ABSTRACT
It was not unusual during the Cold War era for Americans to tune in their evening television news only to catch the image of US soldiers slogging across the jungles, the beaches, or the city streets of some distant, third-world nation. From Truman through Reagan, officials portrayed US intervention as reactive and defensive. Violent revolutions and civil wars, they charged, had stemmed from Soviet subversion. While Washington harbored no expansionist designs, America had a duty to save the newly emerged nations from the grip of communism, and to place them on the path to democratic development.
