Exposing “Red Colonialism”

U.S. Propaganda at the United Nations,

1953–1963

✣ Mary Ann Heiss

When the U.S. envoy to the United Nations (UN), Sidney R. Yates, spoke
during plenary debate in the UN General Assembly on 4 December 1963 and
branded the Soviet Union “the world’s greatest imperialist Power,” his comment
was no isolated barb or spontaneous interjection.1 On the contrary, it reflected
a concerted U.S. effort during the early Cold War to portray Soviet control of
the Baltic republics, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe in imperial terms—what
U.S. officials came to call “Red Colonialism”—in order to challenge the Soviet
Union’s credibility as a champion of decolonization. U.S. officials maintained
that because Red Colonialism involved the imposition of outside control on
peoples who had once been free, it was worse than the colonialism practiced
by West European imperial powers in earlier centuries.
The crusade against Soviet colonialism was part of the larger Cold War
effort to portray the United States, and the free world it led, in ways that would
appeal to people in other countries in the zero-sum competition with the Soviet
Union for global allies. As Justin Hart has argued, the techniques used during
the early Cold War marked a revolution in U.S. propaganda policy.2 Although
mobilizing the domestic population against outside enemies had long been an
element of U.S. wartime practice, as was evident most notably in the work of
the Committee on Public Information during World War I and the Office of
War Information during World War II, officials in Washington prior to the
Cold War had given relatively little thought to the need to sell U.S. ideals

1. Sidney R. Yates (United States) remarks to 1272nd plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly,
4 December 1963, A/PV.1272, para. 10.
2. Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of American
Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Journal of Cold War Studies

Vol. 17, No. 3, Summer 2015, pp. 82–115, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00562
C 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology

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to other countries.3 World War II, however, instilled a realization that the
opinions of the world mattered, and the Cold War painted the importance of
global opinion in bold relief, making the acquisition of allies abroad a national
priority.4
As a result, the visible trappings of the Cold War, such as activist inter-
ventionism abroad, soaring defense expenditures, and a worldwide network of
U.S. military bases, were joined by a concerted—if difficult—effort to define
what the United States stood for and valued and to articulate that vision to
peoples around the world. Much of the definitional effort involved compar-
isons showing that life in the countries of the U.S.-led Western alliance was
much better than conditions in the Soviet-led Communist bloc.5 Some of
the foundational U.S. Cold War documents used such contrasts in making
the case for an activist foreign policy to the U.S. public. The 1947 Truman
Doctrine, for example, starkly contrasted the two competing worldviews that
prevailed during the postwar period in issuing a call for U.S. action to combat
the spread of Soviet oppression.6 Three years later, the top-secret National
Security Council (NSC) report known as NSC 68 used bipolar tropes to argue
for a significant expansion of the U.S. effort to combat international Com-
munism, even at the risk of basic U.S. institutions.7 Contrasts also abounded
in the public propaganda that was disseminated by the Voice of America, the
United States Information Agency (USIA), and other entities that sought to
sell U.S. democracy to the world.8

3. On U.S. wartime propaganda, see, for example, Allan Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office
of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Stephen Vaughn, Holding
Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Robert B. Westbrook, Why We Fought: Forging American
Obligations in World War II (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004); and Susan A. Brewer,
Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
4. See Hart, Empire of Ideas, pp. 3–5.
5. John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) provides an excellent discussion of the U.S.
self-conception during the immediate postwar period. For discussion of the dichotomous nature of
early U.S. Cold War pronouncements, see, among others, Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American
Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 24,
40, 96; and Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American
Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 81.
6. The rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine is superbly analyzed in Denise M. Bostdorff, Proclaiming the
Truman Doctrine: The Cold War Call to Arms (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2008). See also
Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic
Politics, and Internal Security, 1946–1948 (New York: New York University Press, 1985).
7. See Ernest R. May, ed., American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: St. Martin’s Press,
1993).
8. The development of the post–World War II U.S. propaganda system may be followed in Bel-
monte, Selling the American Way; Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency; Lowell

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Beyond illustrating the general U.S. campaign against Red Colonialism,

Yates’s biting remark also made manifest the U.S. government’s reliance on the
UN General Assembly, the preeminent postwar global stage, as a propaganda
platform. With the UN Security Council rendered impotent by East-West
disputes, the General Assembly assumed an importance far beyond its original
intent.9 This was particularly the case as the organization expanded from
its original membership of 51 countries to 113 by 1963, largely as a result of
decolonization, and took an increasing interest in colonial questions in general,
including the UN’s role in bringing what the UN Charter refers to as non-self-
governing territories along to self-governance and independence. For the most
part, the United States and its West European allies, several of which were major
colonial powers, advised caution and adopted a recalcitrant position regarding
actual UN involvement in decolonization.10 The Soviet Union and its satellites
lined up on the opposite side, marshaling an array of facts and figures that
demonstrated the “exploitative nature” of Western colonialism and exhorting
the international community to empower the General Assembly to eradicate
it.11 If U.S. officials during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations
were unable to counter Soviet charges with a wholesale defense of Western
colonialism at the UN, they did see value in highlighting its transitory nature,
in contrast to the seeming permanence of Soviet control of Eastern Europe,
the Baltic States, and Central Asia, employing in the process the language and
tone of the larger U.S. campaign against Red Colonialism.
Exploring the U.S. campaign against Red Colonialism reveals how the
Cold War fundamentally shaped the U.S. propaganda line during the era of

H. Schwartz, Political Warfare against the Kremlin: US and British Propaganda Policy at the Beginning of
the Cold War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s
Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
9. On this point see, for example, Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and
the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009),
pp. 185–189.
10. For a good overview of U.S. policy regarding decolonization, see Michael H. Hunt, “Conclusions:
The Decolonization Puzzle in US Policy—Promise versus Performance,” in David Ryan and Victor
Pungong, eds., The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2000), pp. 207–229. See also Scott L. Bills, “The United States, NATO, and the Colonial World,”
in Lawrence S. Kaplan and Robert W. Clawson, eds., NATO after Thirty Years (Wilmington, DE:
Scholarly Resources Inc., 1981), pp. 149–163; Cary Fraser, “Understanding American Policy towards
the Decolonization of European Empires, 1945–64,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1992),
pp. 105–125; John Kent, “The United States and the Decolonization of Black Africa, 1945–63,” in
Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1992), pp. 168–187; and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold
War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2007), pp. 8–38, 110–157.
11. The Soviet anti-colonial campaign at the United Nations may be followed in Alexander Dallin, The
Soviet Union at the United Nations: An Inquiry into Soviet Motives and Objectives (New York: Frederick
A. Praeger, 1962), pp. 116–129. For Soviet thinking regarding the Third World and decolonization in
general, see Westad, Global Cold War, pp. 39–72.

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decolonization. This is not to say that other considerations were absent or

unimportant. Racial considerations and ideas about development, for exam-
ple, certainly influenced U.S. policy toward decolonization, as scholars such
as Matthew Connelly and Jason Parker have made abundantly clear.12 More-
over, as Andrew Yarrow and Laura Belmonte, among others, have argued, U.S.
propaganda, particularly in the 1950s, mobilized arguments about the coun-
try’s abundance and the personal prosperity of its population in an attempt
to win allies abroad.13 None of these ideas, however, had much role in U.S.
propaganda on colonialism, which was overwhelmingly framed in East-West
terms and designed to discredit the Soviet Union with the developing world.
A variety of factors ultimately thwarted the campaign against Red Colonialism
at the UN, giving the impression that the United States was more focused
on its own differences with the Soviet Union than on supporting national
self-determination and independence.

Crafting the “Red Colonialism” Campaign

The Eisenhower administration was the first to make sustained use of the
propaganda power of the UN on all manner of issues, colonialism included.
Coming from a background in journalism, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot
Lodge saw the UN as a soapbox from which to assail the Soviet bloc at every
opportunity. In keeping with an overall focus on the potential of psycho-
logical operations, as evidenced in the creation of the USIA in June 1953
to serve as a dedicated psychological warfare entity within the U.S. govern-
ment and by the replacement of the Truman administration’s disappointing
Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) with the Operations Coordinating Board
in September 1953 to make psychological warfare an integral part of over-
all U.S. foreign policy, the Eisenhower administration planned to be more
active and aggressive than its predecessor in using the UN as a platform
for highlighting differences between the Free World and the Communist

12. See Matthew Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict dur-
ing the Algerian War for Independence,” American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 3 (June 2000),
pp. 739–769; and Jason Parker, “Cold War II: The Eisenhower Administration, the Bandung Con-
ference, and the Reperiodization of the Postwar Era,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 30, No. 5 (November
2006), pp. 867–892.
13. See Andrew L. Yarrow, “Selling a New Vision of America to the World: Changing Messages in
Early U.S. Cold War Print Propaganda,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Fall 2009),
pp. 3–45; and Laura Belmonte, “Selling Capitalism: Modernization and U.S. Overseas Propaganda,
1945–1959,” in David C. Engerman et al., eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the
Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), pp. 107–128.

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bloc, condemning what it saw as Soviet hypocrisy and wooing the undecided
in the Cold War—including the newly independent states—to the Western
side.14
What became known within the administration as the “Lodge Project”
constituted a no-holds-barred effort to embarrass the Soviet Union on the
world stage of the UN. “Specifically ‘anti-communist’ rather than ‘pro-U.S.,’”
the campaign focused on several areas where Soviet policy was considered
vulnerable, including Moscow’s “absorption of [the] Baltic States and other
territorial accessions in Europe” and “domination of European satellites,”
actions U.S. policymakers described as imperialist. In May 1953, the soon-to-
be-defunct PSB gave Lodge a comprehensive list titled “Anniversaries of Com-
munist Infamy,” with all the “dates on which free nations lost their sovereignty
by the subversion and treachery of Soviet Communism.” Beginning with the
Soviet Union’s forcible annexation of the Baltic states in 1940 and stretching
to the Communist victory in China in 1949, the circumstances under which
ten formerly free countries fell to Communist domination were juxtaposed
against those by which another sixteen had attained “freedom outside the Iron
Curtain” and “joined the Free World as independent nations.” By explicitly
contrasting the emergence of new states from Western colonial control with
the disappearance of others behind the Iron Curtain, U.S. policymakers were
employing the familiar strategy of dichotomous construction and signaling a
new, offensive direction for U.S. propaganda at the UN that sought to dis-
credit Soviet claims to champion individual rights against the purported evils
of Western colonialism. By August, U.S. officials were explicitly referring to
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Baltic states as
“the new colonialism.” “While the Soviet Union preaches its concern for the
liberation of dependent peoples,” the emerging U.S. propaganda line main-
tained, “it has ruthlessly converted every territory over which it has acquired
domination into a vassal of the Soviet state.” U.S. officials, with Lodge in the
lead, became determined “to highlight this practice, and to contrast it with the

14. For Lodge’s activist agenda see, for example, H. S. Craig, memorandum for the record, “Conversa-
tion with Ambassador Lodge,” 4 May 1953, in Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (DDEL), C. D. Jackson
Records, Box 4, Folder: Lodge; Wallace R. Irwin, Jr. (Office of Evaluation and Review), memorandum
for the record, “‘Human Rights’—Consultation with Ambassador Lodge and USUN Staff,” 22 May
1953, in DDEL, C. D. Jackson Records, Box 4, Folder: Lodge; and A. P. Toner, “Notes on Ambassador
Lodge’s Meeting with Contributors to GA Project,” 4 August 1953, in DDEL, Psychological Strategy
Board (PSB) Records, Box 23, Folder PSB 334 UN (6). Eisenhower’s overall psychological warfare
policy may be followed in Osgood, Total War; and Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s
Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 159–163.
On the Eisenhower administration policy toward the UN, see Gary Ostrower, The United States and
United Nations (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), pp. 66–97.

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steady evolutionary progress toward self-determination which has been made

under western auspices since World War II.”15
Many within the PSB, however, questioned Lodge’s plans. Edward P. Lilly
lamented the ambassador’s apparent intention to wage a negative anti-
Communist campaign and advised instead an effort to highlight U.S. accom-
plishments in the field of human rights, which would in practice also lay bare
Soviet failings in that area. Charles R. Norberg made much the same point,
advising that any propaganda program at the UN “be primarily built around
the positive position which the U.S. Government wishes to project with the
subsidiary program being built around an attack on the Soviet position.” Both
Lilly and Norberg believed that the United States would be better served by
pointing up its own positive accomplishments than by reminding the world of
Soviet misdeeds. In a prescient identification of one of the underlying reasons
for the difficult road U.S. propaganda efforts at the UN faced, Arthur M. Cox
proclaimed, “I think we have made a great mistake as a nation of assuming that
because Soviet power and subversion is the greatest problem facing us today,
it is therefore the greatest problem facing everybody else. . . . No amount of
horror stories demonstrating the crimes of the Kremlin will convince millions
of people in the free world that Soviet-inspired Communism is their main
problem,” he warned, “because they know that it is not.”16
These criticisms fell on deaf ears. In defending the decision to engage
in an anti-Soviet campaign, Mason Sears, the U.S. representative on the UN
Trusteeship Council and face of U.S. policy on colonial questions at the UN,

15. Memorandum of 15 May 1953 conversation, “Valley Forge Problem: ‘Human Rights’ Project,”
18 May 1953, in DDEL, C. D. Jackson Records, Box 4, Folder: Lodge; unsigned memorandum,
“List of Soviet Vulnerabilities for Possible Exploitation at the UN,” 30 April 1953, in DDEL,
C. D. Jackson Records, Box 4, Folder: Lodge; Abbott Washburn (executive secretary) to Henry
Cabot Lodge, with attached “Anniversaries of Communist Infamy” and “Anniversaries of Freedom
Outside the Iron Curtain,” 7 May 1953, in DDEL, C. D. Jackson Records, Box 4, Folder: Lodge;
unsigned memorandum, “COSMOS,” 13 July 1953, enclosure to Richard Hirsch memorandum to
Byron K. Enyart (acting assistant director for plans, PSB), “COSMOS,” 27 August 1953, in DDEL,
PSB, Box 23, Folder PSB 334 UN (9).
16. Charles R. Norberg (acting deputy assistant director, Office of Coordination, PSB), memorandum
to Wallace Irwin, “UN Project,” 1 June 1953, in DDEL, PSB, Box 23, Folder PSB 334 UN (1); Arthur
M. Cox, memorandum to Mr. Browne, “Mr. Irwin’s Attached Draft Paper on the Lodge Project,” 2
June 1953, in DDEL, PSB, Box 23, Folder PSB 334 UN (2); and Arthur M. Cox, memorandum
to Mr. Mallory Browne, “Mr. Irwin’s Attached Draft Paper on the Lodge Project,” 3 June 1953,
in DDEL, PSB, Box 23, Folder PSB 334 UN (2). See also Edward P. Lilly (PSB), memorandum to
H. S. Craig and W. Irwin, Jr., “Lodge’s Human Rights Project,” 21 May 1953, in DDEL, PSB, Box 23,
Folder PSB 334 UN (1); Edward P. Lilly, memorandum, “Lodge Project within the United Nations,”
enclosure to Lilly memorandum to Wallace Irwin, “The Lodge Program in the U.N.,” 14 July 1953,
in DDEL, PSB, Box 23, Folder PSB 334 UN (5); and Lilly, memorandum to Enyart, “Mr. Irwin’s
Memoranda on the Lodge Project,” 3 September 1953, in DDEL, White House Office Files, National
Security Council, OCB Sec, Box 4, Folder: Lodge’s Human Rights Project (2).

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gave an implicit nod to Cox’s assertion that Communism was not the bo-
geyman for the rest of the world that it was for the United States. However,
rather than advocating a new direction for U.S. policy he suggested instead
that more needed to be done to educate the rest of the world about “why com-
munism is so repugnant to national freedoms everywhere.” “The continuing
efforts of the Soviets to take over one small nation after another,” he argued,
“represent[ed] . . . the greatest and only important road block to the ultimate
achievement of a secure independence by any dependent or newly-liberated
people.” The United States should thus emphasize the moral differences be-
tween the Soviet effort to “stamp Kremlin control on every nation it can
subvert” and the “lasting liberty for dependent or other newly-liberated peo-
ple” that lay at the heart of the U.S. international vision. Although Sears
acknowledged that more rapid progress was required in the drive toward in-
dependent statehood for the non-self-governing territories, he warned against
“disorderly progress” toward national self-determination, which merely played
into Moscow’s hands.17 For the emerging anti-colonial majority, that caveat
came to be seen as nothing more than a smokescreen for U.S. support of the
West European colonial empires, something that consequently compromised
U.S. credibility with the very countries the campaign against Red Colonialism
was designed to sway.
Apparently blind to the weaknesses of their case against Red Colonialism,
U.S. officials introduced the new propaganda and policy ideas in a variety of
forums. In a speech to the UN General Assembly on 11 March 1953, Ambas-
sador Lodge cautioned the developing world against believing Soviet promises
to support self-determination. “Imperialism” and “world domination,” he as-
serted, were the Kremlin’s real goals, leading to “tyranny” at home and efforts
to “block the irresistible onward march of the human race . . . [toward] in-
creased human rights and increased belief in the dignity of the individual”
elsewhere. Two months later, James J. Wadsworth, the deputy U.S. repre-
sentative to the UN, denounced Soviet domination of the East European
states when speaking before the annual convention of the General Federa-
tion of Women’s Clubs. “The speeches [at the UN] of the five Communist
delegates of the Soviet bloc—full of claims that can’t be verified and charges
that everyone knows are false—are almost identical,” he proclaimed, a fact

17. Mason Sears (U.S. representative on the UN Trusteeship Council), memorandum, “United States
Policy on Colonial Issues,” 18 August 1953, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1952–1954, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), Vol. III,
pp. 1162–1163 (hereinafter referred to as FRUS, with appropriate year and volume numbers); and
Sears, memorandum, “Notes on United States Approach to Colonial Issues,” 22 September 1953, in
FRUS, 1952–1954, Vol. III, pp. 1165–1166.

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that in his mind provided daily confirmation of “the meaning of Commu-

nist captivity.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in an address to the
Congress of Industrial Organizations on 18 November, emphasized the moral
dimension of U.S. foreign policy, particularly in contrast to the “despotism”
and “disregard of the rights of man” that characterized “Soviet imperialism.”
Although Dulles did not deny the role that Western colonialism played in in-
ternational affairs, Dulles insisted that that phenomenon was “transitory and
self-liquidating” by design, a contention he buttressed by noting that “during
the last 10 years 600 million people peacefully won independence from the
West.” During that same period, “a comparable number were pressed into
Communist servitude,” with little prospect of freedom until the inevitable
collapse of the Soviet system. Where Dulles only touched on “the new So-
viet colonialism,” Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian,
and African Affairs Henry A. Byroade had made that the subject of a long,
detailed address to the World Affairs Council of Northern California some
two weeks earlier. “Masquerad[ing] under the guise of nationalism itself,” By-
roade alleged, the new Soviet “imperialism has begun to extend a clutching
hand to every quarter of the globe, . . . persuad[ing] people to surrender all
hope of independence . . . and establishing a system of slavery.” Dependent
and newly independent peoples, the assistant secretary warned, must look to
the hundreds of millions of people “enslaved by the new colonialism centered
in Moscow” as a cautionary tale of their own futures should they fall prey
to “the fatal lure of the new imperialism,” which would ensnare them in “an
age of slavery infinitely more miserable than they have ever known before.”
“The real choice today,” Byroade declared, “lies between continued progress
toward self-determination,” albeit on an “evolutionary” basis, “and surrender
to the new Communist imperialism.” To ensure that newly independent states
made the right choice, Byroade underscored the importance of letting them
know “by every word and action of our Government . . . that the old colonial
relationship is dead and that it will stay dead” and that the United States was
committed to “encourag[ing] the possibilities inherent in a new relationship
based on voluntary cooperation among independent nations.”18

18. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (U.S. delegate to the United Nations), “Soviet Imperialism: Motivated by
Fear of Own People” (speech before the UN General Assembly, 11 March 1953), reprinted in Vital
Speeches of the Day, 1 April 1953, in DDEL, Administration Series, Box 24, Folder: Lodge 52–53
(4); James J. Wadsworth (deputy U.S. representative to the UN), “The Faith of Our Fathers and the
Lives of Our Sons” (address to the 62nd Annual Convention of the General Federation of Women’s
Clubs, 28 May 1953), United States Mission to the United Nations Press Release 1715, 27 May 1953,
in U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Record Group (RG) 59, Files of
Benjamin Gerig, Director of the Office of Dependent Area Affairs, 1948–1954, Lot 60 D 257, Box 18;

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Despite Byroade’s appreciation for squaring words and deeds, the United
States by the mid-1950s was suffering from a lack of credibility on the matter of
demonstrating a true commitment to national self-determination. Although
U.S. officials saw membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) as a Cold War necessity, the leaders of national liberation movements
saw NATO as basically tarring the United States with the brush of West
European colonialism in the same way that, as Justin Hart has noted, the
Marshall Plan did.19 Nor was the matter helped by Washington’s effort to
assist the French in returning to Indochina after 1945 and its subsequent
assumption of the mantle of counterrevolution there in 1954. U.S. support
for the coups d’état in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 also called into
question the U.S. government’s commitment to self-determination. Taken
together, these elements of U.S. foreign policy suggested a preoccupation with
the East-West struggle and gave the impression that the U.S. commitment to
national self-determination was little more than lip service.20
If coming through with action that supported self-determination was
difficult, U.S. officials had an easier time with words, as revealed in the
continuing campaign against Red Colonialism outside the UN. Using pam-
phlets, films, and other media, USIA sought to educate other countries about
what Washington considered the imperialist nature of Soviet policies in the
Baltic States, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. For example, as Laura Bel-
monte has outlined, the booklet Who Is the Imperialist? “listed population
and mileage figures for all the territories and nations annexed by the USSR
beginning in 1939.” U.S. information experts hoped that by shining a spot-
light on Moscow’s own record of imperial conquest—demonstrating in the
process the expansion of the Soviet “empire” at the very time the Western
colonial empires were contracting—the hundreds of thousands of copies of
this booklet along with similar titles distributed worldwide would counter
Soviet claims that the United States and its allies were imperialist. U.S. of-
ficials’ determination to gain the upper hand on the issue of colonialism
through such an initiative points up their fears—which were not entirely

John Foster Dulles, “The Moral Initiative” (address to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 18
November 1953), Department of State Bulletin 29 (30 November 1953), pp. 741–744; and Henry
A. Byroade, “The World’s Colonies and Ex-Colonies: A Challenge to America” (address to the World
Affairs Council of Northern California, 31 October 1953), Department of State Bulletin, Vol. 29 (16
November 1953), pp. 655–656, 660.
19. See Hart, Empire of Ideas, p. 163.
20. See, for example, Hunt, “The Decolonization Puzzle.” For indications that some U.S. officials
recognized the difficulty of their position, see Parker, “Cold War II,” pp. 885–889.

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groundless—that Soviet propaganda about the evils of Western colonialism

might gain sway.21
By the summer of 1955 the U.S. Congress had joined the anti-colonial
chorus with a concurrent resolution titled “Opposing Colonialism and Com-
munist Imperialism.” Opening with the declaration, “Whereas Communist
imperialism and other forms of colonialism constitute a denial of the inalien-
able rights of man,” the resolution recommended continued U.S. “support
[for] other peoples in their efforts to achieve self-government or independence
under circumstances which will enable them to assume an equal station among
the free nations of the world.” The resolution’s proclamation at a time when
the Soviet Union was railing against the U.S.-led West made it part of the
Cold War, a piece of ideological propaganda akin to the broad-based cam-
paign against Red Colonialism. The Cold War context of the resolution was
evident when congressional committees urging passage of the resolution cited
the State Department’s assertion that “Communist colonialism represent[ed]
a far greater threat to individual and group rights and liberties than traditional
colonialism” and that Communist regimes wanted “to create the impression
that the United States [was] an imperialist power and that the only true an-
ticolonial power [was] the Soviet Union,” when “the truth, of course, [was]
precisely the opposite.”22
Yet even as these initiatives gave the impression of a U.S. propensity to
impose a Cold War framework on the question of decolonization, the Non-
Aligned Movement, which sought to eschew alignment with either side in the
East-West conflict, was taking shape at the April 1955 Bandung Conference
that brought together 29 Asian and African states to consider “problems of
common interest and concern” and discuss “ways and means by which their
peoples could achieve fuller economic, cultural and political co-operation.”
After almost a week of spirited discussion, the conferees issued a final com-
muniqué that covered a wide range of issues, including the broadly stated
“Problems of Dependent Peoples.” The communiqué branded “the subjection
of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation” “a denial of
fundamental human rights,” “contrary to the Charter of the United Nations,”
and “an impediment to the promotion of world peace and co-operation” and
“declar[ed] that colonialism in all its manifestations [was] an evil which should

21. Belmonte, Selling the American Way, p. 102.

22. H. Con. Res. 149, 84th Cong., 1st Sess. (31 May 1955); U.S. Congress, House of Representatives,
Committee on Foreign Affairs, Expressing the Sense of Congress on the Maintenance of Traditional United
States Policy in Opposition to Colonialism and Communist Imperialism, 84th Cong., 1st Sess., 1955,
H. Rep. 897, p. 2; and U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Opposing Colonialism
and Communist Imperialism, 84th Cong., 1st Sess., 1955, S. Rep. 855, p. 2.

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speedily be brought to an end.”23 Although Ambassador Lodge lauded the

Asian and African states for having “condemn[ed] all kinds of colonialism—
including, of course, the communist variety,” U.S. hopes that this meant
support from the Non-Aligned Movement in the propaganda war on Soviet
colonialism at the UN went unrealized.24

Decolonization, UN Activism, and Resolution

1514 (XV)

In the meantime, colonial issues assumed increasing importance in the UN

General Assembly as its membership grew considerably after 1955, a devel-
opment that did not work in favor of the United States, as Mark Mazower
has noted.25 Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Ceylon, Finland, Hun-
gary, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Portugal, Romania, and Spain
were admitted in 1955; Japan, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia in 1956; Ghana
and the Federation of Malaya in 1957; and Guinea in 1958. Among the
new members during this period were four Soviet-bloc countries, all of which
were certain to assume an anti-colonial stance, as were the dozen states from
Asia and Africa. The most significant growth in the organization, however,
came in 1960, when seventeen countries, all but one in Africa, became mem-
bers: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Congo
(Léopoldville), Cyprus, Dahomey, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Malagasy Republic,
Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Togo, and Upper Volta.26 Because the
new members saw their admission to the UN as confirmation of their statehood
and were determined to use their membership to work for causes important
to them, U.S. officials expected them to downplay Cold War matters such
as “the question of Berlin and of the unification of Germany, the problem
of the Eastern European oppressed people [a direct slap at the Red Colo-
nialism campaign], and the entire issue of East-West relations” and to focus
much more attention on matters that pitted the haves against the have-nots,

23. Bandung Conference Final Communiqué, 24 April 1955.

24. Henry Cabot Lodge, “An Informed America and a Free World,” Address to the Benjamin Franklin
Magazine Awards Dinner, 11 May 1955, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Henry Cabot
Lodge Papers, Box 25, Folder: UN Speeches and Press, 1955. For reaction within the Eisenhower
administration to Bandung, including debate on how best to respond, see also Parker, “Cold War II,”
pp. 881–883.
25. See Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin Press, 2012),
pp. 258–272.
26. For UN membership information, see http://www.un.org/en/members/growth.shtml.

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 Exposing “Red Colonialism”

such as “colonialism, racial and national discrimination, raising of living and

education standards, . . . and overall economic and social development.”27
By mid-1960, as U.S. officials assessed the consequences of the changing
composition of the UN, they professed to recognize that “the North-South
contrast rather than the East-West conflict will influence more and more the
attitudes and voting of the majority of UN members” and that the U.S. ap-
proach to the organization had to respond accordingly, particularly when it
came to “the colonial issue,” which posed “one of the most difficult problems
in the U.S. relationship with the new nations.” Yet rather than adopting a
vigorous defense of nationalist aspirations or pledging support for indepen-
dence movements, as Byroade had recommended in 1953, they continued
their efforts to reveal the hollowness of Soviet claims to support independence
and self-government. “Two particular aspects of the red threat,” the President’s
Committee on Information Activities Abroad noted, “namely Communist Im-
perialism and Communist Subversion, can be presented even to the neutralist
and underdeveloped as concretely imperilling [sic] their own external and in-
ternal security.”28 The administration also focused intractably on a negative
anti-Soviet campaign instead of a positive pro-U.S. one, an approach Edward
Lilly and Charles Norberg had unsuccessfully warned against in 1953 and
one that gave the impression that U.S. policy was motivated primarily, even
exclusively, by the Cold War.29
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s introduction of a “Declaration on
the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” to the
Fifteenth General Assembly in September 1960 opened the door to further
U.S. attacks against Soviet colonialism, as well as accusations that Moscow
was itself using the UN for Cold War gain. Khrushchev’s declaration began
with a long diatribe against the evils of Western colonialism that drew heavily
on Marxist precepts to denounce the Western powers’ “shameful” history of

27. President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad, “The United Nations as a Public Relations
Forum,” n.d. [Fall 1960], in DDEL, Sprague Committee Records, Box 21, Folder: PCIAA #18 (2).
See also W. Kotschnig (OES), memorandum, “Meeting the Communist Challenge in the Economic
and Social Field: United States Posture and Policies in the United Nations and Other Multilateral
Organizations,” enclosure to Kotschnig memorandum to Francis Wilcox, Woodruf Wallner, William
D. Cargo, and Franklyn W. Phillips, 8 June 1960, in NARA, RG 59, Subject Files, Assistant Secretary
for International Organization Affairs, Box 9, Folder: Soviet Use of United Nations System; and
“Discussion Paper on New Independent Countries and U.S. Policy,” n.d. [Summer 1960], in DDEL,
White House Office Files, OSANSA, Box 6, Folder: New Independent Countries. See also David
A. Kay, The New Nations in the United Nations, 1960–1967 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1970), pp. 20–22, 45–50.
28. President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad, “The United Nations as a Public Relations
Forum.” See also Parker, “Cold War II,” pp. 885–889.
29. On this final point, see Hart, Empire of Ideas, p. 141.

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 Heiss

“exploiting the indigenous population[s]” of their colonies “and plundering

the[ir] natural wealth.” “The colonial system,” it maintained, “deliberately and
artificially perpetuates the economic backwardness of the colonies, hindering
their industrialization and the rational utilization of their resources.”30 Moving
from ideology to present-day conditions, Khrushchev went on to claim that
“many of the most important foci of the present international tension—in
the Middle East and the Far East, in Africa and in Latin America—are to a
considerable degree the outgrowth of colonialist policy. Colonies and other so-
called ‘non-self-governing’ territories are often used as military bases of foreign
Powers, as proving grounds for atomic tests.”
This critique was aimed predominantly at the United States, which by
this time had jettisoned its “formal” empire but had emerged during the
fifteen years since the end of World War II as the foremost exponent of
the informal empire of influence. Khrushchev also decried the control the
U.S.-led “military-colonialist North Atlantic bloc” exerted over much of the
developing world, and he exhorted the other members of the UN to rise up
against that control. To that end, Khrushchev issued three “demands”: (1)
“complete independence and freedom” for all remaining trust and non-self-
governing territories; (2) the elimination of “all strongholds of colonialism in
the form of possessions and leased areas in the territories of other States”; and
(3) strict “respect for the sovereign rights and territorial integrity of all States
without exception.” And lest the members of the UN refuse to act on the
Soviet proposal, Khrushchev closed with the claim that “it is the sacred duty of
each State and each Government to promote an early and full implementation
of this Declaration,” thereby making the “complete and final elimination
of the colonial regime in all its forms and manifestations” an international
responsibility.31
U.S. officials tried to undercut Khrushchev’s declaration, depicting the
Soviet Union itself as a colonial power. “Inasmuch as there will be [a] clear ma-
jority in [the General Assembly] for any statement condemning colonialism,”

30. “Soviet Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, Submitted
by the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at the 869th
Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly,” 23 September 1960, in “Agenda Item 87: Declaration on
the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” Annexes (XV) 87, pp. 2–7.
31. Ibid., pp. 2–7. Additional Soviet thinking regarding colonialism may be found in “Letter Dated
21 October 1960 from the Permanent Representative of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the
United Nations to the President of the General Assembly,” transmitting “Speech Delivered by N. S.
Khrushchev at a Meeting of Working People of Moscow Held on 20 October 1960 and Devoted to
the Work of the Soviet Delegation at the Fifteenth Session of the United Nations General Assembly,”
26 October 1960, A/4550. For a detailed discussion of Khrushchev’s declaration and subsequent
developments see Kay, New Nations, pp. 150–172.

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 Exposing “Red Colonialism”

Secretary of State Christian Herter advised the U.S. delegation to the UN,
“[the] best course we can follow is to seek [to] turn [the] declaration against
[the] Soviets themselves by portraying them in true colonialist colors.” “We
should not neglect [any] opportunity” to “condemn Communist colonialism
to [the] fullest,” he instructed, “pointing out [that the] Soviet Union is not
only [the] largest existing colonial power, but [the] only colonial regime that is
still expanding and which has never granted independence or self-government
to any subject people.” In an effort to avoid the appearance of a strictly su-
perpower set-to, U.S. officials were determined to enlist other delegations in
the attack on Soviet imperialism. “It [was] important,” the State Department
asserted, to “secure as much support as possible . . . for [the] proposition that
[the] USSR remain[ed a] major colonial power while other former colonial
empires have been largely liquidated.” To help this effort along, the depart-
ment was prepared to supply other UN delegations with materials outlining
Soviet domination of the Baltic States, Central Asia, and even Eastern Europe,
although consultation with other delegations prompted State Department
officials to judge this last area off-limits.32
As U.S. officials had hoped, General Assembly discussion of the prospect
of issuing a declaration on the ending of colonialism, which commenced on
28 November 1960, included numerous criticisms of Soviet colonialism, both
implicit and explicit. For example, the Colombian representative Antonio
Alvarez Restrepo noted that “while political colonialism, for the greater good
of humanity, moves rapidly towards its close . . . another type of colonialism
has arisen to take its place”: “the colonialism of souls” that “keeps watch over
man’s conscience, suppresses his freedoms and utterly destroys the life of the
spirit.” Frank Aiken of Ireland and Turgut Menemencioğlu of Turkey also
issued veiled condemnations of Soviet colonialism. The former noted with
dismay that although many peoples who lacked the “right to enjoy a full
measure of independence” had never had such a right, “others—and their
fate is not less tragic—had their independence and lost it.” Menemencioğlu
echoed Aiken’s sentiment, lamenting that despite the “happy trend” of peoples
attaining “freedom and independence through evolutionary processes . . . quite

32. U.S. embassy, Moscow tel. 617 to U.S. del. to UN, 6 October 1960, in NARA, RG 59, 321/410–
660; and State Department tel. 804 to U.S. del to UN, 1 November 1960, in NARA, RG 59,
321.4/10–2560. See also State Department tel. 502 to U.S. del to UN, 26 September 1960, in NARA,
RG 59, 320/9–2660; U.S. del to UN tel. 1011 to State Department, 14 October 1960, in NARA,
RG 59, 321.4/10–1460; and State Department policy information statement IO-78, “The Colonial
Issue in the United Nations General Assembly,” 28 November 1960, enclosure to Acting Secretary
of State C. Douglas Dillon circular instruction CA-4808, 29 November 1960, in NARA, RG 59,
511.00/11–2960.

95
 Heiss

a number of tragic cases in the opposite direction have existed in recent

years and some continue to exist.” Other states were much more direct in
condemning the USSR. Honduras’s Francisco Milla Bermúdez declared that
“the nation least morally qualified to propose [a declaration on the ending of
colonialism was] the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Guatemala’s Alberto
Herrarte expressed much the same sentiment, questioning the legitimacy of
the Soviet Union’s introduction of the issue insofar as Moscow “has obdurately
opposed any consideration of the case of the nations which have fallen victim
to Russian neo-colonialism.” “In condemning all forms of colonialism,” he
professed, the Guatemalan delegation “also condemns all its disguised forms,
imposed upon countries which once were independent, . . . countries in which
respect for the dignity and freedom of the individual and for great spiritual
values has been suppressed.” Statements such as these resulted in part from U.S.
lobbying behind the scenes and supported Washington’s desire that Moscow
not take control of the anti-colonial cause at the UN.33 That they all came
from states closely tied to the United States demonstrated the limits of the
campaign against Red Colonialism.
A second U.S. line of attack focused on countering the Soviet declaration
on ending colonialism with an alternative proposal, preferably to be drafted
by the Asian and African states (though possibly with Western assistance or
input), that condemned both the sort of colonialism the Soviet Union had
practiced in the Baltic states and Central Asia and “the more commonly experi-
enced mercantile colonialism which has been primarily of European origin.” A
balanced declaration against all forms of colonialism, argued John M. Steeves
of the State Department’s Far Eastern Division, had the best chance of secur-
ing broad support within the General Assembly, which was certain to vote
overwhelmingly for a general anti-colonial statement. Such an approach also
fit well with the general desire of the African and Asian states to prevent
the sort of politicization of the colonial issue that characterized the Soviet
draft declaration. The Afro-Asian bloc at the UN was anxious to take the
lead itself in drafting an anti-colonial resolution that avoided outright Cold

33. Antonio Alvarez Restrepo (Colombia), remarks to 929th plenary meeting of the General Assembly,
30 November 1960, A/PV.929, para. 81, 83; Frank Aiken (Ireland), remarks to 935th plenary meeting
of the General Assembly, 5 December 1960, A/PV.935, para. 91; Turgut Menemencioğlu (Turkey),
remarks to 932nd plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 2 December 1960, A/PV.932, para. 27;
Francisco Milla Bermudez (Honduras), remarks to 930th plenary meeting of the General Assembly,
1 December 1960, A/PV.930, para. 17; and Alberto Herrarte (Guatemala), remarks to 933rd plenary
meeting of the General Assembly, 2 December 1960, A/PV.933, para. 137. See also Akira Miyazaki
(Japan), remarks to 933rd plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 2 December 1960, A/PV.933,
para. 90–91; and Lorenzo Sumulong (Philippines), remarks to 933rd plenary meeting of the General
Assembly, 2 December 1960, A/PV.933, para. 177.

96
 Exposing “Red Colonialism”

War divisions and set about this task with enthusiasm and dedication even
as Soviet diplomats tried to claim that “this [was] their item.”34 Borrowing
heavily from the Bandung final communiqué of 1955, the draft resolution
ultimately cosponsored by 43 Asian and African states was an effort to elim-
inate explicit Cold War considerations from the issue of declaring an end to
colonialism and to focus instead on the broad goal of seeing the fulfillment
of the UN Charter’s pledge that all peoples deserved the chance to govern
themselves. Condemning “colonialism in all its forms and manifestations,”
the draft resolution avoided the shrill tone of the Soviet declaration, made no
mention of dismantling foreign bases, and did not call for specific timetables
or target dates. Instead, it spoke broadly about self-government and inde-
pendence as “fundamental human rights,” affirmed the right of all people to
“freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social
and cultural development,” declared that “inadequacy of political, economic,
social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying
independence,” and directed that “all armed action or repressive measures of
all kinds directed against dependent peoples shall cease.”35
The U.S. delegation to the UN strongly supported this more balanced
approach to the colonial problem and worked behind the scenes to shape
the language of the draft resolution. Numerous delegates, even many who
expressed their appreciation for the Soviet effort to bring the issue of ending
colonialism before the General Assembly, nevertheless favored the Afro-Asian
draft resolution instead. Mohieddine Fekini of Libya, for example, asserted
that the draft resolution’s sponsors were motivated by the desire “simply to
ensure that this question was considered objectively and without reference to
matters irrelevant to its essential purposes,” such as the superpower conflict.36

34. John M. Steeves (FE) memorandum to Wallner (IO), “Soviet Draft Declaration on the Granting
of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” 10 October 1960, RG 59, 321.4/10–1060; U.S.
del to UN tel. 1518 to State Department, 24 November 1960, RG 59, 321.4/11–2460. See also James
Wadsworth (U.S. del to UN) tel. 926 to State Department, 7 October 1960, RG 59, 320–10/760;
UN tel. 1117 to State Department, 25 October 1960, RG 59, 321.4/10–2560; Wadsworth (U.S. del
to UN) tel. 1138 to State Department, 26 October 1960, RG 59, 321.4/10–2660; State Department
tel. 804 to U.S. del to UN, 1 November 1960, RG 59, 321.4/10–2560; Wadsworth (U.S. del to UN)
tel. 1547 to State Department, 26 November 1960, RG 59, 321.4/11–2660; and State Department
policy information statement IO–78, “The Colonial Issue in the United Nations General Assembly,”
28 November 1960, enclosure to Dillon circular instruction CA-4808, 29 November 1960, RG 59,
511.00/11–2960.
35. “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples: Afghanistan,
Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan,
Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Togo, Tunisia, and
Turkey: Draft Resolution,” 29 November 1960, A/L.323.
36. Mohieddine Fekini (Libya), remarks to 929th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 30
November 1960, A/PV.929, para. 28.

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 Heiss

Tunisia’s Mongi Slim, whose delegation was among the more than two dozen
original sponsors of the draft resolution, was even more direct in expressing the
widespread displeasure many of the Asian and African delegations felt at the
prospect that the drive to end colonialism would be subsumed under the Cold
War. He cautioned, “We do not want to give this debate” or, by extension,
this whole process of decolonization, an ideological character, which would link
it to the struggle at present going on between East and West. . . . If this debate
took on an east-west, partisan, ideological character, we should be liable to get
off the subject, to introduce emotion and to make the question a propaganda
issue.37

For the cosponsors of the draft resolution the matter of ending colonial-
ism was much more than mere propaganda; it was a matter of “exceptional
historical importance,” as Iranian representative Mehdi Vakil noted, and Gen-
eral Assembly action on it had to be limited “to those aspects of the question
having an essential and exclusive connexion [sic] with the problem of colonial-
ism.” Although U.S. officials viewed the draft resolution’s intent to eradicate
“colonialism in all its forms and manifestations” as a victory for their efforts
to spur UN action against Soviet colonialism—an explicitly Cold War goal—
the resolution’s sponsors took a different view, choosing such broad language
specifically to remove Cold War considerations from the matter of decolo-
nization. Reconciling the two positions proved that the devil is indeed in the
detail.38
The submission of two proposals to end colonialism created a minor fracas
within the General Assembly. Despite the hopes of the Afro-Asian bloc that
the Soviets would either withdraw their measure or agree that it could be
voted on second, the USSR refused on both scores, earning the opprobrium
of the 40-some sponsors of the draft resolution by insisting that, because
their proposal had been submitted first, it should be voted on first. Given
the significant criticism of the Soviet declaration’s contentious tone voiced
during General Assembly debate, its failure to win approval should not have
been surprising. For final voting purposes, the declaration was divided into
two parts, one comprising the long discursive portions containing the harsh,

37. Mongi Slim (Tunisia), remarks to 929th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 30 November
1960, A/PV.929, para. 28.
38. Mehdi Vakil (Iran), remarks to 926th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 28 November
1960, A/PV.926, para. 139–140. See also Dillon (acting secstate) tel. 1006 to U.S. del to UN, 30
November 1960, in NARA, RG 321.4/11–2860; U.S. del to UN tel. 1616 to State Department, 2
December 1960, in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/12–260; and U.S. del. to UN tel. 1640 to State Department,
6 December 1960, in DDEL, Whitman File, Dulles-Herter Series, Box 13, Folder: CH December
1960 (2).

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 Exposing “Red Colonialism”

accusatory anti-Western language, and the second the three “demands” for
ending colonialism. Both were rejected handily. Reaction to the 43-power
draft resolution was much more positive, and, as its sponsors had hoped, it
won General Assembly approval without a dissenting vote. That is not to say
that all delegations voted to approve it, however: Nine, including Great Britain
and the United States, abstained.39
The U.S. decision to abstain on the 43-power resolution reveals much
about both the Eisenhower administration’s thinking on international in-
volvement in the non-self-governing territories as well as the importance of
maintaining good relations with the major Western European countries, par-
ticularly Great Britain, and the difficulty of squaring the U.S. relationship
with Western Europe with the growing importance of the developing world.
The decision to abstain had not been easy for the administration. After a great
deal of internal consideration and input from the U.S. mission to the UN, the
initial inclination was to vote in the affirmative and issue a detailed explanation
qualifying U.S. support for each paragraph of the draft resolution. Although
no U.S. policymaker believed that the draft resolution was ideal—Secretary of
State Christian Herter described it as “exceedingly badly worded”—all agreed
that it was preferable to the Soviet declaration, in no small part because “it
[was] a declaratory resolution and [did] not call upon the respective states to
do other than abide by the Charter provisions.” The 43-power resolution was
also a product of U.S. behind-the-scenes lobbying with the Afro-Asian bloc,
the members of which would likely not respond favorably to a lack of U.S.
support when the resolution came to a vote. Finally, the measure was certain
to win approval by a huge margin, and Washington’s failure to join with the
majority might redound negatively on its overall world position. Despite these
compelling reasons to support the draft resolution, President Dwight Eisen-
hower succumbed in the end to direct pressure from British Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan, who dismissed the resolution as having “no connection
with reality” and issued a plaintive plea that Britain and the United States
“stand together.” Reluctant to go against the country’s “strongest ally,” partic-
ularly when U.S. officials had themselves noted so many shortcomings in the
draft resolution, Eisenhower instructed the U.S. mission to abstain.40

39. Roll-call voting records and delegation statements on the anti-colonialism measures may be followed
in verbatim record 947, plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 14 December 1960, A/PV.947,
para. 1–163. The other states abstaining were Australia, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, France,
Portugal, Spain, and South Africa.
40. Record of telephone calls, Thursday, 8 December 1960, in DDEL, Christian Herter Papers, Misc
Memos, Box 10, Folder: Pres Tel Calls, 7/1959–1/20/1961; Secretary of State Herter, memorandum

99
 Heiss

In choosing to abstain rather than vote yes, the administration, and par-
ticularly Eisenhower himself, decided that maintaining harmonious relations
with key allies, and particularly Great Britain, was more important than the
symbolic step of supporting an end to colonialism at the UN. Because the
resolution was bound to pass handily even without U.S. backing, the practical
effect of the vote was nil. But the “audible gasp of surprise followed by [a]
diminishing murmur of whispered comments” that erupted after U.S. rep-
resentative James J. Wadsworth cast the abstention made clear the symbolic
importance of the U.S. failure to vote yes. Wadsworth warned the State De-
partment straightaway of the likely repercussions of siding with the “colonial
powers which even we recognize as such” over the “Asians and Africans.” The
“immediate, strong, sometimes emotional, and invariably negative” reaction to
the abstention justified his fears, as he reported in comments relayed to Wash-
ington. “How could you vote this way?” asked Ghana’s Alex Quaison-Sackey.
“Are you trying to commit political suicide?” wondered Nigeria’s Chukuemeka
Okeke Ifeagwu. Turkey’s Menemencioğlu called the vote “unbelievable and in-
comprehensible.” Adding to the general disbelief was a clear appreciation for
the way the vote played into Soviet hands in the General Assembly. Liberia’s
T. O. Dosumu-Johnson lamented that the United States had “handed [a]
propaganda victory to [the] USSR without reason,” while Tunisia’s Zouhir
Chelli predicted that the vote would give “ammunition to [the] USSR across
the board.”41 Washington’s concern that the abstention would have deleteri-
ous effects on the U.S. position abroad was such that the State Department
felt compelled to send an instructional circular to all diplomatic and consular
posts emphasizing “that our abstention was based on the language and certain
concepts of the draft resolution and did not represent any change in our basic
position on human freedom, or our support for the provisions of the Charter
of the United Nations relating to the advancement of dependent peoples to

for A. J. Goodpaster, 8 December 1960, in DDEL, Whitman File, Dulles-Herter Series, Box 13,
Folder: CH December 1960 (2); Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to President Dwight Eisenhower,
9 December 1960, in FRUS, 1958–1960, Vol. VII, pt. 2, p. 876; and record of telephone calls,
Friday, 9 December 1960, in DDEL, Herter Papers, Misc Memos, Box 10, Folder: Pres Tel Calls,
7/1959–1/20/1961. See also U.S. mission to UN tel. 1640 to State Department, 6 December 1960,
in DDEL, Whitman File, Dulles-Herter Series, Box 13, Folder: CH December 1960 (2); Secretary of
State Herter tel. 1093 to U.S. mission to UN, 8 December 1960, in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/12–660;
Secretary of State Herter tel. 1116 to U.S. mission to UN, 10 December 1960, in NARA, RG 59,
321.4/12–1060; and Eisenhower to Macmillan, 10 December 1960, in FRUS, 1958–1960, Vol. VII,
pt. 2, p. 876.
41. Wadsworth (U.S. mission to UN) tel. 1775 to State Department, 15 December 1960, in NARA,
RG 59, 321.4/12–1560; and Wadsworth (U.S. mission to UN) tel. 1744 to State Department, 14
December 1960, in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/12–1460.

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self-government or independence.”42 Reaction to the U.S. abstention also sig-

naled to the incoming Kennedy administration the importance the developing
world placed on a firm anti-colonial stance.

The “World of Free Choice”

The administration of John F. Kennedy was determined from the start to

move beyond the public relations fiasco of the U.S. abstention on Resolution
1514 (XV) and demonstrate unequivocal opposition to colonialism, a position
that reflected Kennedy’s own commitment to anti-colonialism while in the
U.S. Senate.43 The administration was also intent on formulating a strong
anti-Soviet message at the UN that hit hard on the issue of colonialism by
highlighting the differences between the West and East while downplaying
the argument that the Soviet Union was imperialist or colonialist. That is,
it resurrected the Truman Doctrine’s free world/slave world dichotomy and
set out to paint the West as a land of freedom, opportunity, and choice, in
contrast to the East, where oppression, despair, and lack of choice were the
norm. Secretary of State Dean Rusk laid out this new approach in testimony
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 31 May 1961. The United
States, he proclaimed, sought “above all, a world of free choice in which a great
diversity of nations, each faithful to its own traditions and its own genius, will
learn to respect the ground rules of human survival. . . . Against the world of
coercion, we affirm the world of choice.”44 Special Assistant to the President
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., elaborated on the “world of free choice” theme
to Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy in June.
“The phrase,” he claimed, “implies human dignity, political freedom, self help
[sic], cultural independence, etc. [and] should strike a particularly responsive
chord in the underdeveloped world.” The twelve million people who had fled
Communist-controlled areas since World War II and the recent construction of
the Berlin Wall gave credence to U.S. claims regarding the repression of Soviet
rule. Such realities therefore became part of the new U.S. propaganda effort
to deflate Soviet claims of supporting self-government and independence for

42. Department of State instruction CA-5377, “US Position on Colonialism Resolution at 15th
General Assembly,” 20 December 1960, in NARA, RG 59, 320/12–2060.
43. See, for example, Mazower, Governing the World, p. 264; and Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War
and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001), p. 138.
44. Rusk statement to Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Building the Frontiers of Freedom,”
Department of State Bulletin, Vol. 44 (19 June 1961), p. 948.

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 Heiss

colonial peoples by pointing directly to the oppression inherent in Communist

societies, an effort that would become full-blown once the Sixteenth General
Assembly got under way.45
The Kennedy administration planned its activist agenda regarding colo-
nialism at the UN against changing realities for the organization, which grew
to 103 members in 1961 with the admission of Mauritania, Mongolia, Sierra
Leone, and Tanganyika and was likely to begin moving beyond the goal of
securing independence for non-self-governing territories toward a focus on
helping new countries build effective domestic institutions, human rights, and
similar issues.46 Officials in Washington were of two minds concerning the
consequences of these changes for the United States. Allan Evans of the State
Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research spoke for those who wor-
ried that as the UN became “a vehicle for the underprivileged and pigmented
to get back at the privileged and white” it would sanction “an era of ‘soaking
the rich’” that would drive home to the United States and its Western allies
“that we whites were the distinct minority in the world.” Others expressed a
more sanguine view, arguing that although the UN of 1961 was very different
from the organization the United States had helped to found in 1945, this
was not necessarily a cause for trepidation. The new administration’s “open
world” propaganda effort at the UN was expected to demonstrate what the
U.S.-led Western system had to offer the developing world and serve to defuse
anti-U.S. sentiment. By working at the UN, which policymakers in the State
Department’s Bureau of International Affairs saw as a “loom on which the
western world and the Southern Hemisphere [could] ‘weave [a] fabric of com-
mon interests’ so wide and so strong that it [could] one day contain—and
then suffocate—the East-West struggle,” the United States could bridge the
gap between North and South and ultimately weaken the Soviet position.
Officials in the Bureau of International Affairs also believed that the United
States could successfully “mobilize the moderate elements in the [General]

45. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., memorandum to the President’s Special Assistant for National
Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy, “The Rusk-Morrow Memorandum on ‘An Effective Coun-
tertheme to Peaceful Coexistence,’” 19 June 1961, in FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XXV, no. 124,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961–63v25/d124. See also National Security Coun-
cil Action Memorandum No. 61, “An Effective Countertheme to ‘Peaceful Coexistence,’” 14 July 1961,
in FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XXV, no. 126, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961–
63v25/d126; and “The Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the
Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples: Letter Dated 25 November 1961 from
the Permanent Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations Addressed to the
President of the General Assembly,” 25 November 1961, A/4985. For the Kennedy administration’s
approach to the United Nations, see Ostrower, United States and United Nations, pp. 98–115.
46. For UN membership information, see http://www.un.org/en/members/growth.shtml.

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 Exposing “Red Colonialism”

Assembly on colonial and other issues to deflect the initiatives of the Soviet
bloc and other extremists.” The trick was to take the lead at the UN, some-
thing the United States, Kennedy administration officials lamented, had not
done enough in recent years. “The luxury of sitting out every second dance,” a
Bureau of International Affairs memorandum proclaimed in the fall of 1961,
“is not for leaders.”47

UN Debate over Implementation of Resolution

1514 (XV)

The Soviet Union revealed its own activist agenda by making an issue of im-
plementing Resolution 1514 (XV).48 After submitting in late August 1961 a
formal request for the General Assembly “to elaborate practical measures for
giving immediate effect to the Declaration adopted in 1960, to set a target
date for its implementation and to provide for measures of supervision and
control by the UN over the progress made in this respect,” the Soviet gov-
ernment explained in a long memorandum to the president of the General
Assembly its reasons for pushing for UN action. A brief portion of the So-
viet memorandum moved through the various elements of Resolution 1514
(XV) that had been ignored, such as halting all violence in suppression of
colonial independence movements, ceasing racial discrimination, and taking
steps to transfer power immediately to indigenous peoples. The bulk of the
memorandum, however, followed the course set in the Soviet colonialism dec-
laration from the previous session by vilifying the United States as “the main
bulwark of present-day colonialism,” “the chief gendarme and oppressor of
the colonial peoples,” and “an accomplice in all the bloody atrocities per-
petrated by the other colonial Powers in their colonies.” Absent the “tanks,
ordnance, aircraft, aerial bombs, napalm bombs, machine guns and other
weapons” supplied by the United States to the colonial powers, as well as the
“aggressive military blocs—NATO, CENTO [Central Treaty Organization]
and SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization]” led by the United States,
the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and

47. Jenkins, memorandum to McConaughy, “Secretary’s Policy Planning Meeting This Morn-
ing Concerning the United Nations,” 1 June 1961, in FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XXV, no 170,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961–63v25/d170; and Bureau of International Or-
ganization Affairs, memorandum for President Kennedy, “United States Strategy at the Sixteenth
General Assembly,” n.d. [Fall 1961], in FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XXV, no. 174, http://history.state.
gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961–63v25/d174.
48. For the general contours of this story, see Kay, New Nations, pp. 172–180.

103
 Heiss

Peoples would surely have been fully implemented and colonialism completely
eradicated, the Soviet statement maintained, because the European colonial-
ists were in no position to resist indigenous drives for independence on their
own.
The Soviet memorandum insisted that the United States and its colo-
nialist allies would never comply with Resolution 1514 (XV) and called for a
sweeping overhaul of the UN approach to decolonization that went beyond
“mere statement[s]” to include a proclamation that all colonialism be liqui-
dated in the year 1962, sanctions against states that refused to cease aggression
against colonial independence movements, and the immediate dismantling of
all foreign military bases in colonial territories. To ensure that these measures
were implemented, the Soviet memorandum proposed the creation of a com-
mission with equal representation from “all three main groups of States—the
socialist States, the countries that are members of the Western military blocs,
and the neutralist States,” a breakdown that mirrored the USSR’s earlier failed
troika proposal for three UN Secretaries General.49
The Communist states rehearsed the same Cold War themes articulated in
Moscow’s memorandum in debate at the General Assembly. They condemned
Western imperialism, denounced Washington’s unceasing support of colonial
resistance against independence drives, and implored fellow UN members
to use the power of the organization on behalf of the non-self-governing
territories. Invoking Henry A. Kissinger’s The Necessity for Choice, Hungary’s
Peter Mod introduced a variation on the U.S. Cold War dichotomy when he
proclaimed, “the whole world sees clearly which of the great Powers represents
progress and which the status quo.” In thus dichotomizing the great powers,
Mod was employing the same sort of rhetorical device that underlay both the
Truman Doctrine and numerous U.S. propaganda initiatives against Soviet or
Red Colonialism, not to mention the Kennedy administration’s new “world of
free choice” campaign. However, Mod did so in a way that played to Moscow’s
advantage. He was also seeking to discredit the Western powers as hidebound
opponents of change and progress who sought to further their own interests

49. “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Request for the Inclusion of an Additional Item in the
Provisional Agenda of the Sixteenth Session,” 29 August 1961, in “Agenda Item 88: The Situation
with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial
Countries and Peoples and Agenda Item 22: Aid to Africa,” Annexes (XVI) 88 and 22, p. 2; and
“Letter Dated 26 September 1961 from the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics Addressed to the President of the General Assembly, Transmitting a Memorandum
from the Government of the USSR on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the
Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” 27 September
1961, Annexes (XVI) 88 and 22, pp. 5, 7–8.

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 Exposing “Red Colonialism”

at the expense of the non-self-governing territories, an argument buttressed by

actual U.S. foreign policy.50
To counter Soviet charges against the West and generally defuse Moscow’s
efforts to shape debate over colonial matters, U.S. officials worked on a variety
of fronts, although their efforts were increasingly ineffectual. As had been the
case with what became Resolution 1514 (XV), direct lobbying paid off in a
host of speeches in the General Assembly critical of Soviet efforts to inter-
twine decolonization and the Cold War, a move that would likely subsume
the former under the latter, thereby negating the UN Charter’s intonation
for “the paramountcy of the interests and the well-being of the inhabitants of
the dependent territories” and, as Nigeria’s Jaja Wachuku warned, “dragg[ing
Africa] into the cold war.” For states across Africa, Asia, and Latin America
that spoke in this vein, the most important issue to be considered in the de-
colonization debate was the plight of the non-self-governing peoples, rather
than the Cold War propaganda battle.51 Other delegations deplored the Soviet
Union’s use of decolonization as a Cold War weapon to discredit the West,
and they turned the tables and made a direct case against Soviet imperial-
ism. Nationalist China’s Chieh Liu, for example, claimed that Soviet “over-
land expansion” had “forcibly annexed, exploited, enslaved and sometimes

50. Peter Mod (Hungary), remarks to 1055th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 15 November
1961, A/PV.1055, para. 135; emphasis in original. For general Cold War comments, see Sergei
G. Lapin (Soviet Union), remarks to 1048th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 7 November
1961, A/PV.1048, para. 8–93; Joseph Winiewicz (Poland), remarks to 1049th plenary meeting of the
General Assembly, 8 November 1961, A/PV.1049, para. 30–81; Silviu Brucan (Romania), remarks to
1052nd plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 13 November 1961, A/PV.1052, para. 29–62; Karel
Kurka (Czechoslovakia), remarks to 1054th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 14 November
1961, A/PV.1054, para. 78–147; L. Y. Kizya (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic), remarks to 1056th
plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 16 November 1961, A/PV.1056, para. 78–87; Milko
Tarabanov (Bulgaria), remarks to 1058th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 20 November
1961, A/PV.1058, para. 53–99; K. V. Kiselev (Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic), remarks to
1059th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 21 November 1961, A/PV.1059, para. 74–143;
Halim Budo (Albania), remarks to 1060th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 21 November
1961, A/PV.1060, para. 23–57; Lapin (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), remarks to 1061st plenary
meeting of the General Assembly, 22 November 1961, A/PV.1061, para. 199–212; Lapin (Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics), remarks to 1064th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 24 November
1961, A/PV.1064, para. 145–233; Kurka (Czechoslovakia), remarks to 1064th plenary meeting of
the General Assembly, 24 November 1961, A/PV.1064, para. 235–257; and Lapin (Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics), remarks to 1066th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 27 November 1961,
A/PV.1066, para. 57–86.
51. Gunapala Piyasena Malalasekera (Ceylon), remarks to 1048th plenary meeting of the General
Assembly, 7 November 1961, A/PV.1048, para. 103; and Jaja Wachuku (Nigeria), remarks to 1047th
plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 6 November 1961, A/PV.1047, para. 102. See also Jonathan
B. Bingham (United States), remarks to 1048th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 7 November
1961, A/PV.1048, para. 138–143; Joseph Luns (Netherlands), remarks to 1049th plenary meeting of
the General Assembly, 8 November 1961, A/PV.1049, para. 11; and M. H. El-Farra (Jordan), remarks
to 1060th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 21 November 1961, A/PV.1060, para. 2.

105
 Heiss

annihilated” the “non-Russian populations,” yet lamentably such actions barely

entered into UN discussions of colonialism. “While the colonialism of the
Western Powers is being rapidly brought to an end,” he declared, “it is being
replaced by a new form of colonialism more embracing in scope and more
brutal in its methods.” Britain’s Joseph Godber made a similar point, noting
that “the Soviet Empire” was, “of all the great empires which existed in the
nineteenth century, [the] only one [to have] actually expanded as a result of
recent territorial aggression.” “It would be wrong if in this Assembly we failed
to remember the plight of those who are denied freedom on the continent of
Europe [due to Soviet imperialism] at least as much as anywhere else,” he in-
veighed, making the case for UN investigation of conditions in those territories
under Soviet control, territories whose “frontiers [were] stringently guarded
to [prevent] the population from escaping.” Livio Theodoli of Italy mocked
the delegates from the Communist countries for having the “audacity . . . [to]
pos[e] . . . as champions of liberty, democracy, justice and progress” when in
reality they represented nations where “there [was] no freedom of speech, no
freedom of the press, no freedom even to travel.” Under the circumstances,
he argued, the UN debate on colonialism needed to be infused with “more
impartiality and humility.” As had been the case a year earlier, such statements
were generally limited to close U.S. allies, thereby making clear the lack of
widespread support for the U.S. campaign against Red Colonialism.52
U.S. officials also repeated their previous effort to work behind the scenes
to influence the shape of emerging counterproposals to the Soviet draft being
prepared by the African and Asian contingent at the UN. The United States
relied on a trio of key “moderates” within that contingent—the delegations
from India, Iran, and Japan, which constituted “a united front against [the]
more extreme views of others.” Maintaining close contact with the U.S. gov-
ernment, those delegations ensured that the final Afro-Asian draft resolution
on the implementation of Resolution 1514 (XV) did not contain elements that
would have made compliance by the administering states impossible, such as

52. Chieh Liu (China), remarks to 1055th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 15 November
1961, A/PV.1055, para. 188, 190; Joseph Godber (United Kingdom), remarks to 1056th plenary
meeting of the General Assembly, 16 November 1961, A/PV.1056, para. 147, 155, 148; and Livio
Theodoli (Italy), remarks to 1064th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 24 November 1961,
A/PV.1064, para. 108, 117. See also Jonathan Bingham (United States), remarks to 1061st plenary
meeting of the General Assembly, 22 November 1961, A/PV.1061, para. 99–164; Frank Corner
(New Zealand), remarks to 1061st plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 22 November 1961,
A/PV.1061, para. 168–169; Jacques Koscziusko-Morizet (France), remarks to 1065th plenary meeting
of the General Assembly, 27 November 1961, A/PV.1065, para. 25–26; Vasco Garin (Portugal),
remarks to 1065th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 27 November 1961, A/PV.1065, para.
275–276; and J. K. Uys (South Africa), remarks to 1066th plenary meeting of the General Assembly,
27 November 1961, A/PV.1066, para. 20.

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 Exposing “Red Colonialism”

either individual or blanket target dates for independence, explicit provision

for visiting missions to or hearing petitioners from the non-self-governing
territories, or the right to make recommendations on individual territories.
They also helped to advance key concepts that were essential to policymakers
in Washington, most notably the importance of avoiding direct reference to
UN competence to intervene in the non-self-governing territories, a contested
point that would have prompted the opposition not only of the United States
but also of “many other del[egation]s from Latin America and Europe and
some from Asia.” Thus, when the Afro-Asian group presented its own draft
resolution on implementing Resolution 1514 (XV) on 20 November, it was
designed to elicit the cooperation of the major administering states rather than
alienate them, as the Soviet proposals seemed destined to do.53
Five days after the introduction of the relatively moderate Afro-Asian–
bloc resolution, the U.S. government completed its planned activist agenda
on colonial questions by transmitting a long written message to the president
of the General Assembly, a tactic that David Kay has attributed to a desire
not to interject Cold War hostility into the General Assembly debate.54 Rather
than refuting the litany of specific allegations against the United States and
its Western European allies that the Soviet and other Communist delega-
tions had raised throughout the plenary session debate, the message instead
briefly reaffirmed the long-standing U.S. opposition to colonialism, “wher-
ever and whenever it occurs,” and launched a multifaceted anti-Soviet assault.
Condemning the Soviet attempt to “inject East-West differences into the com-
plicated and difficult North-South problems” as “a diversionary move . . . to
prevent the world Organization from focusing on the serious deprivations of
human rights in the Soviet world,” the memorandum laid bare what Washing-
ton saw as Moscow’s “dark record of imperialist oppression and exploitation,”
a record that made “Soviet professions of devotion to the welfare of the peoples

53. U.S. del to UN tel. 1739 to State Department, 21 November 1961, in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/11–
2161. See also UK mission to UN tel. 1849 to FO, 27 October 1961, in The National Archives of the
United Kingdom (TNAUK), Commonwealth Relations Office and Commonwealth Office: United
Nations Department and Successors: Registered Files (UND Series), Record Class DO 181/44; UK
mission to UN tel. 1858 to FO, 28 October 1961, in TNAUK, DO181/44; UK mission to UN tel.
302 to FO, 28 October 1961, in TNAUK, DO 181/44; U.S. del to UN tel. 1423 to State Department,
31 October 1961, in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/10–3161; U.S. del to UN tel. 1438 to State Department, 1
November 1961, in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/11–161; UK mission to UN tel. 1938 to FO, 4 November
1961, in TNAUK, DO 181/44; FO circular tel. to various UK embassies, 4 November 1961, in
TNAUK, DO 181/44; U.S. del to UN tel. 1534 to State Department, 7 November 1961, in NARA,
RG 59, 321.4/11–761; U.S. del to UN tel. 1556 to State Department, 8 November 1961, in NARA,
RG 59, 321.4/11–861; and U.S. del to UN tel. 1666 to State Department, 16 November 1961, in
NARA, RG 59, 321.4/11–1661.
54. See Kay, New Nations, p. 177.

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 Heiss

of colonial or former colonial areas outside the Soviet empire . . . hypocritical.”

Proof of the “savagery” of the Soviet empire was as near as the “more than 12
million persons [who had] escaped since the Second World War from the Soviet
Union, Communist China, and the areas they control[led]: Albania, Romania,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Tibet,” as well
as from “Soviet East Germany” and Communist-controlled Hungary. Finally,
and perhaps most importantly, the memorandum sought to induce a more
robust UN interest in “the Soviet colonial system,” “the largest colonial empire
which has ever existed in all history,” “the only imperial system which is not
liquidating itself, as other empires have done,” and “the only modern empire
in which no subject people has ever been offered any choice concerning their
future and their destiny.” “Because the world cannot long remain half-slave
and half-free,” the memorandum asserted, “the United States expect[ed] that
the United Nations [would] focus its attention as carefully on the ‘colonial-
ism’ of the Soviet Union as it [did] on that of . . . any other nation.” With
this document, which reflected the Kennedy administration’s free world/slave
world dichotomy and made manifest its continuing belief that the world was
as troubled by Soviet conduct as it was by West European colonialism, the
United States called on the UN to expand its interest in the plight of non-
self-governing peoples to include the millions who had fallen behind the Iron
Curtain.55
Soviet-bloc rebuttals of the U.S. memorandum, delivered in writing to the
president of the General Assembly rather than during plenary debate, were bit-
ing. The brief statements of Poland and Romania condemned the “unscrupu-
lous” and “worn-out anti-Soviet and anti-communist slanders” launched by
the Americans “for the purpose of diverting the attention of the General As-
sembly from one of the most important questions facing the United Nations
today—the implementation of the Declaration on the granting of indepen-
dence to colonial countries and peoples.”56 For its part, the Soviet Union

55. “Comments by the United States Delegation on the Memorandum of the Government of the
USSR (A/4889),” enclosure to “Letter Dated 25 November 1961 from the Representative of the
United States of America Addressed to the President of the General Assembly,” 25 November 1961, in
“Agenda Item 88: The Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting
of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and Agenda Item 22: Aid to Africa,” Annexes
(XVI) 88 and 22, pp. 16, 18–20. See also U.S. embassy, Bangkok, tel. 284 to State Department, 23
August 1961, in NARA, RG 59, 511.00/8–2361; and U.S. del to UN tel. 1039 to State Department,
3 October 1961, in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/10–361.
56. “Letter Dated 27 November 1961 from the Chairman of the Delegation of Poland Addressed
to the President of the General Assembly,” 27 November 1961, in “Agenda Item 88: The Situation
with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial
Countries and Peoples and Agenda Item 22: Aid to Africa,” Annexes (XVI) 88 and 22, p. 20; and

108
 Exposing “Red Colonialism”

roundly rejected the “flagrant fabrications and slander” contained in the U.S.
memorandum, asserting that “anyone who [was] at all familiar with the his-
tory and policy of the Soviet State” would understand their absurdity. Moscow
also assailed Washington’s call for the UN to take an interest in what Soviet
officials called the “relations of friendship, co-operation and mutual assis-
tance . . . between the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries,” which
were domestic Soviet matters not open to UN scrutiny. U.S. annoyance with
the relations between Moscow and the other socialist states did not justify inter-
ference in those relations, the Soviet delegation asserted, any more than Soviet
outrage at “the racial discrimination practiced against the Negro population
in the United States” allowed for Soviet interference in that instance.57
In making explicit reference to U.S. racial conditions, the Soviet memo-
randum homed in on what was by late 1961 a significant international problem
for the United States, particularly when it came to the opinions of new coun-
tries in Africa and other parts of the developing world. As a growing host of
scholars have pointed out, the ever-more-vigorous civil rights movement—and
the violence it generated—tarnished the U.S. image overseas. The later years
of the Eisenhower administration had been marked by incidents such as the
Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock crisis, and the early sit-ins. Just a
few months before the UN took up discussion of the Soviet call to imple-
ment Resolution 1514 (XV), the Kennedy administration had been forced
to offer federal protection to Freedom Riders seeking to end segregation in
interstate bus transportation, a move well covered in the international press.
When such unfavorable publicity was coupled with the personal discrimina-
tion some African diplomats experienced when in the United States, the result
was a public relations problem of the highest order. Kennedy administration
officials already feared that the UN would in time shift its gaze from decolo-
nization itself to the conditions faced by racial minorities around the globe.
Such a move was fraught with danger for the United States, which could under
no circumstances allow U.S. race relations to be placed under international
scrutiny. Given the need to guard against global condemnation of the gap

“Letter Dated 7 December 1961 from the Chairman of the Delegation of Romania Addressed to the
President of the General Assembly,” 7 December 1961, in “Agenda Item 88: The Situation with Regard
to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries
and Peoples and Agenda Item 22: Aid to Africa,” Annexes (XVI) 88 and 22, p. 21.
57. “Statement by the USSR Delegation on the Subject of the Comments by the United States
Delegation (A/4895),” enclosure to “Letter Dated 20 December 1961 from the Representative of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Addressed to the President of the General Assembly,” 20 December
1961, in “Agenda Item 88: The Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on
the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and Agenda Item 22: Aid to Africa,”
Annexes (XVI) 88 and 22, pp. 22–23.

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 Heiss

between U.S. words and deeds on the matter of equality of opportunity, the
campaign against Red Colonialism was at least in part motivated by a desire
to shift the focus of world opinion away from U.S. shortcomings and toward
those of the Soviet Union.58
In contrast to the vituperative nature of the General Assembly debate on
the implementation of Resolution 1514 (XV), the actual voting on the pro-
posed resolutions was anticlimactic. Under pressure from other delegations,
the Soviet Union withdrew its resolution without a vote, forestalling renewed
charges of obstructiveness in insisting on a one-sided anti-colonialism decla-
ration, as during the previous session. The Soviet retreat cleared the way for
approval of the more moderate resolution put forth by 38 African and Asian
governments. Whereas the Soviet proposal was framed as a harsh prescriptive
toward the administering states—calling for “immediate implementation” of
Resolution 1514 (XV), “final and unconditional liquidation of colonialism in
all its forms and manifestations . . . not later than the end of 1962,” and the
withdrawal of all foreign troops and the dismantling of all foreign military
bases in the non-self-governing territories—the Afro-Asian draft resolution
was mild and almost totally lacking in specifics. The resolution contained no
target date for full implementation of the colonialism declaration, merely call-
ing on the administering states to act “without further delay.” Furthermore, it
lacked the accusatory tone of the Soviet draft resolution and presented universal
goals rather than confrontational conditions. Finally, although the resolution
echoed the Soviet proposal for a new committee to monitor implementation
of the colonialism declaration, it avoided the potentially divisive Soviet for-
mula for membership by saying only that members would be “nominated by
the President of the General Assembly.” Although the new committee was
permitted “to meet outside the Headquarters of the United Nations whenever
and wherever” necessary, it was not specifically authorized to make site visits to
the non-self-governing territories. Nor was it empowered to hear petitioners
or make recommendations about specific territories. Approval of the measure,
which became Resolution 1654 (XVI), was never in doubt, and it passed on
a vote of 97–0–4, with France, Great Britain, South Africa, and Spain ab-
staining; Portugal was present but did not vote. By voting with the majority,
the United States avoided the sort of ignominy it had experienced after its

58. On these issues generally, see, for example, Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the
Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Borstelmann, Cold
War; and Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower, The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, the Press, and
Propaganda in the Cold War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2010). Discussion of the
experiences of African diplomats may be found in Borstelmann, Cold War, pp. 1, 125–126.

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abstention on what became Resolution 1514 (XV). The United States failed,
however, to push the General Assembly toward the sort of assault on Soviet
colonialism proposed in its November 1961 memorandum.59
U.S. officials nevertheless continued that assault even as the UN moved
to implement Resolution 1654 (XVI). In March 1962 the State Department
circulated a paper to U.S. diplomatic posts around the world titled “Case
Studies in Soviet Imperialism” that detailed the “specific cases in which the So-
viet Union has subjugated formerly independent peoples.” Feedback revealed
a mixed response to the idea of Soviet imperialism and suggested the long
odds U.S. officials in trying to make it a major issue at the UN. Not sur-
prisingly, the greatest recognition of the problem of Soviet imperialism came
from Western Europe, where U.S. embassies in Belgium, Denmark, Finland,
France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Spain, and Switzerland re-
ported encouraging support. Several “moderate,” generally Western-leaning
states in other parts of the world also responded positively. In Africa, the issue
was deemed potentially interesting to officials in Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria,
and South Africa; in Asia, Ceylon, Japan, the Philippines, the Republic of
China, and the Republic of Vietnam; in Latin America, Costa Rica, El Sal-
vador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela; in the
Middle East, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. The number of countries in which
U.S. diplomats reported little to no interest in Soviet imperialism, however,
made the issue’s usefulness at the UN unlikely. U.S. embassies in Cambodia,
Indonesia, and Singapore in Asia; Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, and
Syria in the Middle East; Argentina, Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico,
and Nicaragua in Latin America; and the Central African Federation, Chad,
Dahomey, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Togo, Tunisia,
and Upper Volta in Africa all indicated that a preoccupation with local con-
ditions, a lack of interest in world affairs or the Cold War in general, or a
conviction that colonialism was confined, as the U.S. ambassador to Mexico

59. “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Draft Resolution,” 9 October 1961, in “Agenda Item 88: The
Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence
to Colonial Countries and Peoples and Agenda Item 22: Aid to Africa,” Annexes (XVI) 88 and 22,
p. 24; “The Situation with Regarding to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting
of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples: Afghanistan, Burma, . . . United Arab Republic:
Draft Resolution,” 20 November 1961, A/L.366; and U.S. del. to UN tel. 1739 to State Department, 21
November 1961, in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/11–2161. See also unsigned memorandum, “Colonialism,”
22 November 1961, in TNAUK, DO 181/44; unsigned memorandum for the secretary of state,
“United Nations: Proposal for New Committee on Colonial Affairs,” n.d. [November 1961], in
TNAUK, FO 371/160609; Department of State tel. 1349 to U.S. del to UN, 24 November 1961,
in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/11–2461; verbatim record of the 1066th plenary meeting of the General
Assembly, 27 November 1961, A/PV.1066, para. 23–234; and CRO circular tel., 28 November 1961,
in TNAUK, FO 371/160911.

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stated, to “the subjugation of a foreign people (usually non-white) in a distant

and non-contiguous country by a white-skinned European metropole,” sug-
gested that it was likely a non-starter. The general lack of widespread interest
in the issue of Red Colonialism—and the logical reasons advanced for such a
stance—should have given U.S. officials pause when they considered further
reliance on that theme in their propaganda. Instead U.S. officials concluded
that the lack of interest demonstrated the need for a concerted education cam-
paign featuring more papers like “Case Studies in Soviet Imperialism.” In this
way, they revealed a disproportionate focus on the Cold War confrontation of
the sort that Cox had tried unsuccessfully to counter as early as 1953.60
Thus, the campaign to enlist widespread support for the idea that the
Soviet Union was an imperial state gained little traction—despite the best
efforts of the United States and its allies during the Seventeenth General
Assembly. In a typical intervention, U.S. representative Jonathan B. Bingham
railed against what seemed to be a double standard in the way the Soviet
Union assessed what did and did not constitute colonialism, likening the
Soviet Union to Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, for whom the meanings
of words could shift at will. “Where the Soviet Union is master, there is
no colonialism,” asserted Bingham. “Where the Soviet Union is not master
and perhaps seeks mastery, there the cry of colonialism is raised.” He also
harkened back to the administration’s earlier propaganda line in declaring,
“We say that colonialism or imperialism exists where there is no freedom of
choice.” China’s Hsueh Yu-chi insisted that “Russian colonialism [was] real”
and as proof called the General Assembly’s attention to the headquarters of the
Assembly of Captive European Nations located just across First Avenue from
the UN headquarters in Manhattan. Atop the “little building” that served
as the assembly’s base, “the flags of nine captive European countries [were]
hoisted at half-mast . . . as a daily reminder to the General Assembly that the
Declaration on colonialism [had] yet to be implemented in Europe.” Surely,
Hsueh implored in an effort to convince the General Assembly to take up the
cause of working to end Soviet colonialism, “the claim of the freedom-loving
peoples who hoist their flags at half-mast is not less valid than that of the
Angolans in exile in the Congo (Leopoldville).” Heath MacQuarrie of Canada
also drew the General Assembly’s attention to the equivalency between the
subjects of Western colonialism and “the 96 million people under Soviet rule

60. Department of State instruction CW-7235, “Soviet ‘Imperialism,’” 14 March 1962, in NARA,
RG 59, 321.4/3–1462; and Thomas C. Mann (U.S. embassy, Mexico City), airgram A-293 to State
Department, 27 March 1962, in NARA, RG 59, 321.4/3–2762. The full run of embassy responses to
the State Department’s circular instruction may be followed in NARA, RG 59, 321.4.

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who have never been permitted to exercise the right of self-determination which
the Soviet Union so loudly proclaims for others.” “The contrast between the
record of the Western Powers and that of the Soviet Union,” he maintained,
“[was] clear for all to see, and the discrepancy between Soviet protestation
and Soviet performance [was] no secret.” Why, “when the United Nations
[was] examining situations in many other areas of the world, . . . should it
not turn its attention at some stage to the areas of darkness under Soviet
rule,” he wondered, a call that clearly struck a nerve with Soviet representative
A. K. Gren, who “walked out of the Assembly during [MacQuarrie’s] speech,
blushing furiously.”61
Much the same situation played out at the Eighteenth General Assembly,
when the case against Soviet colonialism was again made primarily by the
United States and its allies. China’s Hsueh insisted that “colonialism [was]
colonialism no matter whether it [was] practiced by the Western European
Powers or by the Soviet Union” and called upon the General Assembly to
include “all territories still under colonial rule” in what he termed its effort
to “go all out to end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations.” Vasco
Garin of Portugal, whose own country was under heavy criticism for refusing
to accede to UN involvement in its non-self-governing territories, lambasted
the organization’s failure to take up “questions of real colonialism in its most
damnable form, where nations once free [were] subjugated by force.” Sidney
R. Yates of the United States attacked the Soviet Union itself, calling it “the
world’s greatest imperialist Power” and challenging it to “point to [even] one
territory that it [had] surrendered” at a time when “the United Kingdom,
France and other colonial Powers have been relinquishing their control over
their colonial territories.” Britain’s C. E. King was less direct but no less
determined when he condemned the Soviet bloc for engaging in a “cold-war
communist exercise that [flew] in the face of facts” by accusing the Western
world of engaging in neocolonialism and warning that “if [that] artificial
campaign continue[d Britain would] not hesitate to make use of a considerable
dossier of information to show that the boot [was] on the other foot.”62

61. Jonathan B. Bingham (United States), remarks to 1171st plenary meeting of the General Assembly,
20 November 1962, A/PV.1171, para. 48, 49; Yu-chi Hsueh (China), remarks to 1172nd meeting
of the General Assembly, 21 November 1962, A/PV.1172, para. 65, 70; and Heath MacQuarrie
(Canada), remarks to 1174th meeting of the General Assembly, 23 November 1962, A/PV.1174,
para. 41, 47, 50. See also Sir James Plimsoll (Australia), remarks to 1173rd meeting of the General
Assembly, 21 November 1962, A/PV.1172, para. 56; Sir Patrick Dean (United Kingdom), remarks to
1175th meeting of the General Assembly, 26 November 1962, A.PV.1175, para. 98–99; Corner (New
Zealand), remarks to 1176th meeting of the General Assembly, 26 November 1962, A/PV.1174, para.
129–130; and UK mission to UN tel. 2151 to FO, 23 November 1962, in TNAUK, FO 371/166841.
62. Hsueh (China), remarks to 1268th plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 2 December 1963,
A/PV.1268, para. 11, 14; Vasco Garin (Portugal), remarks to 1270th plenary meeting of the General

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In the end, the UN refused to take up a direct assault against Moscow of

the sort waged against traditional colonialism. Affirming the basic principle
that all peoples should be free of outside domination in a way that condemned
both Western and Soviet imperialism, as was the case in Resolution 1514
(XVI), was one thing. Undertaking a concerted drive against the latter, as U.S.
officials wished, was quite another and hardly something the anti-colonial
zealots in the General Assembly were willing to do. In their minds, waging
war against Soviet control of Central Asia, the Baltic States, or even Eastern
Europe would have made anti-colonialism a Cold War question, which was
precisely the outcome they wished to avoid. For that reason, no amount of
U.S. propagandizing about the evils of Soviet colonialism could nudge the
UN toward formal action against it.63

Conclusion

A variety of factors ultimately thwarted the U.S. campaign against Red Colo-
nialism at the UN. The country’s own history as a colonial power and its
emergence in the post–World War II period as a global hegemon with a mili-
tary presence in hundreds of places beyond its borders, inconvenient realities
that U.S. officials consistently downplayed or ignored, were partly to blame.
Its association with the major West European colonial powers through NATO
and other international organizations and its support for colonial regimes at
the expense of indigenous nationalist movements, as in Indochina, also proved
problematic. So too was its willingness to subvert democracy in the name of
anti-Communism, as in Iran, Guatemala, and other countries. Finally, the
specter of U.S. racism—particularly, Jim Crow segregation—also played a role
by exposing the limits to domestic freedom in the United States. Combining
to place the United States on the conservative or traditional side of interna-
tional politics, in a fashion that resembled what classical realism dubs a “status
quo power,” these considerations called into question the U.S. commitment
to democracy, self-determination, and basic human rights; weakened the effect
of U.S. propaganda portraying the Soviet Union as an imperial power; and
ultimately compromised the U.S. position with the emerging anti-colonial

Assembly, 3 December 1963, A/PV.1270, para. 19; Sidney R. Yates (United States), remarks to 1272nd
plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 4 December 1963, A/PV.1272, para. 10; and C. E. King
(United Kingdom), remarks to 1273rd plenary meeting of the General Assembly, 4 December 1963,
A/PV.1273, para. 168, 170.
63. For a brief account of developments at the United Nations after 1963, including the refusal to
move against Soviet colonialism, see David D. Newsom, The Imperial Mantle: The United States,
Decolonization, and the Third World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 178–180.

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bloc at the UN, which perceived a troubling disjuncture between U.S. words
and deeds and deeply resented the attempt to link the issue of decolonization
with the U.S.-directed struggle against Communism.64
Despite U.S. officials’ repeated claims to appreciate the North-South
dimensions of international relations in the era of decolonization, that ap-
preciation rarely seemed to make its way into propaganda about colonialism,
either at the UN or elsewhere. As a result, rather than explicitly address how
to remedy issues facing the nations of the global South, U.S. propaganda
consistently adopted an overwhelmingly Cold War cast. Unable to defend
Western colonialism in the international arena and faced with a significant
gap between the country’s rhetoric in support of national self-determination
and a domestic reality that suggested just the opposite, U.S. policymakers fell
back on a propaganda campaign that painted the Soviet Union as not only
a colonial power but as a more rapacious and vicious one than the Western
European nations that since 1945 had been jettisoning their empires. In this
way, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations appeared to be preoccupied
with the Cold War, at least when it came to their approach to propaganda on
colonialism, a position that put the United States out of step with the majority
of states at the UN, which did not share the U.S. belief that Communism—
regardless of how vehemently the United States pursued its campaign against
Red Colonialism—was the most important problem facing the international
community in the 1950s and 1960s.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the Harry S. Truman Library Institute and the Kent State
University Research Council for travel support and the journal’s anonymous
readers for many helpful suggestions on a previous version of this essay.

64. For the classic explication of the “status quo power,” see Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among
Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948), pp. 21–25.

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