Schraderpublicized trials. Others, such as Claudia Jones, faced incarceration and
then deportation. Reading NSC 68’s invocation of prisons and police as
the kernel of the vulnerability of the Iron Curtain, then, it is impossible
not to sense the paradox of U.S. global leadership. Emily Rosenberg has
called it the “central dilemma” of NSC 68: “how to advocate ‘freedom’
by greatly enlarging the state’s capacity for coercion.”the fear of Soviet expansion and the resulting political instability
largely outweighed this philosophical question. One of Eisenhower’s own
aides, for example, wanted him to emphasize the “worldwide tendency
for orderly societies to break down into mob-ridden anarchies.” And it
was this concern that became the overriding motivation of the Kennedy
administration’s foreign policy. Not three weeks after Eisenhower’s
farewell speech, Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared that a “mobile,
substantial, and flexible U.S. capability for operations short of general
war is essential.” Eisenhower adversary General Maxwell Taylor urged
Kennedy to adopt this New Frontier policy, which, in practice, meant
a focus on “counterinsurgency,” with police forces as the “first line of
defense” against mob-ridden anarchies around the world, particularly
those ginned up by subversives.
The Kennedy administration lodged its new police assistance
program in the Agency for International Development, calling it the
Office of Public Safety. The program, which was overseen directly by
high-ranking National Security Council officials, consolidated and
funded what had been a sprawling, poorly resourced, and inefficient
set of operations to train, equip, and advise police in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. The goal was to make police in dozens of countries the
preeminent tool in the fight against communist subversion. The Office