In a memorandum to Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, CIA Deputy Director Robert Gates offers "straight talk" about Nicaragua. In the memo, Gates concedes that the CIA-backed Contras cannot overthrow the Sandinista government. He…

President Kennedy wrote this letter to Soviet Chairman Krushchev on the day of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation, in which 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles attempted to invade the island and overthrow Fidel Castro. Responding to an indignant letter…

This 1960 comic book warns young readers of the dangers ahead should Uncle Sam fail to steer clear of the "Red Iceberg." Published by Impact, an imprint of the anti-communist Catholic Catechetical Guild, the comic was distributed to thousands of…

This 1949 Herb Block cartoon highlights the dangers to civil liberty and intellectual freedoms many Americans saw posed by overzealous and anti-Communist crusaders in the early years of the Cold War. Such fears were not unfounded: during the postwar…

Milton Eisenhower, the younger brother of President Dwight E. Eisenhower, served as a special ambassador to Latin America during the Eisenhower administration. He came to see poverty as the major obstacle to economic development and political…

While earning his medical degree, Argentine-born Che Guevara (1928-1967) traveled throughout Latin America and saw firsthand the impoverished conditions of the majority of its people. Believing that a Marxist revolution was the only solution to the…