Personally, I like plain old “underworld” as the catchall here, but that’s a matter of word economy and taste. What all these unwieldy titles share is connection to a common and necessarily flawed “overworld” history. Linking the mafia, the CIA, and some anti-Castro Cubans to the killing of a president, in other words, risks becoming a shaggy dog story if it’s not plugged into “the bigger picture.” By that I mean the sort of simultaneously specific and sweeping saga of humanity that would necessarily befit a public political assassination, an overstory that represents the absolute zenith of both extravagantly public and covert ruthlessness.
That bigger picture was the Cold War. The French theorist Paul Virilio correctly described war as a kind of centrifugal force in a society, writing in 1977’s Speed and Politics that “history progresses at the speed of its weapon systems.” As many millions of Europeans learned during the Thirty Years’ War and Napoleonic period, the centralization of authority and allocation of resources required by war gives it the capacity to underwrite the unfurling of the future. Only a general, in that time, could assume the role of “history on horseback,” to borrow Hegel’s famous description of the French dictator and modernizer. A generation later, across the Atlantic, it was the Civil War that essentially gave the U.S. federal government the authority to really rule over the whole country, and the troops to transmit that truth domestically and abroad. America’s next total war mobilization ostensibly lasted from 1941 to 1945.
No longer shackled by wartime rationing and wage restrictions, at the end of World War II, workers staged industrial strikes across the country. Fearful of the threat that movement represented to the evolving “national security” interest, a regime of both wage and price controls was instituted in 1950. Eighteen months later, staring down labor action that would endanger the war effort in Korea, the Truman administration tried and failed to seize the American steel industry. Four years later, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act created the present-day interstate highway system. NASA-contracted laboratories produced innovations as varied as Velcro and baby formula. Military jet engines using the same propulsion technology as commercial airliners increasingly conveyed people around the world. What we call the internet was initially developed by Pentagon researchers in the 1960s. Adam Driver served in the Marines before he went to Juilliard.
The British historian A.J.P. Taylor once observed that “in every state power rests with the armed forces; and whoever controls these forces controls, in the last resort, the state itself.” Although the Cold War was an amalgamation of proxy wars, deterrence strategies and too many other hijinks to name, it was also a process by which the military fortified its position as the determinant force of the American state. That the Pentagon after World War II became the government’s biggest employer and the globe’s largest capital suck—firing missiles in the long run shrinks the economy rather than growing it—was not preordained. It took a team effort to turn that tragedy into truism.