Stop 'Em At The 38th Parallel Part 12

New, daily updating edition

Stop ‘Em At The 38^th Parallel:

The Soviet Intervention In Korea

By Chris Oakley

Part 12

January 1954 and beyond

January 7th, 1954--Georgi Zhukov is diagnosed with leukemia.

January 10th, 1954-- The 83rd U.S. Congress begins deliberations on a proposed amendment to the G.I. Bill that would establish a fund to pay for specialized medical treatment for U.S. military personnel suffering from radiation poisoning and related health problems.

January 16th, 1954--The proposed medical amendment to the G.I. Bill, formally known as the Radiation Sickness Treatment Act, is approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and passed on to the Senate for further debate.

January 23rd, 1954--The Radiation Sickness Treatment Act is signed into law by President Eisenhower; in the next twenty- five years thousands of World War III veterans who might have otherwise been unable to afford the necessary treatment for radiation sickness will credit the new law with helping to save their lives.

February 2nd, 1954--The new Polish government ratifies Poland’s first post-Communist constitution. That same day the Communist Party of Italy, the only major Marxist political party left in western Europe, announces its members have voted to officially disband the organization effective the next day.

February 19th, 1954--The three Hungarian ex-secret policemen suspected to have been the principal collaborators in the plot to assassinate the late Istvan Dobi are convicted of treason along with conspiracy to aid and abet murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

March 9th, 1954--Roy Cohn, a friend and longtime political supporter of former Senator Joseph McCarthy, announces the ex-senator has died of liver failure at a Chicago hospital.

March 22nd, 1954--German construction workers begin building a monument to the millions of civilians and West German troops killed in the nuclear attack that destroyed Berlin during World War III. When the memorial is finally completed some seven years later, it will be colloquially known as “the Berlin Wall” due to its wall-like design.

April 13th, 1954--Supporters of the New Awakening movement travel to Georgia in support of that country’s burgeoning independence movement. The Georgian pro-independence forces are recognizable by the orange banners they display at their rallies, a practice which will subsequently inspire Western newspapers to dub their movement “the Orange Revolution”.

June 6th, 1954--At ceremonies in France commemorating the ten- year anniversary of the D-Day invasion, President Eisenhower gives a speech calling for political reforms in Russia and an end to the NKVD’s relentless harassment of the New Awakening organization.

October 1st, 1954--A parade in Beijing held to mark the five- year anniversary of the Communist takeover of mainland China turns into a near-riot when a group of ex-PLA soldiers seeking treatment for exposure to radiation blocks the parade for two hours in attempt to call the Mao regime’s attention to their plight.

January 2nd, 1955--Douglas MacArthur ends months of speculation by officially announcing his candidacy for the 1956 Republican presidential nomination. This announcement will prompt the press to nickname the ‘56 GOP nomination fight as “the battle of the generals”, since incumbent president Dwight Eisenhower intends to run for a second term.

March 11th, 1955--Nikita Khrushchev is hospitalized after having a serious heart attack. He will resign as CPSU general secretary three weeks later, sparking a mad scramble to find his successor as the rest of the CPSU elite jockeys for position in the search for a new general secretary.

October 3rd, 1955--Representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council meet in Geneva to begin negotiating the framework for a nuclear arms reduction agreement.

January 3rd, 1956--Georgi Zhukov dies of leukemia at the age of 59; in his honor, the new Red Army general staff college opened to replace the destroyed Frunze Academy the previous year will be renamed the Zhukov Institute.

April 18th, 1956--In his first visit abroad as the new CPSU general secretary, Alexei Kosygin meets with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in San Francisco to restart the five-power U.N. nuclear arms control talks, which have stalled over the issue of monitoring compliance with a proposed underground test ban.

July 7th, 1956--Vietnam is granted full independence from France. The last French colonial governor of Indochina becomes France’s first ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam; the following week Vietnam will open its new embassy in France.

August 24th, 1956--General Douglas MacArthur, having lost his bid to take the Republican presidential nomination from Dwight Eisenhower, announces he will continue his presidential campaign as an independent candidate. This decision triggers a rift in the Republican Party that will ultimately have dire consequences for Eisenhower’s hopes of a second term in the White House; even though most GOP voters still back the incumbent president at the time, a surprisingly substantial minority are leaning towards MacArthur because his perceived stronger anti-Communist stance.

August 28th, 1956--After months of negotiations in Geneva the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council sign the world’s first nuclear arms control pact, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty(START).

October 17th, 1956--Douglas MacArthur is fired on in a bungled a bungled assassination attempt while addressing supporters at a campaign rally in Brooklyn, New York. Outrage over the shooting will drive many conservative GOP voters to MacArthur’s banner, widening the split within the Republican Party’s ranks and in effect handing second-time Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson the presidency.

November 2nd, 1956--Adlai Stevenson wins the presidency in one of the tightest electoral races seen in any U.S. presidential race in nearly a century. Many newspapers, especially out on the West Coast, are reluctant to even consider projecting a winner until their early editions go to press the next morning. But the final tally shows Stevenson winning the election with 45 percent of the vote compared to 40 percent for Eisenhower and 15 percent for MacArthur.

January 20th, 1957--Adlai Stevenson is sworn in as the thirty- fifth President of the United States. In his inaugural address he outlines an ambitious foreign policy agenda aimed at, in his words, “pulling humanity back from the edge of nuclear disaster which it has stood on for more than twenty years”. However, much of the responsibility for implementing this agenda will actually fall on Stevenson’s vice-president, John F. Kennedy, as serious health problems force Stevenson himself to resign the presidency before his term is over. April 27th, 1958--Vietnamese political bigwig Ngo Dinh Diem seizes power in a coup secretly backed by France. Diem, long mocked by his critics as a frivolous playboy, quickly proves instead to be a ruthless autocrat who squashes many of his potential opponents within a matter of months after taking power in Saigon.

June 4th, 1958--Mao Zedong is assassinated during an attempted military coup in Beijing by dissident elements of the People’s Liberation Army. Although the insurrection is quashed within 48 hours by troops loyal to the Communist regime the assassination of Mao constitutes a heavy blow to the Communist Party of China, which for years had been held together partly through the sheer force of Mao’s charismatic personality.

May 22nd, 1959--With most of the republics that formerly made up the Soviet Union having already declared their independence from Moscow, and the Ukraine on the verge of seceding from the now- moribund U.S.S.R., Alexei Kosygin formally declares the Soviet Union dissolved as of midnight Moscow time September 1st, marking the end of an era in Russian political history.

January 18th, 1960--Less than three years after he was sworn in as President, Adlai Stevenson stuns the American people with the announcement that he is resigning the presidency effective as of 7:00 PM that evening due to declining health; at 7:01 PM John F. Kennedy is sworn in at the thirty-sixth President of the United States to finish out the rest of Stevenson’s term in office. In the general elections that November Kennedy will decisively beat Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon, winning 39 out of 50 states from the former VP.

Feburary 11th, 1960--In one of the first major foreign policy crises of the new Kennedy Administration, Alexei Kosygin, then heading a caretaker administration set up to govern Russia in the interim between the U.S.S.R.’s dissolution and the election of a full-time post-Communist Russian government, is removed in a coup orchestrated by Marxist hardliners who still support the old regime.

February 15th, 1960--In a televised press conference at the East Room of the White House, President Kennedy announces the United States is calling for U.N. economic sanctions against the hard- line Marxist cabal that has ousted Alexei Kosygin from office as Russian premier. These sanctions are meant to pressure the hard- liners into restoring Kosygin to power in Russia; in the course of the press conference Kennedy hints Washington is prepared to use military force as a last resort. February 24th, 1960--The hard-line Marxist cabal that ousted Alexei Kosygin as Russian premier nearly two weeks earlier is dissolved, enabling Kosygin to return to office. The economic sanctions which were imposed on Russia following the original coup will be lifted the next day.

May 28th, 1960--Chinese students begin a protest rally in the heart of Beijing’s Tienanmen Square aimed at pressuring the Communist regime into relaxing restrictions on political and religious activities in China. Zhou Enlai, the de facto head of state since Mao Zedong’s assassination, bluntly refuses to submit to what he calls “counterrevolutionary hooliganism”.

June 4th, 1960--PLA troops loyal to Zhou Enlai’s regime move to drive the student protestors out of Tienanmen Square only to be confronted by squads of dissident soldiers who’ve chosen to side with the demonstrators. A full-scale battle between the two factions ensues during which the Communist Party of China’s headquarters is hit by a stray artillery shell; by the time the confrontation finally ends more than nineteen hours later, there are 700 loyalist troops, 400 dissident soldiers, and nearly 1200 civilians dead. A New York Times front-page story printed a few days later aptly describes the confrontation as “a massacre”.

November 7th, 1960--John F. Kennedy wins election to a full term as President of the United States, taking 39 of 50 states from former Vice-President Richard Nixon. In a press conference after his concession speech, the embittered ex-VP tells the media “you won’t have Nixon to kick around any more”.

January 20th, 1961--John F. Kennedy is sworn in for another term as President of the United States. He begins his next tenure in the White House at a time when international tensions are rising to a level not seen since the Korean conflict of the previous decade escalated into World War III; China, seeking to fill the void left by the breakup of the Soviet Union, is funding Marxist insurgencies throughout much of the Southern Hemisphere and also supporting efforts in eastern Europe to revive the defunct hard- line Communist parties that once ruled countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia. There are even ominous hints Zhou Enlai’s regime is trying to subvert the government of Cuba....

The End