Although the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the political and ideological struggle of the Cold War for more than four decades, the conflict never reached the level of outright combat between the two superpowers. Despite the lack of direct fighting, the two powers battled for ideological dominance of the world by intervening in the politics and economies of other countries. Civil wars broke out across the globe, with one side receiving arms and support from the United States and the other side getting the same from the Soviet Union. In this way, American and Soviet weapons and money met on the battlefields of the world without the two powers ever directly waging war on one another.
As Soviet intelligence officer Nikolai Leonov put it, “The destiny of world confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, between Capitalism and Socialism, would be resolved in the Third World.”13 These conflicts became known as the Proxy Wars, or “Hot” Wars, of the Cold War. And while there were many proxy wars across the world in the Cold War period, this exhibition focuses in particular on the conflicts in Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Afghanistan and how each of these wars was covered in real time by PBS NewsHour predecessor programs, mainly The MacNeil-Lehrer Report and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.
MacNeil/Lehrer Report and NewsHour Coverage
The proxy wars addressed in this exhibition were chosen not only because of the extensive attention paid to each by the NewsHour, but also because they represent how the Cold War impacted diverse areas across the globe and continues to play a part in the politics of today. These countries also were chosen to represent a variety of journalistic techniques and strategies employed by the MacNeil/Lehrer Report and NewsHourwhile covering these specific wars. The ability to score high-profile interviews is particularly on display during the proxy war coverage. Guests ranged from rebel leaders fighting in Afghanistan and Angola to the presidents of Nicaragua and El Salvador, with one NewsHour producer even going so far as to befriend the wife of Salvadoran President José Napoleón Duarte in order to secure an interview with him.14
These four conflicts also exemplify how the Report and the NewsHour approached covering wars both near and far. For El Salvador and Nicaragua, the proximity to the United States allowed the show to send correspondents into the field in these countries; in Angola and Afghanistan, conflicts that were inaccessible to NewsHour reporters, the show both utilized footage of outside journalists and secured representatives of those conflicts in the United States to be interviewed on air.