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THE COLD WAR (1945–1963)
1
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U
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presidents Franklin D
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This mutual mistrust actually began as far back as 1917, when the United States
refused to recognize the new Bolshevik government after the Russian Revolution
...
Additionally,
Stalin was irked by the fact that Truman had offered postwar relief loans to Great Britain but not to
the USSR
...
This goal conflicted drastically with the Russian revolutionaries’ original desire to
overthrow capitalism
...
Both the United States and the USSR believed that their respective survival was at stake,
and each was therefore prepared to take any steps to win
...

At the same time, however, both the United States and the USSR did much to prevent the Cold War
from escalating, as both countries knew how devastating a nuclear war would be
...
President Dwight D
...
Likewise, the Soviet Union made sacrifices to keep the war
“cold” by backing down from the Cuban missile crisis
...

The Cold War had an enormous impact on the United States politically, socially, and economically
...
S
...
Eisenhower, for example, sought to
reduce government spending at home in order to halt what he called “creeping socialism” and to
save money for more urgent needs such as defense
...
Even Eisenhower’s farewell warning of a
growing military-industrial complex within the United States, which would come to dominate
American political thinking, proved to be eerily accurate during the Vietnam War era the following
decade
...

The question as to whether the United States or the USSR was more to blame for starting the Cold
War has produced heated debate among twentieth-century historians
...
More recent historians, however, have accused President
Truman of inciting the Cold War with his acerbic language and public characterization of the Soviet
Union as the greatest threat to the free world
...


2
...
Suspicion and mistrust had defined U
...
-Soviet relations for decades and resurfaced as soon
as the alliance against Adolf Hitler was no longer necessary
...
S
...

Stalin intended to destroy Germany’s industrial capabilities in order to prevent the country from
remilitarizing and wanted Germany to pay outrageous sums in war reparations
...
Truman, however, wanted exactly the opposite
...
Unable to compromise or find common ground, the world’s two remaining superpowers
inevitably clashed
...
He
helped create the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and funded the rebuilding
of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur
...
The Marshall Plan was so successful that factories in
Western Europe were exceeding their prewar production levels within just a few years
...
He protested the Marshall Plan as well as the formation of the World Bank
and IMF
...
As a result, the so-called iron curtain soon divided East from West in Europe
...
Determined not to let the city fall, Truman
ordered the Berlin airlift to drop food and medical supplies for starving Berliners
...

In 1947, Truman incorporated this desire for containment into his Truman Doctrine, which vowed
to support free nations fighting Communism
...
In 1949, Truman also convinced the
Western European powers to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so that they
might mutually defend themselves against the danger of Soviet invasion
...


Truman at Home

In the domestic policy arena, Truman signed the National Security Act in 1947 to restructure
America’s defenses for the new Communist threat
...
It also created the National
Security Council to advise the president on global affairs and the Central Intelligence Agency to
conduct espionage
...
HisFair Deal domestic policies
and support for civil rights, however, divided the Republican Party and nearly cost Truman the
election
...
Congressman Richard M
...
Truman initially supported these inquiries
and even established a Loyalty Review Boardto assist in the search
...

The Korean War

Cold War tensions between the United States and the USSR eventually exploded in Korea when
Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950
...
MacArthur succeeded and then pushed the North Koreans almost
up to the Chinese border
...

When MacArthur began to criticize Truman publicly for his unwillingness to use nuclear weapons
in Korea, Truman was forced to fire his top general for insubordination
...
Both sides declared a cease-fire only after the new U
...

president, Dwight D
...

Postwar Prosperity

Eisenhower’s election in 1952 ushered in an unprecedented era of economic growth and prosperity
in the United States
...
I
...
The postwar “baby
boom”contributed to population growth, while the Great Migration of African-Americans to
northern cities, “white flight” from the cities to the suburbs, and the rush to the Sun Belt altered
population demographics
...
Popular television sitcoms like Leave It to
Beaver and Ozzie and Harrietglamorized suburbia and consumerism
...
” He did not, however, cut federal funding
from existing New Deal programs
...
Still a conservative, though, Eisenhower refused to
endorse the blossoming civil rights movement and signed the Landrum-Griffin Act, also known as
the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, in the wake of numerous AFL-CIO labor
union scandals in the mid-1950s
...

Even though McCarthy had no proof to support these claims, Americans supported his endeavors to
find more “Soviet agents” hiding in Washington
...
McCarthy’s influence eventually waned
after he humiliated himself during the nationally televisedArmy-McCarthy hearings in 1954
...
Along with Vice President Richard M
...

Eisenhower threatened the USSR with “massive retaliation,” or nuclear war, against Soviet
aggression or the spread of Communism
...
He resolved the Suez crisispeacefully before it led to war and committed
American funds to fighting Ho Chi Minh’s pro-Communist forces in Vietnam after the French
defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954
...
In his farewell address
in 1961, he warned Americans of the growing military-industrial complex that threatened to restrict
civil liberties and dominate American foreign policy making
...
Democrats countered with World War II hero and Massachusetts
senator John F
...
After a close race, Kennedy defeated Nixon, thanks in large part to the
African-American vote and Kennedy’s polished performance in the first-ever televised presidential
debates
...
Hoping to inspire a new generation of young Americans, he told them to “ask not
what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country
...

Flexible Response

Because Eisenhower’s threat of “massive retaliation” had proved too stringent and binding,
Kennedy and his foreign policy team devised a new doctrine of“flexible response” designed to give
the president more options to fight Communism
...
” In Latin
America, Kennedy took a different approach, funneling millions of dollars into the Alliance for
Progress to thwart Communists by ending poverty
...

The Cuban Crises

Kennedy’s greatest Cold War challenge came in Cuba
...
When
this Bay of Pigs invasion failed embarrassingly, Kennedy authorized several unsuccessful
assassination attempts against Castro
...

Khrushchev capitalized on the opportunity and placed several nuclear missiles in Cuba
...
Khrushchev ended the terrifyingCuban missile crisis when he agreed to remove the
missiles in exchange for an end to the blockade
...
Tragically, Kennedy was assassinated in
late 1963, just as tensions were rising in Vietnam—which would prove to be the next, and most
costly, theater of the Cold War
...
Key People & Terms:
People
Allen Dulles

The director of the CIA under Eisenhower, who advocated extensive use ofcovert operations
...
S
...
Although Eisenhower favored such covert operations because
they were relatively low-cost and attracted little attention, the coups in Iran and Guatemala proved
rather transparent and caused international anger toward the United States
...
Dulles’s policy emphasizedmassive retaliation with nuclear
weapons
...

Dwight D
...
S
...
Stevenson
...
However, he cut back funding to other domestic
programs to halt what he called “creeping socialism
...
Eisenhower committed federal
dollars to fighting Communists in Vietnam, resolved the Suez crisis, and authorized CIA-sponsored
coups in Iran and Guatemala
...
After being rebuffed by the
United States, Ho received aid from the USSR and won a major victory over French forces at Dien
Bien Phu in 1954
...

John F
...
S
...
Kennedy was elected in 1960, defeating RepublicanRichard M
...
Feeling
that their hands were tied by Eisenhower’s policy of “massive retaliation,” Kennedy and members
of his foreign policy staff devised the tactic of “flexible response” to contain Communism
...
He also backed the
disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, which ultimately led to the Cuban missile crisis
...

Johnson took office
...

Initially, many Americans hoped Khrushchev’s rise to power would lead to a reduction in Cold War
tensions
...
The U-2 incident and 1962 Cuban missile crisis, however,
ended what little amity existed between the two nations and repolarized the Cold War
...

Douglas MacArthur

Five-star American general who commanded Allied forces in the Pacific duringWorld War II
...
He
later commanded United Nations forces in Korea, driving North Korean forces back north of
the 38th parallel after making the brilliant Inchon landing
...
President Harry S
Truman later rejected MacArthur’s request to bomb North Korea and China with nuclear weapons
...

Joseph McCarthy

Republican senator from Wisconsin who capitalized on Cold War fears ofCommunism in the
early 1950s by accusing hundreds of government employees of being Communists and Soviet
agents
...
He ruined his own reputation in 1954 after humiliating himself
during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings
...

Gamal Abdel Nasser

The nationalist, Communist-leaning president of Egypt who seized the British-controlled Suez
Canal in 1956, after economic aid negotiations among Egypt, Great Britain, and the United States
fell apart
...

Richard M
...
Nixon later served as vice president under Dwight
D
...
He lost his own bid for the presidency against John F
...

Harry S Truman

Vice president under Franklin D
...
Truman was instrumental in
creating a new international political and economic order after the war, helping to form the United
Nations, NATO, theWorld Bank, and the International Monetary Fund
...

Determined not to let the Soviet Union spread Communism, Truman adopted the idea
of containment, announcing his own Truman Doctrine in 1947
...
He also led
the nation into the Korean Warbut eventually fired General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination
...
S
...
Tens of
millions of Americans watched the televised courtroom proceedings as McCarthy publicly
humiliated himself without offering a shred of evidence
...

Bay of Pigs Invasion

President John F
...
Although Kennedy had originally
intended to use the U
...
Air Force to help the exiled Cubans retake the island, he unexpectedly
withdrew support shortly before the operation started
...

Berlin Airlift

The dropping of thousands of tons of food and medical supplies to starving West Berliners
after Joseph Stalin closed off all highway and railway access to the city in mid-1948
...
The blockade was foiled, and Stalin finally lifted it in 1949
...
S
...
First formulated by State Department
analyst George Kennan during the Truman administration, it suggested that the United States
needed to fight Communism abroad and promote democracy (or at least anti-Communist regimes)

worldwide
...
Kennan’s idea eventually
developed into the single most important tenet of American foreign policy through the Cold War
until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991
...
The Soviet
premier, Nikita Khrushchev, capitalized on the failed invasion, allied with Castro, and secured from
Castro the right to place nuclear missiles in Cuba
...

Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island in 1962 and demanded that Khrushchev remove
them
...
The United States complied and also agreed to remove
from Turkey nuclear missiles aimed at the USSR
...

Dien Bien Phu

A site in Vietnam where an important French outpost fell to Ho Chi Minh’s pro-Communist forces
in 1954
...
Ho Chi Minh
established a government in the city of Hanoi in North Vietnam, while U
...
-backed Ngo Dinh
Diem took control of the South Vietnamese government in Saigon
...
Many foreign policy thinkers subscribed to this theory at
the height of the Cold War, and this led the United States to support anti-Communist regimes
throughout the world, whether or not they upheld democratic ideals
...

Flexible Response

A doctrine of containment that provided for a variety of military and political strategies that the
president could use to stem the spread of Communism
...

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

A committee established in 1938 by the House of Representatives to investigate individual
Americans or organizations who might be linked to the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan
...
Congressman Richard M
...

Marshall Plan

A plan devised by President Harry S Truman and Secretary of State George C
...
Although the Soviet
Union fiercely opposed the plan, Truman knew that rebuilding the region would provide stability
and prevent another world war
...

Massive Retaliation

A primary component of Dwight D
...

Designed to save the U
...
government money on defense spending, this policy effectively tied
Eisenhower’s hands because it limited his options when addressing smaller crises, such as
the 1956 Hungarian Revolution
...

Montgomery G
...
Bill

A bill passed in 1944 that provided federal grants for education to returning World War II veterans
...
Millions of veterans took advantage of these grants
and loans to go back to school and purchase new suburban homes, making the act one of the most
significant pieces of postwar legislation
...
S
...
The act placed the armed forces under the new secretary of defense and Joint
Chiefs of Staff and also created the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security
Council to advise the president
...
NSC-68 set a precedent for increasing defense spending throughout the
Cold War, especially after North Korean forces attacked South Korea in June 1950
...
Opposition in Congress from Republicans and southern
Democrats, however, blocked the passage of most New Frontier legislation
...
The treaty had the additional effect of permanently tying American interests to political
and economic stability in Europe
...
CongressmanRichard Nixon, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and others
led these Communist “witch hunts,” often without any shred of evidence
...


Space Race

The Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for primacy in the
exploration of outer space
...
The Sputniklaunch prompted President Eisenhower to
form NASA and Kennedy to push for alunar landing by the end of the 1960s
...
The launch of
these satellites astonished the world and scared many Americans into believing that the USSR had
the capability to attack the United States with long-range nuclear missiles
...
Congress also passed the National Defense Education Act,
which provided more federal dollars for science and foreign language instruction in public schools
...

Suez Crisis

The crisis that erupted after Egypt’s nationalization of the British-controlled Suez Canal, which took
place in 1956 after negotiations over international aid among the United States, Great Britain, and
Egypt collapsed
...
Although Eisenhower protested the move, he also condemned
the joint British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt to retake the canal
...

Truman Doctrine

A doctrine articulated by President Harry S Truman that pledged American support for all “free
peoples” fighting Communist aggression from foreign or domestic sources
...
Besides committing the United States to the policy of containment, the
language of the Truman Doctrine itself help characterize the Cold War as a conflict between good
and evil
...
President Dwight D
...
The
president’s refusal to apologize or halt future spy missions caused the collapse of a joint summit
among Great Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR in May 1960
...
By
signing the pact, they pledged mutual defense in response to the formation of NATO
...
The Postwar World: 1945–1949:
Events

1945 United Nations forms Nuremberg trials begin Japan surrenders

1946 Tokyo trials begin
1947 Marshall Plan implemented
1948 Israel becomes a nation Truman orders Berlin airlift
Key People

Harry S Truman - 33rd U
...
president; successfully carried out end of World War II after FDR’s
death; helped create new postwar political and economic world order
Joseph Stalin - Soviet premier; opposed reindustrialization of Germany outlined in the Marshall
Plan; ordered Berlin blockade
Douglas MacArthur - U
...
Army general; commanded Allied forces in the Pacific during World
War II and subsequently led U
...
occupation of Japan
Postwar Predicaments
As World War II combat operations ceased in Europe and the war drew rapidly to a close in the
Pacific, the United States and its new president, Harry S Truman, faced many new challenges
...

At first, Truman seemed unfit to solve these problems
...
Roosevelt’s fourth-term vice president
...

The Bretton Woods Conference
The process of rebuilding Europe began almost a year before Truman became president, when the
United States invited Allied delegates to discuss the postwar world in Bretton Woods, New
Hampshire, in July 1944
...

The United Nations
Stalin’s representatives were, however, involved in the formation of the United Nations, which was
intended to promote international security and prevent future global conflicts
...
Roosevelt’s death and Truman’s succession to the
presidency, delegates drafted the organization’s founding charter, which closely resembled the
charter of the failed League of Nations after World War I
...
According to the charter, the United States,
Great Britain, France, China, and the USSR each would have a permanent seat and veto power on
the governing Security Council
...
Carved
out of British Palestine along the eastern Mediterranean, this new state became the home for
millions of displaced Jews who had survived centuries of persecution
...
Although the decision gave the United States a strategic foothold in the
Middle East, it also ruined relations with the Arab countries in the region and Muslim nations
around the world
...
The commander of the
Allied forces in the Pacific, U
...
Army general Douglas MacArthur, spearheaded the
democratization and reconstruction process—a daunting task considering the widespread
devastation throughout Japan
...
The Japanese, for their part, accepted
defeat and worked hard to rebuild their country under U
...
guidelines
...
The new
constitution and reforms allowed Japan to recover quickly from the war and eventually boast one of
the largest economies in the world
...
At the time of the German surrender
in 1945, British, French, American, and Soviet troops occupied different regions of the country
...

Although all four nations agreed that it was necessary to punish the Nazi leadership for war crimes
at the Nuremberg trials, none of the powers wanted to relinquish control of its occupied territory
...
The
British, French, and American occupation zones eventually merged into the independentWest
Germany in 1949, while the Soviet half ultimately became East Germany
...

The Marshall Plan
The Soviet Union in particular wanted to exact revenge on Germany by dismantling its factories
and demanding outrageous war reparations
...

In 1947, Truman’s secretary of state, George C
...
Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany complied and came
together to lead postwar Europe—an early precursor to the European Community and European
Union that would come later
...
Within ten years, European factories had exceeded
prewar production levels, boosting the standard of living and ensuring that Communism would not
take root
...
Determined to build a buffer between Germany and Moscow, the
Soviet Red Army established Communist governments in the eastern capitals it occupied at the end
of the war
...

The Berlin Crisis and Airlift
In 1948, Stalin attempted to drive British, French, and American forces out of Berlin by cutting off
all highway and railway access to the Western-controlled portion of the city
...
S
...
S
...
Instead, he
ordered American airplanes to drop millions of tons of food and medical supplies to West Berlin’s
residents in 1948 and 1949
...
Stalin eventually ended the Berlin crisis when he reopened the roads and
railways in 1949
...
The Start of the Cold War: 1947–1952:
Events

1938 House Un-American Activities Committee created
1947 Doctrine of containment emerges Truman articulates Truman Doctrine Congress passes
National Security Act
1948 Alger Hiss accused of being a Soviet operative Truman is reelected
1949 NATO is formed China falls to Communist forces
1950 Congress passes McCarran Internal Security Bill
1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convicted of espionage
1952 United States develops first hydrogen bomb
Key People

Harry S Truman - 33rd U
...
president; announced Truman Doctrine in 1947, which shaped U
...

foreign policy for four decades
Thomas E
...
Kennan - State Department analyst who developed containment doctrine in 1947,
arguing that Communism and the USSR could not be allowed to spread; this doctrine became the
basis of U
...
foreign policy strategy during the Cold War
Richard M
...
Kennan penned a highly influential essay on the Soviet
Union that transformed fear of the USSR into a cohesive foreign policy
...
Kennan also wrote, however, that the United States
could prevent the global domination of Communism with a strategy of “containment
...

Kennan’s containment doctrine rapidly became the root of the dominant U
...
strategy for fighting
Communism throughout the Cold War
...

The Truman Doctrine
Truman quickly latched onto the doctrine of containment and modified it with his own Truman
Doctrine
...
He then convinced Congress to appropriate
$400 million to prevent the fall of Greece and Turkey to Communist insurgents
...
Many have claimed that the United States
might have avoided fifty years of competition and mutual distrust had Truman sought a diplomatic
solution instead
...
Truman, they have argued,
merely met the existing Soviet challenge
...
S
...
Whatever his
motivations, Truman’s adoption of the containment doctrine and his characterization of the
Communist threat shaped American foreign policy for the subsequent four decades
...
In 1947,
Congress passed the landmark National Security Act, which placed the military under the new
cabinet-level secretary of defense
...
The
National Security Act also created the civilian position of national security advisor to advise the
president and direct the newNational Security Council
...

The Election of 1948
Even though he had initially complained about his new responsibilities as president after
Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Truman decided to run for reelection as the prospect of another world
war loomed
...

Eisenhower refused to run on the Democratic ticket
...
When Truman received the formal party nomination, southern Democrats split from the
party and nominated their own candidate, GovernorStrom Thurmond of South Carolina
...

The Republicans, meanwhile, nominated New York governor Thomas E
...
Most Democrats
and even Truman himself believed victory to be impossible
...
” As it turned out, however, Truman received more than
two million more popular votes than his nearest challenger, Dewey, and 303 electoral votes
...
Continued Republican and southern Democrat opposition in Congress, though,
blocked the majority of Fair Deal legislation during Truman’s second term
...
In 1949, the United States joined Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada,
the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Portugal in forming a
military alliance called theNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
...
Greece and
Turkey signed the treaty in 1952, followed by West Germany in 1955
...
S
...
Outraged and threatened, the USSR and the Soviet
bloc countries it dominated in Eastern Europe made similar pledges of mutual defense
...
For decades, the Nationalist government of Chiang Kaishek (sometimes written as Jiang Jieshi) had been fighting a long civil war against Communist
rebels led by Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-tung)
...
S
...
Mao’s revolutionaries, however, finally managed to defeat government forces
in 1949 and took control of mainland China
...
The so-called fall of China was a
crushing blow for the United States, primarily because it suddenly put more than a quarter of the
world’s population under Communist control
...
S
...

The Arms Race
Also in 1949, Truman announced that the Soviet Union had successfully tested its first atomic
bomb, sooner than American scientists had predicted
...
S
...
Whereas the
United States had lorded its nuclear superiority over the Soviets’ heads in the past, it could no
longer do so
...
Its developers feared this
weapon would become a tool for genocide
...
The United States and the USSR
continued competing against each other with the development of greater and more destructive
weapons in an arms race that lasted until the end of the Cold War
...
Remembering the Bolshevik
revolutionaries’ cry for the global destruction of capitalism, frightened Americans began hunting for
Communist revolutionaries within the United States and elsewhere
...
The board went into overdrive at the end of the decade, and thousands of innocent
individuals were wrongfully accused and persecuted as a result
...

Nixon of California helped spearhead the search for Communists in the government
...
Hiss’s trial dragged on for two more years and ended with a five-year
prison sentence for perjury
...
The Rosenbergs were convicted in 1951 and sent to the electric chair in 1953, becoming
the first American civilians ever executed for espionage
...
He tried to tame the Red-hunters in 1950 when he vetoed the McCarran Internal
Security Bill, which he believed would give the U
...
president too much power to subvert civil
liberties
...


5
...
S
...
Eisenhower is elected president
1953 Korean War ends with signing of armistice
Key People

Harry S Truman - 33rd U
...
president; was commander in chief during most of Korean War
Dean Acheson - Secretary of state during Truman’s second term; announced in1950 that Korea was
outside the U
...
defense perimeter

Douglas MacArthur - U
...
general and commander of United Nations forces who drove North
Korean forces back past the 38th parallel after making Inchon landing
Dwight D
...
S
...
After Japanese forces surrendered to General Douglas MacArthur,
the United States and the USSR shared control of the neighboring Korean Peninsula, which had
been under Japanese control since the turn of the century
...
Both sides also
armed the Koreans and erected new governments friendly to each respective superpower
...
The Soviet Union, however, may have interpreted
Acheson’s remarks as giving the USSR carte blanche regarding Korea and therefore allowed the
North Korean Communist government in Pyongyang to invade South Korea in June 1950, with
some Soviet support
...
Truman watched, stunned, as the North Korean forces
captured almost the entire peninsula within the span of a few months
...
After a vote of unanimous approval, the Security
Council asked all member nations to help restore peace
...
The invasion thus made George F
...

In order to check this feared expansion, Truman’s new National Security Council submitted a
classified document known simply as National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68), which
suggested that Truman quadruple military spending for purposes of containment
...
Within a few years, the U
...

armed forces boasted more than 3 million men, and the United States was spending
roughly 15 percent of its gross national product on the military
...
Truman then ordered
MacArthur to pull U
...
troops out of Japan and retake South Korea below the 38th parallel
...
The surprise Inchon landing allowed U
...
forces to enter the
peninsula quickly, without having to break through the enormous forces surrounding Pusan
...

Truman ordered MacArthur to cross the parallel and pursue the North Koreans
...
China therefore warned the United States not to approach the
Chinese–North Korean border at the Yalu River
...
Interpreting this move as an act of war, the
Chinese sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Yalu to meet MacArthur’s men in North
Korea
...

MacArthur’s Dismissal
Stalemated once again at the 38th parallel, MacArthur pressured Truman to drop nuclear bombs on
mainland China
...
Truman and U
...

military officials, however, knew they lacked the resources to fight a war with China, defend
Western Europe, contain the Soviet Union, occupy Japan, and hold Korea at the same time
...
MacArthur rebuffed these
arguments and instead tried to turn the American people against Truman by criticizing him in
public
...

The Election of 1952
Even though MacArthur had disobeyed orders and publicly rebuked the commander-in-chief, blame
fell on Truman for “losing” Korea to the Communists
...
Stevenson for the presidency
in 1952
...
Eisenhower for president, with former Red-hunterRichard M
...
Eisenhower’s status as a war hero and Nixon’s reputation for being tough on
Communists gave the Republicans an easy victory
...

The End of the Korean War
By the time Eisenhower took the oath of office in 1953, American soldiers had been entrenched in
Korea for nearly three years
...
Eisenhower eventually
brought about an armistice with North Korea, in part by making it known that he, unlike Truman,
would consider the use of nuclear weapons in Korea
...


7
...
I
...
Although
the war had spurred employment and production and had pulled the nation out of the Great
Depression, the war economy couldn’t last forever
...
As inflation soared, many feared that
the immediate postwar recession of 1946 and 1947 heralded the return of the Great Depression
...
In 1946, for instance, Congress
passed the Employment Act, which created the Council of Economic Advisors to help Truman
maximize national employment
...
Truman continued to support the labor unions as he had during the war, but conservatives
feared that halting industrial production would severely cripple the economy
...
The act outlawed all-union workplaces, made unions liable for
damages incurred during interunion disputes, and required labor organizers to denounce
Communism and take oaths of loyalty
...
I
...
I
...
S
...
Also known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act and the G
...
Bill of Rights, the G
...

Bill gave government grants to any veteran who wished to return to school
...

The G
...
Bill also set aside an equal amount of money to provide veterans with loans for new
homes, farms, and businesses
...
I
...
It reduced fierce competition for jobs after the war and boosted
the economy by helping millions of workers acquire new skills
...
I
...

The Postwar Boom
Indeed, the U
...
economy recovered quickly from the brief recession of1946–1947 and then
veritably exploded, making Americans the wealthiest people in the world
...
S
...
Within just a few years, almost two-thirds of
American families achieved middle-class status
...
By 1960, most American families had a car, a
TV, and a refrigerator and owned their own home—an amazing achievement given that fewer than
half of Americans had any of these luxuries just thirty years earlier
...
Whereas the manufacturing infrastructures in Great Britain, France, and
Germany had been destroyed by invasion and bombing, American industries had remained
completely untouched and therefore benefited greatly from the war
...
Low oil prices, along with Eisenhower’s investment in transportation
infrastructure with the Federal Highway Act in 1956, also boosted the nation’s overall economic
strength
...
I
...

White-Collar Workers
The shift in the economic base away from agriculture and manufacturing and toward “white-collar”
jobs also contributed significantly to the postwar boom
...
Instead, corporate “agribusinesses” had take over agricultural production by using
machinery that was more efficient than farmhands
...
S
...
This transformation
contributed to the decline of labor unions in the latter half of the twentieth century
...

Federal grants encouraged companies to invest in research and development to make production
more efficient
...
The development of the transistor rapidly transformed the
electronics industry and resulted in the formation of new technology corporations
...
Jonas Salk’s development of the polio
vaccine in 1952, for example, effectively eliminated a disease that had killed and crippled hundreds
of thousands of Americans in the past, including former president Franklin D
...

Migration and Population Boom
Meanwhile, the U
...
population redistributed itself geographically and grew dramatically during the
postwar years
...
During the 1950s
and 1960s, millions of Americans left the East for the West, South, and Midwest
...
As a result, populations doubled, tripled, and even
quadrupled in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and other so-called Sun Belt states
...
On top of this
migration, the postwar “baby boom”between 1945 and 1957 increased the U
...
population rapidly,
as young Americans took advantage of the postwar peace and their increased wealth to start new
families and have children
...
The Great
Depression, the invention of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1940s, World War II, and the
prospect of jobs in northern cities prompted more than a million blacks to leave the South
...


The Growth of the Suburbs
As blacks moved to the cities, many whites moved out of urban areas and into the suburbs
...
” New housing developments, higher incomes, G
...
Bill
loans to veterans, and the construction of interstates all contributed to the massive growth of
American suburbia during the1950s
...
Amusement parks, credit cards, and the availability
of cheaper consumer goods followed as well, and Americans quickly developed the world’s
foremost consumer culture
...
By the mid-1960s, 90 percent of American families owned televisions, and more
and more spent the bulk of their free time watching TV
...

The new musical genre of rock and roll gained popularity among American youth
...
At the same time, many new American
writers in the 1950s, including members of the Beat Generation, such as poet Allen Ginsberg and
author Jack Kerouac, challenged the new consumerist conformity that pervaded American life
...
Kennedy and Liberalism: 1960–1963:
Events

1960 John F
...
Kennedy - 35th U
...
president; devised tactic of “flexible response” to contain
Communism; narrowly avoided Cuban missile crisis; assassinated in1963
Richard M
...
Nixon at
their national nominating convention in 1960
...
As vice president, Nixon had
traveled abroad extensively to handle “brushfire” crises and had even engaged Khrushchev in a
televised debate in Moscow
...

Kennedy, a young but accomplished senator from Massachusetts who had served with distinction in
World War II and had won a Pulitzer Prize for his1956 book Profiles in Courage
...
Tens of millions of Americans tuned in to watch the two candidates
discuss the issues
...
Largely thanks to
these TV debates, Kennedy defeated Nixon by a slim margin to become the youngest and first
Catholic president
...
The
young president wanted to expand Social Security to benefit more Americans, help the elderly pay
their medical costs, fund educational endeavors, raise the national minimum wage, and reduce
income inequality
...
” He later launched
the Peace Corps to support this effort, encouraging young Americans to assist people in developing
countries
...
His
enthusiasm spread across the country
...
Congress did raise the minimum wage to $1
...

The Berlin Wall
Kennedy’s first foreign policy crisis surfaced just months after he took office, when Soviet
premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened to sign a treaty with East Germany that would cut off the city
of Berlin from the United States and Western Europe
...
Over the years, guard towers were installed, and the “no-man’s-land” between the inner and
outer walls was mined and booby-trapped, making it incredibly difficult for East Germans to escape
to West Berlin without being killed or captured
...


Decolonization
During Kennedy’s term, the issue of decolonization posed a particularly difficult problem for a U
...

government committed to halting the spread of Communism
...
Complicating
the situation was the fact that Eisenhower’s stated policy of “massive retaliation,” which threatened
to use nuclear weapons to halt the Communist tide, effectively tied the president’s hands
...
At the same time, however, he wanted to do anything he could to avoid using
nuclear weapons
...
After carefully considering his options, Kennedy finally decided not to use military force and
instead convened a multination peace conference in Geneva in 1962 to end the civil war that had
erupted in Laos
...
Crafted with the aid of foreign
policy veteran Defense Secretary Robert S
...
In
other words, Kennedy could send money or troops to fight Communist insurgents, authorize the
CIA to topple an unfriendly government, or, as a last resort, use nuclear weapons
...
The United States had been funding Ngo Dinh Diem’s corrupt
South Vietnamese regime since Eisenhower first pledged support after the fall of Dien Bien Phu
in 1954
...
To prevent Communist-backed
insurgents from taking control of South Vietnam, Kennedy increased American commitment by
sending approximately 15,000 U
...
servicemen to Saigon, ostensibly as mere “military
advisors
...

Kennedy’s decision to send “military advisors” to South Vietnam drastically increased U
...

involvement in the Vietnamese civil war
...
Because the United States sent troops, regardless of what they were called,
responsibility for the war began to shift away from South Vietnam and onto the United States
...
Eventually, Kennedy and future presidents would find it politically impossible to recall
U
...
forces without having first defeated the pro-Communist North Vietnamese
...
(For
more information, see the History SparkNote The Vietnam War
...
Hoping to reduce
income inequality and quell pro-Communist stirrings in Central America, South America, and the
Caribbean, Kennedy decided in 1961 to give hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to the region’s

nations
...
Although Democrats lauded
the alliance as the Marshall Plan for the Western Hemisphere, the money did almost nothing to
reduce the Latin American poverty rate
...
U
...
foreign policy advisors hoped that the American-armed exiles, with U
...
Air Force
support, could overpower Castro’s sentries and spark a popular uprising
...
S
...

The CIA-trained exiles, believing that American planes would cover them, stormed a beach on
Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in April 1961, only to be ruthlessly gunned down by Castro’s forces
...
Kennedy accepted full responsibility for the massacre but continued to authorize
covert CIA missions to assassinate Castro, all of which proved unsuccessful
...
Castro, understandably outraged at the U
...
attempt to
oust him, turned to the Soviet Union for support
...
S
...
In 1962, it was revealed that the USSR had installed
severalnuclear missiles in Cuba, less than 100 miles off the Florida coast
...
S
...
Moreover, he threatened to
retaliate against Moscow if Cuba launched any missiles at the United States
...

Finally, Khrushchev offered to remove the missiles if the United States ended the blockade
...
The Cuban missile crisis was the closest the United States and the Soviet Union
came to nuclear war during the Cold War era
...
C
...
S
...
The Communist Party leadership in the USSR
also removed Khrushchev from power for having made the first concession to end the crisis
...
Although the treaty was mostly a symbolic
gesture, as it did not prohibit underground tests, it nevertheless marked a key step toward reducing
tensions between the United States and the USSR
...
Armed with a rifle and hiding in a nearby
book depository, assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy as his convertible passed
...
Although Oswald
was arrested within an hour and a half of the assassination, he himself was shot and killed two days
later in a Dallas police station (and on live television) by another gunman, named Jack Ruby
...
A week
after he took office, President Johnson formed the Warren Commission, headed by Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court Earl Warren, to launch an official investigation into Kennedy’s death
...
Another congressional investigation in 1979questioned the Warren
Commission’s findings, and speculation continues to this day

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