From the CIA's covert operations to the internment of Japanese Americans, the US government has made some of the most egregious mistakes in history. Join us as we count down the worst decisions America ever made.
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00:00After falling for 43 seconds, the time and barometric triggers started the firing mechanism.
00:06A uranium bullet fired down a barrel into a uranium target.
00:11Together, they started a nuclear chain reaction.
00:14Welcome to WatchMojo.
00:16And today, we're looking at the worst choices ever made by the U.S. government.
00:20These decisions either caused untold suffering or came back to haunt America down the road.
00:25He thought making concessions to Southerners was what was necessary to preserve the Union.
00:34CIA's Foreign Interference
00:36After World War II, the CIA had one job.
00:39Fight communism and secure resources by any means necessary.
00:43What followed was a spree of short-sighted covert operations.
00:47The military action culminated months of secret planning by British and American intelligence agencies
00:53as part of a plot to overthrow the Iranian government.
00:57Take the 1953 Iranian coup.
01:00By toppling a democratically elected leader,
01:02the CIA planted the seeds of regional instability that persist today.
01:07Even allies weren't safe, as seen in Italy and Australia,
01:11where they funneled funds and propaganda to sway elections.
01:14Worse, the agency helped install dictators like Mabutu Sese Siku in the Congo
01:19and Suharto in Indonesia, both notorious for human rights abuses.
01:24After replacing Indonesia's first president Sukarno,
01:27Suharto started to rule with an iron fist.
01:30In Latin America, the CIA's Operation Condor saw leftists assassinated
01:35and propped up brutal right-wing dictators,
01:38responsible for countless disappearances and deaths.
01:40These short-sighted interventions inflicted untold suffering
01:44and permanently damaged America's global reputation.
01:48Amongst the victims here, Argentines, Uruguayans, Bolivians, Chileans and Cubans.
01:55This was the centre for planned condor in Argentina.
01:58Laissez-faire economics.
02:00In the roaring 20s, the US embraced laissez-faire economics,
02:05a philosophy best described in English as hands-off.
02:08When the sky is the limit to prosperity, it is also a long way down.
02:14The government let the private sector take the wheel with little to no oversight.
02:18Presidents Harding and Coolidge embraced this philosophy,
02:22leading to rampant abuse and speculation and an unregulated stock market.
02:26It all came crashing down on Black Tuesday with the 1929 crash.
02:31The collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929
02:34was only the most visible sign of a massive economic crisis.
02:38A crisis that spread quickly from Wall Street to Main Street.
02:42Banks, operating with little oversight,
02:45extended excessive credit, creating a debt bubble that exploded.
02:49As the economy spiraled,
02:51President Hoover clung to his belief in limited government action.
02:55He resisted direct federal relief and relied on voluntary private measures.
02:59Putting in a strong protectionist law,
03:03which is then going to trigger retaliatory measures from other countries,
03:09has the effect of putting not just the American economy,
03:13but the entire Western world's economy into a nosedive.
03:18His refusal to provide direct aid to struggling Americans
03:21exacerbated the Great Depression,
03:24spreading it like a contagion to every corner of the nation.
03:26The Iraq War
03:28The Iraq War started with lies and ended in catastrophe.
03:33The Bush administration, led by neoconservative hawks,
03:36insisted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
03:40He didn't.
03:41Neocons promised Iraqis would greet us as liberators.
03:44They didn't.
03:45Instead, America dragged its allies into a brutal and unjustified occupation.
03:50It was fueled by arrogance
03:52and a complete misunderstanding of Iraq's sectarian landscape.
03:55It was intervention on a dramatic scale,
03:58and while it destroyed Saddam's Ba'athist state,
04:01the struggle to define a new Iraq continues.
04:05The administration's reckless decision to disband Saddam's Ba'athist government
04:10left thousands of armed, trained, and angry former soldiers unemployed.
04:14Many later joined insurgent groups, fueling the chaos that eventually birthed ISIS.
04:19The war, which cost over $1 trillion, shattered America's global credibility and left Iraq in ruins.
04:27At first, more than 70% of Americans supported it.
04:30But that waned as the mission became mired in controversy,
04:34eventually falling to just 32%.
04:36Interfering with and ending Reconstruction.
04:39The Reconstruction amendments, considered to be a second Bill of Rights,
04:44had the potential to reshape America into a country that better reflected its promise of equality.
04:48In his first speech after the Union victory,
04:52Lincoln alluded to the enormous challenges Reconstruction would bring.
04:57He even suggested that some black men in the South might get the vote.
05:02His words infuriated many.
05:07Instead, a series of failures sabotaged it.
05:11Andrew Johnson, a Southern sympathizer, let ex-Confederates regain power in the South.
05:17Johnson wanted the post-war South treated leniently.
05:21As for the fate of freed slaves, he wanted that left up to the states.
05:26President Grant, who did make some strides in protecting black rights,
05:30fell victim to corruption and a lack of focus.
05:33The South saw violent white backlash under his watch in the 1876 election.
05:38That vote ended in a corrupt bargain between Rutherford B. Hayes and Southern white Democrats.
05:44When he entered office, he pulled federal troops from the South.
05:48The deal secured his presidency,
05:50dooming black Southerners to a century of segregation, voter suppression, and racial terror.
05:56They felt the North was a vicious aggressor, committed to a perversion, which was black equality.
06:07This sense of a grievance and sense of injustice only grew.
06:14That this was something that was not to be accepted.
06:18Internment of Japanese Americans.
06:20After Pearl Harbor, America's fear turned into paranoia, fueled by racism.
06:26That paranoia fueled one of the most shameful mass civil rights violations in American history.
06:32Motivated by vocal outcries from politicians and military officials,
06:36FDR signed Executive Order 9066,
06:40empowering the U.S. Army to designate areas from which any or all persons may be excluded.
06:45In 1942, the U.S. government forcibly relocated over 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps
06:54under FDR's Executive Order 9066.
06:58These people, most American citizens, were imprisoned without trial for no reason other than their ancestry.
07:05120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans within four months were put into barracks.
07:13I mean, how does that happen?
07:15Families lost their homes, businesses, and dignity.
07:19The Supreme Court upheld this racist policy in Korematsu v. United States,
07:24claiming it was a, quote, military necessity.
07:27Meanwhile, actual Nazi spies operated within the country with impunity completely undetected.
07:34Even after the war, Japanese Americans received little compensation for their suffering.
07:38It would take over 40 years before President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988,
07:45paying reparations to each victim of internment.
07:49Korematsu wasn't officially overturned until 2018.
07:54The Vietnam War
07:55The Vietnam War wasn't just a disaster.
07:58It was a decades-long wound on America's psyche.
08:01Sold to the public as a necessary stand against communism, the war was built on deception.
08:06When President Kennedy first sent Americans to Vietnam in 1961,
08:11he did so with the conviction that America was the natural leader of the free world.
08:16The Gulf of Tonkin incident, for example, was exaggerated to spread a lust for revenge.
08:22The military insisted victory was just around the corner.
08:26Another lie, exposed by the Pentagon Papers.
08:28The New York Times started publication of a series of reports based on a top-secret Pentagon study of the Vietnam War.
08:35The central fact so far revealed is that there was a massive deception of the American public
08:41for starting the bombing of North Vietnam.
08:44Meanwhile, troops, often young draftees, were dropped into a brutal conflict
08:49where they both endured and committed atrocities, like the My Lai Massacre.
08:54As body bags piled up, public support collapsed.
08:58Unlike their fathers, soldiers returning home weren't welcomed as heroes.
09:02They faced hostility and indifference.
09:04The war left lasting scars, from PTSD-ridden veterans
09:09to a deep and abiding public skepticism of government.
09:12The price was over 2 million Vietnamese and Americans dead and wounded.
09:17SCOTUS and legalized segregation.
09:20In the aftermath of Reconstruction, the U.S. Supreme Court made a series of decisions
09:25that entrenched racial segregation for decades.
09:28White Southerners are resistant of the idea of living in an egalitarian society
09:33in which African Americans might operate as equal partners.
09:36The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875,
09:42ruling that the 13th and 14th Amendments could not outlaw discrimination by private citizens.
09:47This was cemented a few years later in Plessy v. Ferguson,
09:51where SCOTUS upheld racial segregation under the guise of, quote,
09:54separate but equal.
09:55They encode white supremacy through the enactment of segregation statutes,
10:02taking the vote away from African Americans,
10:06all sorts of things that are designed to subordinate black people,
10:12to establish a place for black people that they know, in a sense, to choreograph race relations.
10:17Jim Crow revived the Supreme Court stamp of approval, leading to decades of racial terror.
10:23The KKK and other white supremacist groups terrorized black communities with impunity.
10:28Violence and lynchings were commonplace.
10:31Racist laws enshrined systemic racism, economic disparity, and social marginalization,
10:36the effects of which are still felt today.
10:39Sins of the Nuclear Age
10:41As of this video, the United States remains the only nation to use nuclear weapons in war.
10:47The bomb produces some of the worst psychological tension ever in world history.
10:52Historians still debate whether it was necessary, but there's no debating the horror unleashed.
10:57The bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 instantly killed tens of thousands,
11:03leaving many more to suffer slow, agonizing deaths from radiation exposure.
11:07At 11.02 a.m., the B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
11:13In the years that followed, the world lived under the shadow of mutually assured destruction,
11:18the grim doctrine that any nuclear conflict would end civilization.
11:22Meanwhile, the U.S. government secretly conducted horrific radiation experiments on unwitting civilians.
11:28Project Sunshine harvested body parts, not all from adults, to study radioactive fallout.
11:33The Cincinnati radiation experiments exposed cancer patients, many poor and black, to lethal radiation without consent.
11:41Retired English professor Martha Stevens is a whistleblower who brought the research of Dr. Eugene Sanger to light.
11:47The Trail of Tears
11:48The U.S. didn't just take Native American land.
11:52It forcibly marched entire nations to their deaths.
11:55In 1829, Andrew Jackson was elected U.S. president.
12:01He believed that Native Americans had no rights to their land and began proceedings to remove the Cherokee from the southern states.
12:09Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, President Andrew Jackson forced the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole nations off their ancestral lands.
12:20The Cherokee endured the worst of it, dragged on a brutal 1,200-mile march to Oklahoma.
12:27Thousands died from exposure, disease, and starvation.
12:30Those who resisted were shackled, forced to watch soldiers looting their homes.
12:36Thousands of Native Americans were pulled from their homes in Georgia and other states across the south.
12:42Many were shackled in chains and forced to walk at gunpoint more than 1,000 miles west.
12:48It was a large-scale ethnic cleansing, uprooting entire cultures.
12:53The scars of this atrocity remain centuries later.
12:56Indigenous communities still fight tooth and claw for sovereignty, justice, and survival.
13:18Compromising on slavery.
13:21America's worst compromises weren't about policy, but about people.
13:24From the Missouri Compromise to the Compromise of 1850, lawmakers repeatedly sacrificed human decency for political convenience.
13:33Southerners feared that if slavery were banned in the new territories, the Union might tip in favor of abolition and destroy their economy.
13:41They treated slavery like a political chess piece, rather than a moral stain.
13:46Instead of solving the issue, these deals merely delayed the inevitable, allowing tensions to fester.
13:52The Kansas-Nebraska Act was the final insult, a compromise ending in chaos.
13:57He thought making concessions to Southerners was what was necessary to preserve the Union.
14:05Bleeding Kansas turned the prairies into a battleground.
14:08Pro- and anti-slavery forces slaughtered each other without mercy.
14:12The Dred Scott decision then shattered any hope of a peaceful resolution.
14:17Ruling black Americans weren't citizens at all.
14:20These half-measures all but ensured war.
14:23By kicking the can down the road, America guaranteed that blood, not words, would decide its future.
14:30The racist pro-slavery decision inflamed public opinion.
14:34It also angered a rising political star named Abraham Lincoln.
14:38What do you think was the biggest mistake in U.S. history?
14:41Let us know in the comments.
14:43The young professor glanced at the sky, but a thick layer of clouds obscured the aircraft.
14:50A B-29 superfortress laden with a single atomic bomb.
14:53Did you enjoy this video?
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