Chapter 8
Early Cold War politics, 1945–74
Cold War rivalry between nuclear powers—the United States and the Soviet Union—set the tone and substance of American politics from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The Cold War dictated nearly every aspect of American politics. Bipartisan foreign policy prevailed until the Vietnam War in the 1960s, but this did not carry over to elections, domestic issues, or day-to-day politics.
Hand-to-hand political combat was conducted increasingly through television, which inevitably increased the cost of campaigns. Along with television, the other most significant change in American politics came with the struggle to overcome racial segregation and to assure equal voting rights for blacks. One of the ironies of this expanded electorate was that on average only about half of the electorate bothered to vote in presidential elections, a continuation of a trend that began at the turn of the twentieth century. The rise of consumer culture in place of mass political culture, voter apathy, and arguably voting restrictions decreased voter turnout. At the same time, the presidency gained more power in the midst of the Cold War, military interventions in foreign countries, and the continued expansion of the regulatory and welfare state.
The New Deal Democratic political coalition remained in place until the 1960s. It was an uneasy alliance of Northern urban machines, organized labor, Southern courthouse rings, and volunteer activist organizations throughout the nation. These Democrats often had different views about national domestic issues, but they were held together by Cold War unity, party control of Congress, and patronage. Democrats tapped into general public support for welfare programs. Republicans relied on anti-New Deal ideology to motivate party faithful, but did not challenge overturning the entire welfare state. Indeed, Republicans supported its incremental growth.
Many liberals such as Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace hoped to continue the wartime alliance of the Big Three—United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The willful disregard by Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, of the agreements reached at Yalta in 1945 by Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Stalin had increased tensions within the alliance even before Roosevelt’s death. As hostilities intensified, profound fears grew of communist subversion at home. The Communist Party, although small in membership, had gained influence during the Second World War in some unions and liberal groups. The discovery of Soviet spy rings in government encouraged a “Red Scare.” Grassroots anticommunist crusaders launched hunts for suspected communists while organizing patriotic activities in their communities. Anticommunist themes were found in movies, television programs, pulp books, and even comic books. On the Sabbath, Jews and Christians continued to hear anticommunist messages. At the same time, anticommunist liberals undertook their own campaign to root out communist involvement in unions, civic groups, and political organizations.
After fourteen years of Democratic control of the White House and Congress, Republicans took control of Congress in the 1946 midterm election, gaining fifty-five House seats and twelve Senate seats. Democrats fared well only in the South. Republican candidates, such as Richard Nixon running for Congress in Southern California, took advantage of popular anticommunist sentiment to win the election. Republicans saw the advantages of an anticommunist crusade that targeted liberal groups once tied to communists.
After Republicans won control of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) opened hearings into communist influence in Hollywood, universities, labor unions, industry, and government. Under increasing pressure in Mar 1947, Truman ordered the FBI to investigate all federal employees. In this probe more than three hundred employees resigned—some for personal reasons such as homosexuality, which they did not want revealed publicly by their supervisors. For those questioned by the FBI or HUAC, the only way to prove their loyalty was to “name names” of others involved in communist activities. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, exploited anticommunist fears, heightened by the outbreak of war in Korea in 1950. His bellicose style and wild charges led Truman to call these tactics McCarthyism, a name that stuck in describing this period. While using the communist issue, Republicans tapped into widespread postwar discontent over housing shortages, wage-price controls, and scandals in the Truman administration.
The Republican-controlled 80th Congress pushed through tax cuts, a balanced budget, a constitutional amendment establishing a two-term limit for presidents, and the controversial Taft-Hartley Act. Southern and western lawmakers supported the law to lure businesses to their regions. Organized labor railed against the bill, which curtailed union activities and allowed states to enact “right-to-work” legislation banning compulsory union membership. Most southern states did so to attract northern factory jobs. Truman vetoed the legislation, only to have Congress override his veto. That veto cemented his support from organized labor.
In 1948 Republicans again nominated Thomas Dewey. To prove his liberalism and win black votes, Truman delivered to Congress in February 1948 new civil rights legislation, which many southern Democrats opposed. At the Democratic National Convention, Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis, successfully pushed through a plank supporting human rights for racial minorities. In response, Mississippi and Alabama delegates bolted the convention to form the States’ Rights Party. Labeled the Dixiecrats, the party nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. After the Dixiecrats walked out, Truman signed executive orders integrating the armed forces and federal bureaucracy.
At the same time, Truman faced a threat on his left when Henry Wallace accepted the nomination of the Progressive Party. Wallace called for cooperation with the Soviet Union and denounced Truman’s aggressive foreign policy. Wallace’s campaign failed to gain political traction in the larger electorate.
Seeking to place his opponents on the defense, Truman called a special session of Congress, inviting Republicans to try to pass their agenda. When Congress enacted no new legislation, Truman labeled them “the do-nothing, good-for-nothing” Congress. He pursued a vigorous slashing campaign warning that Dewey represented the same forces that led to the Great Depression and fascism in Germany. Crowds turning out at stops along his 30,000-mile railway speaking tour responded, “Give ’em hell, Harry.” Dewey, convinced by the polls that the election was his, played it safe by not attacking Truman. He was stiff, dull, and banal on the campaign trail. He also appeared arrogant when he announced the names of his cabinet before Election Day.
Truman won a stunning upset, getting 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189. Truman’s support for civil rights rallied 77 percent of blacks. In a low turnout election, unions helped Democrats at the polls. Republicans also lost Congress. Thurmond’s Dixiecrats captured four southern states, in all of which Thurmond was listed as the Democratic candidate. Voters gave Wallace only a million and half votes, although his tally in New York tipped the state to Dewey.
This victory should have provided a mandate to achieve Truman’s promise of a “Fair Deal.” His program centered on comprehensive national health insurance and a massive employment program through public works. Both measures failed to gain support in the conservative-dominated Congress. A series of scandals involving corruption within the administration added to Truman’s second-term woes. A stalemated war in Korea (1950–53) grew increasingly unpopular. On the whole, Truman’s call for a Fair Deal resulted, in the end, in a small deal.
Having lost five presidential elections in a row, Republicans believed that 1952 provided them with an excellent chance to win. Midwestern conservatives, although still tainted with charges of prewar isolationism, fervently believed that Republicans had lost by trying to imitate the New Deal with Willkie and Dewey. They rallied to Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican.” Their hopes were dashed when Dwight D. Eisenhower, former commander of the Allied invasion of Europe during World War Two, declared his candidacy.
After Eisenhower and Taft went toe to toe in the primaries, Eisenhower supporters won the nomination for their candidate at the convention when disputed Taft delegates from Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana were not seated. To both appease the conservative wing of the party and to provide regional balance, Eisenhower selected as his running mate Senator Richard Nixon of California. Nixon had gained a national reputation for heading the congressional investigation of alleged Soviet agent Alger Hiss, a former high-ranking State Department official.
Democrats turned to the eloquent Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. The Korean War, revelations of corruption in Truman’s administration, and grassroots anticommunism hindered him. Exploiting Eisenhower’s magnetic personality, Republicans won with “I like Ike.” The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket swept the nation with 55 percent of the popular vote, giving Republicans 442 electoral votes to a meager 89 for Stevenson, who failed even to carry his home state. Republicans carried four Southern states, Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and Texas, the sixth most populous state in the country. Eisenhower’s popularity enabled Republicans to gain control of Congress, but by 1954 weak Republican leadership enabled Democrats to regain it.
In office Eisenhower largely accepted the modern welfare state bequeathed to him by the New Deal and focused on foreign affairs—negotiating a truce in Korea, and confronting crises in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. In a booming economy, he remained a fiscal conservative, but he expanded Social Security benefits and launched an enormous federal program to build new waterways and the interstate highway system. When the Soviet Union launched the world’s first space satellite, Sputnik, the president came out strongly for federal aid to public education, a decisive turning point in education policy. Faced with a powerful conservative wing in his own party, Eisenhower behind the scenes supported a Senate measure to censure Senator McCarthy, shown opposite, in November 1954 after the Wisconsin Congressman charged top brass in the U.S. Army of harboring communists in the military. The Supreme Court, under Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, issued its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). For the first time in the nation’s history, racial segregation in public places was ruled unconstitutional.
Eisenhower won reelection in 1956. With Southern Democrats hostile to civil rights, and with Republicans almost universally in favor, Eisenhower took 39 percent of the black vote in 1956. In 1957, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The bill created the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a civil rights division in the Justice Department.
8. Senator Joseph McCarthy made a political career out of denouncing communist infiltration in government, gaining widespread news coverage. In 1954 the U.S. Senate voted to censure McCarthy for over-reaching in his prosecution of suspected communists.
At the end of his second term Eisenhower remained popular. As a soldier who had fought in two world wars and a president who led the nation through a series of international crises and the beginnings of the civil rights revolution, he understood the profound changes occurring in postwar America. In his farewell address, he warned of rise of the “military-industrial complex” that had emerged with the Cold War.
In 1960, Democrats nominated the telegenic forty-two-year-old senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. He entered the 1960 election opposed by many liberals, including FDR’s widow, Eleanor Roosevelt. In fending off his principal liberal challenger, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, in the primaries, Kennedy outspent and out-maneuvered his opponent. His campaign manager, his brother Bobby, used dirty tricks and spread unfair gossip that Humphrey had been a draft-dodger during World War Two, a sharp contrast to John, a war hero. After winning the nomination, Kennedy astutely selected Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, the Senate majority leader, as his running mate.
The Republicans nominated Vice President Nixon. Having traveled the globe on Eisenhower’s behalf, Nixon pitted his experience in foreign affairs against the inexperienced Kennedy. Any concerns about that inexperience were dispelled, however, during the first-ever televised presidential debate in which the recently ill Nixon appeared tired and the telegenic Kennedy allayed any fears about his understanding of foreign affairs. Kennedy’s campaign gained further momentum when he phoned the wife of jailed civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been arrested in Georgia for demonstrating against racial segregation. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, reinforced his image as a candidate of all the people by speaking on the need for religious toleration and religious diversity in American society.
The 1960 election proved to be one of the closest in American history. Turnout for this election, with 64.3 percent of eligible voters casting ballots, was the highest in modern history. With more than sixty-eight million votes cast, a difference of only 112,803 gave Kennedy the election. Large cities went Democratic, but charges of voter fraud in Chicago marred the victory. Kennedy carried Catholics, Jews, organized labor, and blacks. Despite Lyndon Johnson’s presence on the ticket, Nixon took Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. With Johnson on the ticket, Democrats carried Texas and other key southern states that enabled Kennedy to win. His support for black civil rights and his Roman Catholicism alienated many voters in the Protestant and segregated South. Still, he carried the rest of it, except Mississippi and Alabama, whose electors cast their votes for a segregationist Democrat, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia. The West went for Nixon. Kennedy had put together an uneasy alliance of Northeastern, urban, and Catholic liberals and conservative southerners. He promised to lead America into the “New Frontier.” Congress continued under control of the conservative southern Democratic and Republican coalition.
In early 1961, a failed U.S. invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba nearly ruined Kennedy’s presidency. A showdown with the Soviet Union a year later when the Soviets placed missiles in Cuba almost led to nuclear war. His ambitious New Frontier domestic program in education, health, and welfare stalled in Congress. A rising civil rights movement pressured the administration to enact new legislation, but Kennedy could not persuade Congress to act.
The nation’s conscience was brutally awakened in Birmingham, Alabama, in April 1963 when local officials broke up a peaceful march against segregation organized by Martin Luther King Jr. Americans watching the events on television were outraged to see police with dogs and fire hoses attacking civil rights demonstrators. Three months later Kennedy spoke to the nation asking, “Are we to say to the world … that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes?” He called on Congress to pass legislation integrating schools and banning segregation in public facilities. In August 1963, thousands of civil rights activists marched on Washington. King electrified the crowd by declaring that he had a dream that “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands” to proclaim “I’m free at last.”
Legislation was continuing to languish in Congress when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Johnson set out to fulfill the late president’s promise by pushing civil rights and other pieces of legislation that were stalled in Congress. Pulling out all stops, Johnson, the first southern president since Wilson, got through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, barring discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The measure would not have passed the Senate without Republican support.
At the same time Johnson called for a “war on poverty.” In addition to more federal funding for primary through higher education, the president initiated job training, work relief, adult education, rural assistance, and loans to minority businesses. All were designed, as he promised, to eliminate poverty in a generation.
Johnson’s election to the White House in 1964 was a foregone conclusion, even if Republicans had put up a stronger candidate. They nominated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a staunch conservative who excited the right of the party that opposed the liberal Eastern wing. Goldwater, who barely won the nomination against Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, proved to be an easy target. He had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He did not help matters when he declared in his nomination speech that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” thus opening the door to charges of extremism. Johnson trounced the Republican, winning more than 60 percent of the vote and an astounding 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 52. Goldwater barely carried his own state of Arizona, but won the Deep South. Democrats gained thirty-seven seats in Congress, ensuring that liberals dominated both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue for the first time since 1938.
Given this mandate, Johnson called for the creation of a Great Society and pressed for historic social legislation, including Medicare and Medicaid, providing national health insurance for the elderly and needy. Congress passed legislation for funding federal aid to education programs from kindergarten to graduate school. Programs for urban development, urban transit, and public television were established. Congress liberalized immigration and approved the Voting Rights Act (1965), which provided federal oversight of elections in the South. Johnson promised to eliminate poverty in ten years, rebuild American cities, educate all Americans, provide meaningful jobs, and improve race relations.
The Great Society programs both responded to and promoted social changes brought about by the civil rights movement. The demand for civil rights and growing racial pride among blacks spilled into other ethnic groups including Mexican Americans, Asians, and Native Americans. More radical liberation movements among these groups sprang up. Black leaders Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown turned to revolutionary black nationalism and separatism. The rise of a new feminist movement, led by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, also reflected the emergence of a radical consciousness concerning rights and self-identity. They called for equal rights for women and the right to abortion. In 1969, male homosexuals rioted against abusive police practices at New York’s Stonewall bar. These liberation movements challenged the traditional vision of the American “melting pot.”
9. Student marchers at University of California, Berkeley in 1965 demanded free speech after the university tried to ban the distribution of political literature on campus. The next year Republican Ronald Reagan was elected governor, playing on voter backlash to campus protests.
Johnson’s Great Society raised high expectations in these groups, while creating a backlash among many middle-class and blue-collar whites in the North and the South. Racial riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles, followed by major riots in Chicago and other cities, accelerated this backlash. The following summer, in 1966, race riots broke out in thirty-eight cities across America. The president’s decision to escalate a small counter-insurgency effort in Vietnam into a full-scale war sparked protests on college campuses—like the one at the University of California, Berkeley—that spread into a far-reaching antiwar movement as the Vietnam War intensified and more American soldiers were killed. By 1968, liberals within Johnson’s own party broke ranks with him.
When antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota showed surprising strength in the New Hampshire primary, Robert Kennedy announced he was entering the race. In response to the announcement, Johnson told a surprised nation that he would not seek reelection. The following month, civil rights leader King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Major rioting occurred in the nation’s capital and Chicago. Student antiwar protests turned violent at many of America’s most prestigious universities. The legacy of Johnson’s Great Society programs of Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to cities and education, and welfare programs endured, but Johnson’s America in 1968 stood as a nation divided.
Nixon made one of the greatest political comebacks in modern history by winning the Republican nomination in 1968. The antiwar insurgency within the Democratic Party failed when Kennedy was assassinated by an anti-Zionist extremist the evening he won the California primary. McCarthy’s campaign petered out. When Democrats met in Chicago later that summer, Johnson’s hand-selected candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the nomination. Antiwar protesters in Chicago, brutally suppressed by the police acting under orders from the city’s mayor, Richard Daley, severely damaged Humphrey. His initial reluctance to denounce the war alienated liberals in his party. The disarray of the Democratic Party opened the way for a third-party candidate, Governor George Wallace of Alabama, a staunch segregationist Democrat running on the American Independent ticket.
Nixon courted southern whites, working-class white ethnic voters, and the suburban middle class by calling for law and order and reform of the “welfare mess,” to stop forced busing, and end the war in Vietnam. The strategy paid off, barely. He won 43.4 percent of the popular vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent and Wallace’s surprising 13.5 percent.
In the White House, Nixon pursued a centrist program that kept his Democratic opposition off balance and alienated the far right of his party. In foreign policy, Nixon subordinated ideology through a pragmatic approach that acknowledged a balance of power in the world. He pursued arms control with the Soviet Union through the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) and opened relations with mainland China even as he ramped up the war in Vietnam, launching a major invasion of Cambodia in 1970. In domestic policy, Nixon expanded welfare programs, directed block grants to state and local governments, and signed a record volume of environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act. He created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and he pushed for affirmative action programs tied to government contracts. Faced with an economy beginning to experience high inflation (5 percent in 1970), he imposed wage and price controls and in 1971 took the country off the international gold standard, traditionally supported by conservatives.
In 1972, Democrats moved to the left by nominating the antiwar senator from South Dakota, George McGovern. Rallying young antiwar activists and women, the McGovern campaign won delegate slots at the convention through newly imposed party rules that placed quotas on delegations to ensure full representation of women, ethnic minorities, and community leaders. Nixon undercut McGovern’s antiwar message when he announced a truce in Vietnam. The Democrat’s hastily thrown-together domestic program of high taxes and expanded government proved an easy target for Nixon, who attacked his opponent as an inept radical. The incumbent swamped both the popular vote, polling over 60 percent, and the Electoral College, 520 to 17.
Nixon’s victory seemed certain from the beginning. Nevertheless, leaving nothing to chance, his independent Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) raised millions of dollars by targeting corporations and executives tied to government contracts. The chairman of CREEP, former attorney general John Mitchell, also approved a “dirty tricks” campaign against Democrats. The extent of these tricks became known when Republican operatives were arrested in July while trying to bug phones in the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington. When told of this break-in, Nixon tried to cover up links to the White House.
Congressional investigations after the election, spurred by new revelations coming from Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, revealed the president’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up. A separate congressional investigation of corruption while he was governor of Maryland led Vice President Spiro Agnew to resign. Nixon selected Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to replace him. By the summer of 1974, Nixon had lost the confidence of congressional Republicans. On August 9, 1974, he became the first president of the United States to resign.
Any notions of politicians as “men of honor” had become a forgotten memory in American politics. Democrats swept into Congress in the midterm elections of 1974. Many within the Republican Party openly wondered if their party was going the way of the defunct Whig Party. Both conservatism and New Deal liberalism appeared spent. The nation stood traumatized by a decade of war, racial divisions, a deteriorating economy, and scandal.