Chapter 12

The Postwar Period and Cold War (1945–1980)

TRUMAN AND THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR (1945–1953)

The end of World War II raised two major issues. The first concerned the survival of the combatants; with the exception of the United States, the nations involved in World War II had all seen fighting within their borders, and the destruction had been immense. The second issue involved the shape of the new world and what new political alliances would be formed. This question would become the major source of contention between the world’s two leading political-economic systems, capitalism and communism.

The stakes in this power struggle, called the Cold War (because there was no actual combat as there is in a “hot war”), were high. Though the major powers (the United States and Soviet Union) didn’t enter into combat in the Cold War, the United States did fight hot “proxy” wars in Korea and Vietnam during this time. The American economy was growing more dependent on exports; American industry also needed to import metals, a process requiring (1) open trade and (2) friendly relations with those nations that provided those metals. In addition, with many postwar economies in shambles, competition for the few reasonably healthy economies grew fiercer. Finally, those countries that were strongest before the war—Germany, Japan, and Great Britain—had either been defeated or seen their influence abroad greatly reduced. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the two new superpowers. Although they were allies during World War II, the war’s end exposed the countries’ many ideological differences, and they soon became enemies.

Truman and Foreign Policy

The differences between Soviet and American goals were apparent even before the war was over, but became even clearer when the Soviets refused to recognize Poland’s conservative government-in-exile. (The Polish government had moved to England to escape the Nazis; this government was backed by the United States.) A communist government took over Poland. Within two years pro-Soviet communist coups had also taken place in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The propaganda in the United States and USSR during this period reached a fever pitch. In each country the other was portrayed as trying to take over the world for its own sinister purposes.

Then, in 1947, communist insurgents threatened to take over both Greece and Turkey, but England could no longer prop up these nations. In a speech before Congress in which he asked for $400 million in aid to the two countries, Truman asserted, “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.” This statement, called the Truman Doctrine, became the cornerstone of a larger policy, articulated by George Kennan, called “containment.” The idea of containment came from what is known as the Long Telegram, which Kennan sent to Washington from his duty station in Germany, in 1946. This policy said that the United States would not instigate a war with the Soviet Union, but it would come to the defense of countries in danger of Soviet takeover. The policy aimed to prevent the spread of communism and encourage the Soviets to abandon their aggressive strategies.

Meanwhile, the United States used a tried-and-true method to shore up its alliances—it gave away money. The Marshall Plan, named for Secretary of State George Marshall, sent more than $12 billion to Europe to help rebuild its cities and economy. In return for that money, of course, countries were expected to become American allies. The countries were also required to work together to promote economic growth, and is the precursor to the European Union. Although the Marshall Plan was offered to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, no countries in the Soviet sphere participated in the program, as Stalin viewed the initiative as further evidence of U.S. imperialism. The United States also formed a mutual defense alliance with Canada and a number of countries in Western Europe called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. Truman did not have an easy time convincing Congress that NATO was necessary; remember, from the time of Washington’s Farewell Address, American sentiment has strongly favored avoiding all foreign entanglements.

The crisis in Berlin the previous year, however, helped convince Congress to support NATO. The crisis represented a culmination of events after World War II. In 1945 Germany had been divided into four sectors, with England, France, the United States, and the USSR each controlling one. Berlin, though deep in Soviet territory, had been similarly divided. Upon learning that the three Western Allies planned to merge their sectors into one country and to bring that country into the Western economy, the Soviets responded by imposing a blockade on Berlin. Truman refused to surrender the city, however, and ordered airlifts to keep that portion under Western control supplied with food and fuel. The blockade continued for close to a year, by which point the blockade became such a political liability that the Soviets gave it up. Don’t confuse the Berlin Blockade with the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Blockade occurred when the Soviets closed off access to the city during the Truman administration in 1948, while the Soviets erected the Berlin Wall in 1961 during the Kennedy administration to divide the city between the East and the West. Constructed of concrete and barbed wire, the wall separated the Soviet sector of Berlin from West Berlin and became a symbol of the Cold War. The wall was finally dismantled in 1989.

Not long after the United States joined NATO, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. Fear of Soviet invasion or subterfuge also led to the creation of the National Security Council (a group of foreign affairs advisers who work for the president) and the Central Intelligence Agency (the United States’ spy network).

 

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National Security Council 68 was a document that said the United States should invest much more money into military spending because they couldn’t trust other countries to help protect against communism.

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As if Truman didn’t have enough headaches in Europe, he also had to deal with Asia. Two issues dominated U.S. policy in the region: the reconstruction of Japan and the Chinese Revolution. After the war the United States occupied Japan, and its colonial possessions were divided up. The United States took control of the Pacific Islands and the southern half of Korea, while the USSR took control of the northern half of Korea. Under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, Japan wrote a democratic constitution, demilitarized, and started a remarkable economic revival. The United States was not as successful in China, where it chose to side with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government against Mao Zedong’s Communist insurgents, during China’s 20-year civil war (Mao having taken control of China in 1949). Despite massive American military aid, the Communists overthrew the Nationalists, whose government was exiled to Taiwan. For decades the United States refused to recognize the legitimacy of Mao’s regime, creating another international “hot spot” for Americans. Truman also chose to aid the French during the Vietnamese war for independence in Indochina, although most Americans were not aware of this at the time.

McCarthyism

All this conflict with communists resurrected anti-communist paranoia at home, just as anti-communism had swept America during the Red Scare after World War I. In 1947 Truman ordered investigations of 3 million federal employees in a search for “security risks.” Those found to have a potential Achilles’ heel—either previous association with “known communists” or a “moral” weakness such as alcoholism or homosexuality (which, the government reasoned, made them easy targets for blackmail)—were dismissed without a hearing. In 1949 former State Department official Alger Hiss was found guilty of consorting with a communist spy (Richard Nixon was the congressman mostly responsible for Hiss’s downfall). Americans began to passionately fear the “enemy within.” Even the Screen Actors Guild, then headed by Ronald Reagan, attempted to discover and purge its own communists.

It was this atmosphere that allowed a demagogic senator named Joseph McCarthy to rise from near anonymity to national fame. In 1950 McCarthy claimed to have a list of more than 200 known communists working for the State Department. He subsequently changed that number several times, which should have clued people in to the fact that he was not entirely truthful. Unchallenged, McCarthy went on to lead a campaign of innuendo that ruined the lives of thousands of innocent people. Without ever uncovering a single communist, McCarthy held years of hearings with regard to subversion, not just in the government, but in education and the entertainment industry as well. Those subpoenaed were often forced to confess to previous associations with communists and name others with similar associations. Industries created lists of those tainted by these charges, called blacklists, which prevented the accused from working, just as blacklists had been used against union organizers at the turn of the last century. Eisenhower himself was worried about McCarthy and refused to speak against him, for fear that McCarthy would attack him. McCarthy’s downfall came in 1954, during the Eisenhower administration, when he accused the Army of harboring communists. He had finally chosen too powerful a target. The Army fought back hard, and with help from Edward R. Murrow’s television show, in the Army-McCarthy hearings, McCarthy was made to look foolish. The public turned its back on him, and the era of McCarthyism ended, but public distrust and fear of communism remained.

“You’ve done enough. Have
you no sense of decency,
sir? At long last, have you
left no sense of decency?”
—Army counsel Joseph
Welch, speaking
back to Joseph McCarthy
at the hearings that
would effectively end
McCarthy’s career.

Truman’s Domestic Policy and the Election of 1948

The end of the war meant the end of wartime production. With fewer Jeeps, airplanes, guns, bombs, and uniforms to manufacture, American businesses started laying off employees. Returning war veterans further crowded the job market, and unemployment levels rose dramatically. At the same time, many people who had built up their savings during the war (since rationing had limited the availability of consumer goods) started to spend more liberally, causing prices to rise. In 1946 the inflation rate was nearly 20 percent. The poor and unemployed felt the effects the most. Truman offered some New Deal-style solutions to America’s economic woes, but a new conservatism had taken over American politics. Most of his proposals were rejected, and the few that were implemented had little effect.

 

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Let’s Make A Deal

Both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as FDR’s successor Harry Truman, offered “deals” to the American public:

	President	What’s the deal with this?
Square Deal	Theodore Roosevelt	Government promised to regulate business and restore competition
First New Deal	Franklin Roosevelt	Focused on immediate public relief and the recovery of banks
Second New Deal	Franklin Roosevelt	Addressed the shortcomings of the First New Deal and responded to a changing political climate
Fair Deal	Harry Truman	Extension of New Deal vision and provisions for reintegrating WWII veterans into society (e.g., the G.I. Bill)

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The new conservatism brought with it a new round of anti-unionism in the country. Americans were particularly upset when workers in essential industries went on strike, as when the coal miners’ strike (by the United Mine Workers, or UMW) cut off the energy supply to other industries, shutting down steel foundries, auto plants, and more. Layoffs in the affected industries exacerbated tensions. Americans cared little that the miners were fighting for basic rights. Truman followed the national mood, ordering a government seizure of the mines when a settlement could not be reached. During a later railroad strike, Truman threatened to draft into the military those strikers who held out for more than he thought they deserved. Consequently, Truman alienated labor, one of the core constituencies of the new Democratic coalition. Labor and consumers, angry at skyrocketing prices, formed an alliance that helped the Republicans take control of the Eightieth Congress in the 1946 midterm elections.

Truman also alienated many voters (particularly in the South) by pursuing a civil rights agenda that, for its time, was progressive. He convened the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which in 1948 issued a report calling for an end to segregation and poll taxes, and for more aggressive enforcement of anti-lynching laws. Truman also issued an executive order forbidding racial discrimination in the hiring of federal employees and another executive order desegregating the Armed Forces. Blacks began to make other inroads. The NAACP won some initial, important lawsuits against segregated schools and buses; Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball; and black groups started to form coalitions with liberal white organizations, thereby gaining more political clout. These advances provoked an outbreak of flagrant racism in the South, and in 1948 segregationist Democrats, or “Dixiecrats,” abandoned the party to support Strom Thurmond for president.

With so many core Democratic constituencies—labor, consumers, Southerners—angry with the president, his defeat in 1948 seemed certain. Truman’s popularity, however, received an unintentional boost from the Republican-dominated Congress. The staunchly conservative legislature passed several anti-labor acts too strong even for Truman. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed over Truman’s veto, prohibited “union only” work environments (called “closed shops”), restricted labor’s right to strike, prohibited the use of union funds for political purposes, and gave the government broad power to intervene in strikes. The same Congress then rebuked Truman’s efforts to pass health care reform; increase aid to schools, farmers, the elderly, and the disabled; and promote civil rights for blacks. The cumulative effect of all this acrimony made Truman look a lot better to those he had previously offended. Still, as election time neared, Truman trailed his chief opponent, Thomas Dewey. He then made one of the most brilliant political moves in American history: He recalled the Congress, whose majority members had just drafted an extremely conservative Republican platform at the party convention, and challenged them to enact that platform. Congress met for two weeks and did not pass one significant piece of legislation. Truman then went out on a grueling public appearance campaign, everywhere deriding the “do-nothing” Eightieth Congress. To almost everyone’s surprise, Truman won re-election, and his coattails carried a Democratic majority into Congress.

The Korean War

The Korean War began in June of 1950, when communist North Korea invaded U.S.-backed South Korea. Believing the Soviet Union to have engineered the invasion, the United States took swift countermeasures. Originally intending only to repel the invasion, Truman decided to attempt a reunification of Korea after some early military successes. Under the umbrella of the United Nations, American troops attacked North Korea, provoking China, Korea’s northern neighbor. (The Chinese were not too keen on the idea of hostile American troops on their border.) China ultimately entered the war, pushing American and South Korean troops back near the original border dividing North and South Korea. U.S. commander Douglas MacArthur recommended an all-out confrontation with China, with the objective of overthrowing the Communists and reinstating Chiang Kaishek. Truman thought a war with the world’s most populous country might be imprudent and so decided against MacArthur. When MacArthur started publicly criticizing the president, who was also the commander-in-chief, Truman fired him for insubordination. MacArthur was very popular at home, however, and firing him hurt Truman politically.

Although peace talks began soon after, the war dragged on another two years, into the Eisenhower administration. When the 1952 presidential election arrived, the Republicans took a page from the Whig playbook and chose Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war hero. By this point the presidency had been held by the Democratic party for 20 years. Truman was unpopular; his bluntness is now seen as a sign of his integrity, but during his terms, it offended a lot of potential constituents. In short, America was ready for a change. Eisenhower beat Democratic challenger Adlai Stevenson easily.

Democrats also wanted
Eisenhower for their
presidential candidate. He
had been the President of
Columbia University and
the Supreme Commander
of NATO before winning
the presidency.

THE EISENHOWER YEARS (1953–1961)

The 1950s are often depicted as a time of conformity. Across much of America, a consensus of values reigned. Americans believed that their country was the best in the world, that communism was evil and had to be stopped, and that a decent job, a home in the suburbs, and access to all the modern conveniences (aka consumerism) did indeed constitute “the good life.” Congress had enacted the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, commonly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, in June of 1944. It provided an allowance for educational and living expenses for returning soldiers and veterans who wished to earn their high school diploma or attend college. The G.I. Bill not only helped many Americans achieve the American dream but also helped stimulate postwar economic growth by providing low-cost loans to purchase homes or farms or to start small businesses. The 1950s also proved to be an era in which the civil rights movement built on the advances of the 1940s and met some violent resistance; an era plagued by frequent economic recessions; and an era of spiritual unrest that manifested itself in such emerging art forms as Beat poetry and novels (“Howl,” On the Road), teen movies (Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause), and rock ‘n’ roll (Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry).

 

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The Kitchen Debate

Vice President Richard Nixon visited Moscow in 1959 for a cultural fair. While standing in a model American kitchen, Nixon ended up getting into an argument with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that emblematized not only U.S.-Soviet relations but also common American attitudes toward gender in the 1950s. An excerpt:

Nixon: I want to show you this kitchen. It is like those of our houses in California.

Khrushchev: We have such things.

Nixon: This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women.

Khrushchev: Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism.

Nixon: I think that this attitude toward women is universal.

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Domestic Politics in the 1950s

Eisenhower arrived at the White House prepared to impose conservative values on the federal government, which had mushroomed in size under Roosevelt and Truman. He sought to balance the budget, cut federal spending, and ease government regulation of business. In these goals he was, at best, only partly successful. The military buildup required by the continuing Cold War prevented Eisenhower from making the cuts to the military budget that he would have liked. He reduced military spending by reducing troops and buying powerful weapons systems (thus shaping the New Look Army), but not enough to eliminate deficit spending. The popularity of remaining New Deal programs made it difficult to eliminate them; furthermore, circumstances required Eisenhower to increase the number of Social Security recipients and the size of their benefits. Under Eisenhower the government also began developing the Interstate Highway System, partly to make it easier to move soldiers and nuclear missiles around the country. The new roads not only sped up travel, but they also promoted tourism and the development of the suburbs. The initial cost, however, was extremely high. As a result, Eisenhower managed to balance the federal budget only three times in eight years.

Some of the most important domestic issues during the Eisenhower years involved minorities. In 1953 Eisenhower sought to change federal policy toward Native Americans. His new policy, called termination, would liquidate reservations, end federal support to Native Americans, and subject them to state law. However, in devising this policy, Eisenhower did not take Native American priorities into account. He aimed simply to reduce federal responsibilities and bolster the power of the states. Native Americans protested, convinced that termination was simply a means of stealing what little land the tribes had left. The plan failed and was ultimately stopped in the 1960s but not before causing the depletion and impoverishment of a number of tribes.

The civil rights movement experienced a number of its landmark events during Eisenhower’s two terms. In 1954 the Supreme Court heard the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a lawsuit brought on behalf of Linda Brown (a black school-age child) by the NAACP. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued the case for Brown. In its ruling the Court overturned the “separate but equal” standard as it applied to education; “separate but equal” had been the law of the land since the Court had approved it in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In a 9 to 0 decision, the Court ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and that schools should desegregate with “all deliberate speed.” Although a great victory for civil rights, Brown v. Board of Education did not immediately solve the school segregation problem. Some Southern states started to pay the tuition for white children to attend private schools in order to maintain segregation. Some states actually closed their public schools rather than integrate them. Although Eisenhower personally disapproved of segregation, he also opposed rapid change, and so did little. This inactivity encouraged further Southern resistance, and in 1957 the governor of Arkansas called in the state National Guard to prevent a group of black students, the Little Rock Nine, from enrolling in a Little Rock high school. Eisenhower did nothing until one month later, when the courts ordered him to enforce the law. Arkansas, in response, closed all public high schools in Little Rock for two years. Eisenhower supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, which strengthened the voting rights protection of Southern blacks and the punishments for crimes against blacks, respectively.

Another key civil rights event, the Montgomery bus boycott, began in 1955 when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man as was required by Jim Crow laws. Outrage over the arrest, coupled with long-term resentment over unfair treatment, spurred blacks to stay off Montgomery buses for more than a year. The boycott brought Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence. Barely 27 years old at the time, King was pastor at Rosa Parks’s church. Although King was clearly groomed for greatness—his grandfather had led the protests resulting in the creation of Atlanta’s first black high school, his father was a minister and community leader, and King had already amassed impressive academic credentials (Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, University of Pennsylvania, and finally a Ph.D. from Boston University)—the year-long bus boycott gave him his first national podium. In the end, a ruling by the Supreme Court resulted in the integration of city buses in Montgomery and elsewhere.

King encouraged others to organize peaceful protests, a plan inspired by his studies of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi. In 1960 black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, tried just that approach, organizing a sit-in at a local Woolworth’s lunch counter designated “whites only.” News reports of the sit-in, and the resultant harassment the students endured, inspired a sit-in movement that spread across the nation to combat segregation.

America Versus the Communists

There are a number of terms associated with the Cold War policy of Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that you need to know. The administration continued to follow the policy of containment but called it liberation to make it sound more intimidating. It carried the threat that the United States would eventually free Eastern Europe from Soviet control. Dulles coined the phrase “massive retaliation” to describe the nuclear attack that the United States would launch if the Soviets tried anything too daring. Deterrence described how Soviet fear of massive retaliation would prevent their challenging the United States and led to an arms race. Deterrence suggested that the mere knowledge of mutually assured destruction (MAD) prevented both nations from deploying nuclear weapons. Dulles allowed confrontations with the Soviet Union to escalate toward war, an approach called brinksmanship. Finally, the Eisenhower administration argued that the spread of communism had to be checked in Southeast Asia. If South Vietnam fell to communism, the nations surrounding it would fall quickly like dominoes; hence, the domino theory.

Cold War tensions remained high throughout the decade. Eisenhower had hoped that the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 might improve American-Soviet relations. Initially, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev offered hope. Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s totalitarianism and called for “peaceful coexistence” among nations with different economic philosophies. Some Soviet client states took Khrushchev’s pronouncements as a sign of weakness; rebellions occurred in Poland and Hungary. When the Soviets crushed the uprisings, U.S.-Soviet relations returned to where they were during the Stalin era. Soviet advances in nuclear arms development (the USSR exploded its first hydrogen bomb a year after the United States blew up its first H-bomb) and space flight (the USSR launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space, motivating the United States to quickly create and fund the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA) further heightened anxieties.

 

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The Arms Race

Size of bombs

• Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 1945: equal to 12,500 tons of TNT

• First hydrogen bomb test, 1952: equal to 10,400,000 tons of TNT

• Soviet Tsar Bomba test, 1961: equal to 57,000,000 tons of TNT

Number of warheads

• 1945: USA 6; USSR 0

• 1950: USA 369; USSR 5

• 1955: USA 3057; USSR 200

• 1960: USA 20,434; USSR 1605

• 1970: USA 26,119; USSR 11,643

• 1980: USA 23,764; USSR 30,062

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Meanwhile, the United States narrowly averted war with the other communists, the Chinese. American-allied Taiwan occupied two islands close to mainland China, Quemoy and Matsu. The Taiwanese used the islands as bases for commando raids on the communists, which eventually irritated the Chinese enough that they bombed the two islands. In a classic example of brinksmanship, Eisenhower declared that the United States would defend the islands and strongly hinted that he was considering a nuclear attack on China. Tensions remained high for years, and Eisenhower’s stance forced him to station American troops on the islands. During the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy used the incident as a campaign issue, arguing that the two small islands were not worth the cost of defending them.

Third World Politics

World War II resulted in the breakup of Europe’s huge overseas empires. In the decades that followed the war’s end, numerous countries in Africa, Asia, and South America broke free of European domination. These countries allied themselves with neither of the two major powers; for this reason they were deemed the Third World. Both America and the Soviets sought to bring Third World countries into their spheres of influence, as these nations represented potential markets as well as sources of raw materials. The two superpowers particularly prized strategically located Third World countries that were willing to host military bases.

Neither superpower, it turned out, was able to make major inroads in the Third World at first. Nationalism swept through most Third World nations, recently liberated from major world powers. Enjoying their newfound freedom, these countries were reluctant to foster a long-term alliance with a large, powerful nation. Furthermore, most Third World countries regarded both powers with suspicion. America’s wealth fostered both distrust and resentment, prompting questions about U.S. motives. America’s racist legacy also hurt it in the Third World, where most residents were nonwhite. Yet most Third World nations also saw how the Soviets dominated Eastern Europe and so had little interest in close relations with them. These new nations were not anxious to fall under the control of either superpower.

However, the United States tried to expand its influence in the Third World in other ways. For example, in 1956 in Egypt, the United States tried offering foreign aid, hoping to gain an ally by building the much-needed Aswan Dam. Egypt’s nationalist leader Gamal Nasser suspected the Western powers of subterfuge; furthermore, he detested Israel, a Western ally. Eventually, he turned to the Soviet Union for that aid. Later that year, Israel invaded Egypt, followed by Britain and France, in an effort to gain control of the Suez Canal. President Eisenhower played the “good cop” and pressured Britain and France to withdraw. The American government also used CIA covert operations to provide a more forceful method of increasing its influence abroad. In various countries, the CIA coerced newspapers to report disinformation and slant the news in a way favorable to the United States, bribed local politicians, and tried by other means to influence local business and politics. The CIA even helped overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala in order to replace anti-American governments with pro-American governments. It also tried, unsuccessfully, to assassinate the communist leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro.

The 1960 Presidential Election

In 1960 Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, received the Republican nomination. The Democrats nominated Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. Similar in many ways, particularly in foreign policy, both candidates campaigned against the “communist menace” as well as against each other. Aided by his youthful good looks, Kennedy trounced an awkward Nixon in their first televised debate. Kennedy’s choice of Texan Lyndon Johnson as a running mate helped shore up the Southern vote for the Northern candidate. Nixon, meanwhile, was hurt by his vice presidency, where he had often served the role of Eisenhower’s “attack dog.” The fact that Eisenhower did not wholeheartedly endorse Nixon also marred his campaign. Still, it turned out to be one of the closest elections in history, and some believe that voter fraud turned a few states Kennedy’s way, without which Nixon would have won.

In his final days in office, Eisenhower warned the nation to beware of a new coalition that had grown up around the Cold War, which he called the military-industrial complex. The combination of military might and the highly profitable arms industries, he cautioned, created a powerful alliance whose interests did not correspond to those of the general public. In retrospect, many would later argue that in his final statement, Eisenhower had identified those who would later be responsible for the escalation of the Vietnam War.

THE TURBULENT SIXTIES

At the outset, the 1960s seemed the start of a new, hope-filled era. Many felt that Kennedy, his family, and his administration were ushering in an age of “Camelot” (the theatrical play was very popular then). As Arthur had had his famous knights, Kennedy, too, surrounded himself with an entourage of young, ambitious intellectuals who served as his advisers. The press dubbed these men and one woman “the best and the brightest” America had to offer. Kennedy’s youth, good looks, and wit earned him the adoration of millions. Even the name of his domestic program, the New Frontier, connoted hope. It promised that the fight to conquer poverty, racism, and other contemporary domestic woes would be as rewarding as the efforts of the pioneers who settled the West.

The decade did not end as it had begun. By 1969 America was bitterly divided. Many progressives regarded the government with suspicion and contempt, while many conservatives saw all dissidents as godless anarchists and subversives. Although other issues were important, much of the conflict centered on these two issues: the Vietnam War and blacks’ struggle to gain civil rights. As you read through this summary of the decade, pay particular attention to the impact of both issues on domestic harmony.

Kennedy and Foreign Policy

Like Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy perceived the Soviet Union and communism as the major threats to the security of the United States and its way of life. Every major foreign policy issue and event of his administration related primarily to these Cold War concerns.

Two major events during Kennedy’s first year in office heightened American- Soviet tensions. The first involved Cuba, where a U.S.-friendly dictatorship had been overthrown by communist insurgents led by Fidel Castro. When Castro took control of the country in 1959, American businesses owned more than 3 million acres of prime Cuban farmland and also controlled the country’s electricity and telephone service. Because so many Cubans lived in poverty, Cuban resentment of American wealth was strong, so little popular resistance occurred when Castro seized and nationalized some American property. The United States, however, was not pleased. When Castro signed a trade treaty with the Soviet Union later that year, Eisenhower imposed a partial trade embargo on Cuba. In the final days of his presidency, Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations with Cuba, and Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for financial and military aid.

Taking office in 1961, President Kennedy inherited the Cuban issue. Looking to solve the dilemma, the CIA presented the ill-fated plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion to the new president. The plan involved sending Cuban exiles, whom the CIA had been training since Castro’s takeover, to invade Cuba. According to the strategy, the army of exiles would win a few battles, and then the Cuban people would rise up in support, overthrow Castro, and replace his government with one more acceptable to the United States. Kennedy approved the plan but did not provide adequate American military support, and the United States launched the invasion in April 1961. The invasion failed, the Cuban people did not rise up in support, and within two days Kennedy had a full-fledged disaster on his hands. Not only had he failed to achieve his goal, but he had also antagonized the Soviets and their allies in the process. His failure also diminished America’s stature with its allies.

Later in the year, Kennedy dealt with a second foreign policy issue when the Soviets took aggressive anti-West action by erecting a wall to divide East and West Berlin. The Berlin Wall, built to prevent East Germans from leaving the country, had even greater symbolic significance to the democratic West. It came to represent the repressive nature of communism and was also a physical reminder of the impenetrable divide between the two sides of the Cold War.

Kennedy Wasn’t
a Donut

A popular urban legend
holds that when President
Kennedy went to the
Berlin Wall in 1963 and
declared, “Ich bin ein Berliner,”
he made a grammatical
error and inadvertently
called himself a jelly donut.
Sadly for high school
history teachers trying to
get a laugh out of their
classes, this isn’t actually
true. While the word “ein”
is omitted when literally
declaring one’s residence,
it is required for figurative
statements such as Kennedy’s.
Kennedy made no
error, and the donut legend
didn’t start circulating
until a novelist joked about
it twenty years later.

In 1962 the United States and the Soviet Union came the closest they had yet to a military (and perhaps nuclear) confrontation. The focus of the conflict was once again Cuba. In October, American spy planes detected missile sites in Cuba. Kennedy immediately decided that those missiles had to be removed at any cost; he further decided on a policy of brinksmanship to confront the Cuban missile crisis. He imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba to prevent any further weapons shipments from reaching the island, and then went on national television and demanded that the Soviets withdraw their missiles.

By refusing to negotiate secretly, Kennedy backed the Soviets into a corner; if they removed the missiles, their international stature would be diminished, especially since the quarantine was effectively a blockade, which diplomats defined as an act of war on the part of the United States. Therefore, in return, the Soviets demanded that the United States promise never again to invade Cuba and that the United States remove its missiles from Turkey (which is as close to the USSR as Cuba is to the United States). When Kennedy rejected the second condition, he gambled that the Soviets would not attack in response. Fortunately, behind-the-scenes negotiations defused the crisis, and the Soviets agreed to accept America’s promise not to invade Cuba as a pretext for withdrawing the missiles. In return, the United States secretly agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey a few months later, thus making it look like the United States had won. Recent scholarship suggests that it was the Soviet leader Khrushchev who prevented World War III and a nuclear holocaust.

The policy of containment even motivated such ostensibly philanthropic programs abroad as the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps’ mission was to provide teachers and specialists in agriculture, health care, transportation, and communications to the Third World, in the hopes of starting these fledgling communities down the road to American-style progress. The government called this process “nation building.” The Peace Corps had many successes, although the conflict between its humanitarian goals and the government’s foreign policy goals often brought about failures as well. Furthermore, many countries did not want American-style progress and resented having it forced upon them.

The greatest theater for American Cold War policy during this era, however, was Vietnam, which will be discussed in greater detail shortly.

Kennedy and Domestic Policy

Kennedy began his presidency with the promise that America was about to conquer a New Frontier. He pushed through legislation that increased unemployment benefits, expanded Social Security, bumped up the minimum wage, and aided distressed farmers, among other measures.

Kennedy’s civil rights agenda produced varied results. Kennedy supported women’s rights, establishing a presidential commission that in 1963 recommended removing all obstacles to women’s participation in all facets of society. Congress enacted the Equal Pay Act in 1963, which required that men and women receive equal pay for equal work. Unfortunately, employers continue to get around this federal law by simply changing job titles. However, it was only late in his presidency that Kennedy openly embraced the black civil rights movement. After almost two years of near inaction, in September 1962, Kennedy enforced desegregation at the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi, where James Meredith was the first integrated student.. In the summer of 1963, he asked Congress for legislation that would outlaw segregation in all public facilities. After Kennedy’s assassination in November, Lyndon Johnson was able to push that legislation—the Civil Rights Act of 1964—through Congress on the strength of the late president’s popularity and his own skills as a legislator.

John F. Kennedy also
ordered his Attorney
General, Robert F.
Kennedy, to have the
Justice Department order
the Interstate Commerce
Commission to make all
public transportation
integrated in response to
the Freedom Riders.

Still, Kennedy’s presidency proved an active period for the civil rights movement as a number of nongovernmental organizations mobilized to build on the gains of the previous decade. Martin Luther King Jr. led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which staged sit-ins, boycotts, and other peaceful demonstrations. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Riders movement; the Freedom Riders staged sit-ins on buses, sitting in sections prohibited to them by segregationist laws. They were initially an integrated group, as was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which did grassroots work in the areas of voter registration and anti-segregationist activism. Such groups met considerable resistance. In 1963 Mississippi’s NAACP director, Medgar Evers, was shot to death by an anti-integrationist. Not long after, demonstrators in Montgomery, Alabama, were assaulted by the police and fire department who used attack dogs and fire hoses against the crowd. News reports of both events horrified millions of Americans and thus helped bolster the movement. So, too, for reasons mentioned above, did Kennedy’s assassination.

Lyndon Johnson’s Social Agenda

Like Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson made an early commitment to the civil rights movement, but unlike Kennedy, Johnson took immediate action to demonstrate that commitment. From the time he took office, Johnson started to lobby hard for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on a person’s race, color, religion, or gender. If you can remember only one federal law in U.S. history, this is it! The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the most comprehensive piece of civil rights legislation enacted in U.S. history and the basis of all discrimination suits to this day. The law prohibited discrimination in employment as well as in public facilities (thus increasing the scope of Kennedy’s proposed civil rights act).

Not long after, Johnson oversaw the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce the employment clause of the Civil Rights Act. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after he was elected in his own right in 1964. This law cracked down on those states that denied blacks the right to vote despite the Fifteenth Amendment. He also signed another civil rights act banning discrimination in housing, and yet another that extended voting rights to Native Americans living under tribal governments.

Johnson had grown up poor and believed that social injustice stemmed from social inequality, and therefore, he advocated civil rights in employment. Toward the same end, he lobbied for and won the Economic Opportunity Act, which appropriated nearly $1 billion for poverty relief. After his landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson greatly expanded his anti-poverty program. A number of programs combined to form Johnson’s War on Poverty. Project Head Start prepared underprivileged children for early schooling; Upward Bound did the same for high school students. Job Corps trained the unskilled so they could get better jobs, while Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) acted as a domestic Peace Corps. In addition, Legal Services for the Poor guaranteed legal counsel to those who could not afford their own lawyers. To further assist the poor, Johnson founded the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), increased federal aid to low-income apartment renters, and built more federal housing projects, as well as establishing Medicare and Medicaid.

The legislation passed during 1965 and 1966 represented the most sweeping change to U.S. government since the New Deal. Johnson’s social agenda was termed the “Great Society.” Best of all, taxpayers did not feel much pain: Increased tax revenues from a quickly expanding economy funded the whole package. Not everyone liked Johnson’s agenda, however; many objected to any increase in government activity, and the extension of civil rights met with bigoted opposition, especially in the South. Thus, ironically, the huge coalition that had given Johnson his victory and his mandate for change started to fall apart because of his successes (and were hastened by a bitter national debate over American involvement in Vietnam).

The Civil Rights Movement

In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement made a number of substantial gains. Legislative successes such as those passed under Johnson’s Great Society program provided government support. The movement also won a number of victories in the courts, particularly in the Supreme Court. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court, for a brief moment in history, was extremely liberal. The Warren Court worked to enforce voting rights for blacks and forced states to redraw congressional districts so that minorities would receive greater representation. The Warren Court expanded civil rights in other areas as well. Among its landmark rulings are those that prohibited school prayer and protected the right to privacy. The Warren Court also made several decisions concerning the rights of the accused. In Gideon v. Wainwright, the Court ruled that a defendant in a felony trial must be provided a lawyer for free if he or she cannot afford one. In the Miranda v. Arizona, the Court ruled that, upon arrest, a suspect must be advised of his or her right to remain silent and to consult with a lawyer.

On January 23, 1964, the
24th Amendment to the
Constitution was ratified.
This banned the use of the
poll tax in all elections.

Civil rights victories did not come easily. Resistance to change was strong, as evidenced by the opposition of state governments, police, and white citizens. In Selma, police prevented blacks from registering to vote; in Birmingham, police and firemen attacked civil rights protesters. All over the South, the Ku Klux Klan and other racists bombed black churches and the homes of civil rights activists with seeming impunity. In Mississippi three civil rights workers were murdered by a group that included members of the local police department.

With news reports of each event, outrage in the black community grew. Some activists abandoned Martin Luther King’s strategy of nonviolent protest. Among the leaders who advocated a more aggressive approach was Malcolm X, a minister of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X urged blacks to claim their rights “by any means necessary.” (His autobiography is an essential document of the history of racism in America.) Later, two groups that previously had preached integration—the SNCC and CORE—expelled their white members and advocated the more separatist, radical program of Black Power, with the Black Panthers being at the forefront of this movement. By 1968, when King was assassinated, the civil rights movement had fragmented, with some continuing to advocate integration and peaceful change, while others argued for empowerment through self-imposed segregation and aggression.

The New Left, Feminism, and the Counterculture

Black Americans were not the only ones challenging the status quo in the 1960s. Young whites, particularly those in college, also rebelled. For these young adults, the struggle was one against the hypocrisy, complacency, and conformity of middle-class life.

In 1962 the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) formed. Its leftist political agenda, laid out in a platform called the Port Huron Statement, set the tone for other progressive groups on college campuses; these groups collectively became known as the New Left. New Left ideals included the elimination of poverty and racism and an end to Cold War politics. One particularly active branch of the New Left formed at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1964 students there protested when the university banned civil rights and anti-war demonstrations on campus. These protests grew into the Free Speech movement, which in turn fostered a number of leftist and radical political groups on the Berkeley campus.

 

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Beatniks

We usually associate cultural rebellion with the 1960s and early 1970s, but the Beat Movement got its start in the 1950s. Beat writers, such as Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, challenged the straight-laced conservatism of the Eisenhower era by publishing works championing bohemian lifestyles, drug use, and non-traditional styles of art. The Beatniks would later inspire the Hippies of the 1960s.

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Most New Left groups, however, were male-dominated and insensitive to the cause of women’s rights. Women became frustrated with being treated as second-class citizens and started their own political groups. In 1963 Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique openly challenged many people’s assumptions about women’s place in society. Friedan identified “The problem that has no name” and is credited with restarting the women’s movement, a movement that had faded once women’s suffrage was achieved with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. She was also one of the founders of NOW, the National Organization for Women, formed in 1966 to fight for legislative changes, including the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. The modern movement for gay rights also began to solidify in the 1960s, with the first Gay Pride parades occurring on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an event at which gays fought back against the police in New York City.

Feminists fought against discrimination in hiring, pay, college admissions, and financial aid. They also fought for control of reproductive rights, a battle that reached the Supreme Court in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which enabled women to obtain abortions in all fifty states within the first trimester. Many states argued that they had an obligation to protect “life,” as stipulated in the Fourteenth Amendment, and quickly passed state laws prohibiting a woman from having an abortion after the first three months of her pregnancy. Although there is no specific mention of a constitutional right to privacy, the Supreme Court had established this important precedent in 1965 in the case Griswold v. Connecticut. Roe v. Wade remains a controversial decision and continues to play a central role in American politics and society.

Rebellion against “the establishment” also took the form of nonconformity, a repudiation of the Eisenhower years. Hippies grew their hair long, wore tie-dyed shirts and ripped jeans, and advocated drug use, communal living, and “free love.” Their way of life came to be known as the counterculture because of its unconventionality and its total contrast to the staid mainstream culture, which was typified by aging crooners and banal television variety shows. By the end of the 1960s, the counterculture became more widely accepted, and artists such as Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones were among the biggest moneymakers in the arts.

“There’s a time when the
operation of the machine
becomes so odious, makes
you so sick at heart, that
you can’t take part! You
can’t even passively take
part! And you’ve got to
put your bodies upon the
gears and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all
the apparatus, and you’ve
got to make it stop! And
you’ve got to indicate to
the people who run it, to
the people who own it,
that unless you’re free, the
machine will be prevented
from working at all!”

—Mario Savio, speaking
from the steps of Sproul
Hall at the University of
California, Berkeley, on
December 3, 1964

Concurrent with the rise in activism for civil rights and women’s rights was the upsurge of interest in environmental issues. Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist wrote the seminal work of non-fiction, Silent Spring, a worldwide bestseller to this day. Silent Spring blew the whistle on the widespread use of the chemical pesticide DDT, leading to its eventual ban. Meanwhile, legislators responding to industrial pollution passed the Clean Air Act of 1955, the first law to control the use of airborne contaminants.

The New Left, feminists, the counterculture, and others in the growing left wing of American politics almost uniformly opposed American participation in the Vietnam War. These groups’ vocal protests against the war and the fierce opposition they provoked from the government and pro-war Americans created a huge divide in American society by 1968. Before we discuss that fateful year, it is important to understand how and why America became involved in Vietnam.

American Involvement in Vietnam, World War II–1963

From the Truman administration until the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991, U.S. foreign policy leaders asserted an American right to intervene anywhere in the world to stop the spread of communism and to protect American interests. Nowhere did that policy fail more miserably than in Vietnam, where the United States maintained an economic and military presence for almost 25 years. The Vietnam War divided America as no war before had.

The origins of America’s involvement in Vietnam stretch back to World War II. From the late nineteenth century until World War II, Vietnam was a French colony. France exported the country’s resources—rice, rubber, and metals—for French consumption. This foreign exploitation of Vietnam helped foster a nationalist Vietnamese resistance called the Vietminh, led by Ho Chi Minh. Ho had been schooled in France and had joined the French Communist Party before returning home. In fact, Ho Chi Minh was in Paris during the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 and approached Woodrow Wilson at the time. Ho asked Wilson to honor his commitment to the right of nations to self-determination, as expressed in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and to help the Vietnamese expel the French from their country. Wilson ignored Ho Chi Minh’s appeal.

Japan invaded Vietnam during World War II and ended French control of the country. Faced with a common enemy, the Vietnamese helped the Allies defeat Japan and probably expected to be granted their independence at the conclusion of the war, as India was in 1947. Shortly after the Japanese surrender in 1945, Ho drafted the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence modeled on the United States Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizens.

The United States did not recognize Vietnamese independence nor the legitimacy of Ho’s government, in part because of America’s alliance with France (which wanted its colony back), and in part because Ho was a communist. Instead, the United States recognized the government of Bao Dai, the Vietnamese emperor whom the French had installed in the South, which France still controlled. Subsequently, Vietnam fought a war for independence against the French from 1946 until 1954, when the French were defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Although Ho appealed to President Truman for assistance on several occasions, Truman never responded. Ho hoped the United States would honor its commitment to the principle of self-determination and empathize with the Vietnamese rather than support the colonial power. Truman continued to aid the French. The United States financed more than 80 percent of France’s war effort in Indochina, a fact few Americans knew then or know now.

In 1954 all of the involved parties met in Geneva, Switzerland, and drew up the Geneva Accords, which divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, with Communist forces controlling North Vietnam and (so-called) democratic forces controlling the South. It was agreed that this division was to be temporary and that elections would be held in two years to reunite the country and determine who would rule a unified Vietnam. The elections never took place, however. The United States, certain that Ho Chi Minh would win an election, sabotaged the peace agreement. First, the United States made an alliance with another South Vietnamese leader named Ngo Dinh Diem and helped him oust Bao Dai (whom the United States felt was too weak to control the country). Then, the CIA organized commando raids across the border in North Vietnam to provoke a Communist response (which the South Vietnamese could then denounce). Diem pronounced South Vietnam an autonomous country and refused to participate in the agreed-upon national election. The United States rallied Britain, France, Thailand, Pakistan, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia to form the NATO-like Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) to provide for South Vietnam’s defense against Communist takeover.

Southeast Asia During the Vietnam War

Unfortunately, the situation continued its downward spiral. Diem, it turned out, was a vicious leader. He took despotic control of South Vietnam, imprisoning political enemies, persecuting Buddhist monks, and closing newspapers that criticized his government. As a result, many South Vietnamese citizens joined the North Vietnamese side. These communist South Vietnamese insurgents were called the Vietcong. Rather than cut its losses, the United States continued to support Diem and the South Vietnamese economically. Committed to the policy of containment and intent on nation building, President Kennedy increased America’s involvement in Vietnam by sending in military advisors known as the Green Berets. Finally, in 1963 the CIA helped the South Vietnamese military stage a coup to overthrow Diem’s government. During the coup, Diem and his brother were killed and Kennedy was appalled by the outcome. A few weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated, and Johnson took control of America’s war efforts.

American Involvement in Vietnam, 1964–1968

Upon taking office, Johnson had the opportunity to withdraw American forces in a way that would not have embarrassed his administration. The United Nations, backed by France and the Vietcong, would have intervened and set up a coalition government to rule South Vietnam. Kennedy’s advisers, however, convinced Johnson that U.S. forces could overwhelm any opposition in the region. He remained committed to using those forces to achieve “total victory.”

In 1964 the United States supported a second coup in South Vietnam; apparently, the United States was not terribly selective as to who ran the country, so long as it was not the Communists. (The United States followed a similar pattern in Latin America.) The U.S. Army also started bombing the neighboring country of Laos, through which the North Vietnamese were shipping weapons to the Vietcong. Then, in August of the same year, reports stated that the North Vietnamese had fired on two American destroyer ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. (However, the North Vietnamese attack was never confirmed.) Johnson used the event to get Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed the president to take any measures he deemed necessary to protect American interests in the region. The Tonkin Gulf resolution gave Johnson carte blanche to escalate U.S. participation in the war. It also is the closest Congress ever came to an official declaration of war in Vietnam. Thus, the first ground troops began to arrive in the early months of 1965.

Soon, Johnson had flooded the region with American troops. He also authorized massive Air Force bombing raids into North Vietnam. Those strikes, called called “Operation Rolling Thunder” were supposed to last a few weeks, but continued for years. Many of them dropped chemical agents like Agent Orange and Napalm which destroyed the Vietnamese jungles and contaminated the land. Throughout Johnson’s administration, the United States essentially took over the war effort from the South Vietnamese; hence, the “Americanization” of the Vietnam War. As the war ground on and the draft claimed more young Americans, opposition to the war grew. Protest rallies grew larger and more frequent, and more and more young men either ignored their draft notices or fled to a foreign country (more than 30,000 went to Canada) to avoid military service.

Johnson’s advisers continued to assure him that the war was “winnable” until January 1968, when the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive (named after the Vietnamese holiday celebrating the New Year). In conjunction with the Vietcong, the North Vietnamese inflicted tremendous damage on American forces and nearly captured the American embassy in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. Though the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces were, in the end, decisively driven back, the severity of the strikes was an ugly shock for the American people, who had been assured by the Johnson administration that the United States was winning the war. This would be a major turning point in the war, as most Americans had been confident their superior technology could easily defeat the underdeveloped Third World nation. The Tet Offensive was a highly calculated series of attacks carried out around the country, demonstrating that American military experts had vastly underestimated the sophistication of Vietnamese strategy. That the North Vietnamese and Vietcong could launch such a large-scale offensive and nearly succeed in taking the American embassy made the American public come to believe it was being lied to and that perhaps this war was not winnable.

The My Lai Massacre occurred the same year as the Tet Offensive. American soldiers were becoming more and more frustrated and began to act in unspeakable ways. The most publicized of these horrific events, although not an isolated occurrence, took place in a small village in South Vietnam, where U.S. soldiers abused, tortured, and murdered an estimated 347 to 504 innocent civilians, including women, children, and elderly Vietnamese too infirm to fight. When the story finally came to light in November 1969, the American public was outraged. Public opinion turned and protests against the war grew angrier and more frequent.

The Summer of 1968 and the 1968 Election

Johnson withdrew from the presidential race in large part because his association with the Vietnam War had turned many Americans against him, including many within his own party. Johnson’s renomination would not have been easy; both Eugene McCarthy (no relation to Joseph McCarthy!) and Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s brother and former attorney general, were poised to challenge him. Johnson’s withdrawal opened the field to a third candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Early in April 1968 a white assassin killed Martin Luther King Jr. The murder ignited black riots in more than 150 towns and cities. Arson, looting, and even murder were committed by the outraged mobs. In Chicago, where the Democratic convention would later be held, the mayor ordered the police to shoot arsonists on sight. To say that King’s assassination heightened the already considerable tension surrounding race relations would be a huge understatement. During this time, the Kerner Commission report on race relations came out, stating that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one white and one black—separate and unequal.”

Then, in June, frontrunner for the Democratic nomination Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy had come to represent the last bastion of hope for many Americans. Young, handsome, and vital (like his adored older brother), Kennedy was also an aggressive advocate for the poor and a harsh critic of the war in Vietnam. Together, the two assassinations convinced many that peaceful change from within the political system was impossible.

Many disenchanted young Americans came to Chicago in August to demonstrate at the Democratic Convention against government policy. The police were ordered to break up the crowds of protesters, which they did with tear gas, billy clubs, and rifles. Images of American policemen in gas masks clubbing American citizens reached millions of living rooms across the country through television and the newspapers, presenting a picture eerily reminiscent of the police states against which America supposedly fought. When the convention chose pro-war Vice President Humphrey over the anti-war McCarthy and refused to condemn the war effort, the Democrats alienated many of their core constituency on the left.

Meanwhile, the Republicans handed their nomination to former vice president Richard Nixon at a rather peaceful convention. Then, a third candidate entered the national election, Alabama governor George Wallace, who ran a segregationist third-party campaign, much like Strom Thurmond had done in 1948 against Harry Truman. Wallace was popular in the South, which had traditionally voted Democratic. Thus, Humphrey was twice cursed: He had alienated his progressive urban base in the North and Wallace was siphoning his potential support in the South. Humphrey denounced the Vietnam War late in the campaign, but it was too little, too late. In one of the closest elections in history, Richard Nixon was elected president.

The Counter Counter-Culture

It would be easy to stereotype the 1960s and 1970s as a rollicking party filled with free love, new social ideas, and worthy political causes for which young people could devote their time. Not everyone in America embraced the changes of the 1960s, though. Dismayed with what they perceived to be the excesses of the civil rights movement, the counterculture movement, and feminism, some Americans were eager to bring the country back to traditional values based on religious principles. Other Americans were alarmed by the rising cost of social welfare programs created by the New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. The conservative resurgence began in the 1970s at the grassroots level with a variety of groups that focused on single issues such as ending abortion, criticizing affirmative action, or emphasizing traditional gender roles and the nuclear family. Many older people were suspicious of the largely young contingent who had come to question the values of their parents and grandparents. Religious people distrusted the rejection of traditional morals and spiritual beliefs. Southern segregationists resisted the Civil Rights movement. And some Americans who did not have strong political leanings simply tired of marches and protests and wanted to return to a more peaceful way of life.

One notable leader in the Conservative reaction to the changes of the 1960s was Phyllis Schlafly. She is most well known for lobbying against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. The ERA passed Congress, but was never fully ratified by the states, in part due to efforts to quell it by Schlafly and her supporters. Opponents to the ERA claimed that it could lead to the conscription of women into war (the Vietnam draft was already highly controversial), negatively affect women in divorce cases, and even allow men entry to women’s-only colleges and clubs. Whatever the effects of the ERA would have been, these warnings influenced the opinions of many Americans and thus the ERA was never fully ratified.

When Richard Nixon ran for office, he sought to appeal to Americans who did not fully embrace the cultural and political changes of the 1960’s and 1970. Conservatives voted for Nixon in large numbers, hoping that he would reverse the trend of encroaching federal power, as did some Southern Democrats who distrusted the newer liberal social policies of their party.

Nixon, “Vietnamization,” and Détente

Nixon entered office promising to end American involvement in Vietnam by turning the war over to the South Vietnamese, a process he called “Vietnamization.” He soon began withdrawing troops; however, he also increased the number and intensity of air strikes. Like his predecessors, Nixon was a veteran cold warrior who believed that the United States could, and must, win in Vietnam. He ordered bombing raids and ground troops into Cambodia, in hopes of rooting out Vietcong strongholds and weapons supplies. American involvement in Vietnam dragged on until 1973, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger completed negotiations for a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese.

There are a couple of postscripts to the Vietnam story. First, the negotiated peace crumbled almost as soon as American troops started to vacate the country. In 1975 Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army, and Vietnam was united under communist rule. Second, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 in order to prevent any future president from involving the military in another undeclared war. The War Powers Resolution requires the president to obtain congressional approval for any troop commitment lasting longer than 60 days.

Nixon did have success, however, in his other foreign policy initiatives, especially those concerning the world’s two other superpowers, the USSR and China. During Nixon’s first term, the United States increased trade with the Soviets, and the administration negotiated the first of a number of arms treaties between the two countries. Results were even more dramatic with China. After a series of secret negotiations, Nixon traveled to communist China, whose government the United States had previously refused to acknowledge. Nixon’s trip eased tensions, partly because at the time of the trip, Americans trusted the anti-communist Nixon to improve relations with China, and his trip opened trade relations between the two countries. It also allowed Nixon to use his friendship with the Chinese as leverage against the USSR, and vice versa. (The Chinese and the Soviets, despite both being communist, hated each other.)

The Nixon years added two new terms to the vocabulary of foreign policy. Together, Nixon and Kissinger formulated an approach called détente, a policy of “openness” that called for countries to respect each other’s differences and cooperate more closely. Détente ushered in a brief period of relaxed tensions between the two superpowers but ended when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Nixon Doctrine announced that the United States would withdraw from many of its overseas troop commitments, relying instead on alliances with local governments to check the spread of communism.

Nixon’s Domestic Policy

Nixon could not match his successes overseas at home. During Nixon’s presidency, the economy worsened, going through a period of combined recession-inflation that economists called stagflation. Nixon attempted to combat the nation’s economic woes with a number of interventionist measures, including a price-and-wage freeze and increased federal spending. None of his efforts produced their intended results.

Politically, American society remained divided among the haves and have-nots, the conservatives and the progressives. Much of the political rhetoric on both sides painted the opposition as enemies of the “American way.” Several confrontations on college campuses heightened political tensions, most notably when national guardsmen shot and killed four protesters at Kent State University in Ohio who were protesting the United States’ decision to invade Vietcong camps in neutral Cambodia. This incident became synonymous with the division between the youth and middle America. A similar incident occurred at the historically black Jackson State University in Mississippi, but the media failed to report the incident—further evidence of continued racial conflict in American society. Meanwhile, urban crime levels rose, causing many to flee to the relative tranquility of the suburbs.

Still, in 1972, Nixon won re-election in one of the greatest landslide victories in American political history, defeating liberal Senator George McGovern. Although Nixon won the election easily, both houses of Congress remained under Democratic control, an indication of the mixed feelings many Americans felt toward their political leaders.

Watergate and Nixon’s Resignation

In the summer of 1971, two major newspapers published the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret government study of the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The study covered the period from World War II to 1968, and it was not complimentary. It documented numerous military miscalculations and flat-out lies the government had told the public. Even though the documents contained nothing about the Nixon administration, Nixon fought aggressively to prevent their publication. The United States was involved in secret diplomatic negotiations with North Vietnam, the USSR, and China at the time, and Nixon and Kissinger both believed that the revelation of secret government dealings in the past might destroy their credibility in the present.

Nixon lost his fight to suppress the Pentagon Papers, a loss that increased Nixon’s already considerable paranoia. In an effort to prevent any further leaks of classified documents, Nixon put together a team of investigators called the “plumbers.” The plumbers undertook such disgraceful projects as burglarizing a psychiatrist’s office in order to gather incriminating information on Daniel Ellsberg, the government official who had turned the Pentagon Papers over to the press. During the 1972 elections, the plumbers sabotaged the campaigns of several Democratic hopefuls and then botched a burglary of Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.

When the plumbers were arrested at the Watergate Hotel, the White House began an all-out effort to cover up the scandal. A Senate hearing into the matter began in early 1973 and dragged on, keeping the story alive in the news for the next year and a half. Information was slowly revealed that incriminated the president’s closest advisers. They would resign, and then most would be tried and convicted of felonies. (Perjury and destruction of evidence were two popular and successful charges against them.) At last, it was discovered that Nixon had secretly taped all conversations in the White House, including many concerning Watergate. For the next year, a legal battle over the tapes raged; the Senate demanded them, and Nixon refused to turn them over, claiming executive privilege. All the while, more damning evidence came to light—much of it in the pages of The Washington Post, courtesy of investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—and more former Nixon associates were jailed. When the president lost the battle over the tapes—the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn them over to the Senate—he knew his days were numbered, as the tapes revealed a number of unsavory aspects of Nixon’s character. Rather than face impeachment proceedings, Nixon resigned in August 1974. His vice president, Gerald Ford, took office and almost immediately granted Nixon a presidential pardon, thereby preventing a trial.

Gerald Ford

Gerald Ford became president when Nixon resigned. Ford had replaced Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, who had resigned in the face of impending criminal charges (relating to corruption during his tenure as governor of Maryland). When Ford selected Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, it was the first time that neither the president nor the vice president had been elected by the public.

Ford’s controversial pardon of Nixon brought the Watergate era to a close, but it also cost Ford politically, as it raised suspicions that Nixon and Ford had struck a deal. Ford’s political fortunes were further undermined by the weak economy. People were encouraged to wear “WIN” buttons: Whip Inflation Now. An oil embargo organized by Arab nations (under the leadership of OPEC) against the United States increased fuel prices, which in turn caused the price of almost everything else to rise. Inflation, coupled with an increasing unemployment rate, and the damage done to his credibility by the media, especially parodies by the actor Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live, sealed Ford’s fate. In 1976 he was defeated by Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter

Carter inherited a weakening economy. During his presidency, inflation exceeded 10 percent, and interest rates on loans approached 20 percent. Slow economic growth was coupled with inflation to worsen the stagflation that began in Nixon’s term. Carter tried to balance the federal budget but failed (as had every president since Eisenhower).

Many of the nation’s economic problems resulted from the increased cost of OPEC petroleum. In response, President Carter increased funding for research into alternative sources of power. Carter created a new, cabinet-level government agency, the Department of Energy, to oversee these efforts. Many Americans saw nuclear power as a solution to the nation’s energy woes. Opponents argued that nuclear power plant failures were potentially catastrophic; their fears were reinforced when a Pennsylvania plant at Three Mile Island failed, releasing radioactive materials into the atmosphere.

The high point of the Carter administration came when President Carter personally brokered a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Israeli-Egyptian conflict dated to the moment of Israel’s founding in 1948, when Israel was besieged by hostile Arab neighbors. Tensions between Israel and Egypt were heightened by the 1967 Six Day War, during which Israel took control of the Sinai Peninsula, a desert region belonging to Egypt. In 1978, however, the leaders of the two countries agreed to meet with each other, in each other’s countries. It was a major breakthrough in Israeli-Arab relations; most Arab nations refused even to acknowledge Israel’s existence. President Carter hoped to capitalize on this breakthrough. He invited the two leaders to Camp David and personally brokered an agreement between the two nations. Ever since, the United States has actively participated in peace negotiations in the region.

Carter enjoyed some foreign policy successes. Along with negotiating the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, he also concluded an arms agreement with the Soviets. However, Carter also suffered some major setbacks. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan, Carter’s efforts proved powerless in forcing a withdrawal. Carter also flip-flopped in Nicaragua, where first he befriended the revolutionary Sandinista government and then turned against them as they allied themselves more closely with the USSR and Cuba. Carter’s worst crisis involved Iran, when American hostages were taken in retaliation for America’s decades-long support of the repressive, deposed Shah. Held for more than a year, the hostages were released only after Ronald Reagan took office.

Carter made the promotion of human rights one of the cornerstones of his foreign policy—he also negotiated a treaty between the United States and Panama that gave control of the canal zone back to Panama and got the Senate to ratify it. He spent his retirement working ceaselessly with organizations like Habitat for Humanity.

Summary

Here are the most important concepts to remember from the Postwar Cold War period.

○ After World War II, American life was economically prosperous—while fears of Communism dictated foreign policy.

○ Left-wing liberalism promoted both a larger role for government in society and changing social norms.

○ As industry and population grew, environmental concerns became more pressing.

Chapter 12 Review Questions

See Chapter 14 for answers and explanations.

1. All of the following threatened Harry Truman’s chances for re-election in 1948 EXCEPT

(A) Truman’s positions on civil rights

(B) rampant inflation

(C) the Dixiecrat candidacy of Strom Thurmond

(D) public dissatisfaction with the Korean War

2. Loyalty oaths, blacklists, and Alger Hiss are all associated with the

(A) civil rights movement

(B) New Deal

(C) Red Scare

(D) Great Society

3. John Foster Dulles, secretary of state under Eisenhower, intensified Cold War rhetoric with Washington’s New Look defense program that emphasized

(A) threatening Moscow with “massive retaliation”

(B) containment

(C) collective security

(D) summit diplomacy

4. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the Warren Court was often criticized for

(A) backing down from the Brown decision in its other civil rights rulings

(B) exercising judicial restraint

(C) protecting civil rights for African Americans while denying rights for political activists and communists

(D) in effect, enacting “judicial legislation” through its rulings on individual rights

5. John F. Kennedy was unable to accomplish much of his stated civil rights agenda during his lifetime primarily because

(A) the war in Vietnam demanded his full attention

(B) African American leaders refused to work with him

(C) his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, opposed any changes to civil rights law

(D) the violent tactics of the civil rights movement made any association with it politically untenable

6. Which of the following does NOT accurately describe the presidential election of 1968?

(A) The Democratic Party was fractured due to dissent over the Vietnam War.

(B) A frontrunner for one of the major parties was assassinated during the primary season.

(C) Both major-party candidates campaigned as Washington outsiders.

(D) A third-party candidacy split the traditionally Democratic Southern vote.

7. Inflation throughout the 1970s was driven in large part by

(A) the cost of funding the Vietnam War

(B) rapidly increasing gasoline and oil prices

(C) government investment in the space program

(D) a dramatic reduction of income tax rates

8. The incident that began a chain of events that became one of the most infamous presidential scandals in American history and eventually led to the resignation of Richard Nixon was the

(A) burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office

(B) political sabotage of Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern

(C) illegal use of the CIA to hush up the FBI’s investigation of the events surrounding the publication of the Pentagon Papers

(D) break-in and attempted bugging of the Democratic party’s national headquarters

REFLECT

Respond to the following questions:

• For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you have achieved sufficient mastery to answer multiple-choice questions correctly?

• For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you have achieved sufficient mastery to discuss effectively in a short- answer question or an essay?

• On which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you need more work before you can answer multiple-choice questions correctly?

• On which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you need more work before you can discuss them effectively in a short-answer question or an essay?

• What parts of this chapter are you going to re-review?

• Will you seek further help, outside of this book (such as a teacher, tutor, or AP Students), on any of the content in this chapter—and, if so, on what content?