The Presidency and the Cold War

When you look at the history of the United States Post World War II, you have to think of those first 45 years or so as the time when the United States and their former allies of World War II; the Soviet Union were involved in what became known as the Cold War. 1947 to 1991; the United States was in the second year of a generation known as the Baby Boom being born. They would spend their youth of the 1950s and early 1960s in this era. By the mid to late 1960s they were coming of age. And until they were about to turn 45 years old; just one week before 1992 began that era was over. This was a period of time where the world's two biggest super powers, one representing capitalism and one representing communism were at odds for world domination.

In 1947, Josef Stalin's Russia was spreading their political system towards the west. President Harry S Truman knew that something needed to be done so he went before a Joint Session of Congress on March 12, 1947 to talk about the Truman Doctrine. What this doctrine was, was a foreign policy plan to contain geopolitical expansion by the Soviet Union. By July 1948, the Doctrine was used to contain communist uprisings in Greece and Turkey. What the Truman Doctrine did was it laid the foundation for NATO in 1949.

It was also in 1947, when the 80th Congress convened, two rising stars from opposite ends of the country; John F. Kennedy, D-MA and Richard M. Nixon, R-CA had been sworn in as freshmen Congressmen to the House of Representatives. Both men became fast friends and they had a bet to see who would rise through the ranks to the presidency faster.

Nixon became an anti-communist crusader by getting on what was known as the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. This was a committee who investigated claims of Communist sympathizers within the United States. The investigations were not just focusing on government officials, particularly in the Truman administration but also in places like Hollywood. SAG President Ronald Reagan would testify to the committee on what he knew about who was red and who wasn't.

Kennedy did more of a research approach to the issues of Communism. He would visit the Middle and Far East knowing from his experiences of war after living in England for a time while his father was the Ambassador to the Court of Saint James that Vietnam, as we were already involved with in 1945 just might be an issue in the future. Kennedy would work what we would call today the Sunday Talk Show Circuit and report on what he had discovered.

By 1950, the United States began a hot war against the communists by going to war with North Korea with General Douglas MacArthur heading the military mission. President Truman would fire the general for insubordination, which made the president highly unpopular. Decades later, historians would give Truman high marks for the decision.

The Democrats failed to convince the NATO commander, General Dwight Eisenhower to run for President in 1952. He decided to run as a Republican. To balance the ticket generationally; Ike would pick the anti-communist crusader, California senator Richard Nixon as his running mate. Eisenhower declared that if elected he would take a trip to Korea. And just six months after his Inauguration, President Eisenhower was signing an armistice.

Through the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s, the Cold War was looked at as a competition in education and science. This was punctuated greatly in 1957 when the Russians launched Sputnik into space, leaving the United States behind. President Eisenhower saw this as a warning and decided that the United States needed to educate its young students; particularly in the fields of mathematics and the sciences. With appropriations from Congress, Eisenhower created such schools that tested children to find such aptitudes. By 1960, as Senator Jack Kennedy mentioned during that presidential campaign, the education system in the United States was the envy of the world. Unfortunately though, nearly 30 years later, funding for these schools dried up.

The early 1960s was when the Cold War reached its deepest freeze. Frances Gary Powers' U2 spy plane was shot down in the spring of 1960. Also in 1960, the two freshman Congressmen from the 80th Congress of 1947 were both running for president of their respective political parties. When it comes to foreign affairs expertise at this most crucial time in the Cold War, you could not have two better candidates than Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon running to succeed President Eisenhower. It was at this time too that Nikita Khrushchev would say to the United States in his address to the United States General Assembly, "We will bury you." The other famous line would be, "Our children will not live under capitalism. Your children will live under communism."

In April 1961, a group of Cuban exiles who had been training in the southern United States because of similar climate decided that it was time to go into Cuba and overthrow their dictator, Fidel Castro. The only problem was that the Cuban military was waiting for the exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion would be a fiasco. While this invasion was OK'd by the outgoing Eisenhower administration, President Kennedy held a press conference taking full responsibility for the failure. It was this one incident that lead JFK to not fully listen to and trust his military brass without hearing every option.

Also in 1961, perhaps the most obscene and most tangible symbol of the Communist Bloc had happened. German was to be divided from the east which would be controlled by the Communists and from the west which would be controlled by the Capitalists. This was the erection of the Berlin Wall. In June 1963, the President would go to the Berlin Wall and speak to the people of West Berlin. "Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in." He would conclude his remarks by stating proudly, "Ich bin ein Berliner."

1962 was perhaps the height of the Cold War. In October 1962 while conducting reconnaissance over Cuba, American spy planes discovered offensive Russian missiles located on the island of Cuba, 90 miles off of the shores of Florida. The missiles were placed in Cuba by the Russians because of the Bay of Pigs. After a tense two weeks of possible nuclear war, President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev reached an agreement for Russia to remove the missiles from Cuba where in a deal made by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to remove the United States' Jupiter missiles from Turkey. With the world's two super powers staring at each other eyeball to eyeball, the Russians blinked first.

While this writing makes the Cuban Missile Crisis look easy, it was anything but. Remember the failure at the Bay of Pigs 18 months earlier, the Joint Chiefs felt that they needed redemption by having a war. Thankfully, the administration remembered the failure too and all the President could see was that conversation with his Chiefs just before signing the dotted line for the Bay of Pigs.

Domestically, during the Kennedy years and into the (Lyndon) Johnson years leading up to the Vietnam War, Kennedy made fighting the Cold War something that EVERY American should fight to defeat communism around the world. Anything from the physical fitness of American children vs. Russian children to getting an American to the moon and returning them safely to Earth by the end of the 1960s were reasons for national security. Kennedy would impose two international burdens on the American people; the Alliance for Progress in Latin America and the Peace Corps in Africa and Asia.  

To get that American to the moon, it was the responsibility of everyone. While the adults paid the taxes to allow for research and development at NASA; school children bought savings stamps at school.  

In addition, the president went around the country to expand on President Roosevelt's program of Social Security by selling the idea of a national health care program for the elderly that would be called in 1965, Medicare. But this program was not favored by all Americans. In 1961 the American Medical Association recruited an actor and the spokesman for General Electric named Ronald Reagan to speak out against this newly proposed "socialized medicine." Even after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson ran on let us continue to bring about the Great Society. Reagan would launch his anti-communist crusade at home starting with the Presidential Election of 1964 with his Time for Choosing Speech in support of Barry Goldwater. Before becoming a candidate for governor of California, Reagan would explain the myths about the Great Society.

When Reagan became governor in 1967, California's public education system offered virtually free college tuition for public colleges and universities. Seeing the liberal/communist thoughts of a liberal arts education, Governor Reagan felt that it not right for him to sign off on subsidizing college educations for spoiled brats to be against what he stood for. This anti-college sentiment by the government reached its height by the late 1960s and early 1970s with SDS protesting America's involvement in the Vietnam War. This really rang true in 1970 when President Nixon called out college students in his speech on expanding the war into Cambodia and then calling college protesters bums the next day. 

This inflammatory rhetoric about domestic communism on our college campuses led to protests around the nation with the most infamous being in Kent, Ohio at Kent State University where after a weekend of protests by riot of the downtown, the burning down of the ROTC building on the KSU campus, and violating city and campus curfew resulted in the Ohio National Guard shooting into an unlawful and illegal rally of unarmed students on May 4, 1970. The result was nine students wounded and four students killed.

By the untimely end of the Kennedy administration, the United States had lost 400 American troops in Vietnam. By August 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin got the United States in the Vietnam War for real. This war would destroy LBJ for the rest of his presidency. Because of the strong second place showing of Senator Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire Primary and the entrance of Senator Robert Kennedy into the Presidential Election of 1968; Johnson announced he would not seek and would not accept the nomination by the Democratic Party to be a candidate for president.

Instead, Johnson would spend the remainder of 1968 to have a Bombing halt between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The unfortunate thing for LBJ was that after advising Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace; the three candidates for president it was reported to Johnson that Former Vice President Nixon had gone to the negotiating table asking the North and South to pause the negotiations until after the Election. Johnson went to the Republican leader of the Senate, Everett Dirksen and accused Nixon of treason. Dirksen responded with, "I know."

Despite the alleged treason of Richard Nixon in 1968 and the killing of four unarmed students at Kent State in 1970; Nixon had ended the draft and the war in 1973. Nixon would open doors of negotiation with China and Russia in the early 1970s. For a time it seemed like the Red Scare was all but over. Nixon did feel that after he resigned the presidency due to the Watergate scandal that because of his absence, it took ten years longer for communism to fall in Russia.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, the debt was at $800 billion. World affairs we're getting hot through the 1980s and the economy at home was suffering after a decade of high inflation and oil shortages. The United States went through an overhaul of its tax code much like we experienced in the 1920s under Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover known as the Horse and Sparrow Theory then, in the 1980s it became known as the Trickle Down Economic Theory. While taxes were cut, the military budget was not. Historians will say that by the end of the 1980s and into the first two years of the 1990s, Ronald Reagan had outspent the Soviet Union militarily leading to their collapse. Economists would credit this practice for the $4 trillion debt on the United States by the time George HW Bush became president in 1989.

As the Cold War came to an end in late 1991, leading into the Presidential Election of 1992, the Republican Party utilized the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism in George HW Bush's favor. But now that the Cold War was over, it seemed as though it was time for Baby Boomers to assume control of the United States government after being raised in the shadows of the Cold War. During the 1992 Vice Presidential Debate, Senator Al Gore said, "George Bush taking credit for the Berlin Wall coming down is like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise." The Cold War ended the way that it did thanks to the collective leadership of every president from 1947 to 1991, some with better foreign policy credentials like Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush than others.

But the tragic thing at the end of the Cold War is that ten years later, the United States became entangled with an enemy with no geographic boundaries, but with a philosophy. September 11, 2001 would be the beginning of that War on Terror. The difference with this enemy is that unlike the Russians, who wanted to live as much as the Americans, these terror groups want to die and take as many infidels with them in the process.

This collection looks back at the Cold War and nine presidents who led us through this time. In it you will hear speeches, press conferences, and during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations; some behind the scenes discussions on Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam.

See also: Presidency and Military