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Patterns, Assumptions, and Suspicions: A Review of Chile in their Hearts, by John Dinges

“…the Embassy investigation consisted almost exclusively of asking questions of Chilean officials. That might have been a reasonable approach in some countries, but it made little sense when the government that was being asked for help was in the midst of a campaign of mass killing and likely to be the guilty party.”[1]

After the disappearance and execution of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, US citizens, in the wake of Chile’s brutal coup d’etat in 1973, reasonable suspicions led journalists, activists, and family members to conclude that these two young men had been selected for detention and execution with the complicity and participation of US diplomats and CIA operatives. They were in Chile to witness the social experiment under democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende. One Chilean military intelligence source even offered eyewitness confirmation of that suspicion. Thomas Hauser published a plausible version of events, entitled The Execution of Charles Horman, in 1978. Human rights activists and naïve students like myself, on our way to witness the still-dangerous Chilean dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, devoured it with passion and growing commitment. Internationally acclaimed film director Costa-Gavras turned Hauser’s account into the suspense-filled 1982 blockbuster, Missing, starring Cissy Spacek, John Shea, and Jack Lemmon.[2] That cinematic phenomenon transformed a signature repressive strategy of the Pinochet regime—secretive extrajudicial abduction, torture, and execution—into an internationally recognizable atrocity with diplomatic repercussions.

But in his new book Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup, renowned investigative journalist John Dinges, no stranger to human rights issues, has uncovered an uncomfortable glitch in the narrative. It made cinematic sense that US officials would select Horman, the man who seemed to know too much about US participation in the coup, for summary execution. But the dissenting Chilean military intelligence official, Rafael González, who claimed in 1976 to have witnessed a crucial meeting in 1973, recanted his testimony in 2001.[3] The author develops the legal complexity of the case in abundant detail. Suffice it to say that, as a dissenter seeking asylum in the Italian embassy, Colonel González needed to show clearly why he and his family could not safely remain in Chile. As Chilean courts addressed human rights abuses in 2001, that same eyewitness account of CIA presence at the meeting that determined Horman’s fate would have made González liable as an accomplice in Horman’s execution and temporary disappearance. González changed his story, and no other evidence ever surfaced to confirm the earlier version.

Oddly, as the dramatic lynchpin of Missing dissolves into a haze of pseudo-historical myth, the house of cards does not collapse. There are still reasons why the Pinochet regime killed Horman and Teruggi, and there are reasons why the US Consulate and the US Embassy in Chile failed to seriously investigate the murders. With attention to reliable documentation, Dinges makes the case that this specific failure to protect American citizens abroad, a top priority for any diplomatic team, reveals something far darker than the devious real-life spy thriller that human rights watchers have assimilated into our worldview over the last five decades. Dinges reveals the inner workings of an international system at odds with itself. As such, human rights watchers can no longer consider these executions exceptional, some devious plot for which some deviant individual should have to answer. We must understand it as the predictable outcome of a deeply rooted pattern of conflicting objectives and contradictory orders.

Chilean soldiers burn Marxist literature following the 1973 coup. CIA Freedom of Information Act release. Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the oppositional tradition of Neil Sheehan’s Bright Shining Lie (1988), about the Vietnam War, Dinges shows how the US diplomatic team in Chile found itself forced into a series of impossible choices that tended to maximize injustice and collateral damage. Sheehan relates the experience of John Paul Vann, a patriotic service member turned civilian contractor, who came to understand why the Pentagon refused to accept honest reports of how American military strategy on the ground in Vietnam only served to strengthen the cause of the Viet Cong. Military intelligence officers obeyed orders by changing reports, by confirming that the US was in fact winning a war of attrition, thus promoting massacres of innocent civilians that would amplify the body count, which had become the official scoreboard, stateside.[4]

The Chilean coup occurred in the same Cold War context, when many assumed that marching into hell for heavenly causes was not a fool’s errand, but a moral obligation. To stop the global enemy of truth and the American way, the cost would include extrajudicial murders and hurtful lies. The Embassy and the Consulate in Chile had orders from Kissinger’s State Department to support the military regime. Therefore, when General Pinochet’s Ministry of Foreign Relations reported first that Chilean officials knew nothing about the missing Americans, and then that they had most likely become the victims of leftists posing as Chilean military to discredit the regime, the US diplomats accepted that as the official version without rebuttal.[5] Absurd as it seemed, they reported that story back to the State Department and to the Horman and Teruggi families.

“The Embassy posture during the Nixon and Ford administrations, sympathetic to the junta, was that it could not be known who killed Horman and Teruggi because the junta, the most obvious suspect, said their people did not do it.”[6]

No hard evidence links any rogue CIA agents to the selection of Horman and Teruggi for execution. But in the context of military rule, their murders obeyed a standard pattern. Soldiers encouraged patriotic Chileans to denounce their neighbors and acquaintances for having the wrong friends, for singing the wrong songs, or for wearing their hair in the wrong way.[7] It happened to thousands of Chileans, too. As late as 1980, the Ministry of the Interior revoked my residence because they had “received reports” that I “had the wrong friends.”

Dictatorships make no distinction between dissent and outright terrorism. Secret police agents opened all of my mail and stole the address book off my desk. I suspect that they did not murder me because the Horman-Teruggi case had already caused a stir. But Dinges’ research shows that the Horman-Teruggi case fits a recognizable pattern. The pattern itself led to countless cases of torture and disappearance in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay over the next decade. Two deaths are a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths are just a statistic. We can count that as one more bright shining lie. Moreover, the number of disappearances in South America is far more than ten thousand.

CIA declassified documents about Charles Horman “Missing” Case, Santiago, Chile, 1976. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The top secret CIA report, “Restless Youth,” that Director Richard Helms presented to President Johnson in 1968, did show a deep concern for the elusive connections between rebellious university students and young intellectuals worldwide. Helms even encouraged surveillance of Americans with suspicious connections.[8] Dinges makes no mention of that report, but he does point out that, even if the FBI or the CIA kept files on people like Horman and Teruggi—they obviously qualified as what the Agency would have called “fellow travelers”—no evidence exists for any shared information on Horman or Teruggi. And yet, the assumptions behind “Restless Youth” might account, at least in part, for a diplomatic culture that allowed officials to conclude that most dead activists had it coming, that there was no need to sully relations with the military regime by insisting on accountability for wrongful death. In Dinges’ account, the cover-up is the story, and it is bad enough.[9] And he does point out that diplomatic impunity for the Chilean dictatorship in those early days might have contributed to the dictator’s order to murder Orlando Letelier with a car bomb on a Washington street in 1976, a case that he has reported extensively in his previous work, The Condor Years (2004).[10]

The wave of extrajudicial abduction, torture, and disappearance that started in Chile would engulf the Southern Cone over the next fifteen years. In his previous work, Dinges points out that Chilean officials did, in fact, receive training in the strategies of “counterinsurgency” from US military intelligence operatives.[11] Moreover, even if no hands-on contact between CIA operatives and the Horman-Teruggi executions ever occurred, historian Greg Grandin has documented the formulation and implementation of disappearance as a repressive strategy in Guatemala, under the guidance of CIA operative John Longan, in 1966.[12] The whole point of a proxy war was to get others to do the dirty work in secret, so that leaders could proudly wave the flag and get reelected. Might we safely assume that disappearance as a repressive strategy did not spontaneously generate itself at the Chilean military academy in Santiago, independent of Washington’s Cold Warriors? Probably so, but the central issue of this book is that assumptions, even if probable, weaken the arguments of dissenters. And Dinges has uncovered here an ample trove of dissenters, within the Chilean military and the US diplomatic corps, who refused to go along with the lies, often at great risk to themselves and their families.[13]

Two inaccuracies stood out to me. Horman and especially Teruggi had connections with members of MIR, Chile’s only movement of any size that openly supported armed revolution during the Allende years. One Mirista who lived in Teruggi’s house in Ñuñoa was Fernando Alarcón. Dinges calls him a self-styled “professional revolutionary.”[14] Actually, MIR had an official rank of “professionalized” revolutionaries, chosen to give up their jobs and families and stay available to follow orders. MIR even robbed banks to support them. The other issue is that Dinges calls MIR’s bank robberies violent, but MIR survivor Andrés Pascal remembers how the Secretary General, Miguel Enríquez, prepared the bank robbers for their performances, saying that no one should actually get hurt and nothing should get broken. “We are not terrorists,” he would say, “we are revolutionaries.”[15] CIA reports attribute random acts of violence to MIR in declassified documents, but a fringe group of crazies called VOP actually committed those, and MIR denounced them for it.[16]

The other inaccuracies involve the Catholic Church. Dinges reports that liberation theology and “the preferential option for the poor” came out of the Second Vatican Council in 1965.[17] In fact, one of the documents of the Council, Gaudium et spes, validated the Church’s interest and participation in the material well-being of humanity at large. It was the Latin American Bishops’ Council that formulated the preferential option for the poor. That happened in two meetings, the first in Medellín (1968), and the second in Puebla de los Ángeles (1979). At those regional councils, local bishops validated the grassroots methods of liberation theology and embraced the continent’s poor as their own.

Neither of these inaccuracies has any bearing on the validity and importance of this book, however. This is no time to give in to public secrets, legal fictions, and official stories that ignore obvious facts. In the current climate, when internet memes and conspiracy theories can win elections and start wars, the call for evidence-based truth rings out as urgent and necessary.

Dinges’s most enlightening proposals come in the epilogue, where he lists the unexplored leads that could reveal not only a more detailed account of what really happened, but also how and why. The first of these would be an interview with Michael Townley, a young American who was also an operative for Chile’s secret police, the DINA. Convicted for the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, and currently living under a secret identity in the witness protection program, Townley offered diplomatic officials a tip on the Teruggi murder as early as October of 1973. He might know details that have not become part of the public record. Other unexplored leads include Chilean military sources and dissenters who helped recover the bodies in 1973. Several of these went into exile and survived. There were also agents from an FBI field office in Buenos Aires who knew something about the case. Finally, Dinges proposes the formulation of a Truth Commission with subpoena power, modeled on Latin American examples. “Only such an authoritative commission can overcome the persistent lack of credibility U.S. agencies have earned by their past obfuscations.”[18]

Driven by passion and meticulous attention to depth and detail, this book stands out as one of the best on my shelf. I highly recommend Chile in Their Hearts for scholars of Chile, diplomats, and international lawyers. Most of all, it is a must-read for those who hold a passionate commitment to the truth. I personally share Dinges’ closing sentiment: “…Chile was a great love, and what happened there was a great wound in our hearts.”[19]

[1] John Dinges, Chile in their Hearts: The Untold Story of two Americans who went Missing after the Coup. (Oakland, University of California Press, 2025), 208.

[2] Thomas Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman. (NY, Harcourt, 1978); Costa-Gavras, Missing, (Polygram, Universal, 1982).

[3] Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 143-154.

[4] Niel Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. (NY, Random House, 1988).

[5] See Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 200, 203. The circular shootout among leftists would become its own recurring pattern for the military regime, most notable in the case remembered as Los 119, or Operación Colombo. That story is as patently absurd as the one about terrorists who have an uncanny habit of dropping their passports and ID cards as they commit their crimes.

[6] Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 206.

[7] Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 155-166.

[8] CIA Report, “Restless Youth,” September 1968, declassified June 15, 2018. LBJ Library, NSF, Intelligence File, Box 3, Folder 16, document 4c; and Memorandum, CIA Director Helms to the President, September 4, 1968; declassified October 10, 1979. In Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, National Security File, Intelligence File, Box 3, Folder 16, doc 4b.

[9] All of the Horman family’s documentation of their ordeal sits in a long row of boxes at the Benson library.

[10] Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 183, 204. See also, John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies brought Terrorism to Three Continents. (NY, The New Press, 2004).

[11] Dinges, The Condor Years. (2004), 68-71.

[12] Greg Grandin,The last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 17.

[13] Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 167-178.

[14] Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 42.

[15] Andrés Pascal Allende, El MIR Chileno: Una experiencia revolucionaria (Argentina, Editorial Cucaña, 2003), 39.

[16] See Report, “The Leftist Revolutionary Movement,” U.S. State Department, Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), Chile Project, #S199900030, December 7, 1970, 2.

[17] Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 25.

[18] Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 208-215, 217.

[19] Dinges, Chile in their Hearts, 218.

Nathan Stone is a historian of Latin America and a regular contributor to Not Even Past. He lived and worked in Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil for more than thirty years, and his writing focuses on Chile, dictatorship, revolution, memory, and the Cold War.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (2025)

President Harry S. Truman is a wild card in historians’ dueling storylines about the atomic bombings of Japan at the end of World War II. For “orthodox” historians, Truman and his advisors let casualty projections, Japanese governmental paralysis, and American public opinion lead them to a coldly rational decision to drop the terrifying new weapons on Japanese cities. For “revisionists,” Truman passed the buck on the bombs (he had little interest in when and where in Japan they would fall), declined to pursue the negotiated surrender that many of his Japan experts preferred, and paid more heed to the looming showdown with Soviet leader Josef Stalin than to the moral ramifications of the world’s first nuclear bomb. The most intense back-and-forth over the historical record began in 1995 when the Smithsonian scrapped a 50^th-anniversary exhibit on the bombs amid public and scholarly outcry over its interpretive stance. The backlash and cancellation coincided with the rise of historical internet forums, blogs, and email newsletters, outlets that gave scholarly disagreements increased exposure but perhaps reduced their civility. Some of the rancor may have stemmed from embarrassment that years of close historical analysis had produced so little common ground.

Today’s generation of nuclear scholars are digital natives, and epistemic polarization defines the landscape in which they work and live. Consensus is increasingly beside the point, while creativity adds value. Alex Wellerstein is the ideal contemporary writer to take up the challenge of interpreting Truman and his handling of the nuclear era. Before his new book The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (HarperCollins, 2025), Wellerstein contributed to the public understanding of nuclear warfare by launching an interactive map tool that illustrates the destruction radii and fallout zones of various bombs. This “Nukemap” (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) made a big impact when it hit the internet in 2012; I remember seeing people share what the use of different bombs would mean for their own hometowns. Wellerstein still maintains the service, which remains an excellent educational tool, both informative and intuitive to use.

It is tempting to describe Truman’s approach to the bomb as intuitive as well; having used it out of necessity against Japan, the president then worked to ensure that its use would not become generalized. “It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb,” the president journaled in July 1945. Stalin’s crowd would successfully test their own version a few years later, when Truman was just beginning his second term.

The question of how exactly Truman tried to maintain the American monopoly on nuclear power — and even his own personal monopoly as military leaders pleaded for access to the weapons — is, however, not intuitive. Answering it is a matter of long-guarded secrets, the kind Wellerstein explored in his first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (Chicago, 2021). It requires a close reading of how Truman understood, or did not understand, what had happened in Japan. It also requires lingering in a moment that many postwar histories rush through: the four-year stretch between the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and the detonation of the first Soviet bomb in August 1949. Wellerstein details these early years of the nuclear era through close, highly contextual interpretations of the president’s words and actions. In the book’s final chapters, Wellerstein traces Truman’s decision to regain nuclear supremacy with “the Super,” a nickname for the hydrogen bomb, and demystifies debates about using nuclear weapons in the Korean War that began just as the nuclear arms race became a reality.

Harry S. Truman, 1934. Source: Library of Congress

Before diving into the early postwar years, Wellerstein must reckon with the atomic bombs that inaugurated the conundrum. He must do so without excessive repetition of the existing literature, and without becoming bogged down in the counterfactual traps of earlier debates. Creativity is part of his solution. Wellerstein opens with a lengthy quotation from Truman that is not exactly a quotation, but rather a paragraph “composed of quotes… which have been only mildly edited for grammatical consistency and clarity.” An endnote provides citation details for each part of the frankenquote, all of which express the president’s horror about nuclear weapons.

This sort of quoting is not conventional practice, but as an opener it efficiently communicates Wellerstein’s thesis: that despite some major misunderstandings and attention lapses beginning with the Hiroshima bomb, Truman had a big-picture understanding of the existential risk the bombs posed to humanity. The introductory not-a-quote also announces Wellerstein’s relatively informal writing style. Periodically, and not to excess, he offers sentences like “But here’s the thing” and rhetorical questions like “What did Truman think?” that are more often found in podcast transcripts than scholarly monographs. This is a good, ahem, thing. A self-consciously approachable style is a welcome corrective to the formal yet highly contentious tone of bomb literature from decades past. By allowing himself to use conversational phrasing, Wellerstein neither stifles the emotional content of the subject matter nor weaponizes it.

As Wellerstein examines Truman’s own tonally mixed comments on the bombs, he detects a contradiction between the president’s willingness to use and develop such weapons and his recognition of the bombs’ irreducibly “terrible” nature and efforts to restrict their use. This is a rhetorical rather than an actual problem, as there is no true contradiction in Truman’s logic. Wellerstein’s “sustained attempt to get inside Truman’s head” (p. xiii) is often needless, since the famously “plain” president wrote frequently and with little guile about the issue. Rightly or wrongly, Truman and virtually all of the people around him viewed the bombs as necessary evils that helped end the Second World War and forestall a third. Truman’s understanding of the bombs contained flaws, especially concerning Hiroshima, as Wellerstein shows in his best chapters. Yet it is no more paradoxical than the logic of orthodox historians who agree with Truman, or of the Cold War presidents who succeeded Truman and shared his views. Truman’s notions about nuclear weapons were not overly complex, and they were in strong accord with the prevailing notions of his day.

Following the trajectory of Truman’s thinking is valuable, though, because it clarifies exactly what Truman knew about the first bombs before they fell, and what he did about the bombs that came after. In the case of the Hiroshima bomb, Wellerstein shows that while the president tacitly approved the military’s plan to destroy Hiroshima, he believed Hiroshima to be “a purely military target” and not a city containing tens of thousands of “women and children.” To some extent this is a familiar idea among bomb historians, and the documents that support it figure in many bomb narratives. But Wellerstein goes so far as to suggest that Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who worked hard to spare the old Japanese capital of Kyoto from destruction, may have misled the president into believing that Hiroshima was a purely military target. Truman paid scant attention to the question of targets, a fact historians have recognized but that Wellerstein views as the foundational truth in Truman’s development of a nuclear conscience.

President Harry S. Truman announces Japan’s surrender, August 14, 1945. Source: Harry S. Truman Library & Museum

After Truman “learned that his understanding had been utterly wrong,” and after the Nagasaki bomb took Truman by surprise at a moment when both armistice and surrender were under tense debate in Washington and Tokyo, Truman stated that the civilian death toll left him no choice but to pause the military’s automatic deployment of atomic bombs. Wellerstein details how, in the months and years after Japan’s surrender, Truman shifted authority over nuclear weapons from military bureaucrats to the office of the president. The decentralized way in which the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings happened without Truman knowing the critical details would not happen again, because Truman deeply believed that it should not. The weapons he had at first dubbed “the greatest thing in history” (p. 87) very quickly became his “awful responsibility” (p. 93).

Wellerstein’s decisions about what to emphasize should prompt reflection about how we write and teach the atomic bombs and their aftermath. The book’s chapters are short; the World War II section takes up ten chapters, each of a few pages. Wellerstein’s brevity and writing style make his work accessible to students, and his well-sourced account of the atomic bombs should launch memorable classroom discussions.

The remaining chapters of The Most Awful Responsibility contain enough detail about Truman’s inconsistent quest for nuclear authority that even subject matter experts can find new information. A key event for Wellerstein is the establishment of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, a much-contested civilian body whose creation made the military feel they had lost a custody battle over atomic bomb material. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 receives sustained attention through a nuclear history lens, and Wellerstein shows how the war tested Truman’s authority by exposing conflicting military notions about nuclear warfare. At times Truman largely absented himself from debates, as in nuclear spy scandals and the development of the H-bomb, politically dangerous subjects which Truman preferred to dodge and delegate. In many cases, the buck passed his desk, as it had in 1945. Wellerstein explores obscure-sounding events like Project Venona, Operation Ivy, and NSC-100 (successor to the more famous NSC-68), some of which involved Truman only nominally. The president was often late to weigh in on nuclear questions, and he engaged in self-delusion about issues like peacetime applications of atomic bombs and Russia’s nuclear capacity. Wellerstein acknowledges the inconsistency between such lapses and his preferred image of Truman as a nuclear moralist and leader, but the disconnect weakens the book’s thesis that Truman cared deeply about preventing new nuclear holocausts.

Wellerstein presents a president with conflicting impulses: Truman cared about the chain of command for the country’s growing nuclear arsenal, but he also gave the matter little thought except when the press, Congress, or his advisors made him act. Wellerstein is generally forgiving of Truman’s slowness to assert himself, and of the fact that he often let political pressure decide his path, since his philosophy after Hiroshima was to make it more difficult for the U.S. military to use the country’s growing collection of nukes. Military leaders had dropped the bombs without hesitation in 1945, and some spoke of doing it in Korea and China in 1950, though Wellerstein persuasively argues that the commander in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur, did not go as far down this path as historians have alleged. Truman regularly lowered the temperature of such conversation, declared exclusive power to authorize nuclear strikes, and spoke of boundaries such as only using the weapons in retaliation and only after consulting with key allies.

The book’s conclusion notes that General Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency took a different tack, although the pattern of presidential control that Truman established ultimately survived the 1950s. Given the enjoyability and pedagogical usefulness of The Most Awful Responsibility, one may hope that Wellerstein will follow it up with a closer look at Eisenhower’s “New Look” and its nuclear ramifications. “Ike” was a president with as many conflicting impulses as his predecessor, but he had more focus and intentionality about military problems.

For now, Truman remains the last president to use nuclear weapons in war. Wellerstein has made an engaging, if not entirely convincing, case that Truman’s horror at what happened in Japan is the primary reason for that fact. For Truman and for Wellerstein, placing the burden of responsibility on a single presidential conscience, with its presumed moral sensibilities and capacity for humility, provides a greater safeguard against nuclear disaster than the blunt calculus of military tactics. If that was true even for a leader as inconstant as Truman, then perhaps it is a valid theory. If not, then every presidential election since World War II has been a game of nuclear roulette.

David Conrad received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. He is the author of Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan (McFarland, 2022), and his research and writing focus on postwar Japan, U.S.-East Asian relations, and nuclear history.

Lesson Plans: The Vietnam War and American Society

These lesson plans were developed through a partnership between Not Even Past, AVAnnotate, the This Is Democracy podcast, and the LBJ Presidential Library. Built around curated podcast excerpts and interactive audio annotation, each lesson provides a complete, classroom-ready resource that offers educators an engaging alternative to traditional history instruction while requiring minimal preparation.

The series is continuing to grow, with additional lessons covering a wide range of historical topics in development. Educators with questions, feedback, or requests are encouraged to contact us at notevenpast.uthistory@gmail.com.

Lesson Plans: Protest and Social Unrest

Lesson Plans: Radio and Communications Technology

Lesson plans: radio and communication technology

Lesson Plans: The Cold War

Lesson Plans: Civil Rights and Civic Participation

Cold War Chronicles

What does a Catholic Cardinal sequestered in the US embassy in Budapest and the dead body of an American found in Prague’s Vltava River in the 1960s have in common? Characters in a true crime podcast? No, at least not yet. Instead, these are examples of lives (and lives lost) whose stories are buried in the voluminous files of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library on the University of Texas campus. In addition to a fantastic museum, the Library contains an extensive archive of over 45 million pages of documents from the LBJ administration, providing a unique insight into America’s global reach during the momentous 1960s. For those who don’t have time to visit the wonderfully Cold War modern building and its peaceful reading room, there is also a considerable digital collection. Substantial as it may be, at last count, the percentage of digitized material was still well under 1%, a figure that is understandable given the scope of the collection and the resources required to scan and process materials for public online access. I experienced firsthand these challenges when I initiated and managed Cold War Chronicles, a decade-long (and ongoing) digitization project of the LBJ materials related to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The Cold War is best studied and researched as a deeply transnational phenomenon, in which both sides were constantly observing and directly or indirectly engaging the other side. If we study Eastern Europe only from its own sources, we miss half of the conversation. With that in mind, I began to explore the vast collections housed in the LBJ library over 15 years ago, mining it for documents related to my own research on Cold War-era Eastern Europe. I recall, for example, researching US-Eastern Bloc competition and engagement at Cold War trade fairs as part of my broader interest in consumption practices and patterns under socialism. I found a fascinating memo written by Anthony Solomon, LBJ’s influential financial policy advisor, who pushed for increased trade with the Bloc at a time when many Americans opposed it: “It is clear to me that it is in our best interest to take actions which help bring about a diversion of their resources from military and space programs to consumer goods…Who among us wouldn’t rather have Soviet workers making passenger cars instead of missiles?”^[1] Solomon seemed delighted by the idea of the Soviet citizens having to deal with traffic, parking issues, and their kids asking for the keys to the car. Indeed, new exchanges that exposed Eastern Bloc citizens to American consumer culture mushroomed under the LBJ administration, which led the Eastern Bloc to try (and fail) to “keep up.” I integrated this and other discoveries into my research as well as teaching on Cold War Eastern Europe, which foregrounds the permeability of the Iron Curtain, but also the East-West mutual preoccupations.

My research discoveries coincided with my assuming a new role as Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) in 2010. As director of CREEES, I had the pleasure of hosting and interacting with visiting scholars from Russia and Eastern Europe, many of whom were fascinated with the LBJ materials related to the former Eastern Bloc (and ex-Yugoslavia). These materials were cataloged in a rough guide created in 2009, which I still regularly consult. In 2014, I faced the daunting task of applying for a US Department of Education grant that would give CREEES the status of a National Resource Center (NRC). In preparing our proposal, we needed to think creatively about projects that would utilize the resources of UT relevant to the Eastern Bloc and ideally make them accessible to a much broader audience. We consulted with LBJ library archivists, who informed us that the repository’s documents are in the public domain, allowing us to digitize and post them on our site as desired. An LBJ documents digitization project was featured in our successful grant proposal, which gave CREEES the status of a National Resource Center (NRC) from 2014-2018, and again in 2018-22, and 2022-2026. The Cold War Chronicles project slowly but surely came to fruition.

Okay, but where to begin? The files related to the former Eastern Bloc were significant, and most of them were scattered among disparate collections, including those of Foreign Policy advisors like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, as well as collections on agriculture, trade, space, etc. There were also communications from heads of state, White House central files, and the list goes on. In the very beginning of the guide, however, there was an easy answer – the Country Files of the National Security collection. Given the concentrated nature of this set of documents, it made sense for us to digitize whole folders and boxes on each country of interest, as opposed to cherry-picking documents of interest. Thus, the online collection would be complete, allowing users to have a similar experience to being in the archive. Federal funds supplemented UT resources, which supported a (revolving) team of UT students and staff at CREEES and the UT libraries to scan, crop, tag, process, and post in Texas Scholar Works. By far the largest of these country collections was the USSR, with 15 boxes full of some 10,000 documents! Due to its sheer size, we decided to complete that collection last. As of fall 2025, it is still not available for public use, but it will be soon!

Instead, we started with Czechoslovakia, the largest and most significant of the Eastern Europe collections, because of the notable 1968 event, the so-called “Prague Spring” in which state reform snowballed into a popular movement for change to “socialism with a human face.” The result was a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of the country to crush the liberalized regime and its enthusiastic population. Indeed, our first iteration of a public website was on the Scalar platform, entitled “The Prague Spring Archive,” put together by Ian Goodale, who is currently the European Studies Librarian for the University of Texas Libraries. The LBJ documents shed light on day-by-day developments on the ground, the decision-making process around the US response, and the global reaction to this consequential set of events as the “Czechoslovak crisis.”

The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Tanks burning. People carrying flags

The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Source: Wikimedia Commons

After Czechoslovakia, we went country by country across the region–Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and finally the USSR and East Germany. As of fall 2025, most country files have been digitized, and only the Soviet and East German files remain to be fully processed and posted online. The cache of digitized documents is permanently housed in the Texas Scholar Works (TSW) repository, a massive open-access collection of materials that UT faculty and students have authored, digitized, or collected. In addition to its ample storage capacity, the repository provides convenient features for its collection, such as author and date searchability. However, its interface is not particularly flexible or user-friendly, and it does not allow for any curation of our collection. For that reason, I spearheaded the new Cold War Chronicles website, which we launched this fall in collaboration with a team of CREEES staff and students.

Cold War Chronicles offers a user-friendly portal and guide to our entire TSW collection, designed for researchers, teachers, or enthusiasts of Cold War history. For researchers, we provide a detailed guide with clear instructions on the scope of the collection and how to navigate, access, and cite the documents. The site also includes country-specific landing pages with general overviews of the sub-collection contents and links to folder-by-folder descriptions. I have also included a link to other English-language online archives for Cold War research, with direct links to search pages and short notes on navigation in cases where usability is not intuitive.

These other archives are also linked to through the “teaching resource” page, which includes a series of assignments that I created while teaching my “Cold War Eastern Europe” course at UT in spring 2025 (note: the Soviet Union was not a focus of the course, and the materials reflect that). In these assignments, students are asked to work in “country” groups on in-class activities that require them to dig into various online archives to find answers to prompts on discrete phases in the Cold War. The teaching resources also include a link to a list of English-language memoirs related to communist Eastern Europe and a sample assignment for using them in a course. These teaching materials are flexible and appropriate for higher education, as well as high school curricula.

Returning to the Catholic Cardinal stuck in the Budapest embassy, one of the most interesting collections of country files in our archive is Hungary. The Hungarian Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, designated “venerable” by Pope Francis in 2019, is a famous and revered figure in Hungary today. He spoke truth to power against Fascism and Communism, and as a result was imprisoned by both wartime and postwar regimes in Hungary. Released from prison during the famous Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against Soviet domination, he took refuge in the US embassy when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and remained there until 1971! During the LBJ years, he wrote frequent letters, such as the one to LBJ, who responded through the local chargé d’affaires. The complete set of letters offers a rich Cold War chronicle of this episode in history, in which the US was harboring an enemy of the state in Hungary while trying to broker detente with the Eastern Bloc.

Cardinal Mindszenty giving a public speech

Cardinal József Mindszenty, 1956. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As far as the body in the Vltava River, it was Charles E. Jordan, executive vice president for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), who was found on August 20, 1967. Jordan was reported missing five days prior while vacationing in Prague, a side trip from his JDC work in neighboring Romania. Although it was reported as a suicide by Czech authorities at the time, there has long been speculation as to the cause of death, and it is considered an unsolved murder by the JDC.

Stories such as Mindszenty’s and Jordan’s are just a select few that were once buried among the millions of documents in the carefully kept boxes under lock and key in the LBJ Library. Now, at least some of these chronicles are online for all to access, although there is so much more to discover for those who can make it to the nearly windless white tower perched on a hill on the east end of our campus. Cold War Chronicles will continue to evolve over the coming years. This has truly been a labor of love for me and the CREEES team, and we sincerely hope teachers and researchers make use of this unique collection!

^[1] Personal Papers of Anthony M. Solomon, East–West Trade, Box 1, file 1, p. 36. Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.

Mary Neuberger is the Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Distinguished University Chair in Russian and Slavic Languages; Director of CREEES; and Chair of the Slavic & Eurasian Studies Department at UT Austin. Her research interests include urban culture, consumption, commodity exchange, and the history of truth at the intersection of science and religion in modern Eastern Europe, with a specialization in southeastern Europe.

This is Democracy – Broadcasting Democracy

Jeremi and Zachary have a conversation with Dr. Mark Pomar on the historical impact of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty’s critical role of radio communications during the Cold War, and the challenges they face today including the recent threats to their operation.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Radio Liberty”.

Mark Pomar is a Senior Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas. From 1975 to 1982, Dr. Pomar taught Russian studies at the University of Vermont. From 1982 to 1993, he worked as Assistant Director of the Russian Service at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Munich), Director of the USSR Division at the Voice of America, and the Executive Director of the Board for International Broadcasting, a federal agency that oversaw Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. From 1994 to 2008, Dr. Pomar was a senior executive and President of IREX, a large US international nonprofit organization. From 2008 to 2017, he was the founding CEO and President of the US – Russia Foundation (USRF), a private US foundation that supported educational programs and exchanges. Dr. Pomar is the author of two books, most recently: Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Review of Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army, by Tanja Petrović (2024)

Banner for Review of Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army, by Tanja Petrović

Utopia of the Uniform is a powerful book that challenges historians to broaden their approach to the archive and their sources. It asks how affect and feeling can add nuance to our study of the past, significant historical shifts, and the future. When we met for the first time, Tanja Petrović signed my copy with the note, “To David, for all the stories and feelings he will bring to us from the Yugoslav men”. It stuck with me for some time as I wondered what that word, feeling, meant in that context. It confused me as a historian because I had not really been trained to analyze feelings rather than historical fact. However, after reading Utopia of the Uniform I am left with a sense of wonder in seeing how the author showcased the affective afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army and how she skillfully wove a web that connected periods of time that have traditionally been shattered in post-conflict discourse.

To what degree is nostalgia useful for a society torn asunder by catastrophe? Perhaps a nostalgia that gazes fondly to a period prior to catastrophe might serve as a metaphorical balm, one that eases the lingering pain for the survivors of violence. Or perhaps it could serve as a temporary escape from a grim reality in which contemporary life is contrasted against life in the past, against the ‘better times’. But where does this nostalgic path lead if not to simple daydreaming? Is it capable of inspiring positive change? Tanja Petrović strives to change how scholarly discourse interacts with nostalgia in her 2024 book, Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army.

Petrović views nostalgia as an ineffectual tool of historical analysis and seeks to craft a new frame of reference for temporal progression. As such, she encourages a more nuanced investigation of historical processes and actors in both post-socialist and post-conflict societies. Utopia of the Uniform guides the reader through a nontraditional archive of felt and affective history to showcase how shared memories, photographs, and friendships continue to influence and affect the lived experience of individuals and collectives in the lands that now make up the former Yugoslavia.

To accomplish this, the author foregrounds her study in the past and present lives of male Yugoslav conscripted soldiers. By analyzing a rich archive of personal narratives, interviews, soldiers’ photography, as well as other forms of artistic and documentary expression, she claims that this archive of felt and affective history inherently possesses its own agency; an agency that Petrović argues is capable of dismantling the limitations of hegemonic ethnic binaries that politicians exploit to keep a grip on power. It is these limitations that have kept the region of the former Yugoslavia and its history wrapped “in an ethnic straightjacket” (p. 178) by binding it to the traumatic destruction of the 1990s. A time period when the fall of state socialism coincided with the rise of nationalist politicians into power (such as Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević and Croatia’s Franjo Tuđman). This shift saw warmongering nationalism call for a dramatic reorientation of society that violently bifurcated Yugoslavia’s rich ethnic and religious diversity practically at every level. By the end of the decade the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo would kill hundreds of thousands, displace millions, and destroy the social and physical infrastructure of the country. Petrović tells us that this profound pain created limiting ethnic binaries that keep this region chained to a destructive past.

Slobodan Milošević, former President of Serbia and President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1988.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

That past, however, did not begin at the end of the 20th century. Petrović argues that the ideological motivations found within Yugoslav socialism and the way its distinctive federal system was structured allowed for the potential of a utopian perspective. The Yugoslav socialist project after World War II could be seen as unique because of the Yugoslav Partisans’ National Liberation Struggle and their self-led victory over fascist occupation. A new understanding of Yugoslavism that “acknowledged and approved enduring separate nationhoods and sought federal and other devices for a multinational state of related peoples with shared interests and aspirations” (p. 23) emerged after the war. As a result of the mass intercommunal and ethnicized violence of World War II, the new Yugoslav movement made Brotherhood and Unity (Bratstvo i jedinstvo) one of its defining pillars of legitimacy. Thus, a system that sought peace and cooperation among Croats, Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovar Albanians, Slovenians, Macedonians, and others. The JNA and the accompanying mandatory universal male conscription was a key piece of the unifying project to create Yugoslavs.

The story that Tanja Petrović tells across the book’s nine chapters (including one interlude and an epilogue) is situated along temporal lines that are not limited to narrow linear boundaries. Her narrative examines how forces of the past interacted with each other along a trajectory that moved toward an ideal future, a future that historical actors dreamt would come to fruition. However, as a result of the catastrophic violence and destruction seen in the 1990s during the Yugoslav Wars of Succession, those hopes or utopian ideals and the temporal continuum upon which they progressed was shattered. Therefore, ideal futures that were not only possible but imminent were lost forever, while this rupture forced the former soldiers and their loved ones in Petrović’s study to be left adrift (during the period she coins as the ‘event-aftermath’) in a hostile world where arbitrary ethnic or religious affiliation determines life or death, belonging or ostracization, or prosperity or neglect.

On the left: A map of Yugoslavia, 1990; On the right: Former Yugoslavia during War, a snapshot of the front lines, 1992.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (L), Wikimedia Commons (R)

On the left: A map of Yugoslavia, 1990; On the right: Former Yugoslavia during War, a snapshot of the front lines, 1992.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (L), Wikimedia Commons (R)

Even three decades after the wars’ end this rupture still dictates how life in what was once Yugoslavia is lived and perceived. Petrović argues that the citizens of the states that emerged out of the the corpse of the Socialist Federal Republic (SFR) of Yugoslavia (the republics include Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo) live in neo-fascistic and highly ethnicized societies. Within this post-war world people face a grim present, one in which continuous governmental neglect for peoples’ livelihoods, a general disregard for their safety, and rampant corruption offers no hope for a better future. The author centers an unlikely hero in her story to serve as a utopia of hopeful thought forged in the past and lived in the present: the institution of the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (JNA) and universal conscription of Yugoslav males for one year of military service. Utopia of the Uniform brings forth a potent contribution in that it is paradoxically within the enclosed barbed-wired bases of one of the most strict, disciplined, and conservative institutions resistant to change in SFR Yugoslavia where utopia could be found.

The bases where these soldiers served became key locations for a utopia, not necessarily because life there was perfect; in fact, Petrović discusses throughout her work that many young men felt that the army was robbing them of a year of their youth when the world was at their feet. The idea of going to someplace far away from your home, a base that was isolated from urban centers, to be molded into a good soldier with domineering discipline constantly watching your every move understandably was a source of frustration for many young Yugoslav conscripts. However, the early foundational leadership of the JNA in the postwar era intentionally designed this feature of the military in order to take Yugoslavs from all different ethnic, religious, social, and educational backgrounds and send them to serve somewhere far away from the region in which they were raised. This had the significant effect of intermingling the whole male population with people who might have been different, thus institutionally reinforcing the idea of Brotherhood and Unity in the country’s fighting force. It was in these bases where JNA soldiers forged bonds, memories, and deep friendships with their comrades in arms that would last a lifetime, especially forging strong ties with people of different ethnicities.

Photo of soldiers welcoming Tito — Welcoming Tito in Pirot, 29 September 1965
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Petrović utilizes the affective feeling of these soldiers to shatter the restrictive ethnic binary that has held the Ex-Yugoslav region in a chokehold since the 1990s. Through her gripping narrative that bridges Yugoslav times, the rupture of violence, and the eventual event-aftermath, the author colors significant nuance and elaboration into the picture of the (post)socialist and post-conflict society. Utopia of the Uniform demonstrates that the friendships and positive remembrance of former JNA soldiers’ time in military service take on what the author defines as an ‘affective afterlife,’ that is a phenomenon that lives on inspiring happiness, hope, or a fondness in the present despite unimaginable trauma. Additionally, Petrović significantly diversifies and debunks the dominating ethnic narratives that local politicians have hijacked to dictate that ethnic homogenization is the only viable path forward for the successor states.

Utopia of the Uniform demonstrates that the desires of good will and the strong friendship between soldiers of one background to their army buddies of another ethnic background refute the divisive propaganda that stubbornly lives on from the 1990s. The book articulates how the unique context of Yugoslav socialism and the philosophy of Workers’ Self-Management created an “infrastructure for feelings,” or a new social organization that “makes possible responsible decision-making under conditions of interdependency, mutual social responsibility, and solidarity, and that leads to the liberation of individuals.” (p. 189) Petrović argues that this system, despite its flaws, provided space for people to create their own dreams of utopia of the future. This utopia, found in the past within JNA bases across what used to be Yugoslavia, possesses an affective afterlife for the people who survived the 1990s and still offers them happiness, fond remembrance, and even a glimpse of hope for the future.

David Castillo is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on the former communist Yugoslavia and its successor states. His research explores the links between inter-communal violence, toxic masculinity, gender dynamics, propaganda, and mass manipulation. With academic foundations from the University of Texas at El Paso and Indiana University, David combines cultural history with international politics. Drawing from his experience in the region, he aims to compare post-Yugoslav masculinity shaped by the 1990s wars with Chicano/a/e ‘Machismo’ in Mexican-American borderlands, investigating how violence becomes integral to both identities.

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