After the end of WWII America and the Soviet Union entered in to a conflict of another sort; the Cold War. While neither side actually took up arms against each other there was a constant fear in America about the use of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union against us and how we as a nation should have prepared for it.

The assortment of videos assigned are like a walk through the Cold War, a video history of the sentiments, thoughts, ideas and fears of the time. There is a gradual progression in them beginning in the 1950’s with videos from the Civil Defense all the way through the 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The videos can be grouped in to four broad categories; propaganda, political, religion and pop culture.

The two videos prepared by the Civil Defense Administration were made in an effort to help families be prepared in the event of an atomic bomb blast in the United States. They are scary on so many levels. In hind sight a lot of what is portrayed in the videos is not factual and would not help. However, at the time these seemed like realistic options. The “Duck and Cover with Bert the Turtle” video was prepared for school children, and was shown in public schools (Duck, Turtle). It was meant to be informational and tried to minimize the “red scare”. It showed children the best thing to do when the warning sirens went off or they saw the flash from the bomb; you needed to duck and cover any exposed areas of skin. They also showed scenes of the perfect American life being attacked like innocent children in school, families at home, children playing baseball or riding their bikes to scout meetings. This definitely portrayed the wholesomeness of America against the downtrodden of Communism. There was a deep foreshadowing of doom and fear in these two videos. In the “Target You” video a deep ominous voice tells you that “you are the target of communism”, that your liberties are under attack and that “you must protect yourself”(Target You). The theme is to “plan and practice”. National alertness, comparable to our current “see something, say something” mantra was our call to arms.

The fear of Communism heavily infiltrated religion, politics and pop culture of our country too. Beginning with President Eisenhower speaking out against Communism, he stated in the excerpt that “Communism…according to all its own leaders, must be a system of international control and conformity” and that the Communist leaders are “determined to drive everyone toward that kind of world” (Eisenhower Speaks Out). Again this video reinforced the “red scare” and reiterated that “religions, governments, institutions and traditions” are under attack and that Communism’s goal was to totally destroy these and it was America’s job to stop this (Eisenhower Speaks Out). This theme, even though years later, is still evident in the JFK Debate summation and his speech at Rice University. Even though these were not quite as “doom and gloom” they do still have the overwhelming threat of Communism, that it is a threat to the American way of life and that even the space race must be protected (JFK, Rice). Communism was spreading around the world and we must get to space first so that “we shall not see space filled with instruments of mass destruction” (JFK, Rice). The LBJ election ad portrays the innocence of children against an atomic attack. He uses the threat of Communism and his stand against it as a platform for his campaign and in the video states that we must “make a world in which all God’s children can live” (LBJ, 1964).

The infiltration in to religion is evident in the Billy Graham video wherein he stated that “race is a symptom, war is a symptom” and that all are caused by “sin” (Graham, Threat). He reinforced that Communism and Christianity had philosophical differences in that Communism, through the teachings of Karl Marx, saw world problems as social whereas the Bible says they originate with sin (Graham, Threat). While this may be a rather simplistic comparison of a religion and a form of government, it does serve to reinforce that Communism was evil and that there was no utopia on earth.

The remaining videos, while still portraying the Cold War era, take place in the 70’s and 80’s and did not focus just on the “red scare” at home but around the world as the Soviet Union spread its influence and control across Southwest Asia. They cover areas of politics and pop culture with the Beatles singing “Revolution” (Beatles, Revolution). When the song came out many Americans saw it as a betrayal of the fight against Communism (in Vietnam at that point) and that it spread pacifist ideals, which ties directly in to the interview with MLK on the Merv Griffin Show. In that video MLK stated that he “disagrees with Communism philosophically” and that “Communism stands in the way of certain First Amendment privileges we have in America” (MLK, 1967). He went on to point out that many of the “revolutions in the world today are animated by nationalism and not Communism” (MLK, 1967). This interview seems to recognize Communism as wrong but downplayed its impact. He even went so far as to say that if people chose to live under a Communist regime, that they should be allowed to make that choice (MLK, 1967). This would seem to be a bit naive as President Carter points out in his 1979 speech regarding the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. They obviously did not want their country to be overrun, the President and his family to be assassinated and the spread of Communism to overtake their Muslim beliefs (Carter, 1979).

The overall belief in all the clips is that American democracy is better than Soviet Communism and should be protected. We are free to live as we choose, believe as we choose, and that American exceptionalism like that evident in the 1980 Miracle on Ice is prominent in every aspect of our country; that it would dominate against an illogical theory of utopian society controlled by a Communist government (Miracle, 1980). With the fall of the Berlin Wall and reintegration of East and West Germany (Wall, 1989), the fall of Communism began.