GENERAL ANDREW GOODPASTER

INTERVIEW WITH GENERAL ANDREW GOODPASTER

Continue

INT: What kind of activities are we talking about?

AG: Support for these dissident groups, financial support, publications, providing publications, also the... broadcasting, Radio Free Europe, to broadcasting into these countries, providing short-wave radios surreptitiously, by which they could keep informed of what was happening, and as he said, keep the spirit of freedom alive.

INT: What was the scale of this support in Eastern Europe?

AG: I really am not prepared to talk about specifics or details.

INT: When there were these crises, such as the East German crisis and the Hungarian uprising, it's said that the CIA was ill-informed about these events until afterwards. The CIA hadn't predicted what would happen. How did Eisenhower deal with this, because the CIA was getting a lot of money?

AG: I think Eisenhower out of his military experience, had a very mature, sophisticated appreciation of what you can get from intelligence and what you can't get. you're always going to be subject to some degree of final surprise, but it was clear that there was a restiveness, there was an undertone of disorder in East Germany certainly, and we saw rising in Hungary before the Hungarian uprising.

INT: Finally, did you when (unintelligible) came to talk to you, did he ask you about whether the Cold War was necessary?

AG: I missed the first part of your question.

INT: There was an interview that you conducted with a colleague some months ago and I wonder if he asked you then whether... Perhaps I'll ask you again anyway. Looking... I mean you've been around for most of the Cold War era, what's your assessment, was the Cold War a necessary event?

AG: I think it was inevitable, given the experience, the trauma that the Soviet Union had been through. given also their determination to maintain control, so that they would not be subject to threat from the outside again. And there was running through it the thread of the Communist ideology, the missionary aspect of that, that they wanted to extend it throughout the world. they were committed to a doctrine of struggle and it was bound to happen. And we saw initially, contrary to their agreements about control in Romania and Bulgaria and Hungary and in Czechoslovakia, we saw that they were determined to try to exert totalitarian control under a Communist system in each of those countries. our feeling was that Germany, if they attempted to keep Germany down, as was attempted after World War One, this would be fatal. That we would soon be confronted with a condition for utter hostility and so their line of policy and our policy interests were in conflict and they would back theirs with a very strong military force. but Eisenhower's feeling was always that they would stop short of actual attack against the United States. So our task was to contain their outward trust, in a way that would maintain the freedom of our allies and over a period of time, he thought the demand, the desire for freedom would assert itself in Central and Eastern Europe to the extent that they too would become free.

INT: What would you say was the most dangerous point in the Cold War period?

AG: I think the most dangerous point of the Cold War came after Eisenhower's time, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, because the Soviets had to back away from something that was extremely volatile and extremely dangerous.

INT: What are the take home lessons of the Cold War, now it's over?

AG: My lesson is we didn't do too badly. To have come through a situation with that much danger, I think a lot of people can be given a lot of credit and I think the leadership in the West deserves a great deal of credit that we got through that without it flaring up into actual hostilities, which would have been destructive beyond anybody's power of imagination.

INT: General Goodpaster, thank you very much.

END OF INTERVIEW WITH GENERAL ANDREW GOODPASTER