The Cold War
Note to students: The best preparation for taking the reading quiz is to pay close attention to the key terms as you read. Each question in the question banks is directly linked to these key terms and phrases.
Chapter Focus Question:
How did developments during WWII and the post-War years shape the actions of the the United States during the Cold War
- Churchill and Truman against Soviets
- Henry Wallace and treatment of Russians
- Truman Doctrine promise
- Vietnam and the French colonial power
- Purpose of the Marshall Plan
- Berlin and US Airlift
- George Kennan and the Long Telegram
- Definition of Third World Countries
- Purpose of Truman Doctrine
- Definition of Iron Curtain
- Purpose of the Long Telegram
- Initial phase of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis
Section Focus Question:
What was the Cold War and what is the meaning of the terms “third world” and “containment”?
Key Terms:
The postwar world soon divided between the superpowers: the United States and its allies — the so-called "Free World," or "First World" — and the Soviet bloc, including Russia and Eastern Europe and after 1949, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and a number of other communist nations. The Third World, formed from the dismembered empires of Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and including 3 dozen new nations by 1960, remained contested territory between the two superpowers, although many of these nations chose to stay nonaligned.
For the United States, this period encompassed the Korean War (1950-3), interventions in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) and the beginnings of US support of South Vietnam. The era culminated in the Cuban missile crisis, which in 1962 brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
In 1945 there had been high hopes for postwar harmony, fostered by the gathering of 50 nations at the first United Nations conference in April. Unfortunately, all too soon the first signs of a bipolar chill were appearing, with one two-week period in winter 1946 bringing some of the clearest signals of this development.
In the "Long Telegram" (February 22), State Department attaché George F. Kennan wrote from Moscow that "world communism is like [a] malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue." It was up to the US to prevent this and "put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of the sort of world we would like to see than we have… in the past."
In one poor former French colony, Vietnam, now also freed of Japanese wartime control, leader Ho Chi Minh identified just such a positive example in US history. His declaration of independence quoted from Thomas Jefferson! But his hopes for American support were stillborn. While Ho desired American-style independence from a European yoke, he also wanted a communist-style government and economy. The US was appalled at this and financed a return of France to their former colony.
Vietnam's turn to communism was perceived as part of a larger global threat, one that former Prime Minister Winston Churchill identified in a speech in Westminster, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. Churchill described an "iron curtain" dividing the non-communist world from the communist bloc and called his audience to action by reminding them of the missed opportunities to stand up to Hitler in the 1930s. To Stalin, however, Churchill's speech had its own Hitlerian echoes, with an "English racial theory" of world domination akin to Nazi racism.
While Truman did not openly endorse the speech, his connection to Churchill was deepened on the train to his home town of Independence, Missouri, over Scotch and poker. Even so, an anti-Soviet stance had not yet crystallized in the United States, though minds were tending in that direction. Six months later, Henry Wallace, Secretary of Commerce, filled Madison Square Garden calling for a more conciliatory approach, but Truman soon fired him. The Soviet ambassador Nikolai Novikov noticed the hardened policy that September, pointing to an expanding number of military bases and the advent of universal military training in the US Novikov saw the US as attempting to "dislodge" the Soviet Union from its global position, as well as creating a "war psychosis" among its "masses."
US leaders grew particularly alarmed in this period when a former British client, Greece, faced a communist insurgency. To protect both Greece and neighboring Turkey, in March 1947 the US announced the Truman Doctrine, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." This came with an unprecedented peacetime aid of $650 million, along with advisers.
In Western Europe, too, the communists were making inroads, especially in elections in France and Italy. To avoid the "economic, social and political disintegration" that seemed imminent, 3 months after the Truman Doctrine, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced the Marshall Plan, which would bring $22 billion in aid to Europe over the next 4 years.
Through the Central Intelligence Agency, created as part of the National Security Act of 1947, the US also secretly funded anti-communist political parties in Europe. Such efforts were consistent with a theory George F. Kennan had detailed that year in the journal Foreign Affairs, calling for "long term patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."
At this time, too, the US Britain and France consolidated their 3 occupation zones in Germany, politically and economically. The Soviets responded from their zone in 1948 by blockading access to the capital, Berlin. The US and Britain coordinated a successful airlift in response, lasting a year.
In 1949, lines tightened further in Europe, when American, Canadian, and Western European armies created a defense alliance — NATO. Stalin’s wartime espionage, however, was paying off. The Soviets had spent a great deal of effort during WWII not only finding out about America’s nuclear program but also gathering some of the secrets of nuclear technology. When Stalin blasted off its first A-bomb in August, the American government began a campaign of rooting out the spies in the Atomic Program. The uncovering of one spy ring, the Rosenberg case, resulted in the execution of American engineer Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel in 1953.
- CIA funding during Cold War
- Definition of Third World
- Overthrow of Masaddegh
- Significant turning point in the European war
- Pacific War and race war
- USSR's war strategy and the US
- CIA and Iran and Guatemala
Section Focus Question:
In the post-war period, how did communism affect countries in Asia?
Key Terms:
Meanwhile, Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China (PRC), a new communist state then aligned with the Soviet Union, chased the Nationalist Chinese government, who had governed China since the 1920s, to the island of Taiwan. The US refused to recognize the PRC and declared the Nationalist Chinese in Taiwan the true government of China (until the US normalized relations with Communist China in the 1970s).
Within months, with support from the PRC and the Soviet Union, North Korean troops invaded South Korea. Joined by other members of the UN, the US intervened in June 1950 to defend the South Korean government. Initially, their forces were pressed to retreat into the southern corner of the peninsula, but after General Douglas MacArthur's brilliant landing behind enemy lines at Inchon, the UN succeeded in turning the tide.
MacArthur then pushed for a rollback of communism out of North Korea, but his actions brought the Chinese into the war with 300,000 troops. The general wanted to resort to atomic weapons next, but Truman fired him for insubordination in April 1951. More than 36,000 Americans died in this first hot war of the Cold War, and thousands of their successors remain in Korea today, maintaining the armistice line of July 1953. Korea set a pattern for US military responses in the Cold War. In Europe the 2 superpowers' missiles bristled at each other, but bloody conflicts were confined to the Third World.
During the Korean War, in 1952, former General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been elected president. His first term included two CIA-sponsored interventions to overthrow elected governments in Iran and in Guatemala.
The US, too, bankrolled most of the French effort in fighting the Communist Viet Minh in Vietnam. Eisenhower also tried other, "softer" forms of diplomacy as well in the Third World, such as the US Information Agency, spreading the word of the benefits of "peoples' capitalism" in the United States.
Many smaller nations preferred to be "non-aligned" rather than join either side of the Cold War. Non-alignment was tricky, though, as Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro learned. Initially the US was happy to see him come to power in 1959 promising reforms. But soon Castro's increasingly Marxist program, including nationalizing American assets, recognizing Communist China, and trading with Moscow, too clearly showed his "alignment." The CIA made plans to overthrow Castro including assassination plots and an invasion of 1,400 Cuban refugees to free their homeland.
- Cuban Missile Crisis and nuclear war
- Reasons for dropping the Atomic bomb
- Eisenhower Kennedy and Cuba
- General McArthur and North Korea
- Definition of non-alignment
Section Focus Question:
What role did the CIA sometimes play in countries that attempted to follow an independent path, such as Iran and Cuba?
Key Terms:
When John F. Kennedy came into office in 1961, he decided to carry out the invasion, set for 3 months hence. But a full-scale fiasco was in store, and more than a thousand men were captured. The president took full responsibility, but the CIA had other methods to deploy against Castro, including Operation Mongoose, a covert campaign to undermine him by fomenting rebellion and developing poisons to denude his beard, and Operation Northwoods, a scheme to have the CIA create bogus terrorist attacks in the US to be blamed on Cuba. Yet at the same time Kennedy created the Peace Corps, sending volunteers to provide aid to the Third World.
Castro, meanwhile, was fighting back, welcoming arms and advisers from Moscow. In October 1962, an American U-2 flight revealed Soviet missiles there with a 1,200 to 2,400 mile capacity. Shocked at their presence just 90 miles from Florida, the president called his closest advisers together, ranging from his brother Robert, the Attorney General, to Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and over the next thirteen days the world's future hung in the balance. The Executive Committee could not permit the missiles to remain. Memories of Munich — the site of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's 1938 capitulation to Hitler — were much too alive for them.
Some, like LeMay, pushed for an airstrike and an invasion, but Kennedy eventually decided on his brother's idea, a naval blockade to stop any further shipments, along with a demand that the missiles be removed. Kennedy informed Americans on television about the situation on October 22. Two days later, approaching Soviet ships did turn back, and the next day, Adlai Stevenson showed photographic evidence of the sites in the UN, embarrassing his Soviet colleagues.
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, meanwhile, responded with two letters to Kennedy, the first of which was conciliatory: "let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot." Kennedy accepted the terms of this letter: in return for the Soviets taking the missiles out of Cuba, the US would commit to leaving Cuba alone. Privately, Robert Kennedy gave assurances that Washington would eventually remove its missiles in Turkey, the topic of Khrushchev's second letter.
At least 2 were unhappy at the settlement: Fidel Castro, who saw himself as the pawn he truly had become, and Curtis LeMay, who reckoned Castro's continuation in power was America's "greatest defeat." But Armageddon had been avoided. A direct telephone line was installed between Washington and Moscow to prevent hair-trigger responses in the future. The following year, the 2 governments banned above-ground nuclear testing, too.
