The Cold War and decolonization 359

Literature and arts 1913–2008 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of Négritude, pioneering critic of colonialism

"My turn to state an equation: colonization = 'thingification.'" In Discourse on Colonialism (1950) he argued that Europeans had already applied to colonized peoples the methods they later condemned as Nazism, and that Nazism was the natural conclusion of a civilization that justified colonization.

Born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, the son of a tax inspector, he studied in Paris, where with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas he launched the Négritude movement; the journal L'Étudiant noir (founded 1934–1935) first used the term in its present sense in May–June 1935. Frantz Fanon was his student. Elected with Communist Party support in 1945, he was mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years and deputy for 47, and in 1946 secured the law making Martinique a French département. He broke with the PCF in his Lettre à Maurice Thorez (24 October 1956), citing the Khrushchev report and the repressive policy in the Maghreb; English-language accounts instead attribute the break to the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. He founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais in 1958 and left politics in 2001.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1914–1994 ○ Natural causes

A negotiator of the nuclear age

When he headed the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Smith proposed a direct Moscow–Washington link that met resistance from State and the military, yet once it became the 'hot line,' President Kennedy credited Smith with the original idea.

Gerard C. Smith was an American lawyer and nuclear-policy specialist who treated arms control and nonproliferation as problems of statecraft. As the U.S. lead negotiator at SALT I, he organized the practical work of limitation talks amid competing nuclear strategies, later recording their tensions and judgments in Doubletalk. He continued to oppose measures he believed would undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, making his career a study in both managing and questioning the arms race.

Literature and arts 1914–2005 ○ Natural causes

A Polish courier who connected resistance, exile, and radio

On 29 July 1944, he told Home Army leaders that substantial Western support was impossible, but the decision to rise did not change.

Jan Nowak-Jeziorański was a courier and journalist who linked the Polish Home Army with the government-in-exile in London. Returning from London in July 1944, he warned Home Army leaders that Western support for an uprising would be limited, but he could not stop the decision to rise, and he broadcast during the Warsaw Uprising. After the war he directed the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe, making exile broadcasting a sustained instrument of political communication. He returned to Poland in 1989 and continued to advocate its integration with the West.

Security, intelligence and policing United States state institutions 1915–1992 ○ Respiratory failure

The founding father of photo interpretation whose analysts spotted Soviet missiles in Cuba and triggered the crisis

"If there was ever a time I want to be right in my life, this is it": upon confirming the SS-4 missiles in the U-2 photos of Cuba, October 15, 1962

A Chicago-born geologist who began his intelligence career as a Navy photo interpreter during World War II, Lundahl joined the CIA in 1953 to lead its Photographic Interpretation Division and became the founding director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in 1961, overseeing imagery analysis from U-2 spy planes and early reconnaissance satellites. On October 15, 1962, when NPIC analysts identified Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile sites in U-2 photographs of Cuba, Lundahl personally confirmed the finding and, saying 'If there was ever a time I want to be right in my life, this is it,' alerted CIA headquarters; the next morning he briefed President Kennedy at the White House. He led NPIC until his retirement in 1973, shaping U.S. imagery intelligence through the Cold War and earning the National Security Medal and an honorary knighthood.

Diplomacy and international organization United Kingdom state institutions 1915–1995 ○ Natural causes

A practical architect of nuclear diplomacy

With Kissinger, he turned the Soviet draft into a counterproposal that preserved alliance obligations.

Thomas Brimelow was a British diplomat and Soviet specialist who worked where Cold War alliance politics met arms diplomacy. During the negotiation of the 1973 Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, he helped Henry Kissinger reshape the Soviet proposal for an unconditional renunciation of nuclear weapons into a narrower text preserving alliance obligations and covering third countries. His role showed British Foreign Office expertise entering the heart of American strategy toward the USSR, while also revealing how the language of détente could preserve nuclear deterrence and great-power realpolitik.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1915–2015 ○ Natural causes

From first translator of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts to philosopher of Detroit's revolution

“We are the leaders we've been looking for.” — interviewed in her 90s in Detroit

Daughter of Chinese immigrants, she earned a PhD at Bryn Mawr but was barred from academia by racism and joined the Workers Party. With C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya she formed the Johnson–Forest Tendency triad, co-authoring State Capitalism and World Revolution and producing the first English translation of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts. In 1953 she married Black autoworker James Boggs, settled in Detroit, broke from Trotskyism, and turned toward community-based revolutionary praxis centered on Black liberation, writing into her 90s.

Government and administration United States state institutions 1916–2009 ○ Natural causes

The quantitative defense secretary who led the Vietnam War and helped prevent nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis

The major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.

The eighth U.S. Secretary of Defense (1961–1968), and its longest-serving holder, leading the Pentagon under both Kennedy and Johnson for over seven years. In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he was the first in EXCOMM to propose a naval 'quarantine' over an airstrike and became its fiercest advocate, arguing it would show Khrushchev resolve while remaining a controlled choice that need not escalate into military conflict. Yet in Vietnam, the same quantitative analyst who championed escalation grew privately skeptical, and 27 years after leaving office he confessed in his memoir that the war was 'wrong, terribly wrong.' He later served as president of the World Bank (1968–1981), redirecting its focus from infrastructure to poverty reduction.

Government and administration United States state institutions 1917–1963 ✕ Assassinated

The youngest U.S. president, who took the world to the brink of nuclear war and back

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

The 35th president of the United States (1961–1963), elected at 43 as the youngest president and the first Catholic. He authorized the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and later that year his tense Vienna summit with Khrushchev helped convince the Soviets to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he chose a naval 'quarantine' over an airstrike and, through his brother Robert, secretly traded the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles, pulling the world back from nuclear war. He was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963; after his death, his civil rights and tax-cut agenda passed through Congress.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1917–2000 ○ Natural causes

The Trotskyist theorist who defined the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism and built Britain's Socialist Workers Party

The slogan the Cliff group raised in 1950, when a handful of supporters brought out Socialist Review: “Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism.” It was a refusal of both camps of the Cold War, and the sentence that defined this current for the next half century.

Born Yigael Glückstein. Raised in Palestine in a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he left the Zionist left in his teens for Trotskyism, served twelve months in a British Mandate prison for anti-war agitation, and moved to Britain in 1947. In The Nature of Stalinist Russia (1948) he defined the USSR not as a degenerated workers'' state but as bureaucratic state capitalism, breaking with Fourth International orthodoxy, and on that base he built the theory of the permanent arms economy, which explained the postwar boom by East-West military spending, and of deflected permanent revolution, in which neither bourgeoisie nor working class but intellectuals and officers carry the revolution out. The organization he started as the Socialist Review Group in 1950 became the International Socialists and, in 1977, the Socialist Workers Party. He left a study of Rosa Luxemburg and four-volume biographies of Lenin and of Trotsky, and, never granted British citizenship, remained stateless all his life.