodrow Wilson, also a Democrat and the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921.
It was during this time that the Hatch Act outlawed the hiring of federal workers who advocated the"overthrow of our Constitutional form of government". This phrase was specifically directed at the Communist Party. Later in the spring of 1941 another anti-communist law, Public Law 135, was passed. This law sanctioned the investigation of any federal worker suspected of being communist and the firing of any communist worker.
During World War II General George S. Patton warned the US Government about the dangers from Communism.
The more he saw of the Soviets, the stronger Patton's conviction grew that the proper course of action would be to stifle communism then and there, while the chance existed. Later in May 1945 he attended several meetings and social affairs with top Red Army officers, and he evaluated them carefully. He noted in his diary on May 14:
"I have never seen in any army at any time, including the German Imperial Army of 1912, as severe discipline as exists in the Russian army. The officers, with few exceptions, give the appearance of recently civilized Mongolian bandits."
The Soviet Union had been a close U.S.ally against the Nazis, but Patton was an early, fervent anti-Communist who loathed “Genghis Khan’s degenerate descendants” and felt Roosevelt had surrendered too much European turf to the Russians. He was obsessed with pushing them back out of Germany.
President Trump admires General Patton,but not for his leadership as a general. General Patton was not very happy about orders from General Eisenhower, who wanted him to confiscate the houses of wealthy Germans so Jewish survivors could live in them. As reports on the conditions in Bavaria began to alarm Truman, Eisenhower came down from Frankfurt on September 17 to join Patton on a tour of the camps where Jewish refugees were housed. He was horrified to find that some of the guards were former SS men. During the tour, Patton remarked that the camps had been clean and decent before the arrival of the Jewish “DPs” (displaced persons), who were “pissing and crapping all over the place.”Eisenhower told Patton to shut up, but he continued his diatribe, telling Eisenhower he planned to make a nearby German village “a concentration camp for some of these goddam Jews.”
Globally, the Soviet Union was expanding its sphere of influence by invading those countries nearest its borders. Three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—were occupied by the Soviets under the auspices of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 14 June 1940.
Towards the end of World War II, the Soviet Army occupied Hungary, with the country coming under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. Hungary eventually became a communist state under the severely authoritarian leadership of Mátyás Rákosi. Under Rákosi's reign, the Security Police (ÁVH) began a series of purges, first within the Communist Party to end opposition to Rákosi's reign. Thousands were arrested, tortured,tried, and imprisoned in concentration camps, deported to the east, or were executed, including ÁVH founder László Rajk.
The same story was repeated globally:People's Republic of China (to 1961), Polish People's Republic, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Socialist Republic of Romania,German Democratic Republic, People's Republic of Albania (to 1961), People's Republic of Bulgaria, Mongolian People's Republic, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, Republic of Cuba and the Republic of Nicaragua This expansion was often brutal with thousands killed, and was strongly opposed by the United States, Great Britain along with the other members of NATO and SEATO.
Following World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union, many anti-communists in the United States feared that Communism would triumph throughout the entire world and eventually be a direct threat to the U.S. The Cold War in the United States, brought the anti-communist campaign known as McCarthyism.The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare,lasting roughly from 1947 to 1956 and characterized by heightened political repression as well as a campaign spreading fear of influence on American institutions and of espionage by Soviet agents.
One quote on McCarthyism from Robert J Goldstein:
It originated with President Truman's Executive Order 9835 of March 21, 1947, which required that all federal civil service employees be screened for "loyalty." The order specified that one criterion to be used in determining that "reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal"would be a finding of "membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association" with any organization determined by the attorney general to be "totalitarian, Fascist, Communist or subversive" or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking "to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means."
— Robert J Goldstein
Senator Joe McCarthy picked up that ball and ran with it. Joseph McCarthy, United States Senator from Wisconsin was a Democrat (c. 1936–1944) then Republican (1944–1957), served under President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat known for leading the Cold War against Soviet and Chinese communism through the Truman Doctrine.
The most notable examples of McCarthyism include the speeches, investigations, and hearings of Senator McCarthy himself; the Hollywood blacklist, associated with hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); and the various anti-communist activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under Director J. Edgar Hoover. McCarthyism was a widespread social and cultural phenomenon that affected all levels of society and was the source of a great deal of debate and conflict in the United States.
Thousands of Americans, such as the filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, were accused of being Communists or sympathizers, and many became the subject of aggressive investigations by government committees such as the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
In the 1950s, Under President Truman, we fought against the Communist forces in Korea, sometimes those battles were directly against Chinese forces in North Korea.
In the 1960s, under President Kennedy, we nearly went to war with the Soviet Union over the placement of ballistic missiles placed in Turkey by the United States and in Cuba by the Soviets. Tensions were at the highest level, but cool heads prevailed, and the war did not start.
We were not so fortunate in Vietnam. Our first involvement was under President Kennedy and continued to expand under President Johnson. Although not officially a war, that depends on your point of view. In supporting our SEATO ally, we were up to our chin in the mud and blood there. President Nixon brought the end to the fighting with hundreds of thousands killed in the North and South on both sides, including the civilian population.
In November of 1975, on the eve of Angola's independence, Cuba launched a large-scale military intervention in support of the leftist People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)against United States-backed interventions by South Africa and Zaire in support of two right-wing liberation movements competing for power in the country
During the 1980s, the Ronald Reagan administration pursued an aggressive policy against the Soviet Union and its allies by building up weapons programs, including the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Reagan Doctrine was implemented to reduce the influence of the Soviet Union worldwide by providing aid to anti-Soviet resistance movements, including the Contras in Nicaragua and the Mujahideens in Afghanistan.
In one of the most prominent anti-communist speeches of any U.S. President, Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and anti-communist intellectuals prominently defended the label. In 1987, for instance, in commemoration of the70th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Michael Johns of the Heritage Foundation cited 208 perceived acts of evil by the Soviets since the revolution.
Since the September 11 attacks on the US and the subsequent Patriot Act, overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law and strongly supported by President George W. Bush, some communist groups in the US have faced renewed anti-communism by the government. On September 24, 2010, over 70 FBI agents simultaneously raided homes and served subpoenas to prominent antiwar and international solidarity activists thought to be members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) in Minneapolis, MN, Chicago, IL, and Grand Rapids, MI, and visited and attempted to question activists in Milwaukee, WI, Durham, NC, and San Jose, CA.
Bottom line:
Every President from Truman to Obama,Democrat and Republican alike, has fought against Communist influences in the United States and with nations with which we are aligned. Under President Trump, that fight has now stopped, and we are now working toward becoming friends with our oldest enemy.