Welsh-born cartoonist Leslie Gilbert Illingworth drew the famous cartoon of John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev arm wrestling while sitting on hydrogen bombs. It appeared in the October 29, 1962 edition of the British newspaper The Daily Mail.

Born in 1902, Illingworth started drawing cartoons for the famous British news magazine Punch in 1927. The Daily Mail hired him as well in 1937 and he continued to provide cartoons for both publications for the rest of his career. He gained a measure of national fame for the effective cartoons he drew during England's dogged stand against Nazi Germany.

Illingworth was not an overtly political cartoonist and this is evident in this arm wrestling cartoon. One notices the characteristic Illingworth preference for detail rather than commentary on who is right or wrong. The intensity of the struggle is captured both by the energy that radiates out of Kennedy and Khrushchev's gripped hands, but also by the fact that each is sweating profusely. Each man still has his finger on the button that will detonate the bombs.

Illingworth's drawings contrast sharply with those of Edmund Valtman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and fiercely anti-communist cartoonist for The Hartford Times. On October 30, after the crisis had seemingly passed, his paper published a Valtman cartoon of Khrushchev yanking missile-shaped teeth out of a hideous-looking Castro's mouth. The caption above the illustration reads, “This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You” and the cartoon clearly represents a moment of American gloating over the communists.

That the Illingworth cartoon was published in a British newspaper bears witness to the fact that the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis affected the fate of populations beyond those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed the whole world was watching. The publication date of October 29 is also significant since on October 28, Khrushchev announced that he was withdrawing the missiles out of Cuba and the crisis seemingly had passed. Illingworth's cartoon reminded readers that the superpower struggle would continue and that the possibility of nuclear annihilation remained.

A review of the secondary literature on the Burr-Hamilton duel does indeed reveal some inconsistency on whether the duel was illegal. Perhaps the inconsistency is partly the result of conflicting personal and political judgments contemporary to the event: Burr and Hamilton were leaders of opposing political factions.

The duel was fought on the early morning of July 11, 1804. Burr and Hamilton, and their seconds, had rowed out separately from New York City across the Hudson River to a narrow spot just below the Palisades at Weehawken, New Jersey. It was a secluded grassy ledge, only about six feet wide and thirty feet long above the river, with no footpath or road leading to it. Cedar trees growing on the ledge partially obscured it from across the river.

It was a place where duelists from New York City could go to settle their affairs in secret as dueling per se was not illegal in New Jersey. Duels took place at the Weehawken spot from about 1799 to 1837, when the last determined pair of duelists were interrupted in their preparations by a police constable, who put them in jail to await the action of the grand jury.

Hamilton’s 18-year-old son Philip had been killed in a duel there on January 10, 1802, just two years previously. After that, Hamilton had successfully helped pass a New York law making it illegal to send or accept a challenge to a duel. Those convicted were liable to lose the right to vote and were barred from holding public office for 20 years, but no duelist had yet been prosecuted. Public sentiment supporting the duty to uphold one’s honor if it had been questioned was still strong and could not easily be ignored, even by those who questioned the practice of dueling.

The participants in a duel—including the principals and their seconds—also typically arranged things in order to make it difficult to convict them. For example, they ensured that none of the participants actually saw the guns as they were being transported to the dueling ground, they kept silent about their purpose, and they had the seconds turn their backs while the shots were exchanged. This would allow them to later deny having heard or seen specific things, decreasing the chance that they might be held as accessories to a crime.

After the duel, Burr and Hamilton were each transported back across the river by their seconds, Burr having mortally wounded Hamilton, who died at his physician’s home the following day.

In New York City, a coroner’s jury of inquest was called on the 13th of July, the day after Hamilton’s death. Although Hamilton was shot in New Jersey, he died in New York, and therefore, Burr (his enemies said) could be prosecuted in New York. The jury sat intermittently until August 2, and considered, among other evidence, the contents of the letters that Hamilton and Burr had exchanged before the duel. These letters suggested to some on the jury that Burr had in fact enticed or even forced Hamilton into the duel, pushing the affair over the line from one of settling honor to one of deliberate murder which was a capital offense.

The coroner’s jury returned a verdict that Burr had murdered Hamilton, and that Burr’s seconds were accessories to the murder. New York then indicted Burr not only for the misdemeanor of “challenging to a duel,” but also for the felony of murder.

In November, Burr was also indicted for murder—which is to say, not for dueling—by a grand jury in Bergen County, New Jersey, because the duel had taken place there.

After the duel, Burr was apparently surprised at the public outrage over the affair. Fearing imminent arrest, he fled to New Jersey, then to Philadelphia, and then to Georgia.

He wrote to his daughter Theodosia: "There is a contention of a singular nature between the two States of New York and New Jersey. The subject in dispute is, which shall have the honor of hanging the Vice-President. You shall have due notice of time and place. Whenever it may be, you may rely on a great concourse of company, much gayety, and many rare sights."

He was still the Vice President, however, and he determined to go back to Washington to act as President of the Senate during its upcoming session and preside over the debate and vote concerning the impeachment of Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase. The impeachment proceedings were part of a partisan struggle between Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists, and Burr might be expected to influence the outcome if he were allowed to preside over the Senate. A large group of Congressmen signed a letter to New Jersey Governor Joseph Bloomfield describing the Hamilton-Burr affair as a fair duel and asking him to urge the Bergen County prosecutor to enter a nolle prosequi in the case of the indictment, in other words, to drop the case. This is what eventually happened.

The murder charge in New York was eventually dropped as well, but Burr was convicted of the misdemeanor dueling charge, which meant that he could neither vote, practice law, nor occupy a public office for 20 years.

Good question and one that is often answered a bit too narrowly. The key issue is whether trade routes promoted resource extraction and/or economic development, and if the latter, what sort of development. Of course, the most famous route, with the greatest impact on New World colonies, was the Triangular Trade, which had some variants. In addition, though, there were several versions of a simpler two-way transatlantic trade, from the UK to the northern colonies, from France to Quebec, and from Spain/Portugal to Latin American places. Last, and less known, a transpacific trade took shape in the 17th century, connecting the Philippines with Mexico through the west coast port of Acapulco. So here we have at least half dozen routes to assess in terms of impacts.

The core of the triangular trade, ca. 1600-1800, was the exchange of slaves for materials and goods – African captives brought to eastern Atlantic ports, exchanged for gold or British manufactured products, then transshipped brutally to colonial depots – Charleston, New Orleans, the Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers, New York, for example. There, captives were again sold, for cash or goods (sugar, tobacco, timber) which returned to a UK starting point (often Liverpool). Yet this sequence was not the only one, particularly in New England, where merchants sent rum and other North American goods to Africa, secured slaves for auction to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and brought liquid sugar (molasses) to American shores for distillation into more rum. Though this sounds tidy, actually, rarely was either triangle completed by one ship in one voyage; each triangle stands more as a mythical model than a description of standard practice. Nonetheless these ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains across the 16th through the 19th centuries. That’s quite an impact, creating slave economies from Virginia to Trinidad to Brazil. Another three-sided trade involved slavery indirectly, as when Yankees sent colonial goods to the sugar islands, shipped to Russia to exchange sugar for iron, which returned to New England.

Bilateral trade is simpler to grasp, and yet may depart from our current notions of exchange. The Kingdom of Spain extracted precious metals from Latin America, sending back goods for colonizers, especially through Veracruz, which became Mexico’s principal east coast harbor. By contrast, French trade with Quebec was a constant drain on the monarchy’s funds; often goods sent to sustain some 50,000 settlers cost more than double the value of furs gathered and sold. However, Virginia tobacco sold to Britain at times created high profits, but this single-crop economy proved vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations (Cotton’s southern surge came after the American Revolution.). Clearly trade did not automatically translate into sustained development, though port cities did prosper, not least because they became anchors for coastal shipping within and among colonies. At times, expanding trade could irritate the colonizing state, as when Mexican merchants created a long-distance 16th-18th century trans-Pacific route from Acapulco, trading an estimated 100 tons of silver annually for Chinese silks, cottons, spices, and pottery – resources the Crown thought should be sent to Madrid instead. Overall, my sense is that colonial trade routes deepened exploitation of people and nature appreciably more than they fostered investment and economic development.

The charter of the Second Bank of the United States, granted in 1816, expired in 1836 (President Jackson vetoed Congress' effort to recharter the bank), after which banking and the issuing of bank notes was not done by a central bank, but devolved upon thousands of state-chartered banks with minimal federal regulation. State laws were often so lax that almost anyone could issue bank notes.

Nevertheless, the state of Pennsylvania did renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, with Nicholas Biddle as its president, which issued bank notes under the name of the institution, but which was then only a state-chartered bank, even though the old bank's stock holders (except the U.S. government) voted to transfer the assets and liabilities of the old bank to the new one. The directors of the new bank decided not only to reissue the old bank notes, but also not to close the books of the old bank, but to continue them into the life of the new bank (it continued until 1841), which made it quite difficult later to disentangle the affairs of the defunct bank from those of the new one. One of the consequences was that the new Pennsylvania bank honored the notes issued by the old Bank of the United States. Because of that, other banks and individuals could also honor the old notes because the new bank would redeem them.

Reproductions of 1840 bank notes of the Second Bank of the United States, issued in Philadelphia by the state-chartered bank—the "Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania"—have lately been printed as "souvenirs" but are essentially worthless to numismatic collectors.

The original 1816 charter of the Second Bank of the United States limited the circulation of notes by the bank to $35 million, and required that no notes be issued in denominations less than $5. In practice, the bank never had more than $25 million in notes circulating, and most of the time much less, averaging for one period about $15 million.

In October 1836 (the Second Bank of the United States closed its doors in March of that year), its records showed that about $12 million notes were still in circulation, down from $24 million one year earlier (Cattrell, pps. 427, 512), with the average circulation for 1836 reckoned to have been about $21 million. The mixture of bill denominations in this total was not recorded, so it seems impossible to be certain of how many bills this represented.

Contemporary Americans often picture the War for Independence as a straightforward struggle between American patriots and the British crown over the political independence of the colonies. The reality is far more complex: the colonists did not represent a homogeneous bloc, and in some senses the conflict resembled a civil war over political sovereignty in the colonies. Like all civil wars, it extracted a toll on the civilian population, many of whom who found themselves displaced and their lives disrupted by the military and political struggle being played out in North America.

Not every inhabitant of the colonies in 1776 supported the Declaration of Independence and the political break from the English crown. It is impossible to know precisely how many supporters the Patriot forces enjoyed (especially when announcing one’s allegiance was a potentially risky move), but modern historians estimate that, at most, the Patriots enjoyed a bare majority of popular support—that is, no more than half the residents of the colonies supported the cause of independence. Between one-sixth and one-fifth of the residents of the colonies remained loyal to the British crown; the remainder of the population did their best to avoid an open declaration of their sympathies, since “fence-sitting” was often the safest political and practical course.

Fully fifteen to twenty percent of the residents of the North American colonies retained their allegiance to the crown during the conflict. These loyalists presented some serious challenges to the Patriot forces mounting the War for Independence, already strained by the demands of fighting the world’s most powerful military with scarce resources and an embryonic government. Loyalists threatened to provide information or material support to British forces, and the stakes involved in the struggle—in the eyes of the Crown, after all, the Patriots advocating treason in their push for independence—led the Patriots to deal with Loyalist elements harshly at points in the struggle. Desperate to deter loyalists from overtly supporting British forces, Patriots imposed loyalty oaths on colonists suspected of British sympathies. Other Loyalists had their land confiscated; by war’s end, the hostilities had forced some 60,000 Loyalists to leave their homes in the thirteen colonies and relocate to England or to other parts of the empire.

The 1994 PBS film Mary Silliman’s War does an excellent job of demonstrating many of the tensions the War for Independence created in local communities, and the ways in which civilians caught between two warring armies attempted to continue their lives against a backdrop of conflict and civil war. The film is based on the true story of Mary Silliman, whose husband Selleck actively prosecuted Loyalists for treason as the state’s attorney for Connecticut. After winning a death sentence for two Fairfield men, their relatives kidnap Selleck and threaten to hang him if the convicted Loyalists ascend to the gallows. In charting Mary’s efforts to secure her husband’s release, the film vividly portrays the often insoluble dilemmas faced by civilians during what remained (until the 1970s) America’s longest war.

The goals of U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt during the 1950s were to protect American and western European access to oil in the Middle East, to end British colonial rule throughout the area in line with the ideal of self-determination expressed in the Atlantic Charter, to contain the expansion of communism and particularly the influence of the Soviet Union in the region, and to support the independence of Israel without alienating the Arab states.

In all this, the U.S. State Department regarded Egypt as the natural leader among the Arab states and sought to make it an ally and to encourage pro-Western elements in Egyptian society.

One essential problem was that the various goals of U.S. policy toward Egypt were often at odds with one another. As one example, the U.S. was sympathetic to Egypt's desire to free itself from British colonial rule--just as the U.S. had done--and emphasized its support for full Egyptian self-rule to the country's political and military leaders. But the U.S. was also allied with Britain to oppose the Soviet Union's expansion into Europe.

Almost all of Europe's oil at the time came through the Suez Canal. Britain was divesting itself of its empire, but in Egypt it had strong concerns about leaving the Suez Canal undefended. Britain's lingering military presence in the Mideast helped protect oil shipping lanes, the canal, and the oil fields from the threat posed by the Soviet Red Army. For its part, Egypt simply wanted Britain out and was disappointed when the U.S. did not always take its side.

Another example of internally conflicting goals--the U.S. supported "peoples' right to self-determination." This was, in fact, one way of framing why the U.S. opposed communism and the Soviet Union in particular: because it was totalitarian and crushed individuals' liberties. However, the U.S. had in mind a model of self-governance that assumed its own historical situation and that of other western European states who were the heirs of the Enlightenment and its ideals of individual autonomy. Other places were not necessarily burgeoning libertarian strongholds that only wanted a chance to grow to fruition as western-style capitalist democracies.

Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, approached this dilemma by applying a "Marshall Plan" strategy of massive aid to places such as the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, while also implicitly dealing with the fact that in these places (unlike in the European countries with strong democratic traditions that had been devastated by World War II), the "people" were not necessarily committed to turning their countries into capitalist, pro-western democracies.

Dulles's State Department believed that countries such as Egypt, for example, would naturally undergo a two-step process. First, relatively corrupt old regimes would be cast aside (least destructively, by military coups) and the governments would then be controlled by relatively authoritarian regimes that would pull together and organize the country's various factions. Second, with development aid and the establishment of trade ties with the rest of the world, the countries would emerge (through a peaceful evolutionary process, it was hoped) as full-fledged democracies.

Even if this were a true description of the "natural" evolution of Third World countries, however, none of this could happen in isolation. Larger political forces, outside the individual countries, affected their internal politics.

For the U.S., Dulles's goal of opposing and, as he framed it, "containing" the expansion of the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and China provided a dilemma. When colonial powers disengaged from their former colonies in the Third World, the power vacuum that resulted meant that the U.S. found itself in various places giving its support to indigenous, but authoritarian and even dictatorial, regimes. This, it was thought, would cordon off these countries' borders, as it were, against communist intrusion and provide an opportunity for the U.S. to engage there in what the State Department came to call "nation building," which generally meant the infusion of massive economic and military aid. The eventual goal was the peaceful evolution of these countries into functioning, pro-western democracies.

This was the template for U.S. policy toward Egypt in the 1950s. Unfortunately for its prospects of success, it was only partly congruent with Egypt's own perceived interests. In particular, Egypt's leaders were generally never sympathetic to communism, but they did not fear anything like a takeover by the Soviet Union. In fact, following a long established practice in Mideast diplomatic circles, they looked for ways to play off one great power against another to their advantage.

Egypt had centuries of experience in warding off the domination of great powers by playing them against one another. When the U.S. stalled in advancing Egypt's positions against Britain, Egypt sought to engage with the Soviet Union, partly because that was where it could find military and economic support and partly because it was a way to exact more concessions from the U.S. in return.

In addition, the political power that Egyptian leaders wielded, like that in other countries in the region, was weak. In a way that American diplomats did not understand, Mideast leaders had to adjust their countries' alliances constantly with one another and could not make permanent, unilateral alliances. It was an Egyptian goal to enhance its own power in the region, not as the leader of a pro-American alliance.

Beginning with President Roosevelt's meeting with King Farouk at the end of World War II, American diplomats (including Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson) assured Egyptian leaders that the U.S. supported the country's efforts at self-determination. The Egyptians unfailingly heard these assurances to mean that the U.S. would help them rid Egypt of Britain. Sometimes, however, U.S. diplomats used this sort of language to mean that the U.S. would protect Egypt from communist subversion, internally or externally, from the Soviet Union. This miscommunication caused confusion.

Internal Egyptian politics made Egyptian King Farouk align himself increasingly with factions that demanded an immediate abrogation of an earlier treaty that allowed Britain to continue control over the Suez Canal and that Britain pull all its troops out of Egypt. The U.S. found the King to be unsympathetic to America's reluctance to go along with the demand for Britain to abandon Egypt and the canal immediately. To the U.S., it seemed that political power in Egypt was rapidly being corrupted and that it was flowing "down the drain," out to the more radical political factions.

The U.S. State Department concluded that it would find a more sympathetic hearing from another ruler. Historians have reached different conclusions about the extent of the involvement of U.S. diplomats and CIA operatives at this juncture, but it seems fairly clear that they met with dissatisfied Egyptian military officers and at least promised them that if there was a military coup, that the U.S. would not oppose it, and that the U.S. would prevent possible British opposition to it, as long as foreign nationals and property were protected.

The coup occurred in July 1952. Two military officers, General Mohammed Naguid and Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser, emerged as the new Egyptian leaders. The military government immediately asked for U.S. military and economic aid. A State Department official agreed, but the Secretary of State and the President balked at the deal, which caused internal political problems for the Egyptian leaders.

President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson were succeeded by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles in 1953. Dulles' brother Allen was made director of the CIA.

The Dulles brothers provided military advisors and equipment to the Egyptian army. Through clandestine contacts, both the State Department and the CIA gave Egyptian leaders, especially Nasser, important intelligence training and assistance in moderating potential internal political rivals and in conducting propaganda campaigns.

In 1954, Nasser edged out Naguid and ascended to sole leadership of the military government. During the tumult surrounding this, Nasser was able to disband the main faction of his opposition, the Moslem Brotherhood, after an assassination attempt during one of his speeches, in which the would-be assassin fired seven shots at him, but missed. Public sympathy for Nasser surged, allowing him to quash his opposition. Nasser's chief of security much later admitted that the CIA had given Nasser a bulletproof vest, which he was wearing during his speech, raising the issue of whether the assassination attempt was a setup, designed to benefit Nasser.

Egypt looked for military equipment and aid. During this period, both State and the CIA provided it, sometimes clandestinely, hoping for a formal military alliance with Egypt, and for Egypt to take the lead in reaching a peace settlement with Israel. Egypt, however, extracted as much military and economic assistance from the U.S. as it could, but refused a military alliance with the West. It was Nasser's intention to adopt a policy of "neutralism" between West and East (that is, between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.) in order to maintain its own independence, and, in fact, to heighten competition between the two in the region in order to fend off domination and to gain as much aid as possible from each.

The U.S. recognized that by the mid-1950s the U.S.S.R. had developed a Third World strategy of pouring vast amounts of money and material into countries in Asia, Africa, and the Mideast that had recently been colonies of Western countries. The Soviets hoped to counter Western influence in these countries by promoting anti-colonial sentiment and supporting socialist reform there. The strategy was quite successful, at least for a time. The result was that in much of the Third World, the Soviet Union was viewed more favorably than the United States.

The U.S. and Britain attempted to form a cordon of defensive alliances around the world in order to prevent Soviet expansion. This included NATA in Europe and SEATO in Southeast Asia. The initial plan also included a Mideast alliance to bridge the gap between the two, but when the U.S. and Britain began formalizing agreements with Turkey and Iraq (rivals of Egypt in regional influence), Nasser felt that they had discarded Egypt. Nasser's idea was to form a regional military alliance within the Arab League, with him as leader. The souring of relations between Nasser and the West resulted in a turning point in 1955 in which Nasser asked for, and received, large-scale military equipment sales from the Soviet Union, and distanced his country and himself from the United States. Indeed, he adopted socialist reforms and heavily promoted "pan-Arab nationalism," as well as "neutralism" and "noncooperation with the West."

Despite that, the U.S. continued to court Nasser with economic aid, which indeed he was happy to receive. The U.S. accepted that a "neutralist" Egypt was better than a communist one, and recognized that the Soviets, from this time, intended to block Western efforts to cordon them and, to do that, were encouraging vast sales of its military equipment all over the region, as well as supporting the idea of Arab nationalism, especially in opposition to Israel. The U.S. pressured Israel and Egypt to make concessions toward a settlement, with the intention of avoiding war and reducing Soviet influence in the region.

When the U.S. found that Nasser and Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion were ultimately unable or unwilling to conclude a peace agreement, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles opted to call Nasser's bluff by countering him in several covert ways, especially in promoting relations with his regional Arab rivals in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. The U.S. calculated that Nasser, confronted by the possibility that the other Arab states were aligning with the West, would find himself in a situation that he would find unacceptable--namely, with only one powerful "friend," the Soviet Union.

In order to avoid such an outcome, the U.S. believed, Nasser would become more tractable to a peace settlement with Israel, so that he would not be left behind, relative to the other Arab states. In response, Nasser stepped up anti-American rhetoric in the region and, in return from the Soviets for help in setting up covert intelligence operations in the region designed to undermine the Arab monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Libya, and Iraq, Nasser agreed to accept Soviet military assistance.

The denouement occurred over the plans to construct the Aswan High Dam, which the U.S. had been willing to fund, but which the Soviet Union had told Nasser that it would also be willing to do. Secretary of State Dulles, with Eisenhower's agreement, finally decided to extract the U.S. from situations in the Third World in which the countries were deliberately playing them off against the Soviet Union. In 1956, Dulles let it be known to Nasser that the U.S. would not fund the dam, believing that Nasser's only other option to finance it was to accept the Soviet Union's offer. This, Dulles believed correctly, Nasser would be highly reluctant to do. Nasser responded by opening diplomatic relations with China.

Nasser also had another option that the U.S. did not anticipate: He suddenly took an enormously dangerous risk and nationalized the Suez Canal, anticipating that Egypt could use the canal revenues to finance the construction of the Aswan High Dam without U.S. or Soviet funding.

In response, three months later, Britain, France (the two foreign shareholders in the canal), and Israel attacked Egypt, resulting in a quick and decisive military defeat for Egypt. The Israelis occupied a large portion of the Sinai Peninsula, and the Anglo-French forces occupied Port Said and Port Fouad at the Mediterranean terminus of the Suez Canal. All of this they did without consulting the U.S.

Eisenhower and Dulles were appalled at the attack. They believed with some good evidence that it would result in a military response from the Soviet Union, risking a much larger war, and, in any event, would throw the weight of public opinion throughout the Arab Middle East entirely against the West and into the Soviet camp. The U.S., therefore, strongly and publicly opposed the invasion and worked in the U.N., especially with Canada, to pass a cease-fire resolution and a call for the withdrawal of military forces.

In addition, the U.S. pressured Britain by threatening to sell the British bonds it held, which would have forced a devaluation of the British currency and threatened Britain's ability to import food and oil. The British relented, a cease-fire was called, and the occupying forces were evacuated.

In the Suez Crisis, the Third World in general and the Arab states in particular saw the U.S. as having acted as its friend. Despite Egypt's military loss, Nasser remained in power with the Suez Canal under Egypt's control, and the British, French, and Israelis evacuated the region they had invaded.

For the next few years, U.S. policy toward Egypt was guided by what became known as the "Eisenhower Doctrine," a declaration that the U.S. was prepared to offer assistance to any Middle Eastern country (if it asked for assistance) in order to oppose the military threat of "any nation controlled by international communism." In reality, the doctrine was fairly impractical for a number of reasons.

It invited pro-Western countries in the region to gin up internal or external "communist threats" as a simple way to procure U.S. aid without the necessity to negotiate agreements or treaties. Also, the policy was actually aimed at thwarting Nasser's ambitions to undermine his Middle Eastern rivals in the region, many of whom were pro-Western. The policy was given public shape, however, in a resolution that the Eisenhower Administration had pushed through Congress by the expediency of using the phrase "international communism." This left the Administration's actual policy in the dark and often at odds with its publicly expressed policy.

The practical result of this was State Department and CIA involvement, by covert means, in the complicated internal politics of the region, as the political winds within each country shifted. This created unintended and unwanted consequences for the United States, for which the CIA coined the term "blowback." Much of this activity, including coups and counter-coups, was inspired, influenced, or even orchestrated by the CIA. In Egypt, CIA operator Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. (Teddy's grandson), developed an exceedingly complicated and intimate relationship with (and sometimes against) the Nasser regime, as did CIA operative Miles Copeland. The U.S., however, acted for the rest of the decade under the conviction that Nasser himself was too powerful to be deposed and came to reconcile itself to containing his attempts to consolidate his influence with the other Arab states.