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Origins of the Cold War
The American Stance Soviet Aims Early Cold War Leadership Disillusionment with the USSR The Troublesome Polish Question Economic Pressure on the USSR Declaring the Cold War
The Cold War developed by degrees. It stemmed from divergent views about the shape of the post-World War II world as the colonial empires in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East began to crumble. The United States, strong and secure, was intent on spreading its vision of freedom and free trade around the world to maintain its economic hegemony. The Soviet Union, concerned about security after a devastating war, demanded politically sympathetic neighbors on its borders to preserve its own autonomy. Suppressed during World War II, these differences now surfaced in a Soviet-American confrontation. As tensions rose, the two nations behaved, according to Senator J. William Fulbright, "like two big dogs, chewing on a bone."
The American Stance The United States emerged from World War II more powerful than any nation ever before, and it sought to use that might to achieve a world order that could sustain American aims. American policymakers, following in Woodrow Wilson's footsteps, hoped to spread the values—liberty, equality, and democracy—underpinning the American dream. They assumed that they could furnish the stability that postwar reconstruction required. They did not always recognize that what they considered universal truths were rooted in specific historical circumstances in their own country and might not flourish elsewhere.
At the same time, American leaders sought a world where economic enterprise could thrive. Recollections of the Depression decade haunted leaders. With the American economy operating at full speed as a result of the war, world markets were needed once the fighting stopped. Government officials wanted to eliminate trade barriers—imposed by the Soviet Union and other nations—to provide outlets for industrial products and for surplus farm commodities such as wheat, cotton, and tobacco. As the largest source of goods for world markets, with exports totaling $14 billion in 1947, the United States required open channels for growth to continue. Americans assumed that their prosperity would benefit the rest of the world, even when other nations disagreed.
Soviet Aims The Soviet Union formulated its own goals after World War II. Russia had usually been governed in the past by a strongly centralized, sometimes autocratic, government, and that tradition—as much as Communist ideology, with its stress on class struggle and the inevitable triumph of a proletarian state—guided Soviet policy.
During the war, the Russians had played down talk of world revolution, which they knew their allies found threatening, and had mobilized domestic support with nationalistic appeals. As the struggle drew to a close, the Soviets still said little about world conquest, emphasizing socialism within the nation itself.
Rebuilding was the first priority. Devastated by the war, Soviet agriculture and industry lay in shambles. But revival required internal security. At the same time, the Russians felt vulnerable along their western flank. Such anxieties had a historical basis, for in the early nineteenth century, Napoleon had reached the gates of Moscow. Twice in the twentieth century, invasions had come from the west, most recently when Hitler had attacked in 1941. Haunted by fears of a quick German recovery, the Soviets demanded defensible borders and neighboring regimes sympathetic to Russian aims. They insisted on military and political stability in the regions closest to them.
Early Cold War Leadership Harry Truman Dwight Eisenhower
Both the United States and the Soviet Union had strong leadership in the early years of the Cold War. On the American side, presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower accepted the centralization of authority Franklin Roosevelt had begun, as the executive branch became increasingly powerful in guiding foreign policy. In the Soviet Union, first Joseph Stalin, then Nikita Khrushchev provided equally forceful direction.
Harry S Truman, America's first postwar president, was an unpretentious man who took a straightforward approach to public affairs. He was, however, ill prepared for the office he assumed in the final months of World War II. His three months as vice president had done little to school him in the complexity of postwar issues. Nor had Franklin Roosevelt confided in Truman. No wonder that the new president felt insecure. To a former colleague in the Senate, he groaned, "I'm not big enough for this job." Critics agreed.
Harry Truman
Yet Truman matured rapidly. Impulsive and aggressive, he made a virtue out of rapid response. At his first press conference, reporters could not keep up with his quick replies. A sign on the president's White House desk read "The Buck Stops Here," and he was willing to make quick decisions on issues, even though associates sometimes wondered if he understood all the implications. His rapid-fire decisions had important consequences for the Cold War.
Truman served virtually all of the term to which Roosevelt had been elected in 1944, then won another for himself in 1948. In 1952, war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, affectionately known as Ike, won the presidency for the Republican party for the first time in 20 years.
Eisenhower stood in stark contrast to Truman. His easy manner and warm smile made him widely popular. As British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery observed, "He has the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts bits of metal." On occasion, in press conferences or other public gatherings, he gave convoluted and imprecise comments. Yet beneath his casual approach lay real shrewdness. "Don't worry," he once assured his aides briefing him for a press conference, "If that question comes up, I'll just confuse them."
Dwight Eisenhower
Eisenhower had not taken the typical route to the presidency. After World War II, he served successively as army chief of staff, president of Columbia University, and head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Despite his lack of formal political background, he had a genuine ability to get people to compromise and work together. Though he remained aloof from party politics, he may have entertained hopes of holding office after the war. General George Patton commented in 1943 that "Ike wants to be President so badly you can taste it," yet Eisenhower made no move in that direction until he sought the Republican nomination in 1952.
Ike's limited experience with everyday politics conditioned his sense of the presidential role. Whereas Truman loved political infighting and wanted to take charge, Eisenhower saw things differently. The presidency for him was no "bully pulpit," as it had been for Theodore Roosevelt and even FDR. "I am not one of those desk-pounding types that likes to stick out his jaw and look like he is bossing the show," he said. "You do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault'—not 'leadership.'" Even so, Ike knew exactly where he wanted to go and worked behind the scenes to get there.
Though the personal styles of Truman and Eisenhower differed, they both subscribed to traditional American attitudes about self-determination and the superiority of American political institutions and values. Viewing collaboration with the Soviet Union during World War II as a wartime necessity, Truman grew increasingly hostile to Soviet moves as the war neared its end. It was now time, he said, "to stand up to the Russians." Like Truman, Eisenhower saw Communism as a monolithic force struggling for world supremacy and agreed that the Kremlin in Moscow was orchestrating subversive activity around the globe. Like Truman, he saw issues in black and white terms and regarded the Soviet system as a "tyranny that has brought thousands, millions of people into slave camps and is attempting to make all mankind its chattel." Yet Eisenhower was more willing than Truman to practice accommodation when it served his ends.
The Soviet leader at war's end, Joseph Stalin, possessed almost absolute powers. He had presided over ruthless purges against his opponents in the 1930s. Now he was determined to do whatever was necessary to rebuild Soviet society, if possible with Western assistance, and to keep eastern Europe within the Russian sphere of influence.
Stalin's death in March 1953 left a power vacuum in Soviet political affairs that was eventually filled by Nikita Khrushchev, who by 1958 held the offices of both prime minister and party secretary. A crude man, Khrushchev once used his shoe to pound a table at the United Nations while the British prime minister was speaking. During Krushchev's regime, the Cold War continued, but in brief periods Soviet-American relations became less hostile.
Disillusionment with the USSR American support for the Soviet Union faded quickly after the war. In September 1945, more than half (54 percent) of a national sample trusted the Russians to cooperate with the Americans in the postwar years. Two months later, the figure had dropped to 44 percent, and by February 1946, to 35 percent.
As Americans soured on Russia, they began to equate the Nazi and Soviet systems. Just as they had in the 1930s, authors, journalists, and public officials pointed to similarities, some of them legitimate, between the regimes. Both states, they contended, maintained total control over communications and could eliminate political opposition whenever they chose. Both states used terror to silence dissidents, and Stalin's labor camps in Siberia could be compared with Hitler's concentration camps. After the U.S. publication in 1949 of George Orwell's frightening novel 1984, Life magazine noted in an editorial that the ominous figure Big Brother was but a "mating" of Hitler and Stalin. Truman spoke for many Americans when he said in 1950 that "there isn't any difference between the totalitarian Russian government and the Hitler government. . . . They are all alike. They are . . . police state governments."
The lingering sense that the nation had not been quick enough to resist totalitarian aggression in the 1930s heightened American fears. Had the United States stopped the Germans, Italians, or Japanese, it might have prevented the long, devastating war. The free world had not responded quickly enough before and was determined never to repeat the same mistake.
The Troublesome Polish Question The first clash between East and West came, even before the war ended, over Poland. Soviet demands for a government willing to accept Russian influence clashed with American hopes for a more representative structure patterned after the Western model. The Yalta Conference of February 1945 attempted to resolve the issue (see Chapter 25) with a loosely worded and correspondingly imprecise agreement. When Truman assumed office, the Polish situation remained unresolved. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, warned that the United States faced a "barbarian invasion of Europe" unless the Soviets could be checked and Western-style democracies established. The president agreed.
Truman's unbending stance was clear in an April 1945 meeting with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov on the question of Poland. Concerned that the Russians were breaking the Yalta agreements, imprecise as they were, the American leader demanded a new democratic government there. Though Molotov appeared conciliatory, Truman insisted on Russian acquiescence. Truman later recalled that when Molotov protested, "I have never been talked to like that in my life," he himself retorted bluntly, "Carry out your agreements and you won't get talked to like that." Such bluntness contributed to the deterioration of Soviet-American relations.
Truman and Stalin met face-to-face for the first (and last) time at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the final wartime Big Three meeting of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. There, outside devastated Berlin, the two leaders sized each other up as they considered the Russian-Polish boundary, the fate of Germany, and the American desire to obtain an unconditional surrender from Japan. It was Truman's first exposure to international diplomacy at the highest level, and it left him confident of his abilities. When he learned during the meeting of the first successful atomic bomb test in New Mexico, he became even more determined to insist on his positions.
Economic Pressure on the USSR One major source of controversy in the last stages of World War II was the question of U.S. aid to its allies. Responding to congressional pressure at home to limit foreign assistance as hostilities ended, Truman acted impulsively. Six days after V-E Day signaled the end of the European war in May 1945, he issued an executive order cutting off lend-lease supplies to the Allies. Though the policy affected all nations receiving aid, it hurt the Soviet Union most of all.
The United States intended to use economic pressure in other ways as well. The USSR desperately needed financial assistance to rebuild after the war and, in January 1945, had requested a $6 billion loan. Roosevelt hedged, hoping to win concessions in return. In August, four months after FDR's death, the Russians renewed their application, this time for only $1 billion. Truman dragged his heels, seeking to use the loan as a lever to gain access to markets in areas traditionally dominated by the Soviet Union. The United States first claimed to have lost the Soviet request, then in March 1946 indicated a willingness to consider the matter—but only if Russia pledged "nondiscrimination in world commerce." Stalin refused the offer and launched his own five-year plan instead.
CONFLICTING AIMS DURING THE COLD WAR
United States
Soviet Union
Spread ideological values of liberty, equality, democracy
Spread ideological values of class struggle, triumph of the proletariat
Extend the tradition of representative government
Extend the tradition of strong centralized government
Maintain stability around the world
Support revolutionary movements around the world
Fill vacuum created by the end of imperialism with regimes sympathetic to Western ideals
Support regimes sympathetic to the Soviet Union, particularly to avoid attack on its western flank
Maintain a world free for economic enterprise by eliminating trade barriers, providing markets for American exports
Rebuild the devastated Soviet economy by creating preferential trading arrangements in the region of Soviet dominance
Declaring the Cold War As Soviet-American relations deteriorated, both sides stepped up their rhetorical attacks. In 1946, Stalin spoke out first, arguing that capitalism and communism were on a collision course, that a series of cataclysmic disturbances would tear the capitalist world apart, and that the Soviet system would triumph. Stalin's speech was a stark and ominous statement that worried the West. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called it the "declaration of World War III."
The response to Stalin's speech came not from an American but from England's former prime minister, Winston Churchill, long suspicious of the Soviet state. Speaking in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, with Truman on the platform during the address, Churchill declared that "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." To counter the threat, he urged that a vigilant association of English-speaking peoples work to contain Soviet designs. Containing the Soviet Union
Containment Defined The First Step: The Truman Doctrine The Next Steps: The Marshall Plan, NATO, and NSC-68 Containment in the 1950s
Containment formed the basis of postwar American policy. Both Democrats and Republicans were determined to check Soviet expansion. In an increasingly contentious world, the American government formulated rigid anti-Soviet policies. The Soviet Union responded in an equally uncompromising way.
Containment Defined George F. Kennan, chargé d'affaires at the American embassy in the Soviet Union and an expert on Soviet matters, was primarily responsible for defining the new policy. After Stalin's speech in February 1946, Kennan sent an 8,000-word telegram to the State Department. In it he argued that Soviet hostility stemmed from the "Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs," which in turn came from the "traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity." The stiff Soviet stance was not so much a response to American actions as a reflection of the Russian leaders' own efforts to maintain their autocratic rule. Russian fanaticism would not soften, regardless of how accommodating American policy became. Therefore, it had to be opposed at every turn.
Kennan's "long telegram" struck a resonant chord in Washington. It made his diplomatic reputation and brought him into an influential position in the State Department. Soon he published an extended analysis, under the pseudonym "Mr. X," in the influential journal Foreign Affairs. "The whole Soviet governmental machine, including the mechanism of diplomacy," he wrote, "moves inexorably along the prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force." Many Americans agreed with Kennan that Soviet pressure had to "be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points."
The concept of containment provided the philosophical justification for the hard-line stance that Americans, both in and out of government, adopted. Containment created the framework for military and economic assistance around the globe.
The First Step: The Truman Doctrine The Truman Doctrine represented the first major application of containment policy. The new policy was devised to respond to conditions in the eastern Mediterranean, an area that Americans had never before considered vital to their national security. The Soviet Union was pressuring Turkey for joint control of the Dardanelles, the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, a civil war in Greece pitted Communist elements against the ruling English-aided right-wing monarchy. Revolutionary pressures threatened to topple the government.
In February 1947, the British ambassador to the United States informed the State Department that his exhausted country could no longer give Greece and Turkey economic and military aid. Would the United States now move into the void?
Administration officials, who were willing to move forward, knew they needed bipartisan support to accomplish such a major policy shift. A conservative Congress wanted smaller budgets and lower taxes rather than massive and expensive aid programs. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a key Republican, warned that the top policymakers had to begin "scaring hell out of the country" if they were serious about a bold new containment policy.
Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson took the lead. Meeting with congressional leaders, he declared that "like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east." He warned ominously that a Communist victory would "open three continents to Soviet penetration." The major powers were now "met at Armageddon," as the Soviet Union pressed forward. Only the United States had the power to resist.
Truman likewise played on the Soviet threat. On March 12, 1947, he told Congress, in a statement that came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Unless the United States acted, the free world might not survive. "If we falter in our leadership," Truman said, "we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own Nation." To avert that calamity, he urged Congress to appropriate $400 million for military and economic aid to Turkey and Greece.
Not everyone approved of Truman's request or of his overblown description of the situation. Autocratic regimes controlled Greece and Turkey, some observers pointed out. And where was the proof that Stalin had a hand in the Greek conflict? Others warned that the United States could not by itself stop encroachment in all parts of the world. Nonetheless, Congress passed Truman's foreign aid bill.
In assuming that Americans could police the globe, the Truman Doctrine was a major step in the advent of the Cold War. Truman's address, observed financier Bernard Baruch, "was tantamount to a declaration of . . . an ideological or religious war." Journalist Walter Lippmann was more critical. He termed the new containment policy a "strategic monstrosity" that could embroil the United States in disputes around the world. In the two succeeding decades, Lippmann proved correct.
The Next Steps: The Marshall Plan, NATO, and NSC-68 Cold War Europe in 1950
The next step for American policymakers involved sending extensive economic aid for postwar recovery in Western Europe. At the war's end, most of Europe was economically and politically unstable, thereby offering opportunities to the Communist movement. In France and Italy, large Communist parties grew stronger and refused to cooperate with established governments. In such circumstances, administration officials believed, the Soviet Union might easily intervene. Decisive action was needed, for as the new secretary of state, George Marshall, declared, "The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate." Another motive for action was to bolster the European economy to provide markets for American goods. Excellent customers earlier, Western Europeans in the aftermath of the war were able to purchase less at a time when the United States was producing much more.
Marshall revealed the administration's willingness to assist European recovery in June 1947. He asked all troubled European nations to draw up an aid program that the United States could support, a program "directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos." Soviet-bloc countries were welcome to participate, Marshall announced, aware that their involvement was unlikely since they would have to disclose economic records to join, and Communist nations maintained rigorous secrecy about their internal affairs.
The proposed program would assist the ravaged nations, provide the United States with needed markets, and advance the nation's ideological aims. American aid, Marshall pointed out, would permit the "emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist." The Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, Truman noted, were "two halves of the same walnut."
Responding quickly to Marshall's invitation, the Western European nations worked out the details of massive requests. In early 1948, Congress committed $17 billion over a period of four years to 16 cooperating nations. Not all Americans supported the Marshall Plan. Henry A. Wallace, former vice president and secretary of agriculture, who had broken with the administration, called the scheme the "Martial Plan" and argued that it was another step toward war. Some members of Congress feared spreading American resources too thin. But most legislators approved, and the containment policy moved forward another step.
Closely related to the Marshall Plan was a concerted Western effort to integrate a rebuilt Germany into a reviving Europe. At Yalta, Allied leaders had agreed to divide Germany into four occupation zones (Soviet, American, British, and French) and to force Germany to pay reparations. A year after the end of the war, however, the balance of power in Europe had shifted. With the Soviet Union threatening to dominate eastern Europe, the West moved to fill the vacuum in central Europe. In late 1946, the Americans and British merged their zones for economic purposes and began assigning administrative duties to Germans. By mid-1947, the process of rebuilding West German industry was under way.
Despite French fears, the United States sought to make Germany strong enough to anchor Europe. Secretary Marshall cautiously laid out the connections for Congress:
The restoration of Europe involves the restoration of Germany. Without a revival of German production there can be no revival of Europe's economy. But we must be very careful to see that a revived Germany cannot again threaten the European community.
In mid-1948, a crisis erupted when the Soviet Union attempted to force the western powers out of Berlin, which, like Germany itself, was divided into zones after the war. Soviet refusal to allow the other Allies land access to West Berlin, located in the Russian zone of Germany, led to an airlift that broke the Russian blockade.
The next major link in the containment strategy was the creation of a military alliance in Europe in 1949 to complement the economic program. After the Soviets tightened their control of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the United States took the lead in establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Twelve nations formed the alliance, vowing that an attack against any one member would be considered an attack against all, to be met by appropriate armed force.
Cold War Europe in 1950
The Senate, long opposed to such military pacts, approved this time, and the United States established its first military treaty ties with Europe since the American Revolution. Congress also voted military aid for its NATO allies. The Cold War had softened longstanding American reluctance to become closely involved in European affairs.
Two dramatic events in 1949—the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and the Russian detonation of an atomic device—led the United States to define its aims still more specifically. Responding to Truman's request for a full-fledged review of U.S. foreign and defense policy, the National Security Council, organized in 1947 to provide policy coordination, produced a document called NSC-68, which shaped U.S. policy for the next 20 years.
NSC-68 built on the Cold War rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine, describing challenges facing the United States in cataclysmic terms. "The issues that face us are momentous," the paper said, "involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself." Conflict between East and West, the document assumed, was unavoidable, for amoral Soviet objectives ran totally counter to U.S. aims. Negotiation was useless, for the Soviets could never be trusted to bargain in good faith.
NSC-68 then argued that if the United States hoped to meet the Russian challenge, it must increase defense spending from the $13 billion set for 1950 to as much as $50 billion per year and increase the percentage of its budget allotted to defense from 5 to 20 percent. The costs were huge but necessary if the free world was to survive.
Containment in the 1950s John Foster Dulles
Containment, the keystone of American policy throughout the Truman years, was the rationale for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and NSC-68. Because this policy required detailed and up-to-date information about Communist moves, the government relied increasingly on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Established by the National Security Act of 1947, which had also created the National Security Council, the CIA conducted espionage in foreign lands, some of it aboveboard and visible, some secret and seldom seen. During the Eisenhower administration, Allen Dulles, brother of the secretary of state, headed the agency and provided close foreign policy coordination. With the president's approval the CIA rearranged its priorities so that by 1957, 80 percent of its budget went toward covert activities. More and more, Eisenhower relied on clandestine CIA actions to undermine foreign governments, subsidize friendly newspapers in distant lands, and assist those who supported the American stance in the Cold War.
At the same time, the administration reassessed the impact of the containment policy itself, especially in light of criticism that it was too cautious to counter the threat of Communism. For most of Eisenhower's two terms, John Foster Dulles was secretary of state. A devout Presbyterian who hated atheistic communism, he sought to move beyond containment. Eager to counter the "Godless terrorism" of communism, Dulles wanted to commit the nation to a holy crusade to promote democracy and to free the countries under Soviet domination. Instead of advocating containment, the United States should make it "publicly known that it wants and expects liberation to occur."
John Foster Dulles
Eisenhower's own rhetoric was equally strong. In his 1953 inaugural address, he declared, "Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom is pitted against slavery, lightness against dark." Yet Eisenhower was more conciliatory, cautious, and realistic than Dulles and recognized the impossibility of changing the governments of the USSR's satellites. In mid-1953, when East Germans mounted anti-Soviet demonstrations, in a challenge that foreshadowed the revolt against Communism three and a half decades later, the United States maintained its distance. In 1956, when Hungarian "freedom fighters" rose up against Russian domination, the United States again stood back as Soviet forces smashed the rebels and kept control of their satellite. Because Western action could have precipitated a more general conflict, Eisenhower refused to translate rhetoric into action. Throughout the 1950s, the policy of containment, largely as it had been defined earlier, remained in effect.
Containment in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America
The Shock of the Chinese Revolution Stalemate in the Korean War Turbulence in the Middle East Restricting Revolt in Latin America
In a dramatic departure from its history of noninvolvement, the United States extended the policy of containment to meet challenges around the globe. Colonial empires were disintegrating, and countries seeking and attaining their independence now found themselves caught in the middle of the superpower struggle. Decolonization became even more complicated as it became intertwined with the Cold War. Although the containment initiative had resulted from the effort to promote European stability, it now became worldwide. In Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, the United States discovered the tremendous appeal of Communism as a social and political system in emerging nations and found that ever greater efforts were required to advance American aims.
The Shock of the Chinese Revolution Mao Zedong
The U.S. commitment to global containment became stronger with the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949. An ally during World War II, China had struggled against the Japanese, while simultaneously fighting a bitter civil war deeply rooted in the Chinese past—in widespread poverty, disease, oppression by the landlord class, and national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), (Chinese names are rendered in their modern pinyin spelling. At first occurance, the older but perhaps more familiar spelling (usually Wade-Giles) is given in parantheses.) founder of a branch of the Communist party, gathered followers who wished to reshape China in a distinctive Marxist mold. Opposing the Communists were the Nationalists, led by Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). By the early 1940s, Jiang Jieshi's regime was exhausted, inefficient, and corrupt. Mao's movement, meanwhile, grew stronger during the Second World War as he opposed the Japanese invaders and won the loyalty of the peasantry. Mao finally prevailed, as Jiang fled in 1949 to the island of Taiwan (Formosa) where he nursed the improbable belief that he was still the rightful ruler of all China and would one day return.
Mao Zedong
The United States failed to understand the long internal conflict in China or the immense popular support Mao had garnered. As the Communist army moved toward victory, the New York Times termed Mao's part as a "nauseous force," a "compact little oligarchy dominated by Moscow's nominees." Mao's proclamation of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, fanned fears of Russian domination, for he had already announced his regime's support for the Soviet Union against the "imperialist" United States.
Events in China caused near hysteria in America. Staunch anti-Communists argued that Truman and the United States were to blame for Jiang's defeat by failing to provide him sufficient support. Secretary of State Dean Acheson briefly considered granting diplomatic recognition to the new government but backed off after the Communists seized American property, harassed American citizens, and openly allied China with the USSR. Like other Americans, Acheson mistakenly viewed the Chinese as Soviet puppets.
Tension with China increased during the Korean War (1950-1953) and again in 1954 when Mao's government began shelling Nationalist positions on the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Eisenhower, now president, was committed to defending the Nationalists on Taiwan from a Communist attack, but he was unwilling to risk war over the islands. Again he showed an understanding of the need to proceed with caution.
Stalemate in the Korean War The Korean War General MacArthur's Retirement Speech General Douglas MacArthur Defense Expenditures, 1945-1960
The Korean War, on the other hand, highlighted growing U.S. intervention in Asia. Concern about China and determination to contain Communism led the United States into a bloody foreign struggle. But American objectives were not always clear and were largely unrealized after three years of war.
The conflict in Korea stemmed from tensions lingering after World War II. Korea, long under Japanese control, hoped for independence after Japan's defeat. But the Allies temporarily divided Korea along the 38th parallel when the rapid end to the Pacific struggle allowed Soviet troops to accept Japanese surrender in the north while American forces did the same in the south. The Soviet-American line, initially intended as a matter of military convenience, hardened after 1945, just as a similar division became rigid in Germany. In time, the Soviets set up one Korean government in the north and the Americans another government in the south. Though the major powers left Korea, they continued to support the regimes they had created. Each Korean government hoped to reunify the country on its own terms.
The Korean War
North Korea moved first. On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel to invade South Korea. Though the North Koreans followed Soviet-built tanks, they operated on their own initiative. Kim Il Sung, the North Korean leader, had visited Moscow earlier and may have gained Soviet acquiescence in the idea of an attack, but both the planning and the implementation occurred in Korea.
North Korea's action took the United States by surprise. Earlier, the nation had seemed reluctant to defend South Korea, but the Communist victory in China had changed the balance of power in Asia. Certain that Russia had masterminded the North Korean offensive and was testing the American policy of containment, Truman responded vigorously. "If this was allowed to go unchallenged," he declared, "it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war."
General MacArthur's Retirement Speech
Truman readied American naval and air forces and directed General Douglas MacArthur in Japan to supply South Korea. The United States also went to the United Nations Security Council. With the Soviet Union absent in protest of the UN's refusal to admit the People's Republic of China, the United States secured a unanimous resolution branding North Korea an aggressor, then another resolution calling on members of the organization to assist South Korea in repelling aggression and restoring peace.
General Douglas MacArthur
On Truman's orders, American air and naval forces, then American ground forces, went into battle south of the 38th parallel. Following a daring amphibious invasion that pushed the North Koreans back to the former boundary line, UN troops crossed the 38th parallel, hoping to reunify Korea under an American-backed government. Despite Chinese signals that this movement toward their border threatened their security, the United States pressed on. In October, Chinese troops appeared briefly in battle, then disappeared. The next month, the Chinese mounted a full-fledged counterattack, which pushed the UN forces back below the dividing line.
The resulting stalemate provoked a bitter struggle between MacArthur and his civilian commander in chief. The brilliant but arrogant general called for retaliatory air strikes against China, but Truman remained committed to conducting a limited war. MacArthur's statements, issued from the field, finally went too far. In April 1951, he argued that the American approach in Korea was wrong and asserted publicly that "there is no substitute for victory." Truman had no choice but to relieve the general for insubordination. The decision outraged many Americans. After the stunning victories of World War II, limited war was frustrating and difficult to understand.
The Korean War dragged on into Eisenhower's presidency. Campaigning in 1952, Ike promised to go to Korea, and three weeks after his election, he did so. When truce talks bogged down in May 1953, the new administration privately threatened the Chinese with the use of atomic weapons. This brought about renewed negotiations. Finally, on July 27, 1953, an armistice was signed. The Republican administration had succeeded where the preceding Democratic administration had failed: after three long years, the unpopular war had ended.
American involvement carried a heavy price: over 33,000 Americans killed in action and many more wounded. But those figures paled beside as many as two million Koreans dead and countless others maimed.
The war significantly changed American attitudes and institutions. For the first time, American forces fought in racially integrated units. As commander in chief, Truman had ordered the integration of the armed forces in 1948, over the opposition of many generals, and African Americans became part of all military units. Their successful performance led to acceptance of military integration.
Defense Expenditures, 1945-1960
The Korean War years also saw military expenditures soar from $13 billion in 1950 to about $47 billion three years later as defense spending followed the guidelines proposed in NSC-68. In the process, the United States accepted the demands of permanent mobilization. Whereas the military absorbed less than a third of the federal budget in 1950, a decade later it took half. More than a million military personnel were stationed around the world. At home, an increasingly powerful military establishment became closely tied to corporate and scientific communities and created a military-industrial complex that employed 3.5 million Americans by 1960.
The Korean War had important political effects as well. It led the United States to sign a peace treaty with Japan in September 1951 and to rely on that nation to maintain the balance of power in the Pacific. At the same time, the struggle poisoned relations with the People's Republic of China and ensured a diplomatic standoff that lasted more than 20 years.
Turbulence in the Middle East The Middle East in 1949
Cold War attitudes also influenced American diplomacy in the Middle East. That part of the world had tremendous strategic importance as the supplier of oil for industrialized nations. During World War II, the major Allied powers (including the Soviet Union) occupied Iran, agreeing that they would leave within six months of the war's end. As of early 1946, both Great Britain and the United States had withdrawn, but the Soviet Union, which bordered on Iran, continued its occupation. Stalin claimed that earlier security agreements had not been honored and demanded oil concessions. Only a threat of vigorous American action forced the Soviets out.
The Eisenhower administration maintained its interest in Iran. In 1953, the CIA helped the Iranian army overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh, which had nationalized oil wells formerly under British control, and placed the shah of Iran securely on the Peacock Throne. After the coup, British and American companies regained command of the wells, and thereafter the U.S. government provided military assistance to the shah.
A far more serious situation emerged in Palestine, which since the end of World War I had been under British rule. With British control set to end in 1948, the United Nations attempted to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. Truman officially recognized the new state of Israel 15 minutes after it was proclaimed. But American recognition could not end bitter animosities between Arabs, who believed they had been robbed of their territory, and Jews, who felt they had finally regained a homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust. As Americans looked on, Arab forces from Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded Israel, but the Israelis won the war and added territory to what the UN had given them.
The Middle East in 1949
While cultivating close ties with Israel, the United States also tried to maintain the friendship of oil-rich Arab states or, at the very least, to prevent them from falling into the Soviet orbit. In Egypt, the policy ran into trouble when Arab nationalist General Gamal Abdel Nasser planned a huge dam on the Nile River to produce electric power. Nasser hoped to follow a middle course by proclaiming his country's neutrality in the Cold War. Although Dulles offered U.S. financial support for the Aswan Dam project, Nasser also began discussions with the Soviet Union. Furious, the secretary of state withdrew the American offer. Left without funds for the dam, in July 1956 Nasser seized and nationalized the British-controlled Suez Canal and closed it to Israeli ships. Now Great Britain was enraged. All of Europe feared that Nasser would disrupt the flow of oil from the Middle East.
In the fall, Israeli, British, and French military forces invaded Egypt. Eisenhower, who had not been consulted, was irate. Realizing that the attack might push Nasser into Moscow's arms, the United States sponsored a UN resolution condemning the attack and Dulles persuaded other nations not to send petroleum to England and France as long as they remained in Egypt. These actions convinced the invaders to withdraw.
Before long the United States again intervened in the Middle East. Concerned about the region's stability, the president declared in 1957, in what came to be called the Eisenhower Doctrine, that "the existing vacuum in the Middle East must be filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia." A year later, in line with a congressional resolution that committed the United States to stop suspected Communist aggression, he authorized the landing of 14,000 soldiers in Lebanon to prop up a right-wing government challenged from within.
The Middle East remained a battleground. In 1967, Israeli forces defeated the Egyptian army in the Six Day War and seized the West Bank and Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. Then in 1973, the Egyptians seized the initiative in the Yom Kippur War. In each case, the United States used its influence to halt fighting in order to maintain regional stability and uninterrupted supplies of oil.
Restricting Revolt in Latin America The Cold War also led to intervention in Latin America, the United States' traditional sphere of influence. In 1954, Dulles sniffed Communist activity in Guatemala and Eisenhower ordered CIA support for a coup aimed at ousting the elected government of reform-minded Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. It trained and equipped Guatemalans to overthrow the legitimate regime, which had appropriated property of the American-owned United Fruit Company. The right-wing takeover succeeded, established a military dictatorship that responded to U.S. wishes, and restored the property of the United Fruit Company. These actions demonstrated again the shortsighted American commitment to stability and private investment, whatever the internal effect or ultimate cost. The interference in Guatemala fed anti-American feeling throughout Latin America.
In 1959, when Fidel Castro overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, the shortsightedness of American policy became even clearer. Nationalism and the thrust for social reform were powerful forces in Latin America, as in the rest of the Third World formerly dominated by European powers. As Milton Eisenhower, Ike's brother and adviser, pointed out: "Revolution is inevitable in Latin America. The people are angry. They are shackled to the past with bonds of ignorance, injustice, and poverty. And they no longer accept as universal or inevitable the oppressive prevailing order." But when Castro confiscated American property in Cuba, the Eisenhower administration cut off exports and severed diplomatic ties. In response, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for support. Atomic Weapons and the Cold War
Sharing the Secret of the Bomb Nuclear Proliferation The Nuclear West "Massive Retaliation" Atomic Protest
Throughout the Cold War, the atomic bomb was a crucial factor that hung over all diplomatic discussions and military initiatives. Atomic weapons were destructive enough, but when the United States and the Soviet Union both developed hydrogen bombs, an age of overkill began.
Sharing the Secret of the Bomb The United States, with British aid, had built the first atomic bomb and attempted to conceal the project from its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. Soviet spies, however, discovered that the Americans were working on the bomb, and, even before the war was over, the Soviets had initiated a program to create a bomb of their own.
The question of sharing the atomic secret was considered in the immediate postwar years. Just before he retired, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson favored cooperating with the Soviet Union, rather than acting unilaterally. Recognizing the futility of trying to cajole the Russians while "having this weapon ostentatiously on our hip," he warned that "their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase." Only mutual accommodation could bring international cooperation.
For a time the administration contemplated a system of international arms control. Realizing by early 1946 that mere possession of the bomb by the United States did not make the Russians more malleable, Truman decided to offer the United Nations a proposal for an international agency to control atomic energy. When the Russians balked at a plan they argued favored the United States, negotiations collapsed.
The United States gave up on the process of sharing atomic secrets. Intent on retaining the technological advantage until the creation of a "foolproof method of control," Truman endorsed the Atomic Energy Act, passed by Congress in 1946. It established the Atomic Energy Commission to supervise all atomic energy development in the United States and, under the tightest security, to authorize all nuclear activity in the nation at large. It also opened the way to a nuclear arms race once Russia developed its own bomb.
Nuclear Proliferation As the atomic bomb found its way into popular culture, Americans at first showed more excitement than fear. In Los Angeles, the "Atombomb Dancers" wiggled at the Burbank Burlesque Theater. In 1946, the Buchanan Brothers released a record called "Atomic Power," noting the brimstone fire from heaven that was "given by the mighty hand of God."
Anxiety lurked beneath the exuberance, though it did not surface while the United States held a nuclear monopoly. Then, in September 1949, reporters were called to the White House and told: "We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R." Over the Labor Day weekend, a U.S. Air Force weather reconnaissance plane on a routine mission had picked up air samples showing higher than normal radioactivity counts. Other samples confirmed the reading, and scientists soon concluded that Russia had conducted a nuclear test.
The American public was shocked. Suddenly the security of being the world's only atomic power had vanished. People wondered whether the Soviet test foreshadowed a nuclear attack. Harold C. Urey, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, summed up the feelings of many Americans: "There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb—that's two nations having it."
In early 1950, Truman authorized the development of a new hydrogen superbomb, potentially far more devastating than the atomic bomb. Edward Teller, a physicist on the Manhattan Project, was intrigued with the novelty of the puzzle. During the war, as other scientists struggled with the problem of fission, he had contemplated the possibility that fusion might release energy in even greater amounts. Now he had his chance to prove it.
By 1953, both the United States and the Soviet Union had unlocked the secret of the hydrogen bomb. As kilotons gave way to megatons, the stakes rose. The government remained quiet about MIKE, the first test of a hydrogen device in the Pacific Ocean in 1952, but rumors circulated that it had created a hole in the ocean floor 175 feet deep and a mile wide. Later, after the 1954 BRAVO test, Lewis Strauss, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, admitted that "an H-bomb can be made . . . large enough to take out a city," even New York. Then, in 1957, shortly after the news that the Soviets had successfully tested their first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Americans learned that the Soviets had lifted the first satellite, Sputnik, into outer space—with a rocket that could also deliver a hydrogen bomb.
The discovery of radioactive fallout added another dimension to the nuclear dilemma. Fallout became publicly known after the BRAVO blast in 1954 showered Japanese fishermen 85 miles away with radioactive dust. They became ill with radiation sickness, and several months later, one died. The Japanese, who had been the first to experience the effects of atomic weapons, were outraged and alarmed. But everywhere people began to realize the terrible consequences of the new weapons.
Authors in both the scientific and the popular press focused attention on radioactive fallout. Radiation, physicist Ralph Lapp observed, "cannot be felt and possesses all the terror of the unknown. It is something which evokes revulsion and helplessness—like a bubonic plague." Nevil Shute's best-selling 1957 novel On the Beach, and the film that followed, also sparked public awareness and fear. The story described a war that released so much radioactive waste that all life in the Northern Hemisphere disappeared, while the Southern Hemisphere awaited the same deadly fate. In 1959, when Consumer Reports warned of the contamination of milk with the radioactive isotope strontium-90, public alarm grew.
The discovery of fallout provoked a shelter craze. Bob Russell, a Michigan sheriff, declared that "to build a new home in this day and age without including such an obvious necessity as a fallout shelter would be like leaving out the bathroom 20 years ago." Good Housekeeping magazine carried a full-page editorial in November 1958 urging the construction of family shelters. More and more companies advertised readymade shelters. A firm in Miami reported numerous inquiries about shelters costing between $1,795 and $3,895, depending on capacity, and planned 900 franchises. Life magazine in 1955 featured an "H-Bomb Hideaway" for $3,000. By late 1960, the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization estimated that a million family shelters had been built.
The Nuclear West Nuclear Weapons Facilities in the 1950s
The bomb stimulated more than just shelter building. It sparked an enormous increase in defense spending and created a huge nuclear industry, particularly in the West. Contractors liked the region because of its antiunion attitudes; labor stability, they argued, would make it easier to meet government deadlines.
Nuclear Weapons Facilities in the 1950s
During World War II, a number of the Manhattan Project's major centers were located in the West. The plant at Hanford, Washington, was one of the most important producers of fissionable material, and the first atomic weapon had been produced at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Development in this area expanded after the war. Hanford continued to produce plutonium, a facility outside Denver made plutonium triggers for thermonuclear bombs, the new Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque provided the production engineering of nuclear bombs, and the Los Alamos laboratory remained a major atomic research center. In 1951, the United States opened the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles north of Las Vegas, to try out nuclear weapons, and the facility had a major impact on the city. The Chamber of Commerce offered schedules of test shots, and the mushroom cloud became the logo for the Southern Nevada telephone directory.
Defense spending promoted other development as well. Naval commands had headquarters in Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Honolulu. Radar sites, aimed at tracking incoming missiles, stretched all the way up to Alaska. The Boeing Company, located in Seattle, stimulated tremendous development in that city, as it produced B-47 and B-52 airplanes that were the U.S. Air Force's main delivery vehicles for nuclear bombs.
"Massive Retaliation" As Americans grappled with the implications of nuclear weapons, government policy came to depend increasingly on an atomic shield. The Soviet success in building its own bomb encouraged the conviction that America had to beef up its atomic forces. Truman authorized the development of a nuclear arsenal but also stressed conventional forms of defense. Eisenhower, however, found the effort fragmented and wasteful. Concerned with controlling the budget and cutting taxes, his administration decided to rely on atomic weapons rather than combat forces as the key to American defense.
Secretary of State Dulles developed the policy of threatening "massive retaliation." The United States, he declared, was willing and ready to use nuclear weapons against Communist aggression "at places of our own choosing." The policy allowed troop cutbacks and promised to be cost-effective by giving "more bang for the buck."
Massive retaliation provided for an all-or-nothing response, leaving no middle course, no alternatives between nuclear war and retreat. Still, it reflected Dulles's willingness to threaten direct retaliation to deter Soviet challenges around the world. "The ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art," he said. "If you cannot master it you inevitably get into war." Critics called the policy "brinkmanship" and wondered what would happen if the line was crossed in the new atomic age. Eisenhower himself was horrified when he saw reports indicating that a coordinated atomic attack could leave a nation "a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours." With characteristic caution, he did his best to ensure that the rhetoric of massive retaliation did not lead to war.
Atomic Protest As the arms race spiraled, critics demanded that it end. In 1956, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson pointed to "the danger of poisoning the atmosphere" and called for a halt to nuclear tests. Eisenhower did not respond but Dulles minimized the hazards of radiation by arguing, "From a health standpoint, there is greater danger from wearing a wrist watch with a luminous dial."
In 1957, activists organized SANE, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. One of its most effective advertisements featured internationally known pediatrician Benjamin Spock, looking down at a little girl with a frown on his face. "Dr. Spock is worried," the caption read, and the text below amplified on his concern. "I am worried," he said, "not so much about the effect of past tests but at the prospect of endless future ones. As the tests multiply, so will the damage to children—here and around the world."
Several years later, women who had worked with SANE took the protest movement a step further. As one activist later recalled, "This movement was inspired and motivated by mothers' love for children. . . . When they were putting their breakfasts on the table, they saw not only Wheaties and milk, but they also saw Strontium 90 and Iodine 131." To challenge continued testing, which dropped such lethal elements on all inhabitants of the globe, the protesters called on women throughout the country to suspend normal activities for a day and strike for peace. An estimated 50,000 women marched in 60 communities around the nation. Their slogans included "Let the Children Grow" and "End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race."
Pressure from many groups produced a political breakthrough and sustained it for a time. The superpowers began a voluntary moratorium on testing in the fall of 1958. It lasted until the Soviet Union resumed testing in September 1961, the United States the following March.
The Cold War at Home
Truman's Loyalty Program The Congressional Loyalty Program The Second Red Scare The Casualties of Fear
The Cold War also affected domestic affairs and led to the creation of an internal loyalty program that seriously violated civil liberties. Americans had feared radical subversion before and after the Russian Revolution (see Chapter 16, Chapter 21, and Chapter 22). Now the Soviet Union appeared ever more ominous in confrontations around the globe. Maps showed half the world colored red to dramatize the spread of the monolithic Communist system. As Americans began to suspect Communist infiltration at home, some determined to root out all traces of Communism inside the United States.
Truman's Loyalty Program When the Truman administration mobilized support for its containment program in the immediate postwar years, its rhetoric became increasingly shrill. Spokesmen contrasted American virtues with diabolical Russian designs. For Truman, the issue confronting the world was one of "tyranny or freedom." Attorney General J. Howard McGrath spoke of "many Communists in America," each bearing the "germ of death for society."
When administration officials perceived an internal threat to security after the discovery of classified documents in the offices of the allegedly pro-Communist Amerasia magazine, Truman appointed a Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty. Republican gains in the midterm elections of 1946 led him to try to head off a congressional loyalty probe that could be used for partisan ends, especially since Republicans had accused the Democrats of being "soft on Communism."
On the basis of the report from his temporary commission, Truman established a new Federal Employee Loyalty Program by executive decree in 1947. In the same week that he announced his containment policy, Truman ordered the FBI to check its files for evidence of subversive activity and to bring suspects before a new Civil Service Commission Loyalty Review Board. Initially, the program included safeguards and assumed that a challenged employee was innocent until proved guilty. But as the Loyalty Review Board assumed more power, it ignored individual rights. Employees about whom there was any doubt, regardless of proof, found themselves under attack, with little chance to fight back. Val Lorwin, met at the start of the chapter, was just one of many victims.
The Truman loyalty program examined several million employees and found grounds for dismissing only several hundred. Nonetheless, it bred the unwarranted fear of subversion, led to the assumption that absolute loyalty could be achieved, and legitimated investigatory tactics that were used irresponsibly to harm innocent individuals.
The Congressional Loyalty Program While Truman's loyalty probe investigated government employees, Congress launched its own program. In the early years of the Cold War, the law became increasingly explicit about what was illegal in the United States. The Smith Act of 1940 made it a crime to advocate or teach the forcible overthrow of the U.S. government. The McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, passed over Truman's veto, further circumscribed Communist activity by declaring that it was illegal to conspire to act in a way that would "substantially contribute" to establishing a totalitarian dictatorship in America and by requiring members of Communist organizations to register with the attorney general. The American Communist party, which had never been large, even in the Depression, declined still further. Membership, numbering about 80,000 in 1947, fell to 55,000 in 1950 and 25,000 in 1954.
The investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) contributed to that decline. Intent on rooting out subversion, HUAC probed the motion picture industry in 1947, claiming that left-wing sympathies were corrupting the American public. A frequent refrain in congressional hearings was "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" When 10 Hollywood figures called to testify refused to answer such questions by invoking their constitutional right to remain silent, Congress issued contempt citations, and they went to prison and served sentences ranging from six months to one year. At that point, Hollywood knuckled under and blacklisted anyone with even a marginally questionable past. No one on these lists could find jobs at the studios anymore.
Congress made a greater splash with the Hiss-Chambers case. Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist who had broken with the party in 1938 and had become a successful editor of Time, charged that Alger Hiss had been a Communist in the 1930s. Hiss was a distinguished New Dealer who had served in the Agriculture Department before becoming assistant secretary of state. Now out of the government, he was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He denied Chambers's charge, and the matter might have died there had not freshman congressman Richard Nixon taken up the case. Nixon finally extracted from Hiss an admission that he had once known Chambers. Outside the hearing room, Hiss sued Chambers for libel, whereupon Chambers changed his story and charged that Hiss was a Soviet spy.
Hiss was indicted for perjury for lying under oath about his former relationship with Chambers. The case made front-page news around the nation. Millions of Americans read about the case at about the same time they learned of Russia's first atomic explosion and the final victory of the Communist revolution in China. Chambers appeared unstable and changed his story several times. Yet Hiss, too, seemed contradictory in his testimony and never adequately explained how he had such close ties with members of the Communist party or how some copies of stolen State Department documents had been typed on a typewriter he had once owned. The first trial ended in a hung jury; the second trial, in January 1950, sent Hiss to prison for almost four years.
For many Americans, the Hiss case proved that a Communist threat indeed existed in the United States. It "forcibly demonstrated to the American people that domestic Communism was a real and present danger to the security of the nation," Richard Nixon declared after using the case to win a Senate seat from California and then the Republican vice presidential nomination in 1952. The case also led people to question the Democratic approach to the problem. Critics attacked Dean Acheson for supporting Hiss, his friend. They likewise questioned Truman's own commitment to protect the nation from internal subversion. The dramatic Hiss case helped justify the even worse witch-hunt that followed.
The Second Red Scare Senator Joseph McCarthy Senator Joseph McCarthy
The key anti-Communist warrior in the 1950s was Joseph R. McCarthy. Coming to the Senate from Wisconsin in 1946, McCarthy had an undistinguished career. As he began to contemplate reelection two years hence, he seized on the Communist issue. Truman had carried Wisconsin in 1948, and McCarthy saw in the Communist question a way of mobilizing Republican support. He first gained national attention with a speech before the Wheeling, West Virginia, Women's Club in February 1950, not long after the conviction of Alger Hiss. In that address, McCarthy brandished what he said was a list of 205 known Communists in the State Department. Pressed for details, McCarthy first said that he would release his list only to the president, then reduced the number of names to 57.
Senator Joseph McCarthy
Early reactions to McCarthy were mixed. A subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, after investigating, called his charge a "fraud and a hoax." Even other Republicans like Robert Taft and Richard Nixon questioned his effectiveness. As his support grew, however, Republicans realized his partisan value and egged him on. Senator John Bricker of Ohio allegedly told him, "Joe, you're a dirty s.o.b., but there are times when you've got to have an s.o.b. around, and this is one of them."
Senator Joseph McCarthy
McCarthy selected assorted targets. In the elections of 1950, he attacked Millard Tydings, the Democrat from Maryland who had chaired the subcommittee that dismissed McCarthy's first accusations. A doctored photograph, showing Tydings with deposed American Communist party head Earl Browder, helped bring about the defeat of Tydings. McCarthy blasted Dean Acheson the "Red Dean of the State Department" and slandered George C. Marshall, the architect of victory in World War II and a powerful figure in formulating Far Eastern policy, as a "man steeped in falsehood . . . who has recourse to the lie whenever it suits his convenience."
A demagogue throughout his career, McCarthy gained visibility through extensive press and television coverage. Playing on his tough reputation, he did not mind appearing disheveled, unshaven, and half sober. He used obscenity and vulgarity freely as he lashed out against his "vile and scurrilous" enemies.
McCarthy's tactics worked because of public alarm about the Communist threat. The Korean War revealed the aggressiveness of Communists in Asia. The arrest in 1950 of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg fed fears of internal subversion. The Rosenbergs, a seemingly ordinary American couple with two small children, were charged with stealing and transmitting atomic secrets to the Russians. To many Americans, it was inconceivable that the Soviets could have developed the bomb on their own. Treachery helped explain the Soviet explosion of an atomic device.
The next year, the Rosenbergs were found guilty of espionage. Judge Irving Kaufman expressed the rage of an insecure nation as he sentenced them to death. "Your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb," he charged, "has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, . . . and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason." Their execution in the electric chair reflected a national commitment to respond to the Communist threat.
When the Republicans won control of the Senate in 1952, McCarthy's power grew. He became chairman of the Government Operations Committee and head of its Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. He now had a stronger base and two dedicated assistants, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, who helped keep attention focused on the ostensible Communist threat. The lists of suspects, including Val Lorwin (introduced at the start of this chapter), continued to grow.
As McCarthy's anti-Communist witch-hunt continued, Eisenhower became uneasy. He disliked the senator but, recognizing his popularity, was reluctant to challenge him. At the height of his influence, polls showed that McCarthy had half the public behind him. With the country so inclined, Eisenhower compromised by voicing his disapproval quietly and privately.
With the help of Cohn and Schine, McCarthy pushed on, and finally he pushed too hard. In 1953, the army drafted Schine and then refused to allow the preferential treatment that Cohn insisted his colleague deserved. Angered, McCarthy began to investigate army security and even top-level army leaders. When the army charged that McCarthy was going too far, the Senate investigated the complaint.
The Army-McCarthy hearings began in April 1954 and lasted 36 days. Televised to a fascinated nationwide audience, they demonstrated the power of TV to shape people's opinions. Americans saw McCarthy's savage tactics on screen. He came across to viewers as irresponsible and destructive, particularly in contrast to Boston lawyer Joseph Welch, who argued the army's case with quiet eloquence and asked, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
The hearings shattered McCarthy's mystical appeal. In broad daylight, before a national television audience, his ruthless tactics offended millions. The Senate finally summoned the courage to condemn him for his conduct. Even conservatives turned against McCarthy because he was no longer limiting his venom to Democrats and liberals. Although McCarthy remained in office, his influence disappeared. Three years later, at the age of 48, he died a broken man.
Yet for a time he had exerted a powerful hold in the United States. "To many Americans," radio commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr., said, "McCarthyism is Americanism." Seizing upon the frustrations and anxieties of the Cold War, McCarthy struck a resonant chord. As his appeal grew, he put together a following that included both lower-class ethnic groups, who responded to the charges against established elites, and conservative midwestern Republicans. But his real power base was the Senate, where, particularly after 1952, conservative Republicans saw McCarthy as a means of reasserting their own authority. Their support encouraged the vicious crusade.
The Casualties of Fear The anti-Communist campaign kindled pervasive suspicion in American society. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, dissent no longer seemed safe. Civil servants, government workers, academics, and actors all came under attack and found that the right of due process often evaporated amid the Cold War Red Scare. Seasoned China experts lost their positions in the diplomatic service, and social justice legislation faltered.
This paranoia affected American life in countless ways. In New York, subway workers were fired when they refused to answer questions about their own political actions and beliefs. In Seattle, a fire department officer who denied current membership in the Communist party but refused to speak of his past was dismissed just 40 days before he reached the 25 years of service that would have qualified him for retirement benefits. Navajos in Arizona and New Mexico, facing starvation in the bitter winter of 1947-1948, were denied government relief because of charges that their communal way of life was communistic and therefore un-American. A Senate report branded homosexuals as unfit for government service, claiming they were subject to blackmail and thus a threat to national security. Racism became intertwined with the anti-Communist crusade when African American actor Paul Robeson was accused of Communist leanings for criticizing American foreign policy and denied opportunities to perform. Subsequently the State Department revoked his passport. Black author W. E. B. Du Bois, who actually joined the Communist party, faced even more virulent attacks and likewise lost his passport. Hispanic laborers faced deportation for membership in unions with left-wing sympathies. In 1949, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled 11 unions with a total membership of more than one million for alleged domination by Communists. Val Lorwin, met at the start of this chapter, weathered the storm of malicious accusations and was finally vindicated, but others were less lucky. They were the unfortunate victims as the United States became consumed by the passions of the Cold War.
Continuing Confrontations with Communists
Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs Fiasco The Cuban Missile Face-off Confrontation and Containment under Johnson
The Cold War continued into the 1960s and 1970s. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were both aggressive cold warriors who subscribed to the policies of their predecessors. Their commitment to stopping the spread of Communism kept the nation locked in the same bitter conflict that had dominated foreign policy in the 1950s and led to continuing global confrontations.
John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs Fiasco Cuban Missile Crisis
Kennedy, who won the presidency in 1960, was an activist eager to provide bold executive leadership. At 43, he was the youngest man ever elected president, and he hoped to use his youthful vigor to make good on his campaign promise to get the country moving again after the Eisenhower years. The new president was particularly determined to stand firm in the face of Russian power. During the campaign, he had declared: "The enemy is the communist system itself—implacable, insatiable, unceasing in its drive for world domination." In his inaugural address, he eloquently described the dangers and challenges the United States faced. "In the long history of the world," he cried out, "only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger." The United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty."
Kennedy perceived direct challenges from the Soviet Union almost from the beginning of his presidency. The first came at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in the spring of 1961. Cuban-American relations had been strained since Fidel Castro's revolutionary army had seized power in 1959. A radical regime in Cuba, leaning toward the Soviet Union, could provide a model for upheaval elsewhere in Latin America and threaten the venerable Monroe Doctrine. One initiative to counter the Communist threat was the Alliance for Progress, which provided social and economic assistance to the less-developed nations of the hemisphere. But other, more aggressive, responses were deemed necessary as well.
Cuban Missile Crisis
Just before Kennedy assumed office, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. The CIA, meanwhile, was covertly training anti-Castro exiles to storm the Cuban coast at the Bay of Pigs. The American planners assumed the invasion would lead to an uprising of the Cuban people against Castro. Told of the plan, Kennedy approved it.
The invasion, on April 17, 1961, was an unmitigated disaster. Cuban forces stopped the invaders on the beach, and there was no popular uprising. The United States stood exposed to the world, attempting to overthrow a sovereign government. It had broken agreements not to interfere in the internal affairs of hemispheric neighbors and had intervened clumsily and unsuccessfully.
Although chastened by the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy remained determined to deal sternly with the perceived Communist threat. Following a hostile meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, where discussion centered on the question of a permanent settlement for the divided city of Berlin, to prevent refugees from fleeing from East Germany to the West, Kennedy reacted aggressively. He asked Congress for $3 billion more in defense appropriations, for more men in the armed forces, and for funds for a civil defense fallout shelter program, explicitly warning of the threat of nuclear war. The crisis eased only when the USSR erected a wall in Berlin to seal off its section.
The Cuban Missile Face-off
The next year, a new crisis arose. Understandably fearful of the American threat to Cuban independence after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Fidel Castro sought and secured Soviet assistance. American aerial photographs taken in October 1962 revealed that the USSR had begun to place what Kennedy considered offensive missiles on Cuban soil, although Cuba insisted they were defensive. The missiles did not change the strategic balance significantly, for the Soviets could still wreak untold damage on American targets from more distant bases. But with Russian weapons installed just 90 miles from American shores, appearance was more important than reality. This time Kennedy was determined to win a confrontation with the Soviet Union over Cuba.
Kennedy went on nationwide TV to tell the American people about the missiles and to demand their removal. He declared that the United States would not shrink from the risk of nuclear war and announced a naval "quarantine"—not a blockade, which would have been an act of war—around Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from bringing in additional missiles.
As the Soviet ships steamed toward the blockade and the nations stood "eyeball to eyeball" at the brink, the world held its breath. After several days, the tension broke, but only because Khrushchev called the Soviet ships back. Khrushchev then sent a long letter, transmitted by teletype, to Kennedy pledging to remove the missiles if the United States lifted the quarantine and promised to stay out of Cuba altogether. A second letter demanded that America remove its missiles from Turkey as well. The United States agreed to the first letter, ignored the second, and said nothing about its intention, already voiced, of removing its own missiles from Turkey. With that, the crisis ended.
The Cuban missile crisis was the most terrifying confrontation of the Cold War. Yet the president emerged from it as a hero who had stood firm. His reputation was enhanced, and his party benefited a few weeks later in the congressional elections. As the relief began to fade, however, critics charged that what Kennedy saw as his finest hour was in fact an unnecessary crisis. One consequence of the affair was the installation of a Soviet-American hot line to avoid similar episodes in the future. Another consequence was the USSR's determination to increase its nuclear arsenal so that it would never again be exposed as inferior to the United States. Despite the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which prohibited atmospheric testing, the nuclear arms race continued.
Confrontation and Containment under Johnson After Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. An extraordinarily effective legislative leader (see Chapter 28), he had considerably less experience in foreign affairs. Yet he shared many of Kennedy's assumptions about the threat of Communism. His understanding of the past led him to believe that aggressors had to be stopped before they committed more aggression, as had been true in World War II. Like Eisenhower and Kennedy, Johnson believed in the domino theory: if one country in a region fell, others were bound to follow. He was determined to preserve American power and contain the Communist menace. He assumed he could treat foreign adversaries just as he treated political opponents in the United States.
In 1965, Johnson dispatched over 20,000 troops to the Dominican Republic in the West Indies, believing that "Castro-type elements" might win in a civil war there. In fact, the group Johnson called Communist was led by the former president, Juan Bosch, who had been overthrown by a military junta. Bosch ruefully pointed out that "this was a democratic revolution smashed by the leading democracy of the world." Johnson's credibility suffered badly from the episode.
The Quagmire of Vietnam
Roots of the Conflict The Start of U.S. Involvement in Vietnam Escalation Protesting the War Peace and Its Consequences Post-Vietnam Détente
The commitment to stopping the spread of Communism led to the massive U.S. involvement in Vietnam. That struggle tore the United States apart, wrought enormous damage in Southeast Asia, and finally forced a reevaluation of America's Cold War policies.
Roots of the Conflict The roots of the war extended far back in the past. Indochina had been a French colony since the mid-nineteenth century. During World War II, Japan occupied it but allowed French collaborators to administer internal affairs. An independence movement, led by the Communist organizer and revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, sought to expel the Japanese conquerors. In 1945, the Allied powers faced the decision of how to deal with Ho and his nationalist movement.
Franklin Roosevelt, like Woodrow Wilson, believed in self-determination and wanted to end colonialism. But France was determined to regain its colony, and by the time of his death, Roosevelt had backed down. Meanwhile, Ho Chi Minh had established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945. Although the new government enjoyed widespread support, the United States refused to recognize it.
A long, bitter struggle broke out between French and Vietnamese forces, which became entangled with the larger Cold War. President Truman was less concerned about ending colonialism than with checking Soviet power. He needed France to balance the Soviets in Europe, and that meant cooperating with France in Vietnam.
Although Ho did not have close ties to the Soviet Union and was committed to his independent nationalist crusade, Truman and his advisers, who saw Communism as a monolithic force, assumed wrongly that Ho took orders from Moscow. Hence, in 1950, the United States formally recognized the French puppet government in Vietnam, and by 1954, the United States was paying over three-quarters of the cost of France's Indochina war.
After Eisenhower took office, France's position in Southeast Asia deteriorated. Secretary of State Dulles was eager to assist the French, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff even contemplated using nuclear weapons, but Eisenhower refused to intervene directly. As a French fortress at Dien Bien Phu finally fell to Ho's forces, an international conference in Geneva divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel, with elections promised in 1956 to unify the country and determine its political fate.
The Start of U.S. Involvement in Vietnam The Vietnam War
Elections were never held, and two Vietnamese states emerged. Ho Chi Minh held power in the north, while in the south Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, a fierce anti-Communist, formed a separate government. Intent on securing stability in Southeast Asia, the United States supported the Diem government and refused to sign the Geneva pact. In the next few years, American aid increased and military advisers—675 by the time Eisenhower left office—began to assist the South Vietnamese. The United States had taken its first steps toward direct involvement in a ruinous war halfway around the world that would escalate out of control.
The Vietnam War
John Kennedy's commitment to Cold War victory led him to expand the American role in Vietnam, the country he once called the "cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia." Now resolved to resist the spread of Communism, Kennedy and his closest associates were confident of success. As Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara observed, "North Vietnam will never beat us. They can't even make ice cubes." During the Kennedy administration, the number of advisers had risen from 675 to more than 16,000.
Despite American backing, South Vietnamese leader Diem was rapidly losing support in his own country. Buddhist priests burned themselves alive in the capital of Saigon to protest the corruption and arbitrariness of Diem's regime. After receiving assurances that the United States would not object to an internal coup, South Vietnamese military leaders assassinated Diem and seized the government. Kennedy understood the importance of popular support for the South Vietnamese government if that country was to maintain its independence. But he was reluctant to withdraw and let the Vietnamese solve their own problems.
Lyndon Johnson shared the same reservations. After an early briefing, he said he felt like a catfish that had "grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it." Soon after assuming the presidency, Johnson made a fundamental decision that guided policy for the next four years. South Vietnam was more unstable than ever after the assassination of Diem. Guerrillas, known as Viet Cong, challenged the regime, sometimes covertly, sometimes through the National Liberation Front, their political arm. Aided by Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese, the insurgent Viet Cong slowly gained ground. Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, told Johnson that if he wanted to save that country, and indeed the whole region, he had to stand firm. "I am not going to lose Vietnam," Johnson replied. "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went."
In the election campaign of 1964, Johnson posed as a man of peace. "We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys," he declared. "We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." He criticized those who suggested moving in with American bombs. But secretly he was planning to escalate the American role.
Escalation
In August 1964, Johnson cleverly obtained congressional authorization for the war by announcing that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had made unprovoked attacks on American destroyers in the international waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, 30 miles from North Vietnam. Only later did it become clear that the American ships had violated the territorial waters of North Vietnam by assisting South Vietnamese commando raids in offshore combat zones. With the details of the attack still unclear, Johnson used the episode to obtain from Congress a resolution giving him authority to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The Gulf of Tonkin resolution gave Johnson the leverage he sought. As he noted, it was "like grandma's nightshirt—it covered everything."
Military escalation began in earnest in February 1965, after Viet Cong forces killed 7 Americans and wounded 109 in an attack on an American base at Pleiku. Johnson responded by authorizing retaliatory bombing of North Vietnam to cut off the flow of supplies and to ease pressure on South Vietnam. He personally authorized every raid, boasting that the air force "can't even bomb an outhouse without my approval." A few months later, the president sent American ground troops into action. This marked the crucial turning point in the Americanization of the Vietnam War. Only 25,000 American soldiers were in Vietnam at the start of 1965; by the end of the year there were 184,000. The number swelled to 385,000 in 1966, to 485,000 in 1967, and to 543,000 in 1968.
American forces became direct participants in the fight to prop up a dictatorial regime in faraway South Vietnam. Although a somewhat more effective government headed by Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky was finally established, the level of violence increased. Saturation bombing of North Vietnam continued. Fragmentation bombs, killing and maiming countless civilians, and napalm, which seared off human flesh, were used extensively. Similar destruction wracked South Vietnam.
Protesting the War Vietnam War Protesters The Vietnam War
Americans began to protest their involvement in the war. As escalation began, 82 percent of the public felt that American forces should stay in Vietnam until the Communist elements withdrew. Then students began to question basic Cold War assumptions about battling Communism around the globe. The first antiwar teach-in took place in March 1965 at the University of Michigan. Others soon followed. Initially, both supporters and opponents of the war appeared at the teach-ins, but soon the sessions became more like antiwar rallies than instructional affairs. Boxer Muhammad Ali legitimated draft resistance when he declared, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong," and refused military induction. Working through Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other organizations, radical activists campaigned against the draft, attacked ROTC units on campus, and sought to discredit firms that produced the destructive tools of war (see Chapter 29 for a full discussion of student activism). "Make love, not war," students proclaimed.
Vietnam War Protesters
The antiwar movement expanded. Women Strike for Peace, the most forceful women's antiwar organization, mobilized support by saying, "Stop! Don't drench the jungles of Asia with the blood of our sons. Don't force our sons to kill women and children whose only crime is to live in a country ripped by civil war." Students became even more shrill. "Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?" they chanted. In 1967, some 300,000 people marched in New York City. In Washington, D.C., 100,000 tried to close down the Pentagon.
Working-class and middle-class Americans began to sour on the war at the time of the Tet offensive, celebrating the lunar new year in early 1968. The North Vietnamese mounted a massive attack on provincial capitals and district towns in South Vietnam. In Saigon, they struck the American embassy, Tan Son Nhut air base, and the presidential palace. Though beaten back, they won a psychological victory. American audiences watched the fighting on television, as they had for several years, seeing images of burning huts and wounded soldiers each evening. During the Tet offensive, American TV networks showed scenes of a kind never screened before. One such clip, from NBC News, appears here in still photograph form. Viewers who watched the television clip saw the corpse drop to the ground, blood spouting from his head. Gazing at such graphic representations of death and destruction, many Americans wondered about their nation's purposes and actions—indeed, about whether the war could be won.
When Richard Nixon assumed office in 1969, he understood the need to heal the rifts that the war had torn through American society. A lonely, aloof man who had gained political prominence as one of the nation's most aggressive anti-Communists, he now promised to bring the nation together. He gave top priority to extricating the United States from Vietnam while still seeking a way to win the war. To that end, he announced the Nixon Doctrine, which asserted that the United States would aid friends and allies but would not undertake the full burden of troop defense. The policy of Vietnamization entailed removing American forces and replacing them with Vietnamese troops. At the same time, Americans launched ferocious air attacks on North Vietnam. "Let's blow the hell out of them," Nixon instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Between 1968 and 1972, American troop strength dropped from 543,000 to 39,000, and the reduction won political support for Nixon at home. Yet as the transition occurred, the South Vietnamese steadily lost ground to the Viet Cong.
The Vietnam War
War protests multiplied in 1969 and 1970. In November 1969, as a massive protest demonstration took place in Washington, D.C., stories surfaced about a horrifying massacre of civilians in Vietnam the year before. My Lai, a small village in South Vietnam, was allegedly harboring 250 members of the Viet Cong. An American infantry company was helicoptered in to clear out the village. C Company had already taken heavy combat losses as it prepared to confront the enemy soldiers. Instead of troops, it found women, children, and old men. Perhaps hardened to the random destruction already wrought by the American military, perhaps concerned with the sometimes fuzzy distinction between combatants and civilians in a guerrilla war, the American forces lost control and mowed down the civilians in cold blood. Private Paul Meadlo, one of the soldiers involved, later recalled:
We huddled them up. We made them squat down. . . . I poured about four clips into the group. . . . The mothers was hugging their children. . . . Well, we kept right on firing. They was waving their arms and begging. . . . I still dream about it. About the women and children in my sleep. Some days . . . some nights, I can't even sleep.
Much as Nixon wanted to defuse opposition to the war, he was determined not to lose the struggle either. Realizing that the Vietnamese relied on supplies funneled through Cambodia, Nixon announced in mid-1970 that American and Vietnamese troops were invading that country to clear out Communist enclaves there. The United States, he said, would not stand by as a "pitiful helpless giant" when there were actions it could take to stem the Communist advance.
Nixon's invasion of Cambodia brought renewed demonstrations on college campuses, some with tragic results. At Kent State University in Ohio, the antiwar response was fierce. The day after the president announced his moves, disgruntled students gathered downtown. Worried about the crowd, the local police called in sheriff's deputies to disperse the students. The next evening, groups of students collected on the college grounds. Assembling around the ROTC building, they began throwing firecrackers and rocks at the structure, which had become a hated symbol of the war. Then they set it on fire and watched it burn to the ground.
The governor of Ohio ordered the National Guard to the university. Tension grew, and finally the situation exploded. The Guardsmen watched as students gathered on campus. Though most were so far away they could not have reached the troops, the soldiers reacted by firing without provocation on the students. When the shooting stopped, four students lay dead, nine wounded. Two of the dead had been demonstrators, who were more than 250 feet away when shot. The other two were innocent bystanders, almost 400 feet from the troops.
Students around the country, as well as other Americans, were outraged by the attack. Many were equally disturbed about a similar attack at Jackson State University in Mississippi. As students there returned to their dormitories one evening, they saw police officers and National Guardsmen responding to a bonfire. A few taunted the law officers. The troops responded without warning by firing 460 rounds of automatic weapon fire into a women's dormitory. When the gunfire ceased, two people were dead, more wounded. The dead, however, were black students at a black institution, and white America paid less attention to this attack.
In 1971, the Vietnam War made major headlines once more when the New York Times began publishing a secret Department of Defense account of American involvement. The so-called Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a defense analyst, gave Americans a firsthand look at the fabrications and faulty assumptions that had guided the steady expansion of the struggle. Even though the study stopped with the Johnson years, the Nixon administration was furious and tried, without success, to block publication.
Peace and Its Consequences Vietnam remained a political football as Nixon ran for reelection in 1972. Negotiations aimed at a settlement were under way, and just days before the election, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced, "Peace is at hand." When South Vietnam seemed to balk at the proposed settlement, however, the administration responded with the most intensive bombing campaign of the war. Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, was hit hard, and North Vietnamese harbors were mined. Only in the new year was a cease-fire finally signed.
The conflict in Vietnam lingered on into the spring of 1975. When at last the North Vietnamese consolidated their control over the entire country, Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor as president, called for another $1 billion in aid, even as the South Vietnamese were abandoning arms and supplies in chaotic retreat. But Congress refused, leaving South Vietnam's crumbling government to fend for itself. Republicans hailed Kissinger for having finally freed the United States from the Southeast Asian quagmire. Antiwar critics condemned him for remaining involved for so long. The New Republic wryly observed that Kissinger brought peace to Vietnam in the same way Napoleon brought peace to Europe: by losing.
The long conflict had enormous consequences. Disillusionment with the war undermined assumptions about America's role in world affairs. In the longest war in its history, the United States lost almost 58,000 men, with far more wounded or maimed. Blacks and Chicanos suffered more than whites, since they were disproportionately represented in combat units. Many minority men saw military service as a means of advancement. In 1965, 24 percent of all soldiers killed in Vietnam were African American—a figure far higher than their percentage of the population as a whole. Financially, the nation spent over $150 billion on the unsuccessful war. Domestic reform slowed, then stopped. Cynicism about the government increased, and American society was deeply divided. Only time would heal the wounds.
MAJOR EVENTS OF THE COLD WAR
Year
Event Effect
1946
Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech First Western "declaration" of the Cold War
George F. Kennan's long telegram Spoke of Soviet insecurity and the need for containment
1947
George F. Kennan's article signed "Mr. X" Elaborated on arguments in the telegram
Truman Doctrine Provided economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey
Federal Employee Loyalty Program Sought to root out subversion in the U.S. government
HUAC investigation of the motion picture industry Sought to expose Communist influences in the movies
1948
Marshall Plan Provided massive American economic aid in rebuilding postwar Europe
Berlin airlift Brought in supplies when USSR closed off land access to the divided city
1949
NATO Created a military alliance to withstand a possible Soviet attack
First Soviet atomic bomb Ended the American nuclear monopoly
Communist victory in China Made Americans fear the worldwide spread of Communism
1950
Conviction of Alger Hiss Seemed to bear out Communist danger at home
Joseph McCarthy's first charges Launched aggressive anti-Communist campaign in the United States
NSC-68 Called for vigilance and increased military spending to counter the Communist threat
Outbreak of the Korean War North Korean invasion of South Korea viewed as part of Soviet conspiracy
1953
Armistice in Korea Brought little change after years of bitter fighting
1954
Vietnamese victory over French at Dien Bien Phu Early triumph for nationalism in Southeast Asia
Army-McCarthy hearings Brought downfall of Joseph McCarthy
1961
Invasion at the Bay of Pigs Showed U.S. efforts to check the spread of Communism in the Americas
1962
Cuban missile crisis Showed U.S. determination to resist Soviet intrusion in Cuba
1973
Cease-fire in Vietnam Allowed the United States to withdraw from Vietnam
1975
North Vietnamese victory in Vietnam Ended the war and allowed for unification of Vietnam
Post-Vietnam Détente Richard Nixon Arrives in China Nixon and Brezhnev at SALT Signing
If the Republicans' Vietnam policy was a questionable success, accomplishments were impressive in other areas. Nixon, the consummate Red-baiter of the past, dealt imaginatively and successfully with the major Communist powers, reversing the direction of American policy since the Second World War.
Nixon's most dramatic step was establishing better relations with the People's Republic of China. In the two decades since Mao Zedong's victory in the Chinese revolution in 1949, the United States had refused to recognize the Communist government on the mainland, insisting that Jiang Jieshi's rump regime on Taiwan alone was rightful government of the Chinese people. In 1971, with an eye on the upcoming elections, Nixon began softening his administration's rigid stance. After the Chinese invited an American table tennis team to visit the mainland, the United States eased some trading restrictions. Then Nixon announced that he intended to visit China the following year. He suspected that he could use Chinese friendship as a bargaining chip when he dealt with the Soviet Union. He acknowledged what most nations already knew: Communism was not monolithic. He believed that he could open a dialogue with the Chinese Communists without political harm, for he had long ago established his anti-Communist credentials. Finally, he recognized that the press and television coverage of a dramatic trip could boost his image, as indeed it did.
Nixon went to China in February 1972. He met with Chinese leaders Mao Zedong and Zou Enlai (Chou En-lai), talked about international problems, exchanged toasts, and saw some of the major sights. Wherever he went, American television cameras followed, helping introduce to the American public a nation about which it knew little. Though formal diplomatic relations were not yet restored, détente between the two countries had begun.
Richard Nixon Arrives in China
Seeking to play one Communist state against the other, Nixon also visited Russia, where he was likewise warmly welcomed. At a cordial summit meeting, the president and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I). In addition to this move to limit missile stockpiles, the two nations agreed to cooperate in space and to ease long-standing restrictions on trade. Business applauded the new approach, and most Americans approved of détente.
Nixon and Brezhnev at SALT Signing
When Gerald Ford assumed office, he followed the policies begun under Nixon, even if he ceased calling the approach détente. He continued the strategic arms limitation talks that provided hope for eventual nuclear disarmament, which culminated in the even more comprehensive SALT II agreement, signed but never ratified during Jimmy Carter's presidency.
Timeline
1945
Yalta Conference
Roosevelt dies; Harry Truman becomes president
Potsdam Conference
1946
American plan for control of atomic energy fails
Atomic Energy Act
Iran crisis
Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech
1947
Truman Doctrine
Federal Employee Loyalty Program
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigates the movie industry
1948
Marshall Plan launched
Berlin airlift
Israel created by the United Nations
Hiss-Chambers case
Truman elected president
1949
Soviet Union tests atomic bomb
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established
George Orwell, 1984
Mao Zedong's forces win Chinese civil war; Jiang Jieshi flees to Taiwan
1950
Truman authorizes development of the hydrogen bomb
Alger Hiss convicted
Joseph McCarthy's Wheeling (W. Va.) speech on subversion
NSC-68
McCarran Internal Security Act
1950-1953
Korean War
1951
Japanese-American treaty
1952
Dwight D. Eisenhower elected president
McCarthy heads Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee
1953
Stalin dies; Khrushchev consolidates power
East Germans stage anti-Soviet demonstrations
Shah of Iran returns to power in CIA-supported coup
1954
Fall of Dien Bien Phu ends French control of Indochina
Geneva Conference
Guatemalan government overthrown with CIA help
Mao's forces shell Quemoy and Matsu
Army-McCarthy hearings
1956
Suez incident
Hungarian "freedom fighters" suppressed
Eisenhower reelected
1957
Russians launch Sputnik satellite
1958
U.S. troops sent to support Lebanese government
1959
Castro deposes Batista in Cuba
1960
John F. Kennedy elected president
1961
Bay of Pigs invasion fails
Khrushchev and Kennedy meet in Berlin
Berlin Wall constructed
1962
Cuban missile crisis
1963
Buddhist demonstrations in Vietnam
President Diem assassinated in Vietnam
Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president
1964
Gulf of Tonkin resolution
Johnson reelected
1965
Vietnam conflict escalates
Marines sent to Dominican Republic
1967-1968
Antiwar demonstrations
1968
Tet offensive in Vietnam
Richard Nixon elected president
My Lai incident
1969
Nixon Doctrine announced
Moratorium against the Vietnam War
SALT talks begin
1970
U.S. invasion of Cambodia
Shootings at Kent State and Jackson State universities
1971
New York Times publishes the Pentagon Papers
1972
Nixon visits People's Republic of China and Soviet Union
Nixon reelected
SALT I treaty on nuclear arms
1973
Vietnam cease-fire agreement
1975
South Vietnam falls to the Communists; end of the Vietnam War
© Copyright 2001 by Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc.
