2 September 2026

The great cliché of having “blood on your hands”

David Dimbleby explores America’s metamorphosis into a superpower

Photo by Bettmann / Contributor via Alamy

One of the great clichés of the age is to deem thine enemy to have “blood on their hands”. However distant from real conflict, bloodstained hands can be found everywhere – from newspaper columnists to conglomerate CEOs with ties to crooked governments in war-torn regions. Yet those whose digits are truly crimson are often the ones who conceal them most effectively: warmongering strongmen whom time and history have allowed to slither away.

That is, until the latest series of David Dimbleby’s Invisible Hands: The American Century. The six-part Radio 4 programme explores America’s metamorphosis into a global superpower in the mid-20th century through the lives and minds of its lesser known architects.

The series begins on a less blood-soaked note, with treasury economist Harry Dexter White and his clash with John Maynard Keynes. Or George Kennan, whose famous telegram helped set the early Cold War on its course. But it is in his more bellicose subjects that Dimbleby seems to take true delight. The episode “Rolling Thunder” examines Walt Rostow and his transformation from JFK’s reject to LBJ’s project. (The liberal development theorist nudged the unlikely 36th president towards becoming the war hawk circling Vietnam.) And it is with a mixture of marvel and disgust that listeners can follow Paul Wolfowitz – “Wolfie” to George W Bush – as the academic and political adviser leads the president down a path of personal vengeance against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

In a time of year so pukily dubbed “silly season” by the media, Invisible Hands is a fantastically unsilly offering from the BBC. Meticulously reported, with a wealth of archival interviews (some of which, unsurprisingly, feature Dimbleby himself), this programme is Radio 4 at its finest. Though some escaped notice at the time, Invisible Hands has held up the red claws of the powerful and the guilty.