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SOCIAL SCIENCE RESOURCE GUIDE
An Introduction to the History of the Cold War
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
The Early Cold War in Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
SECTION I: FROM ALLIES TO
RIVALS: WORLD WAR II ENDS AND
THE COLD WAR BEGINS . . . . . . . . . .7
Origins of the Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Nuclear War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
American Ideals: Wilsonian Democracy and
American Exceptionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Soviet Ideals: Marxist-Leninist Revolution
and Stalinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
New Leadership . . . . . . . . . . 27
World War II: The U.S.-Soviet Alliance . . . . .10
The Basis of the U.S.-Soviet Wartime
Alliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
The American Wartime Experience . . . . 11
The Soviet Wartime Experience . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Postwar Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
The Yalta Conference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
The Potsdam Conference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
The United Nations (San Francisco,
April 25–June 26, 1945) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
The Cold War Begins . . . . . . . . 16
The Early Cold War in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . 16
The Iron Curtain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Soviet Satellites . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Containment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
George F. Kennan: Architect of
Containment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Political Containment: The Truman
Doctrine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Economic Containment: The Marshall Plan to
the Berlin Blockade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Military Containment: NATO to NSC-68 . . . . 20
Ideological Containment: Propaganda and the
Campaign of Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
The Arms Race and Deterrence . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Atomic Warfare Strategy: Massive Retaliation
to Mutually Assured Destruction . . . . . 27
The USA: Eisenhower and the Cold War
Consensus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
The U.S.S.R.: The Death of Stalin and the Rise
of Khrushchev . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Section I Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
SECTION II: THE COLD WAR’S
EFFECTS ON DOMESTIC POLITICS
AND CULTURE IN AMERICA . . . . 30
The Enemy Within: “Disloyalty” and the
Fear of Communist Subversion . . . . . . . . .30
Loyalty Programs and the FBI . . . . . . . . . . . 30
HUAC and the Hollywood Ten . . . . . . . . . . . 31
The Smith Act Trials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Espionage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
The Alger Hiss Affair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32
The Execution of the Rosenbergs . . . . . . . . . 33
McCarthyism . . . . . . . . . . . 33
McCarthy’s Rise: Anti-Communist
Crusader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
McCarthy’s Fall: The Army-McCarthy
Hearings, 1954 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Cold War Civil Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
Truman’s Civil Rights Platform . . . . . . . . . . .36
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Clashing Ideals . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Decolonization and Independence . . . . . . . . . 22
Mao Zedong and China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
The Korean War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Cold War Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Cold War Science: Sputnik I and Scientific
Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
Cold War Math . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Preparing for Nuclear War . . . . . . . 41
The Military-Industrial Complex . . . . . . . . . .42
Cold War Arts: Literature and Film . . . . . . . 42
1984 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Science Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Congo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52
The Resource Curse: Rubber to Uranium . . . . 52
Independence and Neutrality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Civil War and Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Vietnam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53
The Domino Theory . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Gulf of Tonkin, 1964 .
54
The Antiwar Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
The Tet Offensive, 1968. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55
Nixon’s War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
The Paris Peace Accords, 1973 . . . . . . 56
Détente . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56
Soviet Literature . . . . . . . . . . . 43
The Sino-Soviet Split . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56
Ping-Pong Diplomacy and Nixon in China . . .57
Section II Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
The Carter Administration and the End
of Détente . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
The Pasternak Affair . . . . . . . . . . 43
Samizdat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
SECTION III: CONFLICT AND
CONCILIATION, 1953–79 . . . . . . . . . . 45
The Central Intelligence Agency and
American Intervention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Iran, 1953 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Guatemala, 1954 . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Vietnam, 1954 . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Congressional Opposition to Détente . . . . . . 58
The Rise of Human Rights Foreign
Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59
Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59
The Iranian Hostage Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59
Section III Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Non-Alignment, Crisis in the Middle East,
TIMELINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
and the New Order . . . . . . . . . 47
The Suez Crisis and the Eisenhower
GLOSSARY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Doctrine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47
The Khrushchev Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48
The Kitchen Debate and Khrushchev’s
American Tour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48
The U-2 Incident . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49
The 1960 U.S. Election . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49
NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
New Flash Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50
Cuba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50
The Cuban Revolution, 1959 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
The Bay of Pigs Invasion, 1961 . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
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Edith Sampson: African-American Diplomacy
in the Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
Desegregation and Foreign Affairs: Brown v.
Board to Little Rock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
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Introduction
The stakes were high—the advent of nuclear weapons
and the ensuing arms race meant that each side
soon possessed the capacity to inflict destruction
on an unprecedented scale. In the United States,
this reality prompted the government to prepare for
possible nuclear war. Enormous subterranean bunkers
were constructed and outfitted with state-of-the-art
communications technology to allow the functions
of state to continue without interruption even in the
event of a catastrophic attack. A similar sense of civic
duty led ordinary teenagers to volunteer to have their
fingers pricked by the school nurse, who squeezed a
single drop of blood onto a test strip. Next, the students
proceeded to make-shift booths where the principal,
or one of their teachers, drew a permanent mark on
their upper torso using an electric needle gun. The
tattoos, no more than five-eighths of inch, contained
letters—O, A, B, AB—followed by either a plus or
minus sign and identified each person’s individual
blood type. The purpose was to save first responders
crucial seconds and allow for a ready supply of blood
donations should the town be hit by a Soviet missile.
The tattoo’s location was pragmatic and morbid—the
torso ensured that the mark would still be legible even
if the person’s limbs were blown off by the force of
the explosion. That the very real threat of nuclear
annihilation never came to pass owes as much to luck
as to human wisdom and restraint. As you will see,
there were some extremely close calls along the way .
It is also essential to recognize that while the United
States and the Soviet Union avoided direct military
confrontation during the Cold War, their toxic rivalry
fueled dozens of proxy wars around the globe,
triggered military interventions that destabilized entire
regions, and brought misery to civilians caught in the
crossfire. Moreover, the Cold War was not confined to
U.S-Soviet relations or the Soviet-allied Communist
Bloc nations of Eastern Europe. The triumph of
Communist governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America showed the tremendous appeal of Marxist
ideology, especially among peoples looking to break
free of European colonialism. Over its lifespan, the
Cold War impacted billions of people in virtually every
nation on earth from Albania to Zambia. Truly, the
Cold War cannot be properly understood without fully
taking in its global reach. The Soviet Union, of course,
no longer exists. Explaining the reasons for its
spectacular and chaotic collapse remains one of the
Cold War historian’s biggest challenges.
The resource guide has one full section devoted to the
domestic social, economic, and political impact of the
Cold War on the United States . The Cold War
fundamentally altered the political landscape of the
United States. Foreign policymakers from both major
parties shared a common worldview that interpreted all
communist victories as American defeats. This
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At the most basic level, the Cold War refers to the
intense military, political, and economic rivalry that
erupted between the United States and the Soviet
Union following World War II. Each nation served
as the standard bearer of an ideology: capitalism for
the United States and communism for the Soviet
Union. The Cold War stretched across more than four
decades, from approximately 1946 to 1991, and served
as the dominant foreign policy concern for nine U.S.
presidents. In this all-consuming competition, every
aspect of each society was mobilized to demonstrate
its cultural superiority. Musicians, athletes, and artists
all assumed overtly political roles in the great Cold
War drama. Ping-pong players became peacemakers,
while chess masters enacted the superpower struggle
in miniature. As American and Soviet engineers raced
to see who would be the first to launch a human into
outer space, electric dishwashers and sugary soft
drinks became potent political symbols. Whether
they symbolized capitalist abundance or decadence
depended on the ideology of the viewer.
NOTE TO STUDENTS: You will notice as you read
through the Resource Guide that some key terms and
names are boldfaced. Terms that are boldfaced and
underlined are included in the glossary at the end of
the Resource Guide.
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logic bled into the domestic sphere as law enforcement
officials and politicians invoked national security
to curtail dissent and infringe on Americans’ civil
liberties. Anti-communism was a potent force and
was too frequently wielded as a blunt instrument
by unscrupulous individuals seeking personal and
partisan gain. An obsession with rooting out internal
enemies coupled with poisonous and divisive rhetoric
constitutes one of the Cold War’s darkest legacies.
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Section I
From Allies to Rivals: World War II
Ends and the Cold War Begins
Historians have long debated how and why the
Cold War began in an attempt to pinpoint the exact
moment one of the defining conflicts of the twentieth
century took shape. According to the general scholarly
consensus, the Cold War officially began in 1946 when
both Soviet and American leaders publicly spoke of a
world divided into two opposing camps. In the wake
of World War II, the national interests of the two allies
became increasingly irreconcilable as each sought to
shape the postwar world in its own image. Divergent
interests set the rival superpowers on a collision
course, but a deep ideological divide accelerated the
initial clash and provided momentum that would
sustain it for over four decades. In order to understand
the origins of the Cold War, therefore, it is important to
understand the national ideologies of the United States
and the Soviet Union.
Clashing Ideals
While the interests of the United States and the Soviet
Union shifted over the course of the Cold War, the
ideals of each remained remarkably stable. The United
States proudly hoisted the banner of individual liberty
and free-market capitalism, while the Soviet Union
held aloft the red flag of Marxist-Leninist revolution
and centralized economic planning. Soviet and
American ideologies were diametrically opposed, but
each purported to offer universal models that the rest
of the world should emulate. Both nations traced their
beginnings to idealistic revolutions that represented
radical departures from the established Eurocentric
order. As the historian Odd Arne Westad astutely
observed, “Both were envisaged by their founders to
be grand experiments, on the success of which the
future of humankind depended.”1 Thus, the Cold War
stemmed in part from a clash between Soviet and
American visions for a world order that were alike
in ambition, if not in content or methods. Soviet and
American leaders each sincerely believed in the moral
supremacy of their own society and pressed for their
own system’s expansion with missionary zeal. This
mentality was a recipe for conflict.
American Ideals: Wilsonian Democracy and
American Exceptionalism
Under the charismatic leadership of President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the United States was able
to definitively shed the popular isolationist tendencies
that had flourished in the 1930s to embrace a muscular
and internationalist foreign policy by the conclusion of
World War II. Even before the nation officially entered
the fray, FDR laid the groundwork for what would
become a powerful wartime narrative—the war was not
a remote conflict that Americans could safely ignore,
as some isolationists contended, but instead was a fight
that struck to the very core of America’s most cherished
ideals. In a speech delivered in early 1941, nearly a year
before America entered the war, FDR telegraphed the
ideological stakes of the conflict from the perspective
of the United States. Echoing the rhetoric of President
Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he had
served two decades earlier, FDR identified freedom of
speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and
freedom from want as quintessentially American values
with universal appeal.
In August of 1941, Roosevelt issued a joint declaration
with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill known
as the Atlantic Charter. The charter outlined a set of
shared principles, including free trade, national selfdetermination, and democracy—though the British
remained intent on preserving their empire. The
Atlantic Charter drew directly from Woodrow Wilson’s
Fourteen Points, originally formulated in an address
to Congress in 1918 and then presented to the world
at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, which had
promoted national self-determination and international
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ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR
fighting lasted, but it could not resolve them.
Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell, 1943. Rockwell
famously depicted FDR’s “Four Freedoms” in an iconic series
of popular posters advertising war bonds.
cooperation in the wake of World War I. After the
United States entered World War II, the Saturday
Evening Post illustrator Norman Rockwell famously
depicted FDR’s “Four Freedoms” in an iconic series of
popular posters advertising war bonds. These images
provided powerful reminders to Americans of what they
were fighting for and what they were fighting against.
In this way, FDR drafted a blueprint for a postwar
order based on American principles. At the same time,
the prominence that FDR gave to these ideals also
invited scrutiny of the nation’s wartime alliance with
the undemocratic and communist Soviet Union. From
its inception the U.S.-Soviet alliance functioned as a
marriage of convenience. It was not based on shared
ideals, but rather on temporarily overlapping interests
and a common foe. The all-consuming task of defeating
Hitler helped to obscure the ideological contradictions at
the heart of the Soviet-American partnership while the
American exceptionalism, the belief that the United
States possessed a unique historical duty to spread
its values and institutions to nations around the
world, provided another key ideological ingredient
that predisposed Americans to embrace a rivalry
with the Soviet Union after World War II. American
exceptionalism actually predated the founding of the
United States by more than a century. In 1630, the
Puritan minister and Massachusetts Bay Governor John
Winthrop had urged his parishioners to help make their
new colony “a city upon a hill,” a shining example that
would inspire others while pleasing God.3 Winthrop’s
sermon resonated with the Founding Fathers and
subsequent generations of Americans who viewed the
United States as a special nation with a divine mandate
to defend freedom and spread democracy around the
globe. While in practice the United States often fell
short of its vaunted dedication to democratic ideals, this
lofty mission helped sustain American commitment to
the Cold War over several decades.
The publisher Henry Luce perfectly captured the
enduring resonance of American exceptionalism in
a widely read editorial written in early 1941. “It now
becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which
the ideals [of civilization] spread throughout the
world,” Luce wrote, calling on every American to pool
their individual efforts in order to collectively “create
the first great American Century.”4 As shorthand for
an assertive stance that placed American leadership at
the center of international affairs and championed the
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World War II encouraged Americans to view world
affairs in black and white terms with little room for
shades of gray. During the war, Roosevelt’s War
Department sponsored propaganda that reinforced the
narrative that the Allies in general, and America in
particular, were fighting a just war against the forces
of evil. The prelude to Frank Capra’s Why We Fight
series, for example, opened with a quote from Vice
President Henry Wallace who proclaimed, “This is a
fight between a free world and a slave world.” While
Wallace’s words echoed, two globes, one bathed in
light and one shrouded in darkness, appeared on the
screen.2 This stark message may have lacked subtlety,
but it proved effective. Allied victory solidified the
popular identification of World War II as the “good
war” and primed ordinary Americans to embrace the
moral righteousness of the Cold War.
image of America as a beacon of freedom and liberty
to the rest of the world, Luce’s “American Century”
became a lodestar for American foreign policymakers
and intellectuals throughout the Cold War.
Soviet Ideals: Marxist-Leninist Revolution
and Stalinism
The philosophy of the nineteenth-century German
intellectual Karl Marx, author of The Communist
Manifesto, led the founders of the Soviet Union to view
all history through the lens of class struggle, in which
a small number of “haves” repeatedly oppressed the
masses of “have nots.” According to Marx and his
followers, the only way to end this cycle was for the
proletarian masses to rise up and overthrow the ruling
classes. Lenin adapted Marx’s ideas to the unique
conditions of the Russian Empire and forged a coalition
of intellectuals, soldiers, workers, and peasants. Lenin
was an outspoken champion of world revolution, whose
critique of economic inequality found fertile ground in
the colonial world.
Soviet domestic and foreign policies, at least in theory,
aligned with the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, as the
official Soviet brand of communist ideology came to
be known. At home, this meant a centralized economy
with production goals set by the state in Five-Year
Plans and later collectivized agriculture. The Soviets
also instituted a slew of social welfare programs and
opened educational and professional opportunities to
workers, women, and ethnic minorities. The Soviet
Union’s official anti-racist stance earned the nation a
favorable reputation among African Americans. In the
1930s, Moscow became a beacon to leftists around the
Portrait of Karl Marx in 1875. Marx’s philosophy, elucidated
in his Communist Manifesto, led the founders of the Soviet
Union to view all history through the lens of class struggle.
globe who admired the nation’s rapid industrialization,
ambitious social policies, and ideological clout. Soviet
education and ubiquitous propaganda encouraged the
peoples of the Soviet Union to think of themselves
as participants in a noble project of world-historic
proportions—and many earnestly internalized this
intensely ideological mindset.
In foreign policy, Marxism-Leninism offered a
pragmatic framework for interpreting world
events. According to Marxist ideology, capitalism was
inherently exploitative and hostile toward communism.
At the same time, since Marx claimed that capitalism’s
ultimate demise was inevitable, the Soviets could
justify peaceful coexistence with capitalist nations
in the short term. Thus, Soviet leaders during the
interwar period opportunistically cooperated with
Western capitalist nations, and even negotiated the
nonaggression pact with Hitler’s Germany, in order
to allow the Soviet Union time to develop its
economy. At the same time, the Soviets utilized nonstate networks headquartered in Moscow to covertly
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The Soviet Union was born from blood and chaos. In
1917, the Russian Empire, weakened by three years
of war and riven by internal divisions, disintegrated.
After two revolutions and a brutal civil war, the
communist Red Army emerged victorious. The
triumphant Bolsheviks, as members of the dominant
political faction of Russia’s banned revolutionary
Marxist political party were known, proclaimed the
creation of the world’s first socialist state, the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), in 1922. Under
the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks did
not set out to build a new nation, but an entirely new
society. Lenin and his comrades pledged to abolish old
social hierarchies based on race, class, and gender and
replace them with a new egalitarian society.
Stalin was born in 1878 in Georgia, located just south of
the Caucasus Mountains, to a poor shoemaker. After
briefly considering the priesthood, Stalin dedicated
himself to the overthrow of the Romanov Dynasty and
was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned by the Tsarist
regime for his revolutionary activities before 1917.
Despite his status as an original member of the
Bolshevik Party, a veteran of the Civil War, and a highranking Soviet official, Stalin was not Lenin’s chosen
successor. Nevertheless, Stalin used his position as the
head of the Communist Party to consolidate power and
set his rivals against one another . By 1928, Stalin had
seized complete control of the Soviet government and
harnessed the state propaganda apparatus to promote
a cult of personality that elevated the Soviet leader to
god-like status among the Soviet people.
In the 1930s, Stalin mobilized the Soviet population to
rapidly industrialize the nation’s economy and collectivize
its vast agricultural sector. These campaigns cast a pall
on the utopian promise of the Soviet Union and offered a
bleak future for the millions of peoples who would
find themselves living under Stalinist regimes created
after the liberation of Europe from Nazi control.
World War II: The U.S.-Soviet Alliance
The Basis of the U.S.-Soviet Wartime Alliance
Portrait of Joseph Stalin in 1937. As important as MarxistLeninist ideology was to Soviet policy, the personality and
predilections of Stalin, who led the U.S.S.R. after Lenin’s
death in 1924, played an even more significant role.
From 1941 to 1945, the United States, Great Britain,
and the Soviet Union, the three major nations of the
Allied Powers (Allies), engaged in an unprecedented
global conflict against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy,
and Imperial Japan, the three major nations of the Axis
Powers (Axis). Of the main belligerents in World War
II, the United States entered the war last, following
a surprise Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet
anchored at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. By
that time, Great Britain had been at war with Adolph
Hitler’s Germany for more than two years and had
endured a relentless bombing campaign waged by
the Luftwaffe (German air force) during the second
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support foreign Communist revolutionaries who would
hopefully undermine the capitalist and imperialist
world order at some future date. As important as
Marxist-Leninist ideology was to Soviet policy, the
personality and predilections of Joseph Stalin, who
led the nation after Lenin’s death in 1924, played an
even more significant role.
Soviet-American alliance strained and then broke.
With the aid of hindsight, the coldly strategic logic
of the wartime alliance makes the Cold War appear
inevitable. To fully understand how two victorious
allies turned into bitter rivals at the conclusion of
World War II, however, we must turn to the vastly
different experiences of each nation in the war itself
and to the stark contrast between the interests of the
United States and the Soviet Union as each looked to
shape the postwar world order.
A view of London in December 1940 after a German bombing
raid. Great Britain endured a relentless bombing campaign
waged by the German air force during the second half of 1940.
half of 1940. The Soviet Union initially signed a
nonaggression pact with Germany in August of 1939
and then quickly conquered Finland in the Winter
War of 1939–40. On June 22, 1941, however, Hitler
launched a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union,
leaving the Nazi-Soviet Pact in tatters.
For each of the “Big Three” Allies, unexpected events
led to a wartime alliance that remained fragile and
pragmatic. This was less true for the Anglo-American
partnership, strengthened by the bonds of common
culture, shared economic interests, and democratic
institutions, than the Soviet-American alliance that
depended almost entirely on a shared hatred of a
common enemy. For more than a decade after the
founding of the Soviet Union in 1922, the United States
refused to recognize the new Communist state. Even
after formal diplomatic ties were established in 1933,
U.S.-Soviet relations remained tense. The United States
suspected the Soviet Union of fomenting revolution
within America, while the Soviets viewed the United
States as an implacably hostile capitalist nation. As
ideological opposites with a history of tense relations,
the United States and the Soviet Union shared little
beyond a common desire to defeat Nazi Germany.
The Soviet-American alliance, in the words of one
leading historian, was “forged in the end from the bare
metal of national self-interest.”6 When those national
interests diverged, as they did with increasing speed
in the final months of the Second World War, the
World War II was not a fight the United States
welcomed or pursued. The nation’s experience in
World War I, though relatively brief, had left many
Americans disillusioned with Woodrow Wilson’s
moralistic brand of internationalism and wary of
involving the nation in foreign conflicts. A strain of
isolationism, amplified by the acute suffering brought
on by the Great Depression, gained traction throughout
the 1930s. An opinion poll conducted in 1936 revealed
the depth of antiwar sentiment among the American
people. When asked if America should take part
in another world war if one broke out in Europe,
95 percent of the respondents answered, “No.”7
Isolationist groups like the America First Committee
attracted hundreds of thousands of members, including
the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh.8 Congress
responded to the popular will by passing four separate
neutrality acts between 1935 and 1939, aimed at
keeping the United States out of war.
The unprovoked Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
on December 7, 1941, however, instantaneously and
fundamentally altered the national attitude toward
intervention. Congress voted nearly unanimously to
authorize American entry into the epic global conflict
the following day. Almost overnight, isolationism was
rendered politically toxic as the nation prepared for
war. By the end of World War II in August 1945, more
than 16 million American men and women had served
the war effort in some official capacity. During the
war, 18.1 percent of American families had at least one
member who served in the armed forces.9
When the United States entered World War II, the
conflict had been raging for two years in Europe and
longer still in Asia. By mobilizing vast manufacturing
capacity, agricultural production, and technological
development to the demands of total war, the United
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The American Wartime Experience
U.S. troops land at Normandy in June 1944 during the D-Day
invasion.
States rapidly shook off the lingering effects of the
Great Depression. From 1942 to 1945, the United States
drastically outpaced all other nations in the production
of vehicles, tanks, ships, and aircraft . For example, in
1944, American factories churned out 600,000 trucks
for the army. Germany, by comparison, produced only
88,000 .10 Even more dramatically, by the end of the
war, the United States had produced 299,293 aircraft,
more than twice the number produced by Germany or
Britain and dwarfing Japan’s total of 69,910.11 American
industrial efficiency, the envy of the world in peacetime,
became a vital weapon in what had quickly become
a war of mass production. Aside from providing a
key advantage on the battlefield, America’s humming
wartime economy reduced unemployment, boosted
wages, and provided the basis for a sustained period of
postwar prosperity . World War II, therefore, helped the
United States solidify its status as the world’s dominant
economy once the fighting stopped.
For the United States, World War II unfolded in two
major theatres: the Atlantic, where Allied forces sought
to defeat Italy and Germany in Europe and North
Africa, and the Pacific, where American forces led a
large-scale campaign to defeat Japan and its empire . In
the first two years of the war, the Americans focused
on North Africa as a staging point for an invasion
of Southern Italy. In June of 1944, American troops
successfully landed in Normandy, France, during the
daring D-Day invasion . Thereafter, U .S . and British
Over the course of World War II the United States lost
405,399 soldiers, an increase over the nation’s losses in
World War I, but still signi cantly lower than all
of the other major belligerents.13 Moreover, with the
exception of Pearl Harbor, the United States
experienced no serious attack on its home soil for the
entirety of the war. No American cities were bombed,
and the nation’s industrial infrastructure remained
unscathed. The United States thus emerged from World
War II in better shape than any other nation on earth and
in sole possession of atomic weapons. Its unparalleled
military and economic strength made the United States
not simply a world power, but a superpower.
The Soviet Wartime Experience
For Soviets, World War II was known as the Great
Patriotic War. The trauma and triumph of the war left
deep psychological impressions on Soviet leaders and
ordinary citizens alike. The magnitude of the Soviet
Union’s sacrifice and suffering during World War
II was astonishing. Soviet causalities totaled more than
29 million, including 6.2 million killed, nearly 19
million injured or incapacitated, and 4.4 million
missing or captured. Eighty-four percent of the Soviet
men and women mobilized were killed, wounded, or
captured. Nearly every Soviet family lost a relative
during the war. This staggering demographic loss
depleted Soviet society of a generation of young men
and left a gender imbalance that continues to this day
in the states of the former Soviet Union .15
Soviet civilians, trapped in occupied territory or
besieged cities, endured extreme deprivation and
dehumanizing barbarity during the war. In Leningrad
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forces rapidly swept through France and Belgium and
into Germany, helping to defeat the Nazis by May of
1945. The Pacific War, which was the focus of only 15
percent of the total American war effort, involved
brutal fighting in a series of battles against the
Japanese fought on small islands that served as
refueling stations for aircraft and ships.12 At the same
time, U.S. aircraft carried out a bombing campaign
against the main islands of Japan that devastated
nearly every major Japanese city. The American aerial
assault on Japan culminated in the dropping of two
atomic bombs in August of 1945 that prompted the
unconditional surrender of the Japanese government.
(St. Petersburg), starvation led people to eat wallpaper,
shoes, dogs, and even human flesh in order to
survive.16 In the villages and cities of Eastern Europe
and the Baltic region, Nazi soldiers carried out horrific
atrocities, including summary executions and mass rape.
While World War II brought unimaginable suffering to
the Soviet Union, victory provided immense validation
of the nation’s ideological mission and purpose.
The nature of the war on the Eastern Front was
far more brutal than the fighting American troops
experienced in France, Belgium, Italy, or Germany in
1944 and 1945. From 1941 on, more than four hundred
Soviet and German divisions fiercely battled along a
thousand miles of territory. Hitler committed the bulk
of Nazi troops, arms, and resources to the war in the
19
east . At Stalingrad, the war’s largest single battle
and a turning point in the war, German losses totaled
147,000 killed and 91,000 captured when the Germans
surrendered on February 2, 1943, after around seven
months of intense fighting that left the city in rubble.20
A hard-won Soviet victory in the epic tank battle of
Kursk in the summer of 1943 prompted a German
Residents of Leningrad gather to collect water from shellholes during the siege of the city . Soviet civilians, trapped
in occupied territory or besieged cities, endured extreme
deprivation during World War II .
Photo Credit: RIA Novosti Archive, Image #907 / Boris Kudoyarov / CC-BYSA 3 .0
retreat. By November, Soviet forces had recaptured
two-thirds of Axis-occupied territory.
The Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944 opened
a long-awaited second front in Western Europe and
allowed Soviet forces to take the initiative in the
east . Stalin, who had viewed the delay of an AngloAmerican invasion as an act of hostility against
the Soviet Union, immediately began to sweep into
Eastern Europe and then south through Romania into
the Balkans. By 1945, the Red Army had begun its
march into Eastern Germany and unleashed a fury of
vengeance in its wake . As the American and British
troops advanced into Germany from the West, Soviet
troops entered Berlin in April 1945. Hitler committed
suicide in an underground bunker on April 30, 1945,
leaving his military commanders to surrender in the
Battle of Berlin on May 2 . A week later, on May 9,
the Germans officially surrendered, the war in Europe
was over, and millions of Soviets took to the streets in
Moscow to celebrate Victory Day. The conclusion of
the war, however, left a host of unresolved questions.
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The war officially began for the Soviets with betrayal,
when Hitler’s Wehrmacht (the German armed
forces) attacked the Soviet Union’s western frontier
in June 1941. German tanks swiftly rolled through
the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and into the
Russian heartland. Within a month, German bombers
began raids on Moscow. By the end of September,
German troops reached the outskirts of Leningrad (St.
Petersburg) and began a nine-hundred-day siege of the
former imperial capital. Stalin, caught unprepared by
the surprise invasion, scrambled to halt the German
advances as Soviet casualties topped six million killed
or captured in the first six months alone.17 In 1942, the
Red Army mounted a broad counter-offensive. At the
same time, Stalin pulled off an ambitious feat of mass
mobilization by ramping up the production of tanks,
aircraft, and munitions in gigantic industrial centers
located thousands of miles east of Moscow behind the
Ural Mountains and beyond the range of German
aircraft . In these remote factories, Soviet workers, over
half of whom were women, worked with singleminded purpose under grueling conditions to supply
the Red Army and outproduce the Germans, which
they did by the end of 1942 .18 Faced with a dire
emergency, Soviet industry proved heroically resilient.
The primary concern for Stalin was the fate of
Germany and the nations of Eastern Europe bordering
the Soviet Union, a corridor used by foreign armies
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to invade
Russia. At the time of the German surrender, millions
of Red Army soldiers occupied this territory, and
Stalin was determined to ensure the security of the
Soviet Union’s borders. This was completely rational—
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Photograph by Yevgeny Khaldei.
Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin
photographed at the Yalta Conference in 1945.
Stalin’s strategic logic stemmed from a desire to
protect the Soviet Union from any future attack.
However, when viewed in conjunction with repeated
American pledges to uphold self-determination and
democracy in the postwar world, Stalin’s grip on
Eastern Europe appeared more problematic. Over
several meetings in 1945, the “Big Three” Allied
leaders attempted to hash out plans for the postwar
order as World War II rapidly drew to a close.
Control Council. Yielding to Stalin’s insistence that
territories on the Soviet Union’s western border fell
within a Soviet sphere of influence, FDR and Churchill
effectively consigned the previously independent nations
of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania to
Soviet domination, while publicly insisting that the
principles of the Atlantic Charter still applied. Poland,
which Hitler and Stalin had divided in the Nazi-Soviet
pact, now stood to fall squarely under Soviet control.
Postwar Planning
While Stalin signed a joint declaration that called for
open and democratic elections for all liberated nations,
he had no intention of upholding this pledge. “Do not
worry, we can implement it in our own way later,” Stalin
assured his foreign secretary during the negotiations.21
Though FDR, in particular, has been criticized for
naively trusting Stalin’s hollow commitment to selfdetermination, the presence of millions of Red Army
soldiers in these territories gave the Soviet Union
tremendous leverage.22 At Yalta, FDR did win Soviet
support for a new international body modeled on the
ill-fated League of Nations and a Soviet commitment to
join the war against Japan in the Pacific.
The Yalta Conference
A photograph taken at the Soviet Black Sea resort town
of Yalta in February 1945 shows Winston Churchill,
Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin seated together
during a break in what would prove to be their final
meeting. The three leaders smile and smoke as various
uniformed aides mill about in the background. The
relaxed and convivial mood conveyed by this snapshot,
however, concealed serious tensions among the Allies
as the war in Europe drew to a close. Yalta signaled
rifts that would be exacerbated, rather than alleviated,
by victory over the Nazi forces.
The heart of the debate and the source of simmering
conflict among the Allies was the fate of Germany and
the territories in Europe that were still occupied by
Nazi Germany or had been successfully liberated by
Soviet troops. The three leaders agreed that following
its surrender Germany would be divided into four
occupation zones (French, British, American, and
Soviet) and jointly administered through an Allied
The spirit of compromise and collaboration that FDR
championed at Yalta could not last. Roosevelt, who
had guided the United States through depression and
war for more than a decade, died two months later, on
April 12, 1945. That same day, Vice President Harry
S. Truman, a former haberdasher from Missouri,
assumed the presidency. Truman was an accidental
president thrust into the most powerful office of the
world’s most powerful nation at a crucial moment
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Soviet soldiers raise a Soviet flag atop the Reichstag building
in Berlin in May 1945 at the end of World War II.
in world history. He lacked the deep foreign policy
experience of Churchill and Stalin, but he would now
have to engage them as equals on the world stage.
During his first term, Truman relied heavily on senior
advisors as he staked out America’s vision for the
postwar world. Less than a month after FDR’s death,
the Allies celebrated the official defeat of the Nazis in
Europe in early May of 1945. The war in Europe had
ended, but as the guns fell silent, the fragile SovietAmerican alliance began to come apart at the seams.
The Potsdam Conference
When the leaders were not able to reach a consensus
on Germany, they decided to give the occupying
powers autonomy and the right to extract reparations
within their own zones, setting the stage for the
permanent partition of Germany along geographic,
economic, and political lines. “Better a dismembered
Germany in which the West, at least, can act as a
buffer to the forces of totalitarianism,” an American
diplomat wrote privately at the time, “than a united
Germany which again brings these forces to the North
Sea.”24 Though the Foreign Ministers of the United
States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union would
meet several more times after Potsdam, the nations’
irreconcilable visions for postwar Germany precluded
any meaningful cooperation and made a divided
Germany the only acceptable outcome.
A final development with far-reaching significance
was Truman’s revelation to Stalin that the U.S. had
successfully tested the first atomic bomb in the desert
of New Mexico. The weapon’s awesome power and
America’s monopoly on the technology assured
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President
Harry S. Truman, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
photographed at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.
American military supremacy in the immediate
postwar period and increased Truman’s willingness
to take a harder line in negotiations. Stalin, who
almost certainly knew of the test thanks to successful
infiltration of the top-secret program by Soviet spies,
immediately ordered the acceleration of the Soviet
nuclear program.25 In August 1945, Truman gave
a terrifying demonstration of the awesome power
of nuclear weapons when he ordered two separate
atomic bombs to be dropped on the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese announced
their unconditional surrender within a week, bringing
an end to World War II in the Pacific.
In retrospect, the unprecedented use of atomic
weapons also represented an opening volley in the
Cold War.26 Historians have questioned the military
necessity of the nuclear attacks, especially the second
bomb dropped on the city of Nagasaki, and have
suggested that the cities’ destruction served as a means
to convey the full force of American military might
to the Soviet Union.27 The next decade would bring a
nuclear arms race that came perilously close to mass
destruction on a previously unimaginable scale.
The United Nations (San Francisco, April 25–
June 26, 1945)
At Yalta, Stalin had agreed to join a new international
organization, the United Nations, proposed by
Roosevelt to help secure peace and order in the postwar
world. While its design was modeled on Woodrow
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In July of 1945, the Allied leaders, Stalin, Churchill,
and the new U.S. President Harry Truman met for
two weeks in a former Prussian palace located in
Potsdam, a rubble-strewn suburb of Berlin, to continue
the postwar planning begun at Yalta. Once again, the
future of Germany and Eastern Europe proved the most
contentious and intractable issue for the erstwhile allies.
In a major diplomatic victory that exposed the hollow
core of the Atlantic Charter’s commitment to postwar
self-determination, Stalin won official recognition of a
Soviet puppet regime in Poland. The Soviet leader also
signaled his intention to set up satellite states in other
Eastern European nations and pushed for billions of
dollars in reparations from the defeated Germans, both
of which met with opposition from Truman.23
Photo Credit: UN Photo / Lundquist
Wilson’s League of Nations, Roosevelt hoped that
the United Nations would prove a more durable and
effective institution than its ill-fated predecessor.
Two weeks after Roosevelt’s death, 282 delegates
representing fifty-two nations arrived in San Francisco,
California, to draft a charter for the United Nations on
April 25, 1945.28 For two months the delegates debated
the precise wording of every clause and the placement
of each comma before unanimously approving the final
Charter of the United Nations and designating New
York as the organization’s headquarters.
The UN General Assembly provided an international
forum where each of the original member states
enjoyed equal representation and voting power
on resolutions. The UN Security Council, on the
other hand, had fifteen total members and only five
permanent members—the United States, the Soviet
Union, Great Britain, France, and China, which was
represented by the Nationalist government of Chiang
Kai-shek. The Security Council alone was able to
enforce binding resolutions, impose sanctions, and
order military action. Crucially, all five permanent
members of the Security Council possessed a veto,
which enabled these states to unilaterally sink any
proposal they opposed.
Stalin’s willingness to participate in the UN almost
certainly resulted from his assessment that this veto
power would allow him to easily neutralize any
unfavorable actions. For exactly the same reason,
smaller nations feared the UN structure provided
little or no protection from great power abuses. At the
THE COLD WAR BEGINS
The Early Cold War in Europe
The Iron Curtain
On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, who had recently
been voted out of office in Britain, spoke at Westminster
College in the small town of Fulton, Missouri. With
President Truman in the audience, Churchill delivered a
speech that some historians mark as the official starting
point of the Cold War. “A shadow has fallen upon the
scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory,” the great
orator told the assembled crowd, “from Stettin in the
Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has
descended across the continent.”30 Churchill’s evocative
phrase referred to the territories, in Eastern and Central
Europe as well as the Balkans, occupied by the Red
Army, whose new peacetime governments were under
various degrees of Soviet control.
The British statesman warned Americans that if they
did not act decisively to defend democracy, the hardwon liberation of Europe from Nazi control would
have been in vain. Churchill, who had begrudgingly
accepted a Soviet sphere of influence at Yalta and
Potsdam, now pleaded that the world not repeat
the mistakes—especially the disastrous policy of
appeasement— that had allowed Hitler to devour the
continent in the previous decade. Churchill’s call to
action rallied public support against Soviet domination
of Eastern Europe. Within the large immigrant
communities of Americans whose ancestors hailed
from the so-called “imprisoned nations” of Eastern
and Central Europe, anti-communism would become a
defining feature of their postwar identities, second only
to their Catholic faith.
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Delegates representing fifty-two nations met in San Francisco
in April 1945 to draft a charter for the United Nations.
same time, conflict between members of the Security
Council had the potential of poisoning and even
crippling the UN’s basic functions. In June of 1945,
however, the delegates in San Francisco remained
optimistic that the UN might live up its high-minded
mission, as outlined in the Charter’s preamble, to
“reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the
dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal
rights of men and women and of nations large and
small.”29 During the course of the Cold War, the UN
was not only a site of dramatic protests and frenzied
maneuvering, but also was an active participant in the
global conflicts that marked the era.
Winston Churchill (right) rides with President Harry Truman
on a visit to Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill delivered a
speech that some historians mark as the official starting point
of the Cold War.
.
Soviet Satellites
The nations behind the Iron Curtain were collectively
known as Soviet satellites and later Eastern Bloc
nations. On one end of the spectrum were the tiny Baltic
nations of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, which were
formally incorporated into the Soviet Union . On the
other end, was the nation of Czechoslovakia, in which
Stalin initially allowed relatively free elections to occur.
In February of 1948, however, Stalin orchestrated
a communist coup in Czechoslovakia brought the nation
firmly within the Soviet sphere of influence. In other
Soviet satellites, including Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria,
Romania, and later the German Democratic Republic
(East Germany), though formally independent and
sovereign nations, in practice their foreign policies,
and many of their domestic policies, were coordinated
from Moscow .
Satellite nations became miniature versions of the Soviet
Union. The one exception proved to be Yugoslavia, where
the charismatic Communist leader Josip Broz Tito had
Josip Broz Tito, the Communist leader of Yugoslavia, resisted
Soviet attempts to dictate Yugoslav policy
won power without the aid of the Soviets and enjoyed
widespread popular support. After Tito resisted
Soviet attempts to dictate Yugoslav policy through
the Moscow-headquartered international communist
.
organization
the Cominform, Stalin cut ties with Tito
in June 1948. Tito then sought and received aid from
the United States in an early example of the American
government’s pragmatic tolerance for ideologically
questionable authoritarian regimes throughout the Cold
War.31 While Churchill and others lamented Soviet
domination of Eastern Europe, there was little that
could have been. done to prevent it in the early postwar
period. The presence of millions of Red Army soldiers
occupying these territories at the conclusion of the war
and the Soviet government’s determination to make its
immediate neighbors into friendly buffer states sealed
the region’s fate.
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Source: The National Churchill Museum
George F. Kennan first articulated the logic of containment,
a series of political, ideological, economic, and military
measures designed to prevent Soviet power from spreading.
Containment
George F. Kennan: Architect of Containment
As Stalin moved to consolidate his grip on Eastern
Europe, the United States debated how best to respond
to Soviet expansion. The Truman Administration
ultimately settled on a multi-faceted strategy known
as containment, a series of political, ideological,
economic, and military measures designed to prevent
Soviet power from spreading. George F. Kennan, a
Princeton-educated career diplomat and keen observer
of the Soviet Union, provided the intellectual framework
for containment. Kennan, who was stationed in the
Soviet capital of Moscow, first articulated the logic of
containment in an eight-thousand-word telegram wired
to the Secretary of State on February 22, 1946.
Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” began with a
dim prognosis for U.S.-Soviet relations in the postwar
world. The Soviets, Kennan observed, “have learned
The following year, in an article published in the journal
Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “Mr. X,” Kennan
further advocated for “a long-term, patient but firm and
vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”
by the “application of counter-force at a series of
constantly shifting geographical and political points,
corresponding to the maneuvers of Soviet policy.”33
The United States, Kennan concluded, must develop
a comprehensive program to promote U.S. values
and interests around the globe lest it cede postwar
leadership in world affairs to the Soviets. Kennan’s call
for a strategy of containment was widely publicized
in popular magazines like Life and Reader’s Digest
and found a receptive audience in popular publications
within the Truman administration, where officials,
including future Secretary of State Dean Acheson, had
already begun to translate Kennan’s theoretical blueprint
into official policies by the spring of 1947.34
Political Containment: The Truman Doctrine
The first application of containment came in the
Mediterranean, where civil wars in Greece and
Turkey threatened to bring communist insurgencies
to power. Britain, whose status as a world power
was greatly diminished by World War II, informed
Washington that it could no longer supply aid to
either nation. In a historic address to Congress on
March 12, 1947, President Truman asked for nearly
$400 million in aid. The funds were urgently needed,
Truman explained, because the conflicts in Greece and
Turkey were symptomatic of a larger clash between
two irreconcilable “ways of life,” in which the United
States was morally bound to defend “the free peoples
who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or
outside pressure.”
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to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle
for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts
or cooperation with it.” Kennan had no doubt that the
Soviets would look to expand their power whenever and
wherever the conditions seemed favorable. Crucially,
Kennan predicted that Soviet expansion would not be
confined to war-torn Europe but would target colonial
peoples of Africa and Asia seeking independence.
Despite this dire assessment, Kennan remained
optimistic that the United States could successfully meet
the challenge of Soviet expansion if it acted proactively
and that it could accomplish this goal “without recourse
to any general military conflict.”32
Economic Containment: The Marshall Plan to
the Berlin Blockade
Truman agreed with Kennan’s description of
communism as “a malignant parasite which feeds
only on diseased tissue.”36 For this reason, the vast
destruction of European infrastructure, industry,
and agriculture, which in turn brought starvation
and poverty to millions in the wake of World War II,
made the region especially vulnerable to communist
incursion. Following the authorization of millions in
aid to Turkey and Greece, Truman sought an even
broader foreign aid program that would supply relief
to war-ravaged Europe, where massive food shortages,
fuel shortages, and key commodity shortages
threatened millions with starvation and economic
collapse. The ambitious program was first unveiled
by Secretary of State George Marshall in a speech to
Harvard University graduates in June of 1947.
From its formal inception in 1948 to its conclusion
in 1951, the European Recovery Program, better
known as the Marshall Plan, provided $13 billion
of aid to Northern and Western Europe.37 To put this
enormous figure in perspective, the same program if
launched today would cost $132 billion.38 The infusion
of American cash helped stabilize the economies of
key allies such as France and Britain, as those nations
worked to rebuild their shattered societies and revive
moribund trade networks. In addition to neutral
nations like Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria, the
Marshall Plan also allocated significant aid to former
Axis foes, Italy and Germany (West Germany), a move
that helped bring former wartime enemies into the
American sphere of influence.
The U.S. even offered Marshall Plan funds to the
A man holds a sign during a protest in Germany in 1947, which
reads, “We want coal. We want bread.” The vast destruction
of European infrastructure, industry, and agriculture in World
War II brought starvation and poverty to millions.
Soviet Union and its satellite states in Central
and Eastern Europe, but Soviet Foreign Minister
Vyacheslav Molotov, at the direction of Stalin,
summarily rejected the offer as a capitalist plot to
undermine Soviet security and promote American
expansion. Moscow then used its political influence
over the governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania to ensure that those
states likewise refused Marshall Plan aid.
The Marshall Plan proved remarkably effective,
increasing the combined GNP (Gross National
Product) of Western Europe by thirty percent between
1947 and 1951 and staving off potential political
revolutions.39 It also set the stage for the division of
Europe that would last to the end of the Cold War
and created two diametrically opposed societies:
the West and the East. The Marshall Plan also made
clear that the United States was committed to a
revived and robust German economy as the
centerpiece of its European recovery program. This
decision placed the United States on a collision course
with the Soviet Union, who opposed a powerful
Germany and wanted to steer German development to
serve Soviet economic interests.
Following the announcement of an Anglo-FrenchAmerican plan to create an independent German
Republic in their occupation zone, Stalin moved to cut
off access to the city of Berlin on June 24, 1948. A
divided city in a divided country, Berlin was located
squarely within the Soviet occupation zone of eastern
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The Truman Doctrine, as this declaration came to be
known, pledged that the United States would intervene
anywhere that local Communists, backed by the Soviet
Union, sought to sow “confusion and disorder.”35
Casting aside the Monroe Doctrine, which had for
more than a century focused U.S. foreign policy in the
Western hemisphere, Truman extended the geographic
scope of American interests to global proportions.
Just as significantly, Truman’s expansive vision of
national security committed the United States to an
activist foreign policy and formally institutionalized
the nation’s ideological struggle with the Soviet Union.
The Cold War had begun in earnest.
capital in the city of Bonn, adopted a constitution,
leading to elections in September 1949 that made
Konrad Adenauer the new country’s first chancellor.
In response, Stalin announced the creation of the
German Democratic Republic (East Germany),
within its occupation zone. For the remainder of the
Cold War, the two German states would exist side
by side and the divided city of Berlin, in the heart of
the East German state, would become a symbol of
Europe’s ideological division.
In 1948, residents of Berlin watch the approach of a U.S.
military plane carrying supplies during the Berlin airlift.
Germany. This allowed Stalin to unilaterally shut off
electricity, rail, road, and canal access to Berlin from
the American occupation zone in western Germany.
Stalin’s blockade was designed to force the United
States to abandon Berlin along with its plans for a
separate western German state by holding the two
million residents of West Berlin hostage. Instead, it
backfired spectacularly. Truman resolved to maintain a
“free” Berlin and ingeniously circumvented the Soviet
blockade by ordering food and fuel flown into the city.
The Berlin airlift was a logistical marvel. Each day
for more than a year, U.S. and British ground crews
worked around the clock to pack airplanes with milk,
bread, coffee, coal, and other provisions. Airmen then
bravely delivered the goods, flying over hostile territory
in treacherous conditions. By the time the blockade was
lifted in May 1949, the Western Allies had supplied 2.3
million tons of supplies to the beleaguered Berliners at
the cost of seventy-three airmen killed.40 Rather than
dissuading the Americans from creating a West German
Republic, the blockade galvanized resolve within the
United States, Britain, and West Germany itself. The
airlift provided a heroic narrative and moral clarity to
the Americans and their allies, while badly damaging
the Soviet Union’s public image.
After almost a year, Stalin ended the blockade without
obtaining any concessions. Weeks later, the Federal
Republic of Germany (West Germany), with its
The Berlin Blockade also helped bring about the
creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), a security pact that committed the United
States to defend the member states in Western
Europe from Soviet aggression. The original NATO
agreement, signed on April 4, 1949, brought the United
States, Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, Holland,
Luxembourg, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and Portugal
into a formal defense alliance. As a peacetime military
alliance, NATO broke with American foreign policy
traditions stretching back to the nation’s founding. From
the administration of George Washington to World War
II, the United States had steadfastly avoided entering
into formal permanent alliances and preferred neutrality
and unilateral action whenever possible. Indeed, the
United States spent the first years of both World War
I and World War II on the sidelines as a neutral nation
in part because of deep-seeded popular aversion to
collective security and foreign alliances.
Despite these reservations, Congress approved
American membership in NATO and fundamentally
altered American foreign policy. According to Article
V of the treaty, each member state pledged to come
to any other member state’s aid if attacked, which
committed the United States, in theory, to waging war
on behalf of tiny Luxembourg. Though the manpower
commitment was modest—only two of the fourteen
NATO divisions stationed in Europe were American—
the alliance symbolized America’s newfound embrace
of international leadership in the early Cold War.41
The Soviets did not formally unveil their own European
alliance until May 14, 1955, when they announced the
Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact brought the Eastern
bloc nations of East Germany, Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Albania, and Bulgaria into a defensive
security alliance with the Soviet Union as an answer to
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Military Containment: NATO to NSC-68
zero-sum battle between two irreconcilable systems and
the Soviet Union as an existential threat to American
interests and ideals. The escalation of the Cold War
in both Europe and Asia gave credence to Nitze’s dire
assessment and led Truman and later presidents to
commit unprecedented resources to best the Soviets in
military, political, and cultural arenas. NSC-68 sought
to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from Kennan’s
containment strategy and opened a new chapter in the
Cold War. Though its impact was not felt immediately,
NSC-68 provided the basis for a surge in U.S. foreign
interventions meant to check the spread of communism,
beginning with the Korean War in June 1950.
Paul Nitze was the primary author of NSC-68, which
advocated for a far more aggressive Cold War strategy that
called for large increases in defense spending and increased
military intervention.
the American-led NATO alliance.
The formation of NATO also highlighted widespread
anxiety among American foreign policy officials
regarding the nation’s military preparedness for fullscale war with the Soviet Union. By 1950, Kennan’s
view that containment could be achieved “without
recourse to any general military conflict” began to
lose ground to more hardline analysis articulated in
a top-secret memo entitled “United States Objectives
and Programs for National Security,” better known
as NSC-68.42 Paul Nitze, who had replaced George F.
Kennan as director of the State Department’s Policy
Planning Staff, was the primary author of NSC-68,
which was presented to the president on April 7, 1950.
In NSC-68, Nitze advocated for a far more aggressive
Cold War strategy that called for large increases in
defense spending and increased military intervention
to counter the Soviet and Communist threat to the
peace and security of the free world.
Nitze’s hawkish worldview presented the Cold War as a
NSC-68 also provided an important boost to America’s
fledgling cultural diplomacy apparatus by calling for
a “psychological offensive” to counter Soviet efforts
to influence world public opinion.43 The United
States first began to utilize cultural diplomacy during
World War II. Under the euphemistic banner of
“information,” the Office of War Information (OWI)
coordinated efforts to bolster morale on the home
front while targeting foreign populations beyond
enemy lines with leaflets and radio broadcasts on the
Voice of America (VOA) network. The scope of the
OWI’s foreign propaganda campaign was impressive.
Between June 6, 1944 (D-Day) and May 8, 1945 (VEDay), the OWI dropped more than three billion fliers.44
Despite these contributions to the U.S. victory in
World War II and President Truman’s support for
the development of a robust information program, a
significant portion of the American public and much of
Congress found little to recommend such an enterprise
in peacetime. Propaganda, in the minds of many
Americans, was associated with Hitler’s Germany
and the notorious Nazi Minister of Propaganda
Joseph Goebbels. To these critics, a state-sponsored
information service was, at best, an unnecessary waste
of taxpayer money. At worst, it was a potential prelude
to totalitarianism, a Trojan horse that would destroy
cherished American liberties and individualism.45
Republicans, especially those from traditionally
isolationist Midwestern states, and several Southern
Democrats vocally opposed the newly formed
Interim Information Service (IIS) in particular
and cultural relations in general. Even the word
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Ideological Containment: Propaganda and the
Campaign of Truth
The escalation of the Cold War the following year,
however, changed the underlying political calculus.
Increasingly, American policymakers fretted about
growing Soviet influence around the globe and
questioned the lack of a coordinated U.S. effort
to challenge and correct Soviet lies or effectively
counter criticism of U.S. racial discrimination. The
martial rhetoric used by Truman in his address to
Congress on the crisis in Greece and Turkey cast the
emerging U.S.-Soviet rivalry as a battle of ideals and
prompted supporters of cultural diplomacy to pitch
their programs as “psychological warfare” to former
skeptics. Nevertheless, opposition persisted.
Representative Forest Harness, an Indiana Republican,
remained concerned that the State Department’s
“Government propaganda” techniques, originally
developed for foreign audiences, might be directed at
the American people, a prospect “not only disapproved
by the conscience of representative government, but
[also] positively unlawful.”47 Fully aware of the antidemocratic overtones of the word “propaganda” and
eager for congressional appropriations, supporters
within the State Department, at least publicly, continued
to apply the neutral term “information” to both overt
and covert U.S. campaigns to influence global public
opinion. In this politically charged atmosphere, U.S.
cultural diplomacy survived by emphasizing its utility
as a weapon to match Soviet propaganda efforts.
Truman first endorsed the new direction in U.S. foreign
policy when he signed the United States Information
and Education Exchange Act, better known as the
Smith-Mundt Act, into law on January 27, 1948.
From this point forward, the newly created United
States Information Agency (USIA) would serve as “a
national foreign information program in time of peace
and as the essential nucleus for psychological warfare
in periods of national emergency or the initial stages
of war.” 48 As the Cold War intensified, defense and
foreign policy experts stressed the size, sophistication,
and reach of the Soviet propaganda machine, and it
was consistently cited—and later exaggerated—to
press for the expansion and consolidation of America’s
information program.49
Spurred by the Korean crisis amid mounting domestic
pressure to counter Soviet propaganda, Truman
called for a “campaign of truth” to “promote the
cause of freedom against the propaganda of slavery”
in an address to the American Society of Newspaper
Editors on April 20, 1950.50 For some conservative
critics of the Truman administration, the president’s
assertive message was a welcome departure from the
policy of containment, which one Republican Senator
had derided as “pantywaist diplomacy.”51 The USIA
stocked American embassies with magazines and
pamphlets, produced a number of documentary films,
and sponsored goodwill tours by notable Americans,
including a number of jazz musicians. Truman’s
“Campaign of Truth” demonstrated America’s resolve
to address the cultural dimensions of the Cold War.
The Early Cold War in Asia
Decolonization and Independence
The focus of American and Soviet leaders on
Europe in the immediate postwar period should not
obscure the global dimensions of the early Cold War.
World War II fundamentally undermined European
colonialism in Africa and Asia by straining or
removing foreign regimes and bolstering nationalist
movements. While the colonial regimes of Britain and
France remained intact at the conclusion of the war,
both had begun to crumble. Revolutionary leaders in
Indonesia and Vietnam declared independence shortly
after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, inaugurating
bloody wars against their former European colonial
masters that would drag on for years to come. India
and Pakistan, partitioned from the former British Raj,
achieved full independence in 1947.
Over the next three decades, hundreds of new nations
followed suit as colonized peoples in Asia and Africa
continued to gain independence at a rapid pace. From
1957 to 1962 alone, twenty-five new states formed.52
Decolonization made the newly formed nations of the
so-called “Third World,” also called the Global South,
a major force in international affairs and a battleground
for the Cold War. Indeed, almost all the actual fighting
of the Cold War took place in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. These areas suffered environmental
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“culture” itself, which since the New Deal had
become linked in the minds of conservatives to all
manner of unsavory leftists, drew resistance from
some quarters.46 Resounding Republican victories
in the mid-term congressional elections of 1946, in
which the G.O.P. gained control of the Senate and
House of Representatives for the first time in more
than a decade, placed the future of American cultural
diplomacy in limbo.
degradation, political instability, and tremendous social
costs as a result of the Cold War rivalry between the
United States and its Communist adversaries.
Mao Zedong and China
The preservation of China as a strong U .S . ally formed
the second pillar of American strategy in Asia . China
was assigned one of the five permanent seats on the
United Nations Security Council and veto power. After
a pause in hostilities to resist the Japanese during
World War II, civil war returned to China in earnest in
1946. The bloody conflict, which first erupted in 1927,
pitted the Nationalists, led by the military commander
Chiang Kai-shek, against the Communists, led by
Marxist revolutionary named Mao Zedong.
Mao’s peasant army survived Chiang’s early attacks
and utilized the principles of guerilla warfare to turn
the tables on the Nationalists. By 1948, it was clear
that the Communists, now receiving substantial aid
from the Soviet Union, had seized the advantage .
American officials advised Truman that, short of an
all-out military intervention, there was little the United
States could do to prevent the triumph of Mao’s forces,
who subsequently won a string of victories that forced
Chiang and the Nationalists to retreat from mainland
China and take refuge on the island of Taiwan. In
.
Mao Zedong proclaims the formation of the People’s
Republic
of China (PRC) in October 1949
October of 1949, Mao proclaimed the formation of the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) and then
negotiated a formal, if somewhat fraught, alliance
with the Soviet Union two months later . The Chinese
revolution shifted the balance of power in the Cold
War by bringing the world’s most populous nation
under Communist control.
The Korean War
These worries were realized when North Korean
Communist forces invaded South Korea on June 25,
1950. The conflict was rooted in the partition of the
Korean peninsula, which had followed its liberation
from Japanese control in 1945, when the Soviet Red
Army occupied the territory north of the Thirty-eighth
Parallel and American forces occupied the territory
south of this arbitrary border. When the occupation
forces withdrew in 1948 and 1949, Korea remained
divided, and the United Nations recognized the 38th
parallel as the official boundary.
In the North, a Communist who had studied in
Moscow, Kim Il-sung, established the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) with Soviet
backing. In the South, Syngman Rhee, who had
studied in New Jersey, established the Republic
of Korea (ROK) with American backing. Both
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For both the United States and the Soviet Union,
the collapse of the old colonial order contained
opportunities and dangers. The United States, born from
an anticolonial independence movement, sympathized,
at least in theory, with the claims of colonial people for
independence . On the other hand, the United States
remained closely aligned with the world’s two largest
colonial powers, Britain and France, whose empires
now relied on massive infusions of American aid. While
Soviet Marxism-Leninism supported anticolonialism,
Soviet leaders remained concerned about the ideological
purity of independence movements in the Third
World. Decolonization, therefore, produced complex
and contradictory reactions from the two global
superpowers.
leaders desired a unified Korea and unsuccessfully
sought military support from their superpower
allies to achieve this objective. Eager to build on the
momentum of Mao’s victory in China the previous
year and judging that the United States would be
unwilling to go to war on behalf of a strategically
insignificant ally, Stalin advised Kim Il-sung to launch
the surprise invasion of South Korea in June of 1950.
The Communists quickly captured the capital of
Seoul, and the South Korean army lost three-quarters
of its troops in less than a week.54 Stalin’s analysis
proved misguided, as the United States rapidly
mobilized to defend South Korea by deploying
American troops stationed in Japan to come to the
aid of Rhee’s imperiled government. Significantly,
the Soviet decision to boycott the United Nations in
protest over the body’s refusal to seat representatives
from the People’s Republic of China a few months
earlier allowed the United States to win the approval
of the UN Security Council, and by extension the
international community, for military intervention
in Korea. The UN forces were commanded by the
swashbuckling General Douglass MacArthur, who
brilliantly executed a risky amphibious landing at
Inchon on September 15, 1950, to flank the North
Korean army and pin them below the thirty-eighth
parallel. MacArthur’s forces liberated nearby Seoul
and then marched into North Korea with the intention
of taking control of the entire country and compelling
an unconditional surrender from Kim Il-Sung, an
objective that went far beyond MacArthur’s original
mandate of restoring the political status quo.
For the next two years, the two sides battled to a
stalemate. While Truman remained committed to
“limited war,” relentless U.S. bombing obliterated much
of the extant infrastructure in North Korea, razed almost
all the nation’s cities, and inflicted enormous suffering
on the population. The scale of urban destruction in
North Korea even exceeded the damage caused by the
Allied bombing campaign against Nazi Germany but
provided no appreciable strategic benefit to the United
States.56 Four months after Stalin’s death smoothed
peace negotiations, an armistice officially ended the
fighting and affirmed the permanent partition of Korea
at the 38th parallel on July 27, 1953.
The Korean War was a terrible tragedy. It achieved
no solution to the political stalemate between
North and South Korea and cost the lives of 36,568
Americans, approximately 600,000 Chinese, and
more than 2 million Koreans.57 In its wake, the war
left a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions as ten
million Koreans faced starvation and one hundred
thousand South Korean children became orphans.58
In the United States, the war proved extremely
unpopular. In his 1953 novel The Bridges of Toko-Ri,
James Michener captured the ambivalence of U.S.
soldiers drafted to fight in Korea for a cause they
dimly understood. Popular dissatisfaction with Korea
certainly contributed to Truman’s decision not to seek
re-election in 1952 and the victory of the Republican
candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former five-star
general and hero of D-Day. Though it is something of
a “forgotten war” in United States history, the Korean
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South Koreans flee south after the North Korean army’s
invasion in 1950.
MacArthur may have succeeded, too, had China stayed
out of the conflict. Instead, later in November, Mao
ordered 300,000 Chinese troops to cross into North
Korea to drive out the American forces.55 Facing
heavy causalities, the combined UN and U.S. forces
retreated south of the 38th parallel. Now locked in a
deadly struggle that pitted U.S. air superiority against
the massive infantry strength of Mao’s Red Army and
Soviet military aid, MacArthur publicly criticized
Truman’s management of the war and called for direct
attacks on mainland China, including the use of
nuclear weapons. Truman was wary of escalating the
conflict and, with the weight of having ordered their
use on Japan, balked at deploying nuclear weapons
again in Asia. Instead, faced with MacArthur’s flagrant
insubordination, Truman relieved the general of his
command in April of 1951.
General Douglass MacArthur observes the shelling of Inchon
by the U.S. Navy during the Korean War.
War set a pattern for future Cold War confrontations,
which became a series of proxy battles, in which
massive foreign military aid stoked and prolonged local
civil wars while avoiding direct military confrontation
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Nuclear War
The Arms Race and Deterrence
Korea also intensified fears that superpower conflict
might spiral into global nuclear war capable of
destroying entire nations or even the planet itself. Such
fears were justified by the development and proliferation
of atomic weapons during the early Cold War. The
United States successfully developed atomic weapons
during World War II through the coordinated research
of thousands of scientists on the top-secret Manhattan
Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge,
Tennessee. The project successfully weaponized the
radioactive elements uranium and plutonium to create
two bombs—nicknamed Fat Man and Little Boy—that
were subsequently dropped on Japan in August of 1945.
The atomic bombs decisively ended World War II, and
by killing more than one hundred thousand Japanese
civilians in a flash, they opened an unprecedented
chapter in the history of human warfare.
Stalin, who perhaps had known of the Americans’
nuclear capability before Truman due to well-placed
spies inside the Manhattan Project, intensified Soviet
efforts to develop a nuclear bomb after the war ended.
Truman, still the only man in human history to have
While the Baruch Plan was pitched as a sincere attempt
to save mankind from destruction, it broke with an
existing U.S. report on nuclear non-proliferation cowritten by J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the leading
Manhattan Project scientists and chair of the General
Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC), by adding provisions that would freeze the
production of all nuclear weapons and eliminate veto
power within the new IADA. Both provisions solidified
American advantages at the expense of the Soviets,
and the proposal arrived at the UN stillborn. Six
months later, Truman was stunned to discover from
the AEC that the U.S. nuclear stockpile stood at a less
than formidable thirteen.59 While the proliferation of
nuclear weapons genuinely concerned him, Truman
nevertheless moved to expand America’s nuclear
arsenal.
Over the next three years, the U.S. produced more than
two hundred bombs that could be dropped on targets
from twenty specially-modified B-29 bombers.60 While
military planners recognized that nuclear weapons
alone would not defeat the Soviet Union in a future
war, they hoped that the serious and credible threat
they posed would serve as a powerful brake on Soviet
adventurism. This, in essence, formed the basis of the
strategy of nuclear deterrence. According to the logic
of deterrence, the United States only needed to threaten
to deploy its nuclear weapons to achieve its objectives.
Although a massive nuclear buildup was meant to
strengthen America’s ability to bluff, this brinkmanship
carried significant risks. The U.S. poured significant
resources into weapons that its own strategy dictated
could never be used, while encouraging other nations to
do the same. In the Cold War, this produced the example
of what political scientists dubbed the “security
dilemma,” in which one nation’s attempt to increase
its own security causes a rival to build up its defenses
leading in turn to an arms race that imperils the safety
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ordered the use of nuclear weapons, understood the
horror of atomic war on a deeply personal level.
Truman created a civilian agency, the Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC), to oversee the development of
nuclear weapons in peacetime and even endorsed
international control of atomic weapons. Bernard
Baruch, the famous financier appointed by Truman as
the American delegate to the United Nations Atomic
Energy Commission, proposed an International Atomic
Development Authority (IADA) on June 14, 1946.
to launch a direct attack on American soil, the pace of
the nuclear arms race made this terrifying prospect a
realistic threat.
of both nations.61 The advent of the atomic bomb, as
the British author George Orwell observed presciently
in 1945, was likely to produce a state of “permanent
‘cold war’” by creating a new class of “unconquerable”
nuclear powers who were “likely to continue ruling the
world between them.”62
Despite the acknowledgement by both sides that
weapons of this force had no rational application in
war, the nuclear arms race continued, with the U.S. and
the U.S.S.R. testing even more powerful “H-bomb”
devices in 1954 and 1955 respectively.64 The American
device, which was tested in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean, recorded a fifteen megaton explosion that
sprayed radioactive fallout hundreds of miles in every
direction.65 Over President Eisenhower’s two terms
in office, the United States stockpiled nearly 20,000
nuclear warheads. This figure, the president explained
in a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1953,
“exceeds by many times the total equivalent of the
total of all bombs and all shells that came from every
plane and every gun in every theatre of war in all the
years of the Second World War.”
The U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons, and the
enormous strategic advantage this monopoly provided,
lasted four short years. In August of 1949, thanks in
part to technological knowledge acquired through
espionage, the Soviets tested their own nuclear bomb.
Soviet acquisition of atomic weapons intensified
the Cold War and forced U.S. officials to reassess
the strategy of deterrence. In Korea, the limitations
of nuclear deterrence were exposed. Not only had
America’s atomic bombs failed to deter the initial
North Korea invasion, but they did not stop China
from entering the war. American calculations now had
to factor in the possibility of a Soviet counterstrike or
even worse a preemptive Soviet strike. Although in
1949 Soviet technology was not yet advanced enough
Despite Eisenhower’s public plea to deescalate the
nuclear arms race while promoting “the peaceful
power of atomic energy,” the doctrine of deterrence
through massive retaliation dictated that America’s
nuclear stockpile would continue to grow.66 For their
part, Soviet officials invested heavily in missile
technology, although the initial three-thousand-missile
system deployed to defend Moscow from a U.S.
nuclear attack was quite clearly defensive in nature.67
Contrary to the handwringing of American officials
and politicians, spurred by inaccurate intelligence
reports, about the need to close the “missile gap”
with the Soviet Union, the Soviets lagged behind
the Americans in nuclear weaponry by almost every
metric throughout the entirety of the Cold War.68
J. Robert Oppenheimer (left) with Leslie Groves, Manhattan
Project Director, in September 1945, after an atomic bomb test
in New Mexico.
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That same year Oppenheimer narrowly convinced the
commission to vote against the development of a new
“super bomb” capable of killing millions or even tens
of millions of people. Despite dissent from the scientific
community, academics, and respected diplomats
like George F. Kennan, however, Truman sided with
military hardliners and authorized the development of
a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. In 1952, the U.S.
successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb that utilized
nuclear fusion, rather than fission, to produce a ten
megaton explosion, more than 450 times as powerful
as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.63 The
Soviets answered nine months later by testing their own
hydrogen bomb in the vast steppe of Kazakhstan.
Atomic Warfare Strategy: Massive Retaliation
to Mutually Assured Destruction
The nuclear arms race produced a central paradox.
To launch a nuclear attack was to invite an immediate
and devastating counterattack. The result—the
instantaneous deaths of hundreds of millions of
civilians and the irradiation of entire cities—made
nuclear conflict inherently suicidal. With full
knowledge of the likely outcome, no sane leader would
risk starting a nuclear war. In a speech delivered in
January 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
declared massive retaliation to be the official policy of
the United States and pledged to respond to communist
aggression “at places and with means of our own
choosing .”71 The policy functioned as a bluff but also
reflected Eisenhower’s decision to expand the nuclear
arsenal as a cost saving measure.
In the 1960s, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S.
McNamara, a former auto executive, abandoned
massive retaliation in favor of a new strategy known as
mutually assured destruction (MAD) that called on
the United States to adopt a nuclear posture calculated
to inflict the maximum number of causalities on the
enemy as a way of rendering any rational application of
nuclear war moot. As the eminent Cold War historian
John Lewis Gaddis observed, McNamara and other
American foreign policy makers had concluded that
The Davy Crockett, a portable bazooka-like weapon, could be
mounted on a tripod or a vehicle to fire a low-powered eleveninch nuclear warhead a short distance.
“the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that war
could no longer be an instrument of statecraft—rather,
the survival of states required there be no war at all.”72
The specter of devastating nuclear war became a
defining feature of the Cold War, flaring up at tense
moments and in a few instances coming dangerously
close to fruition. As discussed in later sections,
nuclear proliferation led to tense standoffs that
brought the world to the brink of atomic war. Arms
control negotiations ebbed and flowed from the late1960s to the 1980s, resulting in some progress toward
non-proliferation and disarmament. While the Cold
War never erupted into the nuclear apocalypse that
many feared, it directly and indirectly fueled armed
conflict around the globe and destabilized entire
regions for decades.
NEW LEADERSHIP
The USA: Eisenhower and the Cold War
Consensus
In the 1952 election, the Republican Party nominated
General Dwight David Eisenhower, the sixtytwo-year-old World War II general who had also
served as the first Supreme Commander of the
newly created NATO forces. “Ike,” as Eisenhower
was popularly known, promised to work to end the
Korean War. When President Truman decided not to
run for reelection, the Democratic Party chose Adlai
Stevenson, the Governor of Illinois. At the polls,
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As each new advance ratcheted up the destructive power
of nuclear weapons, delivery systems also progressed
with alarming speed . By the end of the 1950s, the U .S .
had moved on from the World War II-era B-29 bombers
to new B-52 bombers, whose longer range allowed
the planes to take off rom bases within the United
States and reach Soviet targets . In 1955, the United
States had begun to develop intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs), which within five years provided the
American military with the ability to launch nuclear
warheads from silos throughout the United States
or from submarines at sea (Submarine Launched
Ballistic Missiles-SLBMs) with deadly accuracy and
unprecedented range.69 More quixotically, in 1958 the
U.S. Army also produced the Davy Crockett, a portable
bazooka-like weapon that could be mounted on a tripod
or a vehicle to fire a low-powered eleven-inch nuclear
warhead a short distance .70 Though such tactical nuclear
weapons were never used, they illustrated doomed
attempts to bring nuclear arms within the conventions of
modern warfare .
Dwight D. Eisenhower (right) and Richard Nixon (left) became
the first Republicans to win the White House since Herbert
Hoover in 1928.
the American people responded to Eisenhower’s
trustworthy image and overwhelmingly voted for the
former general and his running mate, Richard Nixon,
a young senator from California who had made a name
for himself as an ardent anti-communist.
Eisenhower became the first Republican to win the
White House since Herbert Hoover in 1928. His
victory also signaled the triumph of internationalism
over isolationism within the Republican Party. In terms
of foreign policy, there was virtually no difference
between the positions of the two major political parties
in the 1952 election. Despite domestic controversies
sparked by the Cold War, some basic premises enjoyed
bipartisan support by 1952. A majority of politicians,
officials, and intellectuals across the political spectrum
embraced an emerging Cold War consensus that
championed liberal internationalism, anti-communism,
free-market capitalism, and high stakes competition
with the Soviet Union.
The U.S.S.R.: The Death of Stalin and
the Rise of Khrushchev
In early March of 1953, just months into the new
Initially it appeared that the new premier, Georgi
Malenkov, a veteran Bolshevik who had overseen
the Soviet nuclear program, would succeed Stalin.
Malenkov, however, confounded Kremlinologists,
as the academic experts who closely followed
political intrigue in Moscow were known, when he
announced that no single leader would determine
Soviet policies. Instead, a committee of equals,
composed of Malenkov; Lavrenti Beria, the head of
the secret police; Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign
minister; Nikolai Bulganin, the defense minister; and
Nikita Khrushchev, the first party secretary, would
collectively formulate Soviet policy.
A vicious power struggle ensued. By mid-1955,
Khrushchev emerged as the victor after outmaneuvering
and sidelining each of his rivals.73 Beria was arrested
and executed in 1953, while Malenkov and Molotov
were stripped of their positions and subsequently sent
to internal exile or barred from further participation
in public office. Just over sixty-years old, the new
Soviet leader was short, squat, and bald. Khrushchev’s
ebullient manner was markedly different than Stalin’s
brooding menace. In public and private, Khrushchev
proudly embraced a brash, uncouth persona as a mark of
his hardscrabble proletarian background.
Indeed, Khrushchev’s rise to power embodied the
promise of the Russian Revolution and the Worker’s
State. Born in 1894, Khrushchev grew up in the coal
mining region of Donetsk, Ukraine, and left school
after four years to work as an apprentice to a metal
fitter. Khrushchev was an original member of his local
Soviet and a veteran of the Red Army who fought
for the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. Khrushchev had
aligned himself closely with Stalin while avoiding
the internal purges of other top party members in
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president’s first term, Eisenhower received stunning
news from Moscow. Joseph Stalin was dead. Stalin
had ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for about a
quarter century. His ruthless and paranoid personality,
as much as his aggressive foreign policy, had defined
the early Cold War. Stalin’s death, therefore, sparked
a flurry of questions in Washington: Who would
take over? Would Soviet foreign policy change in
any meaningful ways? Would new leadership in the
Kremlin help thaw Soviet-American relations? The
uncertainty surrounding the answers to these questions
provoked both hope and anxiety within the Eisenhower
administration.
a Marxist future for a new generation. An impulsive,
reflective, and complex figure, Khrushchev would play
an important role in the next phase of the Cold War,
discussed in Section III of the resource guide.
Nikita Khrushchev, like Stalin, used key positions within the
Communist Party to take control of the Soviet government.
the 1930s. Much like Stalin, Khrushchev used key
positions within the Communist Party to take control
of the Soviet government. Fundamentally an idealist,
Khrushchev looked to reinvigorate the Soviet vision of
74
●
The opposing ideologies of the United States
and the Soviet Union and their divergent
national interests led to the deterioration of
American-Soviet Relations at the conclusion of
World War II as the two superpowers planned
for the postwar world order.
●
The Cold War officially began in 1946 as the
Soviet Union and the United States divided
territories formerly controlled by the defeated
Axis powers in Europe and Asia.
●
The Truman Administration adopted a
broad-based strategy of containment in order
to counter Soviet influence economically,
militarily, politically, and culturally.
●
Atomic weapons sparked a dangerous arms race
that led the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to expand the
size and potency of their nuclear arsenals.
●
New leaders took over in the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R., but the Cold War persisted.
●
The Eisenhower administration favored covert
interventions as a cost-effective tool to combat
the perceived spread of Communism around
the globe.
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SECTION I SUMMARY
Section II
The Cold War’s Effects on Domestic
Politics and Culture in America
Thus far, we have discussed the Cold War almost
entirely through the lens of foreign policy and
international relations. However, the onset of the Cold
War affected the domestic politics of the United States
in ways that profoundly shaped the lives of millions
of Americans who lived through this era. In times of
war, the U.S. government has often moved to curtail
individual civil liberties in the name of national
security. Indeed, anti-communism in the United States
took hold in the aftermath of World War I, when agents
of the Justice Department arrested scores of political
radicals throughout the country. Anti-communism
in general, and antipathy toward the Soviet Union in
particular, continued to resonate with large swaths of
Americans throughout the interwar period.
As discussed in section one, the U.S.-Soviet wartime
alliance provided a temporary and largely illusory
convergence of the two nations’ interests. By 1947,
although the countries remained officially at peace,
escalating tensions with the Soviet Union amplified
fears that “disloyal” elements sympathetic to Moscow
threatened the United States from within. Soviet
leaders’ ideological commitment to world revolution
and heightened suspicion of active Soviet espionage
networks in the United States spurred American
politicians to craft a domestic version of Truman’s
containment policy. The anxious atmosphere of the
early Cold War, heightened by the looming prospect of
nuclear war, prompted the White House and Congress to
extend existing emergency measures while creating new
systems designed to identify and proactively prevent
communist sabotage, espionage, and subversion.
Loyalty Programs and the FBI
The first of these systems was Truman’s Loyalty
Photograph of J. Edgar Hoover in 1959. Under Hoover’s
direction, the FBI utilized a vast network of confidential
informants to compile extensive files on private American
citizens and groups.
Program that instituted the first comprehensive
loyalty oath for federal employees in March of 1947
via Executive Order 9835. Over the next decade,
more than five million federal workers underwent
background screening conducted by the Civil Service
Commission in close coordination with the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Approximately 2,700
of those screened were dismissed, while an additional
12,000 resigned.75 Under the program, all federal
employees and applicants were required to swear a
loyalty oath to the United States and explicitly disavow
any ideology that advocated revolution against the
government. While there were only 75,000 active
members of the Communist Party of the United
States (CPUSA) in 1947, the FBI considered excommunists, friends and relatives of communists,
and alleged communists equally suspicious, which
substantially increased the number of people with less
than one degree of separation from the CPUSA.76
Following the FBI’s zealous lead, loyalty-security
boards flagged a broad spectrum of leftist political
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THE ENEMY WITHIN:
“DISLOYALTY” AND THE FEAR
OF COMMUNIST SUBVERSION
The FBI played a crucial role in the U.S. government’s
campaign to identify and neutralize disloyal
Americans. Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover,
the FBI utilized a vast network of confidential
informants to compile extensive files on private
American citizens and groups, amassing 430,000 by
1960.79 Hoover, who had led the FBI since 1924, was
influential in expanding the government’s definition
of “subversive” organizations beyond the relatively
small official membership of the CPUSA to include a
wide array of leftist groups and causes. Hoover trained
his agents to view membership in a labor union,
homosexuality, and support for civil rights reforms as
telltale signs of communist subversion.
As a result, thousands of individuals with little or
no connection to communism were subjected to FBI
surveillance and repression in a practice known as
red-baiting. The secretive nature of the hearings
in which the accused were not allowed to face their
accusers, or even confirm the precise charges against
them, allowed injustice to proliferate. With an ample
budget and virtually no oversight, Hoover capitalized
on the widespread fear of communism to enhance his
own power and that of the FBI during the Cold War.
The Hollywood Ten and their family members protest their
sentence to federal prison.
HUAC and the Hollywood Ten
Congress also actively participated in the anticommunist crusade. In 1947, the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC), originally formed in
1938 to investigate disloyal elements within American
society, reopened congressional hearings on the subject
of communist subversion that would last for more than
a decade. The committee called celebrities and ordinary
citizens alike to answer questions, including the now
famous query: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a
member of the Communist Party?” If a person answered
yes, remained silent, or invoked the Fifth Amendment
right against self-incrimination, they faced serious legal,
professional, and social consequences.
The booming film industry was an early highprofile target of HUAC. Congress was concerned
that popular movies might be used to disseminate
communist propaganda to audiences across America.
The committee subpoenaed screenwriters, directors,
producers, and actors, including future president Ronald
Reagan, to discuss communist infiltration of Hollywood
and produce the names of any known communists
in the industry. A group of prominent screenwriters,
known as the Hollywood Ten, refused on principle to
answer the committee’s questions or name coworkers as
communists. As a result, these “unfriendly” witnesses
were charged and convicted of contempt of Congress.
They served six months to a year in federal prison after
the Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal.
As a result of the HUAC hearings, hundreds of others
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beliefs and affiliations as suspect. According to the
official protocol, even fleeting contact with any of the
dozens of “subversive” organizations identified by the
attorney general marked Americans as potential national
security threats. For one unlucky Food and Drug
Administration inspector, a single visit to a campground
maintained by the Nature Friends of America, one of the
organizations on the attorney general’s list, triggered his
termination.77 States, local municipalities, and private
businesses followed suit and adopted their own loyalty
review programs. By the mid-1950s, workers in nearly
every sector of the American economy were required
to swear loyalty oaths or pass some form of ideological
background check. Such was the ubiquity of these
measures that New Yorkers who wished to fish in the
city’s reservoirs had to first sign a loyalty oath. This
policy may seem like overkill, but the same reservoirs
where anglers fished for bass provided drinking water
to millions.78 When the Supreme Court began to uphold
challenges to the constitutionality of loyalty oaths
beginning in 1956, loyalty-security programs in the
workplace had already derailed the careers of thousands
of Americans.
in the film industry suffered professionally after being
blacklisted, as the practice of denying employment to
alleged communists became known. Wary of facing
the same fate as the Hollywood Ten, many future
HUAC witnesses chose to name names in order to
protect themselves. Even those who cooperated,
however, found their lives turned upside down as
friends and neighbors ostracized them.
The Smith Act Trials
The party members appealed, arguing that their First
Amendment rights had been violated. In June of 1951,
however, the Supreme Court ruled 6–2 to uphold their
conviction and the constitutionality of the Smith Act
in the landmark case Dennis v. United States. The
Dennis decision legitimized anti-communism and
effectively made membership in the CPUSA illegal.
The highest court in the land issued a green light to the
Justice Department’s anti-communist campaign, which
prompted a wave of arrests of local CPUSA officials
across the nation. From Hawaii to Pennsylvania,
hundreds of mid-level party leaders were charged
with violating the Smith Act between 1951 and 1957,
when a pair of new Supreme Court rulings stalled the
government’s prosecution of communists by imposing
a higher burden of proof for convictions.80
ESPIONAGE
The Alger Hiss Affair
The next year HUAC shifted its focus from Hollywood
to Foggy Bottom, the Washington, D.C., headquarters
of the State Department. HUAC, with ample help
from the FBI, uncovered explosive charges of highlevel espionage against Alger Hiss, a respected State
Department official who had attended the Yalta
Richard Nixon (right) reviews microfilm evidence with HUAC
Special Investigator Robert Stripling.
Conference with FDR. The serious allegations against
Hiss primarily rested on the testimony of Whittaker
Chambers, a journalist and ex-Communist who had
once been a close friend of Hiss. By Chambers’s own
admission, he had spied for the Soviets by acting as a
courier of stolen government documents until the late1930s.
In testimony before HUAC in August of 1948,
Chambers insisted that Hiss had belonged to the same
Washington spy network although he struggled to
identify any specific acts of espionage. When Hiss
was called before the committee shortly thereafter,
he vehemently denied the allegations and even sued
Chambers for libel. Chambers then led congressional
investigators to a farm in rural Maryland where he
had hidden microfilm canisters containing sixtyfive pages of State Department documents allegedly
given to him by Hiss in a hollowed-out pumpkin. The
Pumpkin Papers led a federal court to indict Hiss for
perjury—the statute of limitations for espionage had
expired—and after the first trial ended in a hung jury,
Hiss was convicted and sentenced to federal prison.
Hiss maintained his innocence for the rest of his life,
and historians remain divided as to whether or not he
was actually a Soviet spy.
The “Hiss Affair” demonstrated how congressional
hearings amplified by the national media provided
political theater that helped Republican politicians
construct a partisan narrative that painted the Truman
Administration and the Democratic Party as “soft”
on Communism, a narrative that surged following
the triumph of the Communists in China’s civil war.
In particular, the public attention devoted to Hiss’s
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In 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act, which made
it a federal crime to knowingly conspire to teach and
advocate for the overthrow or destruction of the U.S.
government. In 1948, the Justice Department indicted
the leading members of the CPUSA for violating
the Smith Act by virtue of their party activities. In a
raucous and well-publicized trial that took place in New
York City the following year, the prosecution relied on a
selection of works by Marx and Lenin to prove that the
Communist Party’s revolutionary philosophy rendered
it unfit for participation in America’s democratic
processes. After nearly ten months, the jury voted
unanimously to convict all eleven defendants, and the
judge sentenced them to five years in federal prison.
and prosecuted both Rosenbergs in federal court.
HUAC testimony helped catapult a young Republican
congressman from California named Richard Nixon
into national prominence. In 1950, Nixon vaulted to
the Senate and then two years later was elected Vice
President of the United States. Nixon’s political rise
was directly tied to his reputation as a strident anticommunist, which he cemented as an eager HUAC
attack dog.
The Execution of the Rosenbergs
In early 1950, just as the Hiss case reached its
conclusion, British police announced the arrest of
Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who had worked on the
top-secret Manhattan Project. Fuchs stood accused
of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets, who had
surprised U.S. officials by successfully testing their
own atomic bomb the previous year. Under FBI
interrogation, Fuchs revealed that he had been part
of a larger spy ring and led investigators to David
Greenglass, a machinist at the Los Alamos site.
Greenglass confessed and implicated his brotherin-law, Julius Rosenberg, an unassuming electrical
engineer from Brooklyn. Rosenberg, whose
participation in high-level espionage has since been
established beyond a doubt by decrypted Soviet
records, maintained his innocence. In an effort to get
Rosenberg to talk, the Justice Department indicted his
wife Ethel despite having little evidence of her guilt
MCCARTHYISM
One evening in February of 1950, members of the local
Republican Women’s Club filed into a nondescript hotel
banquet hall in Wheeling, West Virginia, to listen to
Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy deliver the
annual Lincoln Day keynote address. “Today we are
engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic
atheism and Christianity,” McCarthy warned the
audience before dramatically announcing that he held in
his hand a list of 205 communists working in the State
Department. Later that week, McCarthy revised the
number down to eighty-one and then to fifty-seven but
declined to publish the list or provide even one specific
name.82 The reason was simple: no such list existed.
The speech, which egregiously plagiarized remarks
delivered by Richard Nixon a few days earlier,
jumpstarted McCarthy’s infamous career and marked
a key moment in the surge of political repression
throughout the United States during the first decade
of the Cold War known as McCarthyism. The term
refers to the anti-communist crusade that dominated
American politics from the late 1940s to the mid1950s and destroyed the lives of thousands of doctors,
lawyers, teachers, civil servants, actors, and workers
throughout the United States who were publicly
identified as communists or communist-sympathizers.
Because of its excesses, McCarthyism has also
become synonymous with illegitimate and politically
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Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, photographed as they leave a
U.S. courthouse after being found guilty of spying on behalf of
the Soviet Union.
The sensational trial took place in 1951 as American
troops shipped out to Korea, and anti-communism
reached a fever pitch. The presiding judge called their
treachery “worse than murder” and sentenced them
to death.81 Two years later, in spite of international
appeals for mercy, the Rosenbergs were executed
in the electric chair. The controversial decision left
the couple’s two orphaned children to be raised by
family friends and has since been roundly criticized
by historians. Like the Hiss affair, the Rosenberg
trial supplied high drama and placed espionage at
the center of America’s collective imagination. Both
lent credibility to the notion that secret communist
agents posed a serious threat to America’s national
security and added fuel to the brush fire of popular
anti-communist hysteria that defined the early 1950s
phenomenon known as McCarthyism.
McCarthy’s Rise: Anti-Communist
Crusader
McCarthy, a World War II veteran nicknamed “Tail
Gunner Joe,” won election to the Senate in 1946 as part
of a Republican wave that returned control of Congress
to the Grand Old Party for the first time in sixteen
years. Until his theatrical speech in 1950, McCarthy’s
time in Washington had been unremarkable and
dogged by charges of corruption. McCarthy’s genius
resided in his ability to manufacture controversy
and attract media coverage through shameless and
frequently baseless attacks. McCarthy also benefitted
from international events, like the Communist triumph
in China and the outbreak of the Korean War, which
made his broad charge that the Truman Administration
was “soft” on communism resonate. Initially, many
of McCarthy’s Republican colleagues supported
his accusations, not based on their merit, but as an
effective partisan weapon that damaged the president
and the Democratic Party.
McCarthy may have cynically stoked populist fears
of communism, but in many communities across
America, such fears had already captured the public’s
imagination. In McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin,
the residents of Mosinee staged an elaborate political
drama that envisioned life in the small town following
a Communist Party takeover. The day-long pageant
enlisted local members of the American Legion to
impersonate “Red commissars” and secret police. In
an early morning roundup, the communists arrested
the town’s mayor, chief of police, several clergymen,
and the editor of the local newspaper, who were then
corralled in a wire stockade. The day culminated with
a parade down Main Street with thousands of marchers
chanting communist slogans. The theatrical event drew
national coverage and demonstrated the popular appeal
of McCarthy’s brand of fantasy anti-communism.84
Back in Washington, McCarthy used the Alger Hiss
case to impugn the entire State Department as a den of
Communists. McCarthy initiated hearings into alleged
Communist infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman
Administrations and set out to prove that Communist
influence had led directly to the failure of American
policy in China. McCarthy pounced on any witness who
invoked the Fifth Amendment and declared their silence
to be proof positive of guilt. In the midterm elections
of 1950, McCarthy actively campaigned in several
races and helped to defeat an incumbent Democratic
Senator by smearing him as a friend of the CPUSA
leader Earl Browder. The following year, McCarthy
torpedoed the nomination of a respected Columbia
University professor to serve as U.S. delegate to the UN
by accusing him, falsely, of belonging to a number of
Communist-front organizations. Far from protecting
the nation, McCarthy’s attacks caused the morale of the
nation’s diplomatic corps to crater and chased dedicated
officials with valuable expertise from government
service.
McCarthy’s power grew when he was chosen to chair
the Senate’s Government Operations Committee,
which contained a permanent sub-committee devoted
to investigations. The Wisconsin senator turned the
committee into his personal fiefdom and staffed it with
rabid and unscrupulous anti-communists who scoured
America’s overseas information programs for evidence
of communist influence. Even after Republicans
reclaimed the White House in 1952, McCarthy
continued to beat the drum against communist
subversion in the executive branch. McCarthy’s
decision to plunge headlong into a direct attack on the
Eisenhower Administration and the armed forces set
the stage for his downfall.
McCarthy’s Fall: The Army-McCarthy
Hearings, 1954
On November 24, 1953, McCarthy delivered a
nationally televised speech that put him on a collision
course with the White House and his own party.
McCarthy began by reminding viewers that the
Truman Administration had been “crawling with
Communists,” before rehearsing a familiar litany
of insults against the former president that involved
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partisan “witchhunts,” an analogy first introduced
in 1953 by Arthur Miller’s allegorical play The
Crucible, which invited Americans to see the parallels
between Cold War anti-communist hysteria and the
Salem witch trials. Although McCarthy’s repeated
charge that dozens of communists had infiltrated the
top levels of American government was spurious
and unsubstantiated, it struck a nerve with many
Americans who feared that the Soviet Union was
working to destroy the United States from within.
As discussed at the beginning of this section,
McCarthyism in many ways predated McCarthy’s rise
to prominence in 1950. It would also extend beyond his
downfall four years later.83
cataloguing the ways in which various officials had
protected alleged Communists within the federal
government. But McCarthy did not stop there. He
warned of the dangers of “whining, whimpering
appeasement” taking hold of the Republican Party
and questioned whether President Eisenhower was
fully committed to the urgent task of rooting out
Communists embedded within government agencies.85
The speech put the Eisenhower Administration on
notice and prompted the conflict-averse president to
move closer to open confrontation with McCarthy.
Rather than vindicating his crusade, McCarthy’s
erratic behavior in the hearings, made worse by the
senator’s alcoholism, hastened his political demise. In
March, Edward R. Murrow, perhaps the nation’s most
respected news anchor, devoted an entire episode of
his nightly news program to McCarthy’s unscrupulous
methods that ended with an impassioned plea for
Americans to oppose the senator’s assault on American
freedom. In the wake of the hearings, McCarthy’s
approval rating plunged to thirty-four percent, a steep
drop from fifty percent at the beginning of 1954.87
In an ironic turn, the Senate ordered an investigation
Senator Joseph McCarthy (right) questions the U.S. Army’s
lead counsel, Joseph Welch, during the Army-McCarthy
hearings in 1954.
of McCarthy’s behavior during the army hearings
and, on December 2, officially censured McCarthy.
While censure was a symbolic action, it was still the
Senate’s most severe reprimand short of removal and
signaled the end of McCarthy’s political relevance.
McCarthyism, the anti-communist crusade that
would bear his name, however, continued to shape the
contours of American politics in the Cold War.
COLD WAR CIVIL RIGHTS
McCarthyism specifically targeted African-American
civil rights leaders and organizations for political
repression. For example, the FBI closely monitored
the singer and activist Paul Robeson, whose leftist
views and extensive travel in the Soviet Union made
him an especially attractive target for anti-communist
crusaders. After Robeson publicly criticized the U.S.
government’s slow pace on civil rights reform while
attending an international conference in Paris, the State
Department revoked his passport in 1950. Deprived
of the ability to tour internationally, Robeson soon
discovered he had also been blacklisted within the
United States in response to his refusal to cooperate
when called to testify before HUAC. In this way, public
and private authorities conspired to silence and punish
Robeson for his outspoken views, despite never charging
the famous performer with a crime. While the Cold
War led to restrictions on the civil liberties of AfricanAmerican activists like Robeson, it also contributed to
the enactment of federal civil rights reform.
Long considered to be a domestic issue with no
bearing on U.S. foreign policy, American race relations
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McCarthy, a political brawler by nature, never backed
down from a fight. The Wisconsin senator trained
his sights on the failure of military brass to properly
remove an officer stationed at Fort Monmouth in
New Jersey, identified as a security risk by military
intelligence. Although the army’s oversight had
resulted from ordinary bureaucratic inefficiency,
McCarthy seized on the incident as evidence that the
communist menace had spread to the Pentagon. The
Army-McCarthy hearings, as the official Senate
investigation into whether the army had harbored
communists became known, began in April of 1954.
Television news cameras covered the spectacle, which
allowed ordinary Americans to witness McCarthy’s
frequent interruptions of the proceedings in order to
pontificate from the dais or rudely harangue witnesses.
One month into the hearings, McCarthy accused a
young attorney who worked at the same firm as the
army’s lead counsel Joseph Welch of belonging to a
subversive organization aligned with the Communist
Party. Welch’s dramatic response has since become
legendary. “Let us not assassinate this lad further,
Senator,” Welch pleaded before asking McCarthy,
“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have
you left no sense of decency?”86
Paul Robeson leads shipyard workers in singing the “Star
Spangled Banner” in 1942. Robeson’s passport was revoked
in 1950 after he criticized the slow pace of civil rights reform,
and he was blacklisted for not cooperating with HUAC.
rocketed onto the world stage during the Cold War.
Soviet propagandists seized on incidents of Jim
Crow racial discrimination, which mandated separate
facilities for black and white Americans in many
public and private spaces throughout the South, and
violence in order to claim moral superiority over the
United States and distract from the Soviet Union’s
own human rights abuses. The Soviets did not need to
invent stories of American racism, as ample evidence
of the nation’s crisis in race relations appeared
regularly on the front pages of American newspapers.
In addition to providing a boon to the Soviets,
American racial discrimination threatened U.S.
attempts to establish and maintain positive relations
with newly independent nations in Africa, Asia, and
the Middle East, as the first wave of decolonization
dramatically altered the global geopolitical landscape.88
By 1947, many of the State Department’s top officials
had come to see race relations as a strategic liability.
It was, in a phrase first used by acting Secretary of
State Dean Acheson, America’s “Achilles heel,” an
embarrassing blot that damaged America’s image
abroad and directly interfered with U.S. foreign policy
objectives. Domestic race relations became a national
security issue, and by extension civil rights reform
became what the historian Mary Dudziak has called a
“Cold War imperative.”89
Truman’s Civil Rights Platform
As Truman moved to confront the spread of
Communism abroad and retain the presidency in
Even when couched as a matter of national security,
however, Truman’s civil rights agenda sparked
significant backlash. In direct response to the inclusion
of a civil rights plank in the official Democratic Party
Platform, Southern segregationists broke away and
formed the splinter Dixiecrat Party.92 In spite of the
revolt within his own party, Truman won reelection in
1948 by a razor-thin margin, secured by unprecedented
African-American support.93 Truman explicitly framed
his domestic civil rights platform as part of a larger
strategic push to counter Soviet propaganda and
project a positive image of the United States abroad.
In order to achieve these twin goals, Truman needed a
new kind of diplomacy and a new kind of diplomat.
Edith Sampson: African-American
Diplomacy in the Cold War
At a time of heightened tension and looming nuclear
conflict, the humanistic idea that cultural exchange
could promote world peace offered a welcome
alternative to the cut-throat world of power politics.
Looking to win the hearts and minds of peoples
around the world, the State Department embraced
cultural diplomacy, an innovative departure from
traditional statecraft that tapped ordinary citizens to
serve as goodwill ambassadors who would directly
engage foreign populations. African Americans, long
excluded from the foreign service and the lily-white
world of U.S. foreign policy making, became active
participants in America’s foray into cultural diplomacy.
This made sense, as much of the popular culture that
America exported to the world was in fact AfricanAmerican culture. The State Department’s fledgling
cultural diplomacy strategy leaned heavily on AfricanAmerican musicians, actors, and athletes.
Edith Sampson, a charismatic, middle-aged AfricanAmerican attorney, stepped forward to become one
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1947, his handpicked civil rights committee published
To Secure These Rights. The groundbreaking report
advocated broad civil rights reforms, including antilynching legislation, voting rights, and desegregation
of the armed forces.90 On July 26, 1948, Truman
acted on the final item by issuing Executive Order
9981, which ended Jim Crow segregation in the
military and affirmed arguments that racism hindered
U.S. preparedness in the Cold War.91 During the
Korean War, American soldiers would finally fight in
integrated units.
Sampson instantly became one of the most
photographed members of the entire UN and received
more mail than anyone in the American delegation
except former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.96 The
United States Information Service (USIS) even
produced a short documentary film celebrating
Sampson’s life story as a shining example of “the
opportunities in the United States for people of all
races and creeds.” 97 The film was distributed to U.S.
embassies and information centers around the world
as part of a multimedia public relations “kit” designed
to “explain American progress against [racial]
discrimination” to foreign audiences.98
In an effort to further capitalize on Sampson’s
popularity, the State Department enlisted her as a
goodwill ambassador and sent her on two separate
whirlwind tours of Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia
in 1951 and 1952. Sampson’s tightly packed schedule
included meetings with local dignitaries and officials,
but also placed Sampson in contact with school
children, housewives, and workers. The trips reflected
the State Department’s embrace of person-to-person
diplomacy as well as its attempt to reshape public
perception of the nation’s racial problems abroad.
Sampson ably served this cause and delivered dozens
of speeches in cities throughout Austria, Germany,
and Scandinavia on American race relations with titles
like: “The Negro in American Life” and “The Problem
of the American Negro.”99 Sampson’s real genius,
however, lay in communicating directly with audiences
during question and answer sessions. Sampson openly
acknowledged the persistence of racism in American
society but pointed to her own success as proof that
progress was possible. Sampson was at her best in
these unscripted exchanges and won high praise from
State Department officials for her ability to charm
Photographic portrait of Edith Sampson by Carl van Vechten.
Sampson became one of the State Department’s most effective
goodwill ambassadors.
audiences.
Events at home, however, complicated Sampson’s
attempts to sell a narrative of American racial progress
overseas. For example, just after Sampson returned
from Austria in the summer of 1951, a white mob
prevented an African-American veteran and his family
from moving into a home in Cicero, Illinois. For two
days, the mob ransacked the house, burned furniture,
and rioted until the National Guard finally restored
order. The events struck close to home, literally and
figuratively, for Sampson. “What’s happening here in
America?” she implored in an editorial published later
that year that urged her countrymen not to “forget that
our nation bears the torch of liberty that is expected to
light the way for the other nations of the world. Don’t
let that torch grow dim through acts like Cicero. Keep
the torch bright.”100
While Sampson continued to serve as a goodwill
ambassador for the State Department, she grew
increasingly disillusioned. When the Austrian
ambassador, whom she had met and befriended
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of the State Department’s most effective goodwill
ambassadors and an unconventional weapon in
America’s Cold War arsenal. Born on October 13,
1901, in Pittsburgh, Sampson put herself through law
school while working fulltime as a social worker. 94
In 1950, she ran a bustling family law practice on
Chicago’s South Side and served as an officer of the
National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). That
year Truman selected Sampson to serve as an alternate
delegate to the UN, explicitly touting her appointment
as “an answer to Soviet propaganda regarding the
Negro.”95
on her tour, visited her hometown of Chicago in
1952, Sampson did not receive an invitation to the
welcome reception. The snub stung, but also led
Sampson to question the government’s commitment
to racial issues. “We go forth to tell other people
in other countries about the American way of life
and the changing status of the Negro in the United
States,” Sampson wrote to the top American official
in Austria, “yet when foreign visitors come to see
democracy in action there is no planning attempted
so that they might meet Negro groups and visit Negro
institutions.”101
Other African-American goodwill ambassadors
echoed Sampson’s frustrations with the federal
government’s approach to civil rights reform. The
nation’s push to desegregate its public schools provided
a dramatic contrast between the image of racial
progress that the United States trumpeted abroad
and the more sobering reality that existed on the
ground. In 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously
ruled that racial segregation in public schools was
unconstitutional in the groundbreaking case Brown v.
Board of Education. The court’s decision in Brown
was motivated in part by the strategic calculus of the
Cold War. An amicus brief submitted by the Justice
Department stated that segregation “furnishes grist for
the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts
even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our
devotion to the democratic faith.”102
Following the ruling, the State Department looked to
showcase the Brown decision as concrete evidence
that the United States was actively addressing its
checkered history of racial discrimination. The State
Department worked to publicize the Brown ruling as
widely as possible, and the USIS immediately planned
to distribute a documentary film of black and white
children attending an integrated school in Baltimore,
Maryland, to U.S. embassies around the globe.103
In a follow-up ruling, known as Brown II, the court
instructed states to desegregate schools “with all
deliberate speed.” The inclusion of the adjective
“deliberate,” which means careful, ensured that
integration would proceed gradually. The slow pace
emboldened segregationist opponents predisposed to
ignore the court’s ruling entirely. The inability of the
Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division escort nine AfricanAmerican students into all-white Central High School in Little
Rock, Arkansas.
Supreme Court to enforce its own decisions and states’
rights, both integral features of America’s federalist
system, set the stage for a dramatic confrontation.
The crisis came to a head in Arkansas, in September
of 1957, when the state’s governor ordered the National
Guard to prevent nine African-American students from
attending Little Rock Central High School. Asked to
comment on the unfolding crisis, Louis Armstrong,
a world-famous jazz trumpeter and one of the State
Department’s most active goodwill ambassadors,
publicly rebuked the Eisenhower Administration for
its lackluster response to the crisis. “The way they are
treating my people in the South, the Government can
go to Hell,” Armstrong told a stunned AP reporter in
North Dakota, adding, “It’s getting so bad a colored
man hasn’t got any country.”104 Armstrong’s words
alarmed State Department officials who feared that the
musician’s protest might escalate into a broad boycott
of government-sponsored tours by African Americans.
On September 24, Eisenhower ordered federal troops
to break the impasse and escort the students to school.
Armstrong, in turn, praised the president and resumed
his participation in the State Department’s jazz
diplomacy program. The United States Information
Agency and the American-sponsored radio programs
overseas used Eisenhower’s intervention to put a
positive spin on the crisis by claiming the president’s
actions reflected the nation’s progress on civil rights.
Little Rock underscored the perils of shining too bright
a spotlight on the nation’s race relations or proclaiming
that the government had found a definitive solution to
its racial problems.
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Desegregation and Foreign Affairs:
Brown v. Board to Little Rock
COLD WAR SOCIETY
Cold War Science: Sputnik I and
Scientific Inquiry
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully
sent the world’s first manmade satellite, Sputnik I,
into orbit. Although the beeping satellite was no larger
than a basketball, the news sent shock waves through
the United States. A month later, the Soviets sent
the far larger Sputnik II, which carried a dog named
Laika, into outer space. The military implications
of the Soviet space program’s rapid progress chilled
Western officials to the bone. They knew that the same
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that had
launched the satellites provided the Soviets with the
capacity to remotely deploy nuclear weapons with a
range of thousands of miles.
Eisenhower announced the creation of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and
capitalized on the moment’s urgency to build popular
support for new initiatives meant to bolster American
education in science, math, engineering, and foreign
languages. In 1958, Congress passed the National
Defense Education Act, which designated $1 billion
in federal spending over seven years to fund research
grants, student loans, scholarships, and curriculum
development in order to align America’s education
system with its national security needs. While
McCarthyism decimated the ranks of the nation’s
university professors, the Cold War significantly
bolstered federal investment in post-secondary
education. Meanwhile, NASA would become the
vanguard of the dramatic space race that reached its
peak in the late 1960s.
Beyond high-profile fields like atomic physics and
A technician puts the final touches on Sputnik I.
Image Credit: NASA/Asif A. Siddiqi
aeronautic engineering, science itself became a
contested battlefield during the Cold War. The United
States officially championed pure scientific inquiry and
international collaboration as part of a broader strategy
of contrasting American liberal democracy’s openness
and freedom with the insularity and oppression of
Soviet communism. Evolutionary biology provided the
most dramatic illustration of an ideologically fraught
scientific debate in the Cold War. Shortly after World
War II, Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist, rejected
natural selection, the core principle of Charles Darwin’s
theory of evolution, and instead proposed an alternative
theory of genetics that argued individual biological
traits resulted entirely from the immediate environment,
rather than being inherited. Lysenko believed, for
example, that rubbing ice on seeds would produce plants
that thrived in cold weather.
Lysenko maintained that his genetic theory adhered
to the principles of Marxism, while Darwin’s ideas
represented the corrupt bourgeois values of capitalism.
Soviet scientists unwilling to embrace Lysenko’s
idiosyncratic model of genetics, which had the official
backing of the state, risked losing their jobs or worse.
To American scientists, Lysenko’s claims were
dangerous not only because they lacked empirical
evidence, but also because they privileged political
ideology over scientific truth. For American officials
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Up to this point, a nuclear strike still required a pilot
to fly an airplane directly over the target and drop the
bomb. After Sputnik, the threat of a surprise Soviet
attack struck new levels of terror into the hearts
of Americans. Lyndon B. Johnson, at the time a
Democratic senator from Texas, proclaimed that the
nation faced its gravest national emergency since Pearl
Harbor. President Eisenhower, who knew from topsecret intelligence reports that, despite the propaganda
value of the Sputnik launches, the Soviet Union’s nuclear
weapons technology continued to lag behind the United
States, sought to calm and reassure the nation.
Cold War Math
Trofim Lysenko rejected natural selection and proposed an
alternative theory of genetics that argued individual biological
traits resulted entirely from the immediate environment, rather
than being inherited.
alert to any opportunity to showcase the United
States as the defender of freedom against creeping
totalitarianism, Lysenko offered a near perfect foil.
As a result, the State Department seized on scientific
inquiry as a metaphor for the wider Cold War struggle
and began to recruit scientists willing to attack the
Soviet Union’s politicization of science and promote
the message that the United States altruistically
supported science for science’s sake. As the historian
Audra Wolfe has demonstrated, America’s public
embrace of pure, apolitical science masked the U.S.
government’s deep and self-serving manipulation of
international scientific networks and conferences. By
1967, the U.S. was spending $15 million annually to
secretly fund thirty-eight supposedly private scientific
organizations.105 At the height of the Cold War, the
U.S. government and the CIA funded academic
journals, published textbooks, and deputized “scientific
attachés” who served as both goodwill ambassadors
and spies. There is little evidence that these efforts
were effective, but they illustrate another example of
“soft power” resources tapped by U.S. officials during
the Cold War.
A new branch of mathematics known as game
theory may not have offered a definitive answer
to this question, but it did provide a new way of
thinking. Game theory was pioneered in the 1940s
by a small cadre of mathematicians, led by John
von Neumann, who began to formulate a system
for analyzing outcomes in games of chance, like
poker. Their insights were quickly translated into the
arena of business and international affairs. The Cold
War increased the appeal of game theory, especially
among top national security officials. The new field
seemed to promise a way to introduce rational order
to the uncertainty and insanity of global nuclear war.
Reduced to series of simple “games,” with names like
The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, and Stag Hunt, the
superpower rivalry between the United States and the
Soviet Union appeared manageable and predictable.
Game theory’s most significant contribution to
American Cold War strategy came from John Nash,
a brilliant young scholar from Princeton recruited
by the RAND Corporation, a defense industry think
tank founded to facilitate cooperation between the
nation’s academic and military elites. Nash proposed
that in noncooperative games each side pursued
strategies designed to maximize individual gain while
simultaneously assuming that the other would do the
same. This symmetry produced an optimal strategy
known as a “Nash equilibrium.” In the case of Cold
War nuclear warfare, in which a strike by either side
would be met with a devastating counterstrike, the
Nash equilibrium produced a stalemate. As previously
discussed, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s
strategy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) was
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Just as science received a boost from the Cold War,
mathematics assumed new and vital relevance. Warfare
in the atomic age demanded ever more sophisticated
math modeling to project the likely costs of nuclear
attacks and counter-attacks. Grisly hypotheticals
abounded. How many civilians were likely to die if
a hydrogen bomb was dropped on New York City?
How far would the radioactive fallout extend? How
fast could a counter-strike reach Moscow? Computers
programed to analyze thousands of these hypothetical
scenarios generated valuable data that provided key
decisionmakers with an additional tool. The biggest
question of all, however, was strategic: how could the
United States win the Cold War?
The brilliant mathematician John Nash was recruited by the
RAND Corporation, a defense industry think tank founded
to facilitate cooperation between the nation’s academic and
military elites.
formulated on the principles of game theory.
Preparing for Nuclear War
As military planners attempted to integrate atomic
weapons within the nation’s grand strategy, officials,
teachers, and ordinary citizens worked to prepare the
country for a nuclear attack. Beginning in 1951, the
newly created Federal Civil Defense Administration
(FCDA) spearheaded national campaigns designed to
educate the public about practical measures that could
potentially limit the devastating effects of a nuclear
attack. Following the musical advice of an animated
turtle named Bert, the star of the FCDA’s most famous
film, millions of schoolchildren across the nation
crouched under their desks in “duck and cover” drills
while imagining a mushroom cloud leveling their
towns .106
Several municipalities, including New York City and
Washington, D.C., issued military-style dog tags
containing emergency contact information to every
student in the district.107 One Indiana county went a
During the 1950s, sales of family-sized nuclear
fallout shelters skyrocketed, as public officials and the
popular media encouraged Americans to purchase
these backyard bunkers. The craze swept the nation.
A newlywed Miami couple decided to spend their
honeymoon twelve feet underground in a custom
bomb shelter, while a women’s magazine provided tips
for giving birth in a bunker. On a darker note, other
Americans stockpiled guns and ammunition to protect
their home shelters from opportunistic neighbors
who would no doubt seek refuge during the nuclear
apocalypse.109 The few public community shelters that
were constructed offered spartan living conditions with
severely limited rations consisting mainly of highcalorie, but nearly inedible “survival crackers.”110
Private corporations secured space in abandoned mines
and caves to house records and top-level personnel,
while the federal government spent hundreds of
millions of dollars to secretly construct a series of
massive underground facilities, including Raven Rock
in Pennsylvania and Mount Weather in Virginia, that
would serve as ultra-secure relocation sites for various
U.S. military and government agencies in the event of
an attack on Washington, D.C. President Eisenhower
oversaw the most critical period of the development of
the nation’s Continuity of Government (COG) planning
and orchestrated a large-scale emergency drill to test
the nascent protocol for the evacuation of key officials
in 1955.
Even Eisenhower’s signature domestic achievement,
the construction of 41,000 miles of interstate highways
in under a decade, was grounded in the need to prepare
for nuclear war. The “National System of Interstate and
Defense Highways,” as the road network was officially
known, was built to accommodate the largest military
vehicles and provide a means to rapidly transport
civilians away from densely populated areas to safer
locales.111 The Cold War left a lasting legacy on the
infrastructure of the United States.
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step further. High school volunteers in Lake County,
Indiana, received a tattoo of their blood type just under
the left arm during gym class. 108 These measures were
meant to expedite search and rescue efforts following a
nuclear attack. While they may seem extreme, comical,
or simply ineffective—each provided ordinary citizens
with psychological reassurance that they were doing
something for themselves and their loved ones to
prepare for a catastrophic event beyond their control.
The Military-Industrial Complex
The alignment of the nation’s academic and intellectual
resources with national security objectives increasingly
blurred the lines between the private and public
sectors. On January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower
warned his countrymen in his farewell address about
the dangers of a mushrooming defense industry that
had militarized many aspects of American society. The
“military-industrial complex,” a phrase Eisenhower
coined to describe the close coordination between the
military, policy makers, scientists, and corporations,
posed a real threat to American democracy.
By 1958, the Boeing Company, which secured
lucrative contracts to supply the government with
military aircraft, heavy equipment, and missiles, had
become a corporate behemoth, employing more than
60,000 people in the greater Seattle area. Washington
state’s economy became so dependent on Boeing’s
relationship with the U.S. Air Force, that a proposed
relocation of aircraft manufacturing to Wichita,
Kansas, sparked frenzied lobbying by Senator Henry
“Scoop” Jackson. Jackson’s dogged determination to
steer federal dollars to his home state won him plaudits
from supporters, while critics derisively nicknamed
him “the senator from Boeing.”112 Other defense
contractors, like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon,
similarly cultivated close connections to Congress and
the Pentagon to reap enormous profits.
Ballooning defense budgets meant less funding for
schools, infrastructure, and domestic social welfare
Cold War Arts: Literature and Film
1984
The British socialist George Orwell penned one of
the Cold War’s most popular and enduring novels,
1984, while dying of tuberculosis. Published in 1949,
Orwell’s classic dystopian tale details the struggle
of Winston Smith to preserve his individuality in
the futuristic society of Oceania. Orwell’s literary
indictment of totalitarianism focused on omnipresent
government surveillance, deliberate manipulation of
language to limit dissent, and the ruthless oppression
of all who deviated from the Party’s prescribed beliefs.
Although it was work of fiction, 1984 deeply shaped
the West’s perception of Communist societies. Orwell’s
short novel also helped jumpstart the genre of science
fiction, which spanned television, film, and literature
during the Cold War.
Science Fiction
Low-budget science fiction (sci-fi) films, many of
which were adapted from pulp fiction novels, featured
prominently in the drive-in movie era of the 1950s.
The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise
and released in 1951, gave viewers a moralistic tale
tailored to the anxieties of the atomic age. The alien
protagonist Klaatu and his giant robot sidekick Gort
visit the United States to deliver a dire warning that
unless humans abandon their nuclear weapons, the
entire earth will be destroyed.
Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which hit
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A model fallout shelter from 1957. During the 1950s, sales of
family-sized nuclear fallout shelters skyrocketed.
programs. Eisenhower pointed out that a single jet
cost more than any American was likely to make in
a lifetime. Though he had overseen the escalation of
the arms race, Eisenhower had tried to place restraints
on defense spending. The five-star general ruefully
pondered the existential costs of the Cold War on so
many aspects of American daily life. Now regarded
as one of the most important presidential speeches
in American history, Eisenhower’s address failed
to produce any meaningful shift in American civilmilitary relations despite its prescient observations.
In fact, the cozy relationship between Congress and
defense contractors that so troubled Eisenhower only
metastasized as annual military spending continued to
increase. In 2019, the arms maker Lockheed Martin,
according to one recent report, held a staggering $50
billion in government contracts.113
Later films, like the 1962 thriller The Manchurian
Candidate and the 1984 drama Red Dawn approached
the themes of Communist “brain-washing” and
invasion far more directly and literally . Stanley
Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece Dr . Strangelove: or How
I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
offered an over-the-top satire of Cold War conflict
that brilliantly skewered the illogical nature of nuclear
warfare and the dangers of a thoroughly militarized
society. Science fiction would continue to provide
fertile ground for Cold War commentary, with popular
television shows like Star Trek featuring thinly veiled
American and Soviet proxies .
Soviet Literature
Boris Pasternak in 1956. Pasternak was nominated for the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958 for his novel Dr. Zhivago.
The Pasternak Affair
Photo Credit: Aleksandr Less. Pasternak family digital archives, Hoover
Institution Library and Archives.
Within the Soviet Union, writers had long faced heavyhanded censorship and persecution. Many of the
nation’s finest authors were arrested, murdered, or
driven to suicide during the Great Terror in the mid to
late 1930s . While conditions had improved after
Stalin’s death, the position of writers in the Soviet
Union and its communist satellites remained extremely
precarious. In the fall of 1958, the Russian writer Boris
Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize for
Literature for the novel Doctor Zhivago. Under normal
circumstances, Soviet officials would have welcomed
such an honor as a way to add to the prestige of the Soviet
Union and bolster its claims to cultural supremacy over
the West. But since they had refused to publish
Pasternak’s novel after deeming his treatment of the
Russian Revolution anti-Soviet, the prize committee’s
acclaim became a source of embarrassment. In fact, the
CIA had orchestrated a secret campaign to push
Pasternak’s selection for precisely this reason .
In Moscow, Pasternak refused to accept the prize and
contemplated suicide following his expulsion from the
Writer’s Union. Khrushchev adopted a hard line and
encouraged vicious attacks on Pasternak’s character in
the Soviet press. Khrushchev declared that if Pasternak
did not like the Soviet Union, he should leave, but
ultimately permitted the disgraced writer to remain in
his homeland .114 Late in life, when Khrushchev finally
read Pasternak’s offending novel for the first time, he
confessed that he saw nothing that justified its ban.115
Samizdat
The Pasternak Affair had a chilling effect on Soviet
authors but did not stop them from writing politically
provocative works, or ordinary Soviets from reading,
literature not sanctioned by the state. Across the
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screens in 1956, became an instant classic of the genre.
The plot follows the residents of a small California
town as they are taken over, one by one, by aliens from
outer space. The “pod people” continued to go about
their daily lives, and only their closest friends and loved
ones could detect something amiss about their
personalities. As an allegory, the aliens who seized
control of the bodies of the ordinary townspeople stood in
for the imagined legions of secret Communists
“invading” American communities from within. At the
same time, the extraterrestrial-inspired panic of Invasion
of the Body Snatchers and other contemporaneous sci-fi
films also provided poignant criticism of the destructive
effects of anti-communist paranoia.
Despite his harsh treatment of Pasternak, Khrushchev
did sanction the publication of fictional works by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a former political prisoner
and survivor of the gulag, in the early 1960s as part
of his broader de-Stalinization campaign. When
Khrushchev was removed from power in 1964, the
brief period of liberalization ended abruptly, and
Soviet writers who did not toe the party line faced
stiff repression once again. The Soviet Writers’ Union
unceremoniously expelled Solzhenitsyn, and his works
were pulled from bookshelves in schools and libraries
across the Soviet Union. Though Solzhenitsyn won
the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, he dared not travel
to the ceremony in Sweden, lest he be barred from
reentering the Soviet Union .
Mindful that the KGB, the Soviet secret police, might
confiscate his manuscript at any time, Solzhenitsyn
wrote his most famous work, a harrowing history
of the Soviet labor camps, in secret. The final threevolume masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, drew
on his own experiences as well as interviews with
hundreds of fellow camp survivors and was published
in France in 1973 . Already a prime target of the Soviet
security services, Solzhenitsyn was permanently
deported the next year following accusations of
treason. Historians credit Solzhenitsyn, who continued
to be a vocal critic of the Soviet Union from his
farmhouse in Vermont, with exposing the horrors of
the Soviet prison system to the world .
SECTION II SUMMARY
● As tensions with the Soviet Union intensified,
the federal government turned its attention to
identifying “disloyal” Americans engaged in
communist espionage, sabotage, and subversion.
High-profile cases against alleged Soviet
spies helped fuel popular paranoia concerning
communist infiltration of American society.
●
●
●
During the era of McCarthyism, the intense
anti-communist crusade that dominated
American domestic politics from the late
1940s to the mid-1950s, Congress and the
FBI investigated thousands of Americans for
alleged subversion and ruined many people’s
lives in the process.
In the early Cold War, the desire to counter
Soviet propaganda and appeal to non-white
nations in Africa and Asia helped make civil
rights reform an urgent national security and
foreign policy issue.
African Americans served as goodwill
ambassadors who promoted the image of the
United States abroad but struggled with the
slow pace of racial progress at home.
●
Fear of falling behind the Soviets led the
federal government to invest heavily in STEM
subjects, and the government enlisted scientists
and mathematicians to help wage the Cold War.
●
Eisenhower warned Americans about dangers
stemming from the increasingly close
relationship between the nation’s academic,
corporate, governmental, and defense sectors.
●
Literature provided a powerful medium for
political and cultural criticism.
●
Soviet authors faced censorship and persecution
for writings deemed subversive by the state.
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Soviet Union, people passed tattered photocopies of
banned works to be devoured surreptitiously before
being passed on. The practice became known as
samizdat and provided a way for Soviets to read a wide
variety of foreign banned books, including Orwell’s
1984, as well as the unpublished works of Soviet
writers and dissidents. For many Soviets, smuggled
copies of banned books became as necessary to
survival as oxygen. Samizdat carried enormous risks
since possession of “anti-Soviet” works could lead
to imprisonment or internal exile to the notorious
network of forced labor camps known as the gulag .
Section III
The Korean War marked the globalization of the Cold
War and signaled a rupture in the neatly demarcated
bi-polar world initially envisioned by U.S. foreign
policy elites . As decolonization accelerated in the
1950s and 1960s, a series of revolutions, civil wars,
and proxy conflicts reoriented the Cold War away
from Europe to nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. At the same time, the rise of China and Cuba
inspired a new wave of Marxist movement in Asia,
Latin America, and Africa. A growing ideological
divide between China and the Soviet Union, which
eventually led to a complete rupture between the
one-time allies, shattered the myth of a monolithic
globe-spanning communist movement.
Under Eisenhower, the CIA greatly expanded its
capabilities and became the preferred instrument for
American intervention in foreign nations. The agency’s
total number of covert operatives surged from 302
in 1949 to 2,812 in 1952. During the same period,
the yearly budget for clandestine activities grew by a
factor of seventeen from $4.7 million to $82 million.116
An expanded CIA offered the president a way to
wield American power discretely while circumventing
Congress and avoiding public scrutiny. In time, the
CIA would become, according to one high ranking
official, “a government within a government, which
could evade oversight of its activities by drawing the
cloak of secrecy about itself.”117
While U .S .-Soviet relations remained integral to
international affairs, the ideological clash between
communism and liberal capitalism took on a far more
complex shape . Leaders of the former colonized world
looked to strategically benefit from the superpower
rivalry while attempting to chart an independent path .
The United States struggled to reconcile its democratic
and anticolonial traditions with a desire for stability
and an alliance with Britain and France, the postwar
world’s two largest imperial powers . Often American
policy makers struggled to distinguish strains of
anticolonial nationalism from doctrinaire communism
and as a result frequently backed unpopular,
authoritarian regimes in the name of anti-communism.
At the height of the Cold War, the desire to counter
Soviet influence trumped concerns regarding the CIA’s
lack of transparency. With the recent declassification
of many CIA documents, historians now have a clearer
picture of U.S. covert operations that began in earnest
under Eisenhower. Early CIA interventions followed
a familiar pattern. If a government appeared to be
drifting toward the Soviet Union or toward Marxist
ideology in general, officials sounded the alarm.
In Iran and Guatemala, such alarms led to the first
CIA interventions, which overthrew democratically
elected governments identified as too pro-Soviet
or insufficiently pro-American and installed U.S.friendly autocratic regimes in their place. Throughout
the Cold War, anti-communism consistently trumped
democratic ideals in U.S. foreign policy decisions to
back dictatorial governments.
THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
AGENCY AND AMERICAN
INTERVENTION
Iran, 1953
Covert action orchestrated by the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) was one of the defining features
of Eisenhower’s “New Look” Cold War strategy .
Congress created the CIA in 1947 to coordinate and
streamline American intelligence gathering as part
of Truman’s broad-based national security initiative.
As an oil-rich nation that shared a border with the
Soviet Union, the Middle Eastern nation of Iran was
economically and strategically important to the United
States. In 1951, the newly elected prime minister
Mohammad Mossadegh, moved forward with a plan
to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, which at the time was
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Conflict and Conciliation, 1953–79
dominated by the British-owned, Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company . Mossadegh, an ardent nationalist, viewed
foreign control of Iran’s natural resources as a form of
colonialism that infringed on Iran’s national sovereignty .
As tensions between Iran and Great Britain escalated,
Mossadegh was rumored to be actively courting Soviet
aid in the early months of 1953 .
To the new American secretary of state John Foster
Dulles and his brother, director of the CIA Allen
Dulles, this made Mossadegh seem a dangerous figure
who needed to be removed from power, lest he led Iran
into the Soviet camp. Eisenhower agreed and in midJune gave the green light to a CIA-backed coup,
officially known as Operation AJAX.The CIA helped
undermine Mossadegh by bribing local officials,
disseminating propaganda, organizing protests, and
arming anti-government forces. By the end of August,
the pro-American Shah Reza Pahlavi had successfully
ousted Mossadegh.118 Washington viewed the coup as a
double success. It had saved Iran from falling into
Moscow’s orbit and provided American corporations
access to Iran’s oil. In the long term, however, the
removal of a democratically elected and popular leader
in favor of a corrupt dictator deeply damaged
America’s reputation among Iranians and sowed the
seeds for the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Guatemala, 1954
In 1950, the election of Jacobo Arbenz, a populist left-
Eisenhower endorsed a CIA-led military coup code
named Operation PBSUCCESS that forced Arbenz to
flee the country after resigning his office in June of
1954. During the mission, CIA agents helped train rebel
forces, ran a radio station that broadcast propaganda,
and even escorted the military junta into the capital.
While intelligence reports found no direct connection
between Arbenz and Moscow, Allen Dulles and other
cold warriors still celebrated the liberation of Guatemala.
Meanwhile, the Guatemalan people found little to
celebrate as they suffered decades of repressive
military rule and brutal civil war that destabilized and
devastated the country. The U.S. intervention achieved
its immediate objective in Guatemala, but it fueled
longstanding resentment against the United States in
Latin America. For Eisenhower, success in Iran and
Guatemala affirmed his commitment to CIA
intervention as a cost-effective Cold War strategy and
bred overconfidence in the power of covert operations
to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Vietnam, 1954
The Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam had a long
history of foreign domination. In ancient times, the
region was conquered by the Chinese. In the latenineteenth century, it fell under French colonial rule.
During World War II, the Japanese military occupied
French Indochina and subjected its people to particularly
harsh rule. Following the liberation of Vietnam from the
Japanese in 1945, the communist leader Ho Chi Minh
renewed his longstanding call for independence in a
declaration that quoted directly from Thomas Jefferson.
Truman, despite America’s wartime support of Ho’s
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Shah Reza Pahlavi shakes hands with OPEC (Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries) members in Tehran in 1970.
The CIA-supported coup that brought Shah Reza Pahlavi to
power provided American corporations access to Iran’s oil.
leaning military officer in the small Central American
nation of Guatemala provoked anxiety within U.S.
foreign policy circles. Arbenz pledged to institute
dramatic land reforms—2.5 percent of Guatemalans
controlled seventy percent of the nation’s arable land—
and began to expropriate uncultivated land, including
hundreds of thousands of acres owned by the U.S.owned United Fruit Company, for this purpose.119
The Dulles brothers, both of whom had close ties
to the United Fruit Company, feared Arbenz’s land
redistribution represented the first stage of a communist
influence that could spread throughout the region if left
unchecked. In the minds of many U.S. officials, the
“disease” of communism demanded an active response.
.
The Suez Crisis and the Eisenhower
Doctrine
fight against Japanese occupation, chose to double down
on U.S. support of French colonialism in the Southeast
Asian nation, echoing Woodrow Wilson’s rejection of
Ho’s first petition for Vietnamese self-determination at
the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference .
Unlike Mossadegh and Arbenz, whose connections
to communism and the Soviet Union were quite
tenuous, Ho Chi Minh belonged to the Communist
Party and had studied Marxist revolution at Moscow’s
Communist University for the Toilers of the East in the
1930s. As Minh embraced armed struggle to oust the
French, the Eisenhower Administration poured billions
of dollars of aid into propping up French rule.
At this pivotal moment, Eisenhower balked at sending
American troops, and the defeated French were forced
to accept Vietnamese independence . That same
year, peace negotiations at the Geneva Conference
established what was meant to be a temporary partition
of the nation at the 17th parallel .A central provision of
the conference’s Geneva Accords scheduled national
elections for 1956 to establish the government of an
independent and unified Vietnam.
On July 26, 1956, less than a week after the Americans
broke off foreign aid talks, Nasser nationalized the
Suez Canal, an economically vital manmade waterway
linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas jointly
operated by Britain and France. This dramatic action
was calculated to deliver a strong rebuke to Egypt’s
former colonial masters and pressure the United States
to reconsider its refusal to fund the Aswan Dam.
The Eisenhower Administration urged caution, but
Britain, France, and the young state of Israel ignored
Washington’s advice and launched a coordinated
invasion of Egyptian territory in late October, just
weeks before the U.S. presidential election.
Eisenhower viewed the British attack, the planning of
which British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had
deliberately hid from Washington, as a fundamental
betrayal of the trust that undergirded the special
relationship between the two English-speaking nations
and as disrespectful of American leadership. Worse, the
The elections, which American officials feared the
communists would win, never occurred, resulting in the ill-timed attack, and the international furor that
followed, inadvertently provided the Soviets with
partition of Vietnam into two hostile nations: the
perfect cover to ruthlessly suppress a popular uprising
Republic of Vietnam in the south where Ngo Dinh
in Hungary. Washington and Moscow, in a rare
Diem succeeded the emperor Bao Dai, and the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north ruled by moment of agreement, jointly condemned the Suez
Ho Chi Minh’s Communist Party. Eisenhower secretly invasion. Eisenhower then pressured Britain and
France to halt the invasion and withdraw their
funnel money, military supplies, and CIA advisers to
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Peace negotiations at the Geneva Conference in 1954
established what was meant to be a temporary partition of
Vietnam at the 17th parallel.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic Arab nationalist
and leader of Eygpt’s military government, had
attended Bandung and left the conference determined
to chart an independent course for his nation and
rid the Middle East of the last vestiges of European
colonialism. Nasser embraced “non-alignment” and
looked to play the superpower rivals against each
other. From the Americans, Nasser sought economic
aid for large-scale development projects like the
Aswan High Dam, a massive hydroelectric dam on the
Nile. From the Soviets, Nasser sought arms and other
manufactured goods.
THE KHRUSHCHEV ERA
The successful launch of Sputnik I in 1957 led
Khrushchev to trumpet the scientific and technological
superiority of the Soviet Union over the United States.
Khrushchev claimed that for Soviet engineers building
missiles was like making sausages and boasted that the
new ICBMs allowed him to target virtually any point
on Earth. When Western dignitaries met with
Khrushchev, he was fond of listing the cities he would
vaporize if provoked .126 In reality, the Soviet Union’s
weapons systems paled in number and capability
compared to those of the United States. Although
Khrushchev’s saber-rattling bluster was pure bluff, it
nevertheless unnerved America and its NATO allies.
Finally secure in his position atop the Soviet power
Gamal Abdel Nasser raises the Egyptian flag in Port Said on
hierarchy, Khrushchev felt emboldened to move
the Suez Canal to celebrate Britain’s withdrawal from Egypt
aggressively on the international stage. On November
in 1956.
10, 1958, the Soviet leader issued an ultimatum, giving
respective troops to allow a UN peacekeeping force to France, Britain, and the U .S .six months to demilitarize
West Berlin and negotiate directly with the East
monitor the ceasefire and return possession of the
canal to Egypt. Through these decisive actions, which German government for continued access to the city.
were completed in less than a month, the United States Berlin had remained a constant source of friction in
delivered a humiliating blow to Britain’s international U.S.-Soviet relations, as each side worked to shore up
their respective German states.
standing, accelerated the pace of decolonization,
and unequivocally asserted American dominance of
Khrushchev chose to kick the hornet’s nest because he
the Western alliance. The Suez Crisis cemented the
felt the United States and NATO leaders would not risk
demotion of Britain and France to the status of junior
World War III for half a city. The steady stream of
partners in the U .S .-led Cold War coalition.
hundreds of thousands of young, educated East
By the same token, the Suez Crisis signaled increased
American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The
region was of increasingly vital strategic interest to the
United States, primarily because of its rich oil deposits.
By thwarting the invasion of Egypt, Eisenhower was
not declaring sympathy with Nasser or Arab
nationalism. In 1957, the president announced the
Eisenhower Doctrine, which applied Truman’s
previous pledge to defend independent nations from
Communism explicitly to the Middle East . One year
later, U .S . Marines land in Lebanon to prevent the
toppling of a pro-American government. As the Soviet
Union looked to build and strengthen ties with various
Arab nations, the United States drew closer to the
Jewish state of Israel, which Washington viewed as a
key bulwark against the spread of Communism in the
region.
Berliners fleeing to the West each year added urgency
to Khrushchev’s gamble.127 Eisenhower held firm and
even readied plans to defend West Berlin with nuclear
weapons if necessary, a reflection of his “New Look”
policy. The standoff over Berlin dragged on but did
not prevent Vice President Nixon from traveling to
Moscow to officially open the American Exhibition in
Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in the summer of 1959.
The exhibition presented a case for capitalism’s
supremacy over communism through a dizzying array
of consumer goods, including color televisions and
Pepsi cola. Khrushchev agreed to tour the exhibit with
Vice President Nixon on July 24, on the eve of its
official opening. As the two leaders entered the kitchen
of a model equipped with sparkling new appliances,
they began a now-famous exchange known as the
Kitchen Debate that was partially captured by the
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The Kitchen Debate and Khrushchev’s
American Tour
trailing camera crews . Nixon explained that an average
American worker could afford the ranch style home and
directed Khrushchev’s attention to the brand-new
washing machine, which he said made life easier for
American women .
Khrushchev and Vice President Nixon debate the merits of
communism versus capitalism during the kitchen debate at the
American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.
It’s amiable tone also signaled a momentary thaw in
U.S.-Soviet relations, confirmed a week later by the
announcement that Khrushchev would tour the United
States in September. Khrushchev, who had been
angling for an official invitation for years, was elated.
Khrushchev mingled with movie stars and relished the
red-carpet treatment he received at various events held
in his honor. He bristled at pointed questions from the
press and fumed when security concerns thwarted his
planned visit to Disneyland. Though it was historic,
Khrushchev’s American sojourn produced little
tangible diplomatic progress despite several days of
one-on-one talks with Eisenhower at the presidential
retreat Camp David. The two leaders agreed to meet
again, or at least to the possibility of meeting again, at
the Four Powers Summit in Paris the following year to
discuss the Berlin situation.
Giddy for the chance to expose Washington’s blatant lie,
Khrushchev paraded Gary Powers, the plane’s pilot who
had miraculously survived the crash, before the
international media. In a massive propaganda coup for
the Soviets, Powers publicly apologized after admitting
that he had engaged in espionage for the CIA. Powers
was convicted of espionage by a Soviet court and
imprisoned for nearly two years. The incident cast a pall
over U.S.-Soviet relations, spoiled the Four Powers
Summit, and led Khrushchev to steer Soviet foreign
policy in an even more confrontational direction .At the
UN in October, Khrushchev interrupted a speech critical
of the Soviet Union by repeatedly banging his shoe on
the table in front of him.
The U-2 Incident
The 1960 U.S. Election
On May 1, 1960, two weeks before the summit was
scheduled to convene, the Soviets shot down an
American U-2 spy plane, which instantly erased
any goodwill Khrushchev’s visit had generated. The
plane, which was designed to fly at extremely high
altitudes and evade radar, had been photographing
Soviet missile sites. Eisenhower first initiated the aerial
reconnaissance missions in 1956, and they had yielded
valuable intelligence on the anemic state of the Soviet
nuclear program. For all of Khrushchev’s bravado,
the Soviets had only six operational ICBM missiles
by 1960.129 The Eisenhower Administration badly
fumbled their response by initially asserting that the
plane was conducting meteorological research but had
strayed off course.
Eisenhower was already a lame-duck president at the
time of the U-2 incident, which amplified Cold War
tensions in an election year. Striking a hawkish tone, the
Democratic candidate, a young Senator from
Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy, stridently
criticized the Eisenhower Administration’s management
of the Cold War. Kennedy’s main line of attack centered
on the erroneous claim that a growing “missile gap”
threatened America’s national security. Kennedy’s
Republican opponent, Vice President Nixon, was not
accustomed to having to prove his foreign policy
toughness. In televised debates, both candidates
endorsed a robust and muscular Cold War strategy, and
in truth little separated the two men’s assessment of the
state of world affairs.
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They had the same sort of things, he claimed, and
besides, unlike in the United States, all Soviet citizens
were provided housing as a basic right. Nixon playfully
praised Khrushchev’s pugnacity and then used the
debate itself as evidence of the value of “a free
exchange of ideas” between the two nations.128 The
spontaneous back-and-forth had pitted American
materialist consumerism against Soviet dialectical
materialism and provided a window into the two vastly
different worldviews.
Kennedy quickly clashed with Khrushchev when the
Soviet leader, eager to test the new president’s will,
reissued his previous Berlin ultimatum at a tense
summit held in Vienna in June of 1961. Kennedy
held firm and asked Congress for an additional $3.2
billion in defense spending.130 Later that summer,
with Moscow’s blessing, the East Germans began
construction of a permanent barrier in Berlin that
would finally stem the tide of refugees fleeing to the
West . The Berlin Wall dashed hopes for German
reunification but also crudely removed a perennial
source of conflict. Outside of Europe, turmoil
continued unabated. In Cuba, Congo, and Vietnam,
Kennedy was forced to manage complex events set
in motion by his predecessor while confronting the
closest brush with nuclear war of the entire Cold War.
NEW FLASH POINTS
Cuba
The Cuban Revolution, 1959
Since the nation’s independence in 1898, the Caribbean
island of Cuba, had remained closely linked politically,
economically, and militarily to the United States. Just
about ninety miles south of Florida, Cuba supplied the
U.S. with millions of pounds of sugar annually. After
World War II, Havana’s nightclubs and casinos served
as a playground for wealthy American business tycoons,
tourists, and gangsters. For decades, an oppressive
military dictatorship headed by Fulgencio Batista had
ruled Cuba with the support of Washington.
John F. Kennedy casts his ballot in the 1960 presidential
election. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in one of
the closest presidential elections in American history.
law student, cut a striking figure. Tall, with a thick,
unkempt beard, Castro preferred to dress in simple olivegreen fatigues and combat boots.
After taking power, Castro moved to nationalize the
Cuban economy and expressed interest in negotiating
trade and arms deals with the Soviets and Eastern Bloc .
Castro charmed Khrushchev and other top Soviet
officials, who saw versions of themselves reflected in
the passion and idealism of the Cubans. “We felt like
boys again!” one former Bolshevik later gushed.131
Khrushchev was determined to provide Castro and his
comrades with whatever assistance they required.
The growing coziness between Havana and Moscow
prompted Eisenhower to sever diplomatic relations
with Cuba in January of 1961 and impose heavy
After returning from exile, a young revolutionary named sanctions aimed at crippling the Cuban economy. At
Fidel Castro fashioned a motley crew of revolutionaries, the same time, Eisenhower directed the CIA to plot the
students, and peasants into an effective guerilla fighting assassination of Castro while simultaneously preparing
anti-Castro exiles to launch an invasion of Cuba.
force. From the rugged Sierra Maestra Mountains,
Castro’s army marched to the capital, where they finally Eisenhower’s embrace of regime change, bolstered
toppled the deeply unpopular Batista regime on January by earlier success in Guatemala, bred a dangerous
1, 1959 . Castro, the son of a wealthy planter and former overconfidence in covert action.
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In November, Kennedy narrowly defeated Nixon in
one of the closest presidential elections in American
history. At forty-three-years-old, Kennedy was the
youngest president in history and the first Catholic to
occupy the nation’s highest office. Kennedy inherited
a series of simmering conflicts across the globe, which
demanded immediate attention. Kennedy, aware that
many viewed him as a foreign policy novice, boasted
that his administration represented America’s “best
and brightest.”
to the island as a guarantee against further American
aggression . After all, the Soviet leader reasoned, the
United States had placed missiles next door to the
Soviet Union in Turkey, and what’s good for the goose
must surely be good for the gander. Given that the real
Fidel Castro visits Washington, D.C., shortly after the Cuban
Revolution in 1959.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion, 1961
U .S . Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson shows
UN delegates aerial photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba on
October 25, 1962 .
missile gap placed the Soviet Union at an enormous
strategic disadvantage, placing missiles in the Western
Hemisphere also offered a way of leveling the playing
field once more. Castro agreed, and the Soviets secretly
began construction of missile sites in the summer of
1962 that would place some eighty million Americans
living in the southeastern United States, roughly
between Houston and Baltimore, within reach of
nuclear rockets.133
On October 14, an American U-2 flight captured
images of nearly completed ballistic missile sites in the
Cuban countryside. Subsequent photographs confirmed
Worse for the Americans, Castro’s victory solidified
that between sixteen and thirty-two missiles had
popular support for his government and allowed the
been installed and would be fully operational within
charismatic leader to credibly present himself as the
a week .134 Kennedy was stunned but nevertheless
heroic defender of the Cuban people against American moved deliberately to handle the crisis. While a few
imperialism. For Kennedy, the fiasco was humiliating military advisers called for immediate air-strikes to
and humbling but only stiffened his resolve to get rid
wipe out the missiles, Kennedy instead announced
of Castro. He doubled down on covert operations—
a “quarantine,” or naval blockade, of Cuba in a
including exploding cigars, psychological warfare, and nationally televised address on October 22 watched by
sabotage—aimed at destabilizing Cuba. At the same
nearly ninety-six million Americans, two-thirds of the
time, Cuba moved firmly into the communist camp as nation’s total population.135 The president also warned
Castro looked to the Soviet Union to safeguard the
the Soviets that any missile launch would be met with
revolution and Cuban sovereignty.
the full power of the American nuclear arsenal.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
Several excruciatingly tense days followed as Kennedy’s
national security team hunkered down in the newly built
Khrushchev responded to Castro’s pleas with a
provocative suggestion: he would send nuclear missiles Situation Room. Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s
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Following his inauguration, Kennedy was briefed
by the CIA and military officials about the plans to
oust Castro begun under Eisenhower. In Kennedy’s
haste to prove his foreign policy mettle, the president
failed to properly vet the operation, known as the Bay
of Pigs invasion, and sanctioned what turned out to be
a spectacularly ill-conceived and poorly executed
disaster. On April 17, a brigade of Cuban exiles landed
on the island’s southern coast. This force was meant to
spearhead the invasion, which planners believed would
inspire a full-blown popular uprising against the Castro
regime. Instead, in less than twenty-four hours,
Castro’s military thwarted the clumsy attack and routed
the poorly prepared exiles. In total, 140 died in the
botched invasion and 1,189—nearly all of the
remaining men—were taken prisoner .132
Historians have praised Kennedy’s cool under pressure
during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his team certainly
deserves credit for averting a potentially catastrophic
war. Despite continued U.S. efforts to undermine and
economically and politically isolate his government,
Fidel Castro ruled Cuba for another half-century,
and his brother Raul remains the First Secretary of
the Cuban Communist Party to this day. Under Fidel
Castro’s leadership, Cuba would become a force in
its own right in Latin America as well as in Cold War
international politics .
Congo
The Resource Curse: Rubber to Uranium
From the late nineteenth century, when King Leopold
II claimed the territory as his personal colony, the
people of the central African nation of the Congo
suffered immensely under Belgian rule. The tiny
European nation extracted enormous wealth from the
Congo, using brutal forced labor tactics to harvest vast
quantities of natural rubber, which was turned into tires
for the nascent automobile industry. The near genocidal
atrocities committed by Leopold’s forces at the height of
the rubber boom gave way to equally brutal conditions
endured by workers in the nation’s various mines.
Of all the natural resources that Congo possessed,
the nation’s extremely high-grade uranium deposits
assumed immense strategic value in the age of atomic
weapons. Uranium ore from Congo’s Shinkolobwe
mine supplied the scientists of the Manhattan Project
with the key radioactive fuel necessary for the
construction of the first atomic bombs. After World
War II, the United States continued to secretly extract
large quantities of uranium from Congo, which was far
more concentrated than alternatives in North America .
Congo remained America’s single largest source of
uranium into the 1950s. In 1951, the United States
obtained seventy-five percent of its total uranium
supply, some 2,792 tons, from the Congo.136
Such overwhelming reliance on a single source pushed
U.S. officials to establish close ties to the controversial
white minority-ruled Republic of South Africa, which
they predicted would become the “principal future
source of uranium.”137 Nevertheless, Congo’s uraniumrich Katanga region remained a major geopolitical
prize in the burgeoning Cold War, as the Americans,
and their Belgian allies, worried about Congo’s mines
falling into communist hands. These concerns were
amplified by the uncertainty introduced by the end of
colonial rule.
Independence and Neutrality
After two years of intensifying unrest, Congo officially
won its independence from Belgium on June 30, 1960.
Patrice Lumumba, a former postal clerk and trade
union leader, became Congo’s first Prime Minister.
Lumumba initially sought to keep the young nation out
of the Cold War power struggles, which he believed
artificially pitted developing nations against one another
and perpetuated European domination.138 “We are going
to make Congo the focal point of development of all
Africa,” Lumumba declared at his inauguration, adding
“we are going see to it that the soil of our country really
benefits its children.”139 Lumumba’s foreign policy drew
direct inspiration from the Non-Aligned Movement and
the example of Kwame Nkrumah, the Prime Minister
of newly independent Ghana. Lumumba first met
Nkrumah when he attended the 1958 All-Africa Peoples
Conference held in Accra, Ghana’s capital, and the two
men became fast friends and ideological kindred spirits.
Lumumba not only became an ardent supporter of
Nkrumah’s vision of African unity, but also embraced
his policy of “positive neutrality” in the Cold War.140 By
eschewing any direct alliance with the United States or
the Soviet Union, Lumumba hoped to provide Congo
with maximum flexibility in its foreign relations and
trade .141
American officials who viewed neutrality as an
invitation for Soviet meddling immediately distrusted
Lumumba. At the same time, Belgians viewed
Lumumba’s pledge to return Congo’s resources to
the people as a fundamental threat to their continued
plundering of Congo’s wealth. Within weeks of
independence, Lumumba’s idealistic vision for Congo
suffered a serious blow when rebels in Katanga, backed
by Belgian mining interests and elite paratroopers,
announced the secession of the mineral-rich province
from the Republic of Congo.
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brother and attorney general, scrutinized Khrushchev’s
letters for clues into his mindset and eventually drafted a
settlement that resolved the conflict on October 28.
Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba in
exchange for a public declaration from the United
States that it would not invade the island. Kennedy also
privately agreed to a third provision, the removal of
American missiles from Turkey.
Civil War and Crisis
Many African leaders viewed both the United States
and the United Nations as complicit in Lumumba’s
brutal death. Lumumba became a martyr and a
symbol of anti-colonial resistance around the world.
President Kennedy continued Washington’s support of
Mobutu, while privately conceding that the new
Congolese regime was deeply corrupt and
authoritarian. After Kennedy’s own assassination,
President Johnson committed significant American
resources to keep Mobutu in power after a widespread
rebellion nearly toppled the dictator
in 1964. Washington’s response to the Congo Crisis fit
a disheartening pattern in America’s Cold War
foreign policy: in the name of anti-communism, the
United States was willing to support undemocratic
and abusive regimes, severely damaging its reputation
in Africa and the rest of the developing world . The fall
of Lumumba and Nkrumah demonstrated how difficult
it was for African leaders to maintain a policy of
neutrality or non-alignment in the Cold War .
Vietnam
Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba (second from
left) on a visit to New York in 1960.
The Domino Theory
By 1960, the U.S.-backed Republic of Vietnam
(South Vietnam) teetered on the brink of collapse.
Kennedy steadily poured resources into South
Vietnam, increasing the number of American advisers
from six hundred to sixteen thousand in his first two
years in office.143
Like Eisenhower and Secretary of Defense McNamara,
Kennedy subscribed to the domino theory, which
predicted that communist victory in one nation would
produce a cascading effect, causing neighboring
nations to turn to communism like dominoes lined
up in a row. In Southeast Asia, U.S. officials feared
that communist victory in the South Vietnam would
strengthen the Communist Pathet Lao movement
in neighboring Laos. This fundamental fear led the
United States to support the deeply unpopular and
increasingly corrupt Diem regime.
In 1963, a wave of anti-government protests, which
involved dramatic scenes of orange-robed Buddhist
monks setting themselves on fire, convinced
Washington to pull the plug on Diem. On November 1,
a group of South Vietnamese generals carried out a
successful coup, in which they murdered Diem.
Kennedy was dismayed by Diem’s killing but had little
time to reevaluate American policy in South Vietnam.
Just three weeks after the coup, Kennedy was shot and
killed, leaving Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to
sort out the deteriorating Vietnamese situation.
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With his country disintegrating before his eyes,
Lumumba appealed to the UN to send peacekeepers to
help retake Katanga. UN Secretary General Dag
Hammarskjöld agreed to send troops but forbade
them from directly entering the civil war . The now
desperate Lumumba traveled to Washington, D.C.,
to seek American assistance but was rebuffed by
State Department officials. Finally, Lumumba turned
to the Soviets, who agreed to provide military and
economic assistance to the Congo. Ghana’s Kwame
Nkrumah, Lumumba’s closest African ally, sent 2,340
soldiers to join the UN peacekeeping force, the largest
contribution of any nation and nearly one-third of
the entire force .142 The specter of Soviet intervention
led CIA officials to green-light an assassination
plot against the Congolese leader while backing a
military coup in September led by Joseph Mobutu,
Lumumba’s trusted chief of staff. Lumumba fled but
was captured by Mobutu’s troops two months later.
Mobutu turned the prime minister over to his political
enemies in Katanga, who tortured Lumumba before
murdering him in cold blood.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution on August 10, 1964.
Johnson, who grew up in rural Texas, earned a
reputation as a master political operator in the U.S.
Senate . Like his predecessors, Johnson viewed Vietnam
through the zero-sum prism of international Cold War
competition and the domestic partisan politics of anticommunism. The following summer, Johnson relied on
dubious reports that North Vietnamese patrols had fired
on a U.S. destroyer to push for congressional
authorization to respond with military force. In the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution, Congress overwhelmingly voted
to give Johnson the power to utilize “all necessary
measures to repel any armed attack against the United
States and to prevent further aggression.”145 The
resolution’s vague language amounted to a blank check.
After defeating his Republican opponent in a landslide
in November 1964, Johnson steadily expanded
America’s military commitment to South Vietnam as
the conflict careened into a full-blown war. In 1967,
U.S. planes dropped 226,000 tons of explosives on
North Vietnam while the number of American troops
in South Vietnam approached 500,000.146 Despite
possessing vastly superior economic and military
resources, the United States was unable to impose its
will in Vietnam to secure a decisive victory. Instead,
the war settled into a bloody stalemate that critics
likened to a “quagmire,” a sucking pit of quicksand
nearly impossible to escape. It was an apt metaphor.
Fear of appearing weak not only led Johnson to
dramatically escalate American military involvement
in Vietnam, but also prevented him from extricating
the United States from an unwinnable war.
In 1967, protesters march in Washington, D .C ., in opposition
to the Vietnam War .
The Antiwar Movement
At home, Johnson faced mounting opposition to the
Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, mass protests erupted in
cities and on college campuses across the United States
where opposition to the draft and political radicalism
flourished. One of the most dramatic protests took place
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. On October 17,
1967, student activists staged a sit-in to disrupt a Dow
Chemical Company recruitment event scheduled later
that day. Dow, best known for making saran wrap, also
supplied the military with napalm. The flamable jelly
widely used in American bombing raids over the jungles
of North Vietnam produced horrific injuries, which led
antiwar protestors to accuse Dow of facilitating war
crimes. As students chanted, “Down with Dow,” local
police arrived to restore order . Dressed in riot gear,
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Gulf of Tonkin, 1964
The draft, which compelled American men to serve in
Vietnam, was a major focus of the antiwar movement.
Some young men burned their draft cards in protest or
fled to Canada. In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave
an impassioned speech condemning the Vietnam War .
“If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” the civil
rights leaders declared, “part of the autopsy must read
‘Vietnam .’”148 By 1968, the Vietnam War had become
the single most divisive force in American society,
tearing communities, families, and the nation itself
apart .
The Tet Offensive, 1968
The skyrocketing financial cost of the war, estimated
at $3.6 billion per year, and significant American
casualties, more than twenty-eight thousand troops
were killed in 1967 and 1968 alone, led to a steep
decline in public support for the war.149 In late January
of 1968, the North Vietnamese and the National
Liberation Front (NLF) launched a series
of coordinated attacks on cities and American military
bases throughout South Vietnam during the
Vietnamese New Year holiday of Tet . While the Tet
Offensive failed militarily, it shattered public faith in
the war effort. It was impossible for many Americans
to reconcile the images they saw on television—
including a fervent assault on the U.S. embassy in
Saigon—with the Johnson Administration’s claims that
America was winning the war .
In the wake of Tet, CBS Evening News anchor Walter
Cronkite broke from the show’s usual format to directly
address the American people . “To say that we are closer
to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence,
the optimists who have been wrong in the past,”
Cronkite candidly observed, before sharing his personal
conclusion that “the only rational way out then will be
to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people
who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and
did the best they could.”150 Johnson had lost Cronkite,
and with him a sizable chunk of the American people.
Faced with freefalling approval ratings, the defection of
his top national security advisors, and primary
challenges for the Democratic Party nomination,
Johnson announced in late March that he would not seek
reelection and intended to open peace negotiations with
the North Vietnamese .
Nixon’s War
In November, Richard Nixon eked out a victory
to win the presidency in one of history’s most stunning
political comebacks. During the campaign, Nixon had
teased a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam .
Nixon, like Johnson, wished to avoid any identification
with weakness and was loathe to concede defeat. He
instead proposed a new policy known as
Vietnamization. In close consultation with his
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Nixon
hoped that Vietnamization would shift the bulk of the
fighting to the South Vietnamese army, which would
allow for the withdrawal of American troops . The
policy failed to bring a resolution to the war and left
the Nixon Administration groping for leverage in the
now-stalled peace talks .
Nixon attempted to intensify the American military
assault to pressure the North Vietnamese to engage in
serious negotiations. Nixon also embraced what he
termed the madman strategy, in which he encouraged
Kissinger to promote an image of the president as
reckless and willing to resort to nuclear weapons
among his North Vietnamese interlocutors. The ploy,
which proved ineffective, required actions in order to
be credible.
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officers forcibly removed the students and fired tear gas
into the crowd. Antiwar protests surged in the wake
of the Dow sit-in, as organizations like Students for
a Democratic Society (SDS) attacked Vietnam as an
unjust war. Less than a week after the Madison protest,
as many as 100,000 antiwar protestors marched from the
Washington Memorial to the Pentagon .147
.
In March of 1969, Nixon authorized a secret bombing
campaign of Cambodia in the hopes of crippling North
Vietnamese supply lines that ran through the neutral
nation. The following year, Nixon briefly deployed
American troops to Cambodia, marking the latest
chapter of the so-called Secret War that had raged
in Laos since 1964. In 1969 alone, the U.S. dropped
more bombs on the tiny impoverished nation of Laos
than it did on Japan during the entirety of World War
II .151
Nixon’s expansion of the war and the continuing draft
reignited antiwar protests . In 1970, massive
demonstrations rocked hundreds of college campuses.
At Kent State University in Ohio, National Guard
troops fatally shot four student protestors in a tragedy
that reverberated across the country. The following
year, The New York Times and The Washington Post
published portions of the Pentagon Papers, a classified
review of the Vietnam War obtained from a former
Defense Department official, Daniel Ellsberg . The
damning report revealed that multiple administrations
had misled Congress and the American people about
the true state of military progress in Vietnam and
deepened the country’s widespread disillusionment
with what had become the longest-running war in
American history .
A CIA officer helps evacuees onto a U.S. helicopter shortly
before the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese troops
The Paris Peace Accords, 1973
Despite his failure to end the war in his first term, Nixon
won re-election in 1972. The following January, Henry
Kissinger finally secured a peace treaty between the
North Vietnamese, the NLF, the South Vietnamese,
and the United States . The terms of the Paris Peace
Accords included a cease-fire, a prisoner exchange,
and a complete withdrawal of American troops . While
Kissinger and his co-signatories were awarded the
1973 Nobel Peace Prize, the treaty did not establish a
lasting peace. For an ignominious defeat, around 58,000
Americans died. Historians estimate between 3 to 4
million Vietnamese were killed over the course of the
fighting, at least half of whom were civilians.152
DÉTENTE
The Sino-Soviet Split
Nixon and Kissinger’s Cold War maneuvering, while
focused on Vietnam, also involved a major shift
in superpower relations. In the early years of the Cold
War, American officials tended to view world
communism as a single, monolithic movement.
Beneath the superficial unity of the “socialist camp” in
international affairs, roiling tensions between China
and the Soviet Union suggested a more complex
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Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (left) and President
Richard Nixon (center) discuss the Vietnam War with Major
General Alexander Haig at Camp David in 1972.
reality . The Sino-Soviet split, as the diplomatic
rupture between the two largest communist nations
came to be known, began in earnest in 1958 when
Mao Zedong decisively broke from the Soviet model
of economic growth during the period of intense crash
industrialization known as the Great Leap Forward .
In 1969, when a border skirmish in Central Asia nearly
ared into war between China and the Soviet Union,
Sino-Soviet relations hit a new low .
From Washington, Nixon viewed these developments
with interest and sensed an opportunity to play the
former allies against one another in order to achieve
international stability and end the Vietnam War. Nixon
made détente, the broad de-escalation of the Cold War,
a central pillar of U .S . foreign policy and tasked Henry
Kissinger with triangulating a strategy between
Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. Kissinger later
explained that the ultimate objective of détente was to
improve America’s diplomatic clout and flexibility by
becoming “closer to both communist giants, than either
was to the other .”154 Domestic instability in China, the
Soviet Union, West Germany, and the United States
also provided leaders in each nation with a powerful
incentive to pursue détente.155
Ping-Pong Diplomacy and Nixon in
China
Rapprochement with China constituted the second
prong of Nixon’s détente strategy . The United
States had refused to recognize the People’s Republic
of China in 1949 and two decades later still lacked
normal diplomatic relations with the world’s largest
communist nation. Nixon, who spent much of his
political career railing against the menace of Red
China, shocked even his own cabinet members by
suggesting a bold “opening” of China shortly after
taking office. Over the next three years, Nixon and
Kissinger dutifully worked through intermediaries and
backchannels to gauge Beijing’s receptiveness to a
thaw in U .S .-China relations .
The first breakthrough came in the spring of 1971,
when the U.S. national table tennis team accepted
an invitation to play a series of exhibition matches
in China . The team’s eight-day visit enthralled the
American public and helped to humanize the People’s
Republic of China. Unlike other iconic Cold War
sporting events like the 1972 World Chess
Championship and the 1980 Winter Olympic Games
that highlighted competition between the United States
and the Soviet Union, ping-pong diplomacy
emphasized sportsmanship as a potent symbol of
international goodwill. The emphasis of friendship
over competition was also a necessity.
.
A Chinese and an American ping-pong player shake hands
before a friendship match held in Shanghai in 1971
Photo: Xinhua
The Chinese team was a powerhouse, the top-ranked
team in the world . The U.S. team, by contrast, was
ranked a distant twenty-eighth and was comprised
mainly of teenagers whom the press would briefly
transform into global celebrities.159
Each match was carefully choreographed to appear
closely contested . The crowds applauded in the stands.160
During their off ime, the young Americans visited the
Great Wall and met with premier Zhou En-Lai.
“A ping pong ball has cracked the bamboo curtain,”
a New York Times editorial declared .161 The trip was
a resounding success and paved the way for Nixon’s
subsequent visit, in which the president would square
off in a strategic ping-pong match with the Chinese
leadership .
Nixon arrived in Beijing on February 21, 1972, the first
American president in history to visit China . While
Nixon’s China trip had rankled some conservative
members of his own party, it won bipartisan praise and
was hailed as the “week that changed the world .”162
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President Nixon shakes the hand of Chinese premier Zhou
Enlai after landing in China in 1972. It was the first time a
U .S . president had visited China .
Both nations established unofficial embassies and
named envoys, a big step toward normalizing
U .S .-Chinese relations .Trade, travel, and cultural
exchange between the two nations further reduced
tensions. Though the Vietnam War continued to cast a
shadow over the flowering of superpower détente,
Nixon and Kissinger had made real progress toward
stabilizing the Cold War. Nixon’s 1974 resignation in
th .e wake of revelations that he had personally directed
a cover-up of his re-election campaign’s bungled
burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s
headquarters in the Watergate Hotel imperiled détente,
his signature foreign policy accomplishment.
THE CARTER
ADMINISTRATION AND THE
END OF DÉTENTE
Congressional Opposition to Détente
In the American federalist system of government, the
executive branch traditionally sets the nation’s foreign
policy. This was certainly the case with détente,
which was planned and executed by the White House
without consultation with Congress or, at times, the
State Department. Members of Congress, especially
those in the Democratic majority, however, flexed their
constitutional privileges to interrupt Nixon’s diplomatic
agenda. From 1972 to 1974, Henry “Scoop” Jackson,
a staunchly anti-Communist Democratic Senator from
Washington, steadfastly worked to add an amendment
to a proposed U .S .-Soviet trade agreement that
required Moscow to allow long persecuted Soviet Jews
the freedom to emigrate, mostly to Israel . The Soviets
backed out of the trade deal but not before imposing an
exit tax on would-be emigrants, exposing the limits of
Nixon and Kissinger’s unilateral approach to detente.
Jewish emigration along with the plight of high-profile
Soviet dissidents, like the recently expelled Nobelprize winning novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, helped
revive human rights as an issue of central importance
to U .S . foreign policy .
Jackson also inserted himself into the SALT
negotiations by securing a Congressional resolution
requiring future arms control agreements to implement
strict numerical equality. These Congressional
intrusions irritated Kissinger and threatened to derail
détente. In 1975, the Finnish capital of Helsinki
hosted a thirty-five-nation summit on European
security and cooperation. The Helsinki Final Act,
the conference’s concluding resolution, endorsed “the
universal significance of human rights and fundamental
freedoms .”163 Brezhnev’s signature provided
ammunition to critics of détente who wanted to hold the
Soviets accountable for domestic human rights abuses.
THE RISE OF HUMAN RIGHTS
FOREIGN POLICY
After Ford’s brief and forgettable tenure, the Democrats
recaptured the White House when Jimmy Carter, a
devout evangelical Christian and former peanut farmer
who rose from political obscurity to become governor
of Georgia, won the 1976 presidential election. In his
first inaugural address, Carter embraced a return to
the idealistic internationalism of Woodrow Wilson and
pledged to put individual human rights at the center
of U .S . foreign policy . Carter’s moralism was a direct
rejection of the amoral realism championed by Kissinger
as well as an attempt to inject American foreign policy
with a noble sense of purpose after the trauma of the
Vietnam War. To the Soviets, however, Carter’s human
rights rhetoric represented an unwelcome intrusion into
its internal affairs and a violation of the spirit of détente.
Carter’s lack of foreign policy experience blinded him
to the serious and practical consequences of his human
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Nixon jumped at the opportunity to play peacemaker
and insisted on taking sole charge of the negotiations
with Zhou. Finding common cause in the shared desire
to limit Soviet influence in Asia, Nixon and Zhou
concluded their talks with a joint statement in which
the United States recognized Taiwan as part of China
and expressed its willingness to withdraw troops from
the contested island in the future.
rights agenda on fragile U.S.-Soviet relations. By
contrast, the Carter Administration moved to officially
recognize the People’s Republic of China, and invited
the new premier, Deng Xiaoping, to visit the United
States in January of 1979, following the full restoration of
diplomatic relations between Beijing and Washington on
New Year’s Day.
Africa
If Carter’s criticism of Soviet domestic politics
weakened détente, interventionist Soviet foreign policy
sealed its demise. In 1975, the Soviets, along with a
brigade of Cuban commandos, helped the Marxist
Popular Front for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)
triumph in a brutal civil war that immediately followed
the end of Portuguese rule. Two years later, Somalia, a
Soviet ally, invaded neighboring Ethiopia, which had
recently come under the control of a Marxist-Leninist
junta known as the Dergue. In a fateful decision,
the Soviets intervened on the side of the Ethiopian
revolutionary regime, which successfully drove the
U.S.-backed Somalis out of the Ogaden peninsula with
the aid of Cuban troops.
In the long term, this turned out to be a Pyrrhic
victory for Moscow. Soviet meddling in the Horn of
Africa appeared to Carter and his hawkish national
security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to portend the
launch of a broad offensive in the Third World. Such
adventurism threatened to return the superpowers to
an era of disastrous regional proxy wars. While Carter
and Brezhnev managed to come together in Vienna
Photo Credit: Erwin Lux
to sign a SALT II agreement in June of 1979, the U.S.
Senate delayed its ratification.
Afghanistan
Trust between the two nations had badly eroded, and
détente was on already on life-support when in late
December 1979 seventy-five-thousand Soviet troops
streamed into Afghanistan to prevent the total collapse
of the nation’s Marxist regime. In a nationally televised
address, President Carter condemned the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan as a violation of international
law and warned the American people that Moscow
stood poised to extend its influence from Central Asia to
the Middle East, imperiling the world’s oil supplies.164
In protest, Carter pulled the SALT II treaty from the
Senate; ended American exports of grain, technology,
and manufactured goods to the Soviet Union; and froze
trade and cultural exchanges. When the Soviets failed
to meet Carter’s deadline for withdrawal, the president
announced that the United States would boycott the
upcoming 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. Covertly,
Carter also began to funnel military support to the
Afghan mujahideen rebels. The Soviets, convinced
that the war would be short-lived, insisted that the
invasion was a simple extension of the Brezhnev
Doctrine and refused to back down. Détente was dead.
The Iranian Hostage Crisis
Carter’s stern opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan
earned him little credit from conservative critics at
home. In early 1979, a popular revolution inspired by
the Muslim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the
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Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping and U.S. President Jimmy
Carter in 1979.
Mujahideen fighters during the Soviet-Afghan War. The U.S.
provided military support to the Afghan mujahideen rebels
during the war.
enemies expanded. In the 1980 election, Carter lost in
a landslide to the Republican Ronald Reagan, who
had vowed to restore America’s global prestige. The
American hostages were finally freed on January 20,
1981, the same day that Reagan was sworn into office.
SECTION III SUMMARY
● From the mid-1950s, the CIA became a key
Two Americans who were among those held hostage in Iran
in 1979. The hostage crisis dominated the nightly news and
badly damaged President Carter’s already faltering reelection
campaign.
secular, but increasingly oppressive regime of Shah
Reza Pahlavi, which for a quarter century had been a
key regional ally of the United States. Six weeks before
Soviet tanks arrived in Kabul, radical students affiliated
with Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution had stormed
the American embassy in Tehran and taken the staff
hostage. Fifty-two captives were held prisoner inside
the embassy for a total of 444 days, fueling a crisis that
dominated the nightly news and badly damaged Carter’s
already faltering reelection campaign.
The Iranian hostage crisis, made worse by a failed
rescue mission that killed eight American servicemen,
reinforced a popular narrative that Carter was a weak
and ineffectual leader. Earlier in 1979, Carter ruled
out American military intervention in Nicaragua,
where the Sandinistas, Marxist-Leninist guerilla with
close ties to Cuba, overthrew the nation’s authoritarian
leader Anastasio Samoza, who had previously
enjoyed strong support in Washington. In Central
America, Africa, and the Middle East, American
power seemed to be receding while the strength of its
●
●
●
●
●
The Non-Aligned Movement and the Suez
Crisis signaled the rise of newly independent
states in Asia and Africa and the decline of
traditional European colonial powers.
Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalin’s crimes
in 1956 but embraced traditional Soviet
foreign policy in Eastern Europe and adopted
a belligerent form of brinksmanship in his
approach to the United States that culminated
in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
U.S. fears that communism would spread
to new nations and bolster the international
position of the Soviet Union led the Kennedy
administration to support regime change in
Cuba and the Congo.
Under President Johnson, the United States
dramatically escalated its military involvement
in South Vietnam, sparking a wave of antiwar
protests.
The Nixon administration pursued détente
with the Soviet Union and China to provide
diplomatic breathing room to end the Vietnam
War and reduce tensions in the Cold War.
The Carter administration’s focus on human
rights and Soviet advances in Africa, Latin
America, and Afghanistan led to the end of
détente by 1979.
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●
weapon in the U.S. Cold War arsenal and led
to covert intervention in Latin America, Asia,
Africa, and the Middle East.
February 4, 1945 –
Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill convene at the Yalta Conference.
April 12, 1945 –
Roosevelt dies; Truman becomes President of the United States.
May 8, 1945 –
World War II ends in Europe (V-E Day).
August 6 and 9, 1945 –
The United States drops two atomic bombs on Japan.
September 2, 1945 –
Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam’s independence.
February 22, 1946 –
George F. Kennan sends the “Long Telegram” from Moscow.
March 5, 1946 –
Winston Churchill delivers his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri.
March 12, 1947 –
The Truman Doctrine is officially announced.
June 24, 1948 to
May 12, 1949 –
The Berlin airlift brings provisions to West Berlin.
June 8, 1949 –
George Orwell’s dystopian anti-totalitarian novel 1984 is published.
August 29, 1949 –
The Soviet Union successfully tests an atomic bomb.
October 1, 1949 –
Mao Zedong declares the founding of the People’s Republic of China
January 21, 1950 –
Former State Department official Alger Hiss is convicted of perjury.
June 25, 1950 –
The Korean War begins.
August 24, 1950 –
January 19, 1951 –
Truman appoints Edith Sampson as the alternate delegate to the United Nations;
she is the first African-American woman to officially represent the U.S.
Construction begins on the Raven Rock bunker complex in southern Pennsylvania,
which is designed to serve as a secure headquarters for top military officials in the
event of a nuclear attack.
November 1, 1952 –
The U.S. successfully detonates a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific.
November 4, 1952 –
Dwight Eisenhower is elected President of the United States.
March 5, 1953 –
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin dies.
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Timeline
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed.
July 27, 1953 –
An armistice ends the Korean War.
August 12, 1953 –
The Soviet Union successfully detonates a four-hundred-kiloton hydrogen bomb.
August 19, 1953 –
A CIA-backed coup overthrows Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh.
April 22, 1954 –
The Army-McCarthy hearings open in Washington, D.C.
June 27, 1954 –
The CIA covertly overthrows Guatemala’s elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz.
October 29, 1956 –
The Suez Crisis begins.
October 4, 1957 –
The Soviet Union successfully launches Sputnik I into orbit.
October 29, 1958 –
Soviet novelist Boris Pasternak refuses the Nobel Prize for Literature.
January 1, 1959 –
Fidel Castro’s victorious revolutionary forces enter Havana.
September 1959 –
Nikita Khrushchev visits the United States.
January 17, 1961 –
Patrice Lumumba, the first president of the Republic of Congo, is assassinated.
April 17, 1961 –
The Bay of Pigs invasion begins.
August 13, 1961 –
The Berlin Wall is erected.
October 30, 1961 –
The Soviets detonate a fifty-eight-megaton hydrogen bomb.
October 28, 1962 –
The Cuban Missile Crisis ends after thirteen days.
November 1962 –
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s gulag novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is
published in Moscow.
December 31, 1962 –
The number of U.S. military advisors in Vietnam reaches 11,000.
November 22, 1963 –
President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
August 7, 1964 –
The U.S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
October 1964 –
Khrushchev is removed as Soviet leader and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev.
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June 19, 1953 –
Total U.S. troops in Vietnam reach 500,000.
January 30, 1968 –
Vietnamese Communist forces launch the Tet Offensive.
March 31, 1968 –
President Johnson announces he will not seek re-election.
November 5, 1968 –
Richard Nixon is elected President of the United States.
March 1969 –
Nixon authorizes a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia.
February 21, 1972 –
President Nixon’s historic visit to China begins.
January 27, 1973 –
The Paris Peace Accords officially end the Vietnam War.
February 12, 1974 –
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Union.
August 9, 1974 –
Faced with impeachment, Nixon resigns the presidency.
January 3, 1975 –
The U.S. Trade Act is signed into law with the Jackson-Vanick Amendment
denying favored nation status to states that restrict emigration or violate human
rights.
April 30, 1975 –
U.S. officials scramble to evacuate as Saigon falls.
July 1977 –
Somalia, a former Soviet ally, invades Soviet-backed Ethiopia.
October 1978 –
John Paul II becomes the first Polish Pope in Catholic history.
December 1978 –
Time magazine names China’s new leader Deng Xiaoping its Man of the Year.
February 11, 1979 –
The Ayatollah Khomeini takes power in Iran.
June 2–10, 1979 –
Pope John Paul II visits his native Poland and draws millions.
December 1979 –
Soviet forces invade Afghanistan.
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December 31, 1967 –
Glossary
American exceptionalism – the belief that the United
States possessed a unique historical duty to spread its
values and institutions to nations around the world
Appeasement – a failed strategy used by British Prime
Minister Chamberlain in the 1938 Munich negotiations
to placate Hitler’s expansionism by conceding territory
in Central Europe
Arbenz, Jacobo – a populist military officer and
democratically elected leader of Guatemala who was
overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1954
Army-McCarthy hearings – nationally televised Senate
hearings into communist infiltration of the U.S.
Army that began in April 1954, in which Sen. Joseph
McCarthy repeatedly clashed with witnesses
Atlantic Charter – an Anglo-American declaration
issued in August 1941, outlining a shared commitment
to national self-determination, free trade, and liberal
democracy
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) – a civilian
organization created in 1946 to oversee America’s
nuclear program, including atomic weapons
Bandung Conference (1955) – the first Afro-Asian
Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, as a forum
for the Non-Aligned Movement, which encouraged
newly independent nations to adopt a neutral stance
in the Cold War
Baruch Plan – the failed 1946 proposal by American
financier Bernard Baruch to freeze the development
of nuclear arms and provide international control over
atomic weapons
1959 Cuban Revolution
Bay of Pigs Invasion – the failed invasion of Cuba on
April 17, 1961, in which Fidel Castro easily defeated
a force of Cuban exiles backed by the United States
Berlin airlift – from June 1948 to May 1949, the heroic
aerial provisioning of West Berlin by U.S. and British
pilots following a Soviet blockade of the divided city
Berrigan, Phillip – a Catholic priest and antiwar activist
who was arrested for destroying draft files in Maryland
Blacklist – to fire individuals and bar them from
employment because of their past affiliation with the
Communist Party or leftist causes
Blat – the black-market system of favors and barter that
thrived in the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc during
the economic downturn of the 1970s and 1980s
Boeing Company – a Seattle-based defense contractor that
manufactures aircraft, missiles, and heavy equipment
for the U.S. Air Force
Bolsheviks – the dominant faction of Russia’s banned
revolutionary Marxist political party that orchestrated
the October Revolution and triumphed in the Russian
Civil War; its early members included many future
Soviet leaders, including Lenin and Stalin.
Brezhnev Doctrine – the Soviet foreign policy named for
Premier Leonid Brezhnev and announced in 1968 that
pledged Moscow’s support for beleaguered Marxist
governments but was used to stifle liberal reforms
in Czechoslovakia; the policy was later invoked
during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas – the
1954 Supreme Court case that ruled racial segregation
in public schools is unconstitutional
Brzezinski, Zbigniew – the Polish-born National Security
Batista, Fulgencio – a U.S.-backed dictator of Cuba who
Advisor in the Carter Administration who was known
was overthrown by guerilla led by Fidel Castro in the
for his hardline stance toward the Soviet Union
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Able Archer 83 – NATO training maneuvers that nearly
led to nuclear war with the Soviet Union in 1983 when
the Kremlin mistook the exercises as preparations for
a preemptive attack
Castro, Fidel – the charismatic military leader of the
Cuban Revolution and longtime leader of Cuba’s
Communist government
Chambers, Whittaker – an ex-Communist journalist
who confessed to spying for the Soviets in the late
1930s; Whittaker accused his friend Alger Hiss of
espionage at the HUAC hearings in 1948 and later
provided congressional investigators with bombshell
evidence, which he hid in a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Chernobyl disaster – a 1986 nuclear accident at a power
plant in Ukraine that generated far-ranging toxic
radioactive pollution and led to the evacuation of
several thousand Soviet citizens
Churchill, Winston – The British Prime Minister during
World War II, he coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in
a 1946 speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri.
Cold War consensus – refers to the bipartisan commitment
within the United States to an anti-communist foreign
policy and domestic capitalism during the early Cold
War
Collectivized agriculture – a key feature of Stalin’s
economic agenda, in which private land was violently
consolidated into massive state-owned farms
Cominform – an international communist organization
founded by Stalin in 1947 to coordinate the policies
and actions of communist states
Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) –
the official American communist party, whose top
leadership was tried in federal court for violating the
Smith Act in 1948–49
Containment – the Truman Administration’s strategy
to economically, militarily, and politically counter
Soviet influence around the globe in order to “contain”
the spread of international communism; originally
devised by George F. Kennan
Contras – a Nicaraguan anti-communist force, covertly
trained by the United States and based in Honduras,
that waged a protracted campaign to topple the
Sandinista government
The Crucible – an allegorical play by Arthur Miller that
debuted in 1953; the play’s setting is the seventeenthcentury Salem Witch trials, but it offered a commentary
on anti-communist hysteria in mid-century America.
Cuban Missile Crisis – a stand-off between the United
States and the Soviet Union prompted by the Soviet
installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba; resolved
on October 28, 1962, when Soviet leaders agreed to
remove the missiles in exchange for a public declaration
that the United States would not invade Cuba and the
secret removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey
Cult of personality – hero-worship of the leader, which
featured in many totalitarian regimes, including
Stalin’s Soviet Union
Cultural Revolution – a violent campaign to root out
alleged counter-revolutionary elements from Chinese
society that began in 1966
The Day After – a fictional ABC movie dramatizing a
nuclear attack on Lawrence, Kansas, that premiered
in 1983; it was one of the most viewed programs in
U.S. television history.
Decolonization – the post-World War II push for
independence by African and Asian peoples living in
territories that had been European colonies; resulted
in scores of new nations from 1947 to 1977
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – Communist
North Korea
Dennis v. United States – the 1951 Supreme Court case
that upheld the conviction of the CPUSA’s leaders for
violating the Smith Act
Dergue – the revolutionary Marxist junta that took power
in Ethiopia in 1974; backed by the Soviet Union and
Cuba in war with neighboring Somalia in 1977
De-Stalinization – Khrushchev’s program to move the
Soviet Union away from the political repression of
the Stalinist-era by freeing prisoners and allowing for
some discussion of Stalin’s crimes
Détente – a period of improved relations between the
United States and Communist powers, particularly
China, during the Nixon administration
Diem, Ngo Dinh – the U.S.-backed Catholic authoritarian
leader of the Republic of Vietnam from 1954 until
1963, when he was assassinated in a military coup
Doctor Zhivago – the Nobel-prize winning novel by Soviet
author Boris Pasternak, who refused the prize and was
subjected to political repression by Soviet authorities,
who viewed his work as subversive
Domino theory – a metaphor that became shorthand for
the U.S. fear that once a state fell to communism, its
neighbors, like dominoes toppling in a row, would
soon follow, leading an entire region to come under
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communist control; popularized by Eisenhower
Dow Chemical Company – the manufacturer of Saran
Wrap, among other products, that was targeted by
student antiwar protestors for supplying napalm to the
U.S. military
Draft – the colloquial term for the conscription of young
men into military service; the draft was one of the
most unpopular features of the Vietnam War.
Dulles, Allen – the first director of the CIA (1953–61) who
oversaw the agency’s expansion during the Eisenhower
Administration; he was instrumental in the elevation of
clandestine intervention within U.S. foreign policy; he
was the brother of John Foster Dulles.
government
Four Freedoms – the freedom of speech, freedom of
religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear;
FDR’s concise summation of the Allied War aims as
described in his January 6, 1941, State of the Union
Address
Free-market capitalism – an economic system in which
goods are traded according to the market demands of
supply and demand, uninhibited by protectionist tariffs
Garst, Roswell – an Iowa farmer who befriended
Khrushchev in 1955 and supplied the Soviet Union
with thousands of tons of hybrid corn seed
Geneva Accords (1954) – a peace agreement that formally
granted Vietnam independence but partitioned the
former French colony at the 17th parallel and called
for national elections in 1956 for a unified Vietnam
government; the elections were never held.
Eastern Bloc – the Communist states of Eastern Europe,
including Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, that
were allied with the Soviet Union; also called Soviet
satellites
German Democratic Republic – East Germany; it was a
communist state allied with the Soviet Union, whose
capital was East Berlin.
Eisenhower Doctrine – the U.S. foreign policy announced
in 1957 that pledged to defend Middle Eastern nations
that faced Communist
Glasnost – “openness”; Gorbachev’s domestic reform of
Soviet culture and society, which included increased
freedom of the press and cultural exchange
Ellsberg, Daniel – a former Department of Defense
official who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in
an attempt to stop the Vietnam War
Global South – a term for the former colonized nations of
Asia, Africa, and Latin America
En-lai, Zhou – the first premier (1949–76) and foreign
minister (1949–58) of the People’s Republic of China,
who acted as China’s bridge to the Non-Aligned
Movement and helped usher in détente with the
United States
Evil Empire speech – a 1983 keynote address delivered
by Ronald Reagan that characterized the president’s
sharp moralistic rhetoric during his first term
Executive Order 9835 – Truman’s 1947 directive that
instituted a loyalty oath for all federal employees
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – the domestic
law enforcement agency that led an anti-communist
surveillance campaign against an ever-growing list of
potential subversives
Federal Republic of Germany – West Germany; its
capital was Bonn.
Five-Year Plans – the standard method of planning for
economic development in the Soviet planned economy
in which all production goals were set by the central
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Dulles, John Foster – U.S. Secretary of State (1953–59),
and the brother of Allen Dulles, who championed
massive retaliation as the official policy of the United
States
Great Leap Forward – a period of intense crash
industrialization begun by Mao in the late-1950s that
aimed to modernize China’s economy
Gulag – a network of forced labor camps located in remote
regions of the Soviet Union, where millions of political
prisoners were sent during the Stalinist purges
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – the congressional resolution
that granted President Johnson wide authority to use “all
necessary measures to repel any armed attack against
the United States and to prevent further aggression,”
which was passed on August 7, 1964, following
erroneous reports that North Vietnamese patrols had
fired on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin
Hammarskjöld, Dag – the Norwegian UN Secretary
General who was killed in a plane crash while
mediating the Congo Crisis
Helsinki Final Act – a Human rights declaration signed
by the Soviet Union during the 1975 summit on
European security and cooperation; it was used by
dissidents to press for further reforms.
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Hitler, Adolph – the dictatorial leader of Nazi Germany,
who was responsible for the systematic murder of Jews
and other groups; died by suicide on April 30, 1945
Ho Chi Minh – a prominent Vietnamese revolutionary
and president of North Vietnam from 1945 to 1969;
nicknamed “Uncle Ho,” he led his nation’s struggle
for independence from the French, resistance of the
Japanese occupation during WWII, and fight for a
unified Communist Vietnam against the United States.
Hollywood Ten – a group of screenwriters imprisoned for
refusing to answer questions or identify communists
in the film industry during the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in 1947
Hoover, J. Edgar – the rabidly anti-communist director of
the FBI who greatly expanded the bureau’s domestic
surveillance programs during the Cold War
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
– a House committee that investigated communist
subversion in American society; during its prime, from
1947 to 1958, HUAC accused hundreds of Americans of
disloyalty based on their membership in the Communist
Party (CPUSA) or related leftist groups.
Hungarian uprising – the 1956 popular movement to
bring democratic reforms to Communist Hungary that
was brutally suppressed by a Soviet invasion
Hydrogen bomb – an atomic bomb that utilized nuclear
fusion to produce explosions several orders of
magnitude more destructive than fission bombs
Inchon – the location of a daring amphibious landing on
September 15, 1950, by Gen. Douglass MacArthur’s
forces during the Korean War
Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – a landmark
nuclear arms agreement signed by Gorbachev
and Reagan in 1987 that significantly reduced the
European arsenals of both powers
Iran-Contra affair – a scandal during Reagan’s second
term involving the secret sale of arms to Iran and
funneling of the profits to the Nicaraguan Contras, in
direct violation of a congressional ban
Iron Curtain – the term coined by Winston Churchill
to describe the Cold War divide between Western
Europe and the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe
Jackson, Henry “Scoop” – the anti-communist
Democratic senator from Washington who was also
known as “the senator from Boeing” for his lobbying
on behalf of the Seattle-based defense contractor;
in 1974, he was responsible for amending trade
legislation to include human rights provisions.
Jim Crow – a phrase used to refer to legal and extralegal
racial discrimination prevalent throughout the United
States, especially in Southern states, from 1896 to the
mid-1960s
Kai-shek, Chiang – a military general and authoritarian
leader of Nationalist China driven to Taiwan in 1949
in the Chinese Civil War
Katanga region – the resource-rich southern province
that seceded from the Republic of Congo shortly after
the nation gained independence in 1960
Kennedy, Robert F. – the U.S. Attorney General (1961–
64) during the Cuban Missile crisis who helped his
brother, President John F. Kennedy, avert nuclear
war; he was later assassinated while seeking the
Democratic Party nomination for president in 1968.
KGB – acronym for the Soviet secret police and spy
agency responsible for both internal surveillance of
the Soviet population and foreign espionage
Khomeini, Ayatollah – a Shi’a religious figure who
returned from exile to lead the 1979 Islamic revolution
in Iran; he refused to authorize the release of American
hostages held in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for 444
days.
Kissinger, Henry – a Jewish émigré and Harvard scholar
who served as the U.S. National Security Advisor
(1969–75) and Secretary of State (1973–77); he was the
key architect of détente and the primary U.S. negotiator
in the peace talks that ended the Vietnam War.
Kitchen Debate – an impromptu debate on July 24, 1959,
between Khrushchev and Nixon in a model-kitchen of
the American Exhibition in Moscow
Korean War – a conflict that began in 1950 when
North Korea invaded South Korea; U.S. forces fought
the Chinese and North Korean militaries until 1953.
Kremlinologist – a term for an academic Soviet expert
who studied public statements from Moscow for clues
to the private political dynamics within the top ranks
of the Soviet Communist Party
Lenin, Vladimir – a Bolshevik and the first leader of the
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Hiss, Alger – a State Department official accused of
espionage and convicted of perjury in 1950 for
his testimony in front of the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC)
Liberal democracy – a democratic system of representative government in which citizens also enjoy civil
liberties such as freedom of speech
Long Telegram – a telegram sent by U.S. diplomat George
F. Kennan in 1946 outlining his views of the Soviet
Union that inspired Truman’s containment strategy
Loyalty Program – the system for screening federal
employees instituted by President Truman in March
of 1947
Lumumba, Patrice – the first prime minister of the
Republic of Congo who was assassinated in 1961 after
his government was toppled by a CIA-backed military
coup
Lysenko, Trofim – a Soviet geneticist who rejected
Darwin’s theory of evolution and argued that
environmental factors determined biological traits
MacArthur, Douglas – the U.S. Army General who
led the American assault on the Philippines during
World War II and then commanded U.S. troops in
the Korean War; he was dismissed from his post by
President Truman in 1951 after publicly criticizing the
Commander-in-Chief’s military strategy.
Madman strategy – President Nixon’s strategy to gain
leverage in negotiations by appearing reckless and
unpredictable
Manhattan Project – a top-secret American program
during World War II to develop an atomic bomb
Marshall Plan – the U.S. program for the reconstruction of
post-World War II Europe through massive economic
aid to Allied nations as well as former enemies, such
as Germany; named for Gen. George Marshall, the
U.S. Secretary of State who proposed it in 1947
Marx, Karl – a nineteenth-century German intellectual
and author of the influential Communist Manifesto
(1848), which provided the framework for class-based
revolutions in the twentieth century
Marxism-Leninism – the official ideology of the Soviet
Union that blended Karl Marx’s economic interpretation
of history with the revolutionary ideas of Lenin
Massive retaliation – a nuclear strategy favored by John
Foster Dulles that relied on the threat of extremely
destructive retaliatory strikes to deter first strikes
from the enemy
McCarthyism – a wave of political repression
spearheaded by Congress and the FBI to uncover and
expose Communists; it peaked from 1950 to 1954
when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin publicly
declared that dozens of Communists had infiltrated
the U.S. government and military.
McNamara, Robert S. – A former auto executive who
served as U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to
1968, McNamara became closely identified with the
escalation of American involvement in Vietnam under
President Johnson.
Military-industrial complex – the concept of “an
immense military establishment” combined with
a “permanent arms industry,” which President
Eisenhower warned Americans to stay vigilant of in
his 1961 farewell address
Missile gap – the erroneous claim, made frequently
by John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential
campaign, that the nuclear arsenal of the United States
had fallen behind that of the Soviet Union
Mobutu, Joseph – a military officer and trusted aide to
Patrice Lumumba who led a CIA-backed military
coup in 1960 that deposed Lumumba and later took
control of the Republic of Congo
Mossadegh, Mohammad – the democratically elected
prime minister of Iran who was ousted in a CIA coup
in 1953
Mujahideen – an anti-Soviet coalition of Islamic fighters
in Afghanistan, funded and armed by the CIA; they
included many foreigners, including Osama bin
Laden, the architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks
on the United States.
Mutually assured destruction (MAD) – a nuclear
strategy favored by Robert McNamara that called
on the United States and the Soviet Union to target
heavily populated civilian areas in order to inflict the
maximum number of causalities as a way of rendering
any rational application of nuclear war moot
Nagy, Imre – the reformist prime minister of Hungary
who was executed for his role in the 1956
Hungarian uprising
Napalm – a flammable gel manufactured by Dow Chemical
for use in incendiary bombs dropped over the jungles
of Vietnam; responsible for horrific civilian injuries
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Soviet Union, whose ideas about revolution provided
the intellectual and political framework for official
Soviet ideology; he was succeeded by Stalin after his
death in 1924.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) – the federal agency created by Eisenhower
to compete with Soviet advances in outer-space
satellite technology and the main American entity
engaged in the Cold War “space race”
Nazi-Soviet Pact – the non-aggression treaty between
Germany and the Soviet Union signed on August 23,
1939, that divided Eastern Europe between the two
powers; also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
after the foreign ministers and signatories of each
nation; the pact was later violated by Hitler’s invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Neoconservatives – hardline anti-communists who
helped shape Reagan’s aggressive interventionist
foreign policy, especially in Latin America
New Look – Eisenhower’s foreign policy strategy that
aimed to save money by relying on nuclear weapons
and covert action over conventional arms and forces
Non-alignment – a movement led by leaders of newly
independent nations in Asia and Africa to declare
neutrality in the Cold War
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – a
security alliance founded in 1949 by ten Western
European nations, the United States, and Canada to
deter Soviet expansion in Europe
NSC-68 – a top-secret policy memorandum, written
by Paul Nitze in 1950, that outlined a shift from
containment to an aggressive and militaristic approach
to stopping the spread of global communism
Nuclear deterrence – a strategy that assigns the primary
value of nuclear weapons to their ability to deter the
enemy from taking unwanted or aggressive actions
through credible threats of attack
Nuclear proliferation – the spread of atomic weapons and
the steady increase in the total number of warheads in
existence
Operation AJAX – the code name for the 1953 CIA coup
that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh and brought Reza
Shah Pahlavi to power in Iran
Operation PBSUCCESS – the code name for the 1954
CIA coup that ousted Jacobo Arbenz and installed a
U.S.-backed military dictatorship in Guatemala
Operation Urgent Fury – the code name for the 1983
U.S. invasion of Grenada
Oppenheimer, J. Robert – the lead scientist on the
Manhattan Project; as a civilian consultant to the
Atomic Energy Commission, he argued against the
development of the hydrogen bomb and for nuclear
non-proliferation, which led the FBI to investigate
him for potential communist ties.
Pahlavi, Reza Shah – the American-backed dictator of Iran
who came to power following a CIA coup in 1953 and
who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution
Paris Peace Accords – the 1973 treaty that officially
ended the Vietnam War
Pentagon Papers – a classified report on the Vietnam
War that revealed how the government had repeatedly
misled the American people on the progress of the war;
leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsberg and published
by The New York Times and The Washington Post in
1971
People’s Republic of China – China, founded in 1949
by Mao Zedong
Perestroika – one pillar of Gorbachev’s reforms that
focused on “restructuring” the Soviet economic and
political systems
Ping-pong diplomacy – goodwill exhibition matches
between the U.S. and Chinese national table tennis
teams played in China in April 1971; credited with
advancing détente
Pope John Paul II – the anti-communist Polish priest
who became pope in 1978 and inspired millions of his
native countrymen to resist communism and preserve
their Catholic identities on an official visit in 1979
Powers, Gary – the pilot of a U-2 spy plane that was shot
down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960; he was
tried and convicted of espionage by Soviet authorities
and served close to two years in Soviet prison.
Prague Spring – the brief period of social, political, and
cultural liberalization in Czechoslovakia in 1968; it
was crushed by the Soviet invasion on August 20, 1968.
Proletarian – a Marxist term referring to the working
class of an industrial society
Pumpkin Papers – pages of State Department documents
allegedly typed by Alger Hiss and stashed in a hollow
Pumpkin by Whittaker Chambers
Reagan Doctrine – interventionist foreign policy designed
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Nash, John – a Princeton mathematician and the Nobel
Prize-winning pioneer of game theory
Red-baiting – the practice of tarnishing a person’s
reputation through unfounded accusations of
involvement with communism
Republic of Korea – South Korea
Robeson, Paul – an African-American singer and civil
rights activist whose passport was revoked by the
State Department in 1950 following his public praise
of the Soviet Union
Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel – Tried, convicted, and
executed in 1953 for espionage, the Rosenbergs were
the only Americans to meet this fate during the Cold
War.
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) – the
U.S.-Soviet arms control treaty signed on May 26,
1972, in Moscow that limited the quantity of nuclear
warheads each nation could possess and prohibited
the development of missile defense systems
SALT II – the U.S.-Soviet arms control treaty negotiated
from 1973 to 1979; it was signed by President Carter
and Premier Brezhnev in 1979 but was pulled from
the U.S. Senate before it was ratified.
Samizdat – “self-published” copies of banned literature,
typed and circulated in secret to avoid state censors
that became increasingly prevalent after 1968 in the
Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc states
Sampson, Edith – an anti-communist African-American
lawyer, who served as the alternate U.S. Delegate to
the United Nations and a State Department goodwill
ambassador; she played a central role in U.S. cultural
diplomacy in the mid-1950s.
Sandinistas – the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement in Nicaragua that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator
Anastasio Somoza in 1979 and then battled the CIAfunded Contras in the nation’s long-running civil war
Secret Speech – Nikita Khrushchev’s February 25,
1956, speech to the twentieth Party Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union that catalogued
and condemned Stalin’s crimes
Secret War – the covert bombing campaign and CIA-led
military operations in Laos and Cambodia during the
Vietnam War
Security dilemma – a game theory concept popularized
in political science; refers to the paradoxical effects of
one nation’s attempt to increase its own security that
causes a rival to build up its defenses, leading in turn
to an arms race that imperils the safety of both nations
Shinkolobwe mine – located in Congo’s Katanga region,
the mine contained the world’s richest uranium and
was the main source of nuclear fuel for the United
States from 1941 to 1959
Sino-Soviet split – the progressive breakdown of relations
between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet
Union that began in the 1950s
Smith Act – the 1940 law that made it illegal to knowingly
conspire to teach and advocate the overthrow or
destruction of the U.S. government
Smith-Mundt Act – a 1948 law that created the United
States Information Agency to counter Soviet cultural
diplomacy
Solidarity – the first independent trade union in a
Communist nation, founded in Gdansk, Poland, in
1980 and led by Lech Wałęsa; it was dissolved by the
state in 1982; in Poland’s first democratic elections
in 1989, Solidarity won many seats in the nation’s
parliament, and Wałęsa became president in 1990.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – a gulag survivor, NobelPrize-winning author, and Soviet political dissident
who was deported in 1974
Soviet satellites – the Communist states of Eastern
Europe, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, and
Hungary, which were allied with the Soviet Union
Sputnik I – the first ever manmade satellite to orbit the
earth, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4,
1957; the achievement spurred a “space race” between
the United States and the Soviet Union as each tried to
match and outpace the other’s technology.
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – the controversial
missile defense system proposed by Ronald Reagan to
intercept incoming strikes using lasers in outer-space;
nicknamed “Star Wars” by critics
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) – a major force
behind antiwar protests on college campuses in the
late 1960s
Suez Crisis – Following the Egyptian government’s
nationalization of the canal zone in 1956, British,
French, and Israeli forces launched an invasion but
were forced to withdraw following pressure from the
United States.
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to “roll back” communist gains around the world that
was championed by neoconservatives within the
Reagan administration
Third World – a term for newly independent nations in
Africa and Asia as well as less developed nations in
Latin America; see also, Global South.
Thirty-eighth Parallel – the partition line dividing North
and South Korea
Totalitarianism – a term for aggressive, ideologically
driven states that seek to control all aspects of society
through propaganda and utilize force to stamp out
individual civil liberties and dissent
Truman Doctrine – Truman’s Cold War policy, announced
in 1947, pledging U.S. aid to European countries
—specifically Greece and Turkey—threatened by
communism
U-2 spy plane – specially designed aircraft used to fly
high-altitude aerial reconnaissance missions in the
1950s; the downing of a U-2 over the Soviet Union
on May 1, 1960, led to an international diplomatic
incident that badly damaged U.S.-Soviet relations.
United Nations – an organization of nations created in
1945 and headquartered in New York to provide a
forum for discussion and peaceful resolution of world
issues; the U.S. and Soviet Union were both founding
members.
United States Information Agency (USIA) – a
subdivision of the U.S. Department of State created
in 1953 that was responsible for America’s cultural
diplomacy initiatives
Velvet Revolution – the peaceful transfer of power in
Czechoslovakia in 1989 from the Communist party to
the democratically elected president and playwright
Vaclav Havel
Vietnamization – a strategy adopted by President Nixon
in 1969 to shift the fighting to the South Vietnamese
army to allow for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from
Vietnam
Vietnam Syndrome – the belief, following the disaster
of the Vietnam War, that the United States should be
cautious in deploying military force abroad
Virgin lands campaign – the failed Khrushchev initiative
to increase Soviet agricultural production by sending
settlers to grow staple crops in remote regions of the
Soviet Union
Von Neumann, John – a mathematician and the father of
game theory
Warsaw Pact – the Soviet-led security alliance of Eastern
bloc nations that formed as an answer to the Americanled NATO alliance in 1955
Wehrmacht – Nazi Germany’s armed forces
Wilson, Woodrow – the American president during
World War I known for his idealistic internationalism;
Wilson’s Fourteen-Point Peace Plan included a
commitment to national self-determination, freedom
of the seas, and the creation of the League of Nations
to mediate international conflict
Xiaoping, Deng – the leader of the People’s Republic of
China from 1978 to 1992; oversaw economic reforms
Yalta Conference – the final meeting of the Allied Big
Three—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—held in
February 1945 at a Soviet resort on the Black Sea to
plan for the postwar order
Zedong, Mao – the revolutionary leader and first premier
of the People’s Republic of China; Mao’s ideology and
model of guerilla war were especially influential in
the former colonial world.
Viet Cong– an armed Communist military force in South
Vietnam, also known as the National Liberation
Front, that waged a guerilla war to overthrow the
Zero-sum – a term from game theory referring to any
U.S.-backed Republic of Vietnam
competition in which a victory for one side results in a
loss for the other side and vice-versa
Viet Minh – a Vietnamese independence movement led
by Ho Chi Minh that defeated the French Army at
Dien Bien Phu in 1954
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Tet Offensive – coordinated attacks launched in January
1968 by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces on
South Vietnamese cities that were timed to coincide
with the celebration of the new year holiday Tet
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George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little Brown and
Company, 1967), 356.
Harry S. Truman, Address to Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947,
80th Congress, 1st Session, Document 171. Accessed via avalon.law.yale.
edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.
“George Kennan’s Long Telegram,” February 22, 1946, 709.
Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 30.
Figure accurate for 2016 dollars. Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A
World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 94.
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin
Press, 2005), 96.
Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe, 96.
Judt, Postwar, 150.
“George Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’,” February 22, 1946, History and
Public Policy Program Digital Archive, National Archives and Records
Administration, Department of State Records (Record Group 59), Central
Decimal File, 1945-1949, 861.00/2-2246; reprinted in US Department of
State, ed., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Volume VI, Eastern Europe; The Soviet Union (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1969), 696–70
“NSC-68,” April 7, 1950. NARA, RG 59, Entry 57D459, Box 3, Folder 60.
Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War,
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 53.
For an in-depth account of the controversy surrounding the place of
“information” services in the early post-War period, see David F. Kugler,
The Voice of America and Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945-1953
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).
Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and
Cultural Relations (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press), 121.
Rep. Harness, statement on July 25, 1947, 80th Cong., 1st sess., 93, Congressional Record, 10298-10299.
“United States Information and Education Exchange Objectives In Next
Five Years,” November 2, 1949. Department of State, Office of Publi
Affairs. National Archives Record Adminstration (NARA), College Park,
Maryland, RG 59, Entry 57D459, Box 3, Folder 164.
Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of
Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 7.
“For A Campaign of Truth,” New York Times, April 21, 1950.
Senator Alexander Wiley, quoted in Melvin Small, Democracy and
Diplomacy: The Impact of Domestic Politics on U.S. Foreign Policy,
1789–1994 (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 95.
Westad, Global Cold War, 90.
McMahon, A Very Short History of the Cold War, 43.
Westad, The Cold War, 169.
Gaddis, The Cold War, 45.
Bruce Cummings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Random
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Notes
bune, August 19, 1950.
“Restricted: Press Comment on Mrs. Sampson’s Appointment to the UN
Delegation.” ESS Papers, Box 10, Folder 210.
97. Edith Sampson: United Nations Delegate. USIS. 1950. NARA. 306.1538.
98. S. Shepard Jones to Ambassador Chester Bowles, “Secret” memorandum,
March 12, 1952. NARA, RG 59, Lot 54D349, Box 1A/Secretary of State
for Public Affairs. Subject Files
99. Edith Sampson to Chester Williams, June 5, 1951. ESS Papers, Box 10,
Folder 224.
100. Edith Sampson, “What Price Cicero?” Negro Digest (November 1951): 31.
101. Edith Sampson to Walter Donnelly, June 2, 1952. ESS Papers, Box 3,
Folder 72.
102. Quoted in Mary L. Dudziak, “Brown as Cold War Case,” Journal of
American History 91, no. 1 (June 2004): 34.
103. Ibid., 36.
104. “Louis Armstrong, Barring Soviet Tour, Denounces Eisenhower and Gov.
Faubus,” New York Times, 19 September 1957.
105. Audra Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of
Modern Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 163.
106. Anthony Rizzo, dir., Duck and Cover (Washington, D.C.: Federal Civil
Defense Adminstration, 1951).
107. Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 928.
108. “Atomic Tattoos,” 99% Invisible. podcast. https://99percentinvisible.org/
episode/atomic-tattoos/.
109. Graff, Raven Rock, 118–119.
110. Graff, Raven Rock, 141.
111. Graff, Raven Rock, 64–65.
112. Richard S. Kirkendall, “Two Senators and the Boeing Company: The
Transformation of Washington’s Political Culture,” Columbia Magazine
11, no. 4 (Winter 1997–98): 41.
113. William D. Hartung, “Defense Contractors are Tightening Their Grip On
Our Government,” The Nation, 16 July, 2019. https://www.thenation.
com/article/military-industrial-complex-defense-contractors-raytheonunited-technologies-merger/.
114. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 2003), 385.
115. Taubman, Khrushchev, 628.
116. Gaddis, The Cold War, 163.
117. Clark Clifford quoted in Geo ge C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower:
U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008), 614.
118. Westad, Global Cold War, 122; LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold
War, 162.
119. Westad, Global Cold War, 346.
120. Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 964.
121. John Foster Dulles quoted in LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold
War, 180–181.
122. Taubmann, Khrushchev, 279.
123. Judy, Postwar, 318.
124. Taubmann, Khrushchev, 373.
125. Taubmann, Khrushchev, 377–378.
126. Gaddis, The Cold War, 69–70.
127. Westad, The Cold War, 292.
128. “The Kitchen Debate,” 24 July 1959. English transcript: www.cia.gov/
library/readingroom/docs/1959-07-24.pdf.
129. Gaddis, The Cold War, 73.
130. McMahon, The Cold War, 84.
131. Quoted in Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 688.
132. Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 706.
133. Westad, The Cold War, 305; McMahon, The Cold War, 91.
134. McMahon, The Cold War, 91.
135. Graff, Raven Rock, 136.
136. Susan Williams, “How a rich uranium mine thrust Congo into the centre
of the Cold War,” 1 September, 2016. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/how-a-rich-uranium-mine-thrust-the-congo-into-thecentre-of-the-cold-war-64761.
137. Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States
and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 130.
138. Westad, The Cold War, 282–283.
139. Quoted in Westad, The Global Cold War, 137.
96.
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House, 2010), 159.
57. Gaddis, The Cold War, 50.
58. Westad, The Cold War, 182.
59. Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret
Plan to Save Itself-While the Rest of Us Die (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2017), 20.
60. Westad, The Cold War, 101.
61. John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,”
World Politics 2, no. 2 (January 1950): 157–180.
62. George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb,” Tribune, 19 October 1945.
63. Westad, The Cold War, 102.
64. McMahon, A Very Short Introduction to the Cold War, 74–75.
65. Gaddis, The Cold War, 64.
66. Dwight David Eisenhower, “Atoms for Peace.” Address to the 470th Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, New
York. 8 December 1953. Full text, audio, and video: www.iaea.org/about/
history/atoms-for-peace-speech.
67. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic
Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 324.
68. McMahon, A Very Short History of the Cold War, 74–75.
69. McMahon, A Very Short History of the Cold War, 74–75.
70. Jeffrey Lewis, “Point and Nuke: Remembering the Era of Portable
Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Policy, 12 September, 2018. foreignpolicy.
com/2018/09/12/point-and-nuke-davy-crockett-military-history-nuclearweapons/.
71. John Foster Dulles, “The Evolution of Foreign Policy,” Address to Council on Foreign Relations, 12 January 1954. Department of State Bulletin
30 (25 January 1954): 107–110.
72. Gaddis, The Cold War, 80–81.
73. Gaddis, The Cold War, 107.
74. Westad, The Cold War, 195–196.
75. Richard S. Kirkendall, ed., Civil Liberties and the Legacy of Harry S.
Truman, 70.
76. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 19
77. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 276–277.
78. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 154.
79. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 208.
80. Mark A. Sheft, “The End of the Smith Act Era: A Legal and Historical
Analysis of Scales v. United States,” Journal of Legal History 36, no. 2
(1992): 169.
81. Judge Irving Kaufmann quoted in Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 930.
82. Joseph R. McCarthy, “Speech at Wheeling (1950),” excerpt reprinted in
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
2017), 936.
83. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, xii.
84. Richard M. Fried, “Springtime for Stalin: Mosinee’s ‘Day Under Communism’ as Cold War Pageantry,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 72,
no. 2 (Winter 1993–1994): 82–108.
85. Joseph R. McCarthy, “A Speech Against Harry Truman,” 24 November
1953. NYPR Archives. Full audio and transcript available: www.wnyc.
org/story/joseph-r-mccarthy-a-speech-against-harry-s-truman/.
86. Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 931.
87. Shrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 264.
88. “America’s Caste System,” The Times of India, July 26, 1947.
89. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and Image of American
Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 80–82.
90. President’s Committee On Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947
91. President Harry S. Truman, “Establishing the President’s Committee on
Equality of Treatment and Equality in the Armed Services, Executive
Order 9981,” July 26, 1948. www.trumanlibrary.org/9981.
92. Karl Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South,
1932-1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001),
127–130.
93. Leah Wright Riguer, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic
Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2015), 26.
94. “These Things I Remember Well,” in Edith Spurlock Sampson Papers
(ESS Papers), Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Box 1, Folder 1.
95. “Report Chicago Negro Woman to Get U.N. Post,” Chicago Daily Tri-
Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 889.
Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 888.
Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 883.
Seth G. Jones, “The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan: Getting History
Right,” 13 January, 2019. Lawfare. https://www.lawfareblog.com/sovietexperience-afghanistan-getting-history-right
170. Ben Lewis, Hammer and Tickle: A Cultural History of Communism (New
York: Pegasus Books, 2009), 210.
171. Judt, Postwar, 581.
172. Judt, Postwar, 582.
173. Judt, Postwar, 595.
174. William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (New York: W.W. and
Norton, 2017), 273.
175. Erin Blakemore, “The Chernobyl Disaster: What happened, and the
long-term impacts,” National Geographic, 17 May 2019. https://www.
nationalgeographic.com/culture/topics/reference/chernobyl-disaster/.
176. Judt, Postwar, 597.
177. Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 896.
178. Taubmann, Gorbachev, 201.
179. Quoted in Taubmann, Gorbachev, 264.
180. Gaddis, The Cold War, 232.
181. Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 897.
182. Gaddis, Cold War, 232.
183. Quoted in Westad, The Cold War, 549.
184. Gil Troy, The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 102; Quoted in Judt, Postwar, 604.
185. Westad, The Cold War, 550.
186. Taubmann, Gorbachev, 139.
187. Judt, Postwar, 588.
188. Judt, Postwar, 607.
189. Quoted in Westad, The Cold War, 589.
190. Judt, Postwar, 612.
191. Gaddis, The Cold War, 242; Westad, The Cold War, 587.
192. Taubmann, Gorbachev, 513.
193. Taubmann, Gorbachev, 518.
194. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16
(Summer 1989): 3.
166.
167.
168.
169.
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140. Ebere Nwaubani, “Eisenhower, Nkrumah and the Congo Crisis,” Journal
of Contemporary History 36, no. 4 (October 2001): 611.
141. Westad, The Global Cold War, 138.
142. Nwaubani, “Eisenhower, Nkrumah and the Congo Crisis,” 612.
143. Westad, The Cold War, 317.
144. Quoted in Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 1006.
145. Quoted in Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 739.
146. Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 740.
147. Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 1009.
148. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” 4 April 1967. Riverside
Church, New York. Speech. Full transcript: https://kinginstitute.stanford.
edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam.
149. Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 754.
150. Full transcript: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=
106775685,
151. Kit Gillet, “History of Laos’ secret war-and the way it transformed the
CIA-reveals a sobering legacy,” 1 February, 2017. Post Magazine.
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/2066808/
history-laos-secret-war-and-way-it-transformed-cia.
152. Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 1040.
153. Gaddis, The Cold War, 147.
154. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 76.
155. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest.
156. Westad, The Cold War, 370.
157. Westad, The Cold War, 376.
158. McMahon, The Cold War, 128.
159. Jerome Charyn, Sizzling Chops and Devilish Spins: Ping-Pong and the
Art of Staying Alive (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001), 117.
160. Charyn, Sizzling Chops, 108.
161. Quoted in Rick Pearlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the
Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 571.
162. Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 791.
163. Westad, The Cold War, 391.
164. Westad, The Cold War, 495.
165. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National
Association of Evangelicals,” speech, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983,
Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Public Papers, Reagan Library.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/30883b (accessed
August 15, 2019).
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