Cold War Turns Hot: Berlin and Korea

The economic recovery instigated by the Marshall Plan included the western zones of Germany, which in 1948 had introduced a unified currency. Fearing a revitalized Germany under Western influence, the Soviets fomented the first major crisis of the Cold War in June 1948. Taking advantage of a postwar arrangement guaranteeing only air access to jointly occupied Berlin, 100 miles inside the Soviet zone, the U.S.S.R. closed off rail and road links hoping to force the West out. A massive airlift supplied the city with more than two million tons of supplies, ranging from basic foodstuffs at the start to luxuries as the pace of airlift increased. The Soviets lifted the blockade on May 1949, effectively admitting defeat and deferring a decision on Berlin. As insurance against increasingly provocative Soviet aggression, 12 nations joined together in a mutual-defense pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As one observer put it, NATO was designed to “keep the U.S. in, the Germans down, and the Soviets out.”

The Soviets rapidly recovered from the humiliation caused by the Berlin Airlift with the detonation of their first atomic device in August 1949. Although of limited immediate military significance, the test had a profound psychological impact. This shock was reinforced two months later when China, America's traditional ally in mainland Asia, joined the communist bloc with the establishment of Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China.

These shocks triggered the first comprehensive study of American national security policy during the Cold War. The resulting National Security Council Memorandum-68 (NSC-68), produced in 1950, was an ideologically charged call for wholesale revision of U.S. policy. Rather than aiming to contain Moscow and await its eventual demise, NSC-68 advocated an immediate buildup of conventional forces. In historian John Gaddis's term, it was a switch from Kennan's asymmetrical containment to a symmetrical one that matched the U.S.S.R. strength for strength.

As Truman considered restructuring of national security policy, Soviet armed and trained North Korean troops launched a devastating surprise attack against South Korea on June 25, 1950. Although U.S. Sec. of State Dean Acheson earlier had explicitly deemed Korea outside America's area of interest in the Pacific, Truman strongly believed that this blatant aggression was a direct challenge to the West and won United Nations approval for armed intervention. Despite initial reversals, U.N. forces crushed the communist army and drove it into North Korea. As Western forces drew closer to the Chinese border, Mao quietly warned that their presence would not be tolerated. When Western troops continued pushing north, more than 300,000 Chinese troops intervened, throwing U.N. forces behind the 38th parallel. However, the Chinese outran their supply lines and the war entered a static phase.

McCarthyism

As American troops bogged down against communist forces overseas, imagined communist infiltrators continued to inflame U.S. domestic politics. Despite the effective disruption of Soviet spy rings in the government and the rooting out of spies from the nuclear weapons program, anticommunism still provided fertile ground for domestic politics, exemplified in the early 1950s by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin. He gained notoriety in 1950 during a speaking tour when he touted a list of “205 known Communists” in the State Department. In actuality, McCarthy was drawing on lists several years old, which had already been used in previous congressional hearings. Nevertheless, McCarthy attacked government officials and those in influential positions in society in his hearings to root out communist infiltrators. His assault on the State Department climaxed in June 1951 with an incoherent diatribe against the wartime Army chief of staff, former secretary of defense, and then-Sec. of State George Marshall.

After gaining control of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee, following the 1952 Republican election victory, McCarthy continued his populist attacks against an increasingly wide spectrum of opponents, including alleged infiltrators at the Voice of America and American authors carrying communist literature at overseas American libraries. His shift in focus from the State Department to Army civilian workers eventually led to his downfall. His office's attempt to blackmail the Army into favorably treating a draft-eligible member of his staff, David Schine, and McCarthy's subsequent sloppy cover-up, brought about the televised Army– McCarthy hearings in April 1954. The senator's performance, using his normal tactics of insinuation and bullying, decisively undercut his public support and set the stage for his censure. McCarthy's political demise was rapidly followed by Supreme Court decisions under the new chief justice, Earl Warren, that undercut such tools of government anticommunist programs as loyalty oaths (Cole v. Young), the firing of employees who exercised their 5th Amendment rights (Slochower v. Board of Education), and the legality of congressional committees conducting investigations without drafting legislation (Watkins v. United States). This last case was a direct attack on HUAC.

Korean War Ends and “The New Look”

At the height of McCarthy's influence, and as the conflict in Korea dragged into its third year, the Cold War changed dramatically when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953. In the leadership struggle that ensued, a troika briefly emerged consisting of Nikita Khrushchev, Georgi Malenkov, and Leventi Beria. When Beria wavered over continuing Stalin's iron-fisted control of Eastern Europe, East Berliners revolted in June 1953. After Soviet tanks quickly crushed the rebellion, the troika sought to simplify external relations while they struggled with each other.

The Soviets strongly urged their Chinese and North Korean allies to agree to the armistice the U.N. had been seeking since 1951. When they balked, the new U.S. president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, opaquely threatened to use atomic weapons. The final armistice, signed on July 27, 1953, essentially restored the status quo ante bellum. To an American public fearful of Soviet power abroad, infiltration at home, and accustomed to thinking of World War II–style absolute victory as the norm in conflict, this outcome was unsettling, a feeling reflected in some of the more hysteriafilled Hollywood films produced in these years.

The new president placed American security policy on a wholly different footing than his predecessor (Harry S. Truman), choosing asymmetrical containment. Eisenhower's National Security Council issued NSC 162/2, implementing his vision of the Cold War as a long-term competition whose winner would be determined in the economic arena, not the battlefield. To preserve America's economic edge, Eisenhower sharply realigned military spending. He used the “bang for the buck” efficiency of nuclear weapons, in which the United States had a technological lead, to pare down expensive conventional forces.

The technological edge resulted from the development of new nuclear weapons in 1952. Where earlier atomic fission weapons carried the explosive equivalent of hundreds of World War II bombers, a single thermonuclear fusion device carried the power equivalent to that of all the munitions used between 1939 and 1945. Weapons also became smaller, as tactical atomic weapons designed for use on the battle-field multiplied in number and variety. Furthermore, jet bombers and even intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons became operational by the end of the decade. Although Eisenhower attempted to put in place arms control, most notably the Open Skies proposal in 1955, distrust of Soviet intentions and the technical impossibility of verification stalled progress.

Along with this emphasis on nuclear weapons, the United States hoped that the recovering European economies would contribute more to their defense. Formal recognition of West Germany in 1949 was followed by its rearmament and admission to NATO in 1955. In response, Soviet leaders formed the Warsaw Pact, which imposed unity on Eastern Europe but failed to quash the discontent first seen after Stalin's death. A 1956 Hungarian uprising was at first tolerated, but then brutally crushed by the Red Army, vividly showing the limits of Soviet tolerance and the coercive nature of the Eastern alliance. Despite the Eisenhower administration's aggressive “rollback” rhetoric, the West's muted response reinforced the hold that the Soviets had over Eastern Europe.

At the same time Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, French and British paratroopers, acting in concert with Israel, seized the Suez Canal from Egypt. This intervention, however, threatened this last European attempt to retain imperial prerogatives. While Soviet leader Khrushchev bullied Britain with the threat of nuclear destruction, an infuriated Eisenhower threatened to cut off London's economic aid unless the Europeans withdrew. Although Anglo-American relations recovered from the British embarrassment, already rocky Franco-American relations continued to unravel, with Paris ultimately leaving NATO in 1966.

Khrushchev, emboldened by his successful nuclear intimidation of the West, and feeling pressure from East German leader Walter Ulbricht to stop the flight of scientists and intellectuals from East Berlin, provoked a second crisis over the city in 1958. Khrushchev set a six-month time limit for the West to agree to a permanent German peace treaty and declare Berlin an “open city,” which would have led to the withdrawal of U.S. and British forces. Eisenhower defused the situation by agreeing to a summit with Khrushchev at Camp David, in Maryland, a substantial personal victory for the Soviet leader, and the U.S.S.R. quietly let the deadline pass.

Two more crises in the 1950s engaged the United States on the other side of the world. The islands of Quemoy and Matsu, within sight of mainland China, were controlled by the Nationalist Chinese, who had been ousted during the communist takeover of the mainland. The islands became the scene of showdowns between the communists on the mainland and Taiwan (the seat of Nationalist Chinese forces) in 1955 and 1958. Both times, rapid U.S. intervention, including deployment of substantial air and seapower and thinly veiled nuclear threats, deterred invasion.

The 1958 Quemoy crisis marked a turning point in the Sino–Soviet relationship. Khrushchev, fearing Moscow would be drawn into direct conflict with Washington through Chinese aggression, tried to check its dangerous ally. Soviet and Chinese economic and, more critically, nuclear cooperation abruptly ended in 1959. This widening Sino–Soviet rift grew in importance through the 1960s as the two powers struggled to dominate revolutionary movements in Third World countries that were seeking independence from colonial powers.

These independence movements, some of which predated the Cold War, rapidly redrew the global map as European empires dissolved. Britain followed a two-pronged approach: granting independence after minimal struggle, beginning with India in 1947, while keeping those newly independent countries out of the communist bloc. These efforts led to extended counterinsurgencies in Malaya (now part of Malaysia) and Kenya. The French struggled harder to keep their empire, first in Indochina and then Algeria, both efforts failing in 1954 and 1962, respectively. Despite the success of British and French independent nuclear programs in 1952 and 1960, respectively, the two powers fell to second-rank military status.

As Europe moved into the postcolonial era, its former colonies exuberantly moved into independence but rarely with stability or prosperity. Both superpowers sought new power in the realignment: the Soviet Union (and China) fostered revolutionary movements—from Vietnam to Cuba—while the United States both courted the new governments and overthrew them—notably in Guatemala and Iran in 1953.

While this covert struggle for Third World hearts and minds continued, the nuclear foundation of American security and the doctrine of massive retaliation based on it appeared to become fragile as the 1950s drew to a close. As growing Soviet nuclear capability threatened to inflict grievous harm in almost any conceivable nuclear exchange, a group of “defense intellectuals” critiqued massive retaliation and recommended reconfiguring the American military to credibly fight conventional war.

Public anxiety ratcheted up another notch when the U.S.S.R. launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957, thereby demonstrating that an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) threat was more pressing. Public fear developed that the Soviets had already surpassed the United States in bomber production (the “bomber gap”) as well as missile production (the “missile gap”). Although credible intelligence informed Eisenhower that these gaps were imaginary, the sensitive source of the information prevented him from publicly refuting it. The cynical exploitation of these fears for greater military expenditure by defense and industry leaders led Eisenhower to warn in his farewell speech in 1961 of a “military–industrial complex.”

The election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960 marked a return to symmetrical containment as he increased American conventional forces, emphasizing counterinsurgency Special Forces. Kennedy's first crisis arose from a bungled attempt to oust Fidel Castro, the communist and anti-American leader who had taken control of Cuba in 1959. An abortive 1961 invasion by CIA-trained exiles at the Bay of Pigs undermined Kennedy's prestige, which was further damaged by Kennedy's inability to secure a test ban agreement from Khrushchev at a summit meeting in Vienna later that year. Khrushchev prodded the young president by renewing his demands for the West to abandon Berlin. Kennedy's resolve, punctuated by his visit to Berlin itself, resulted in a tense standoff that failed to stop the Soviets from constructing the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from fleeing to the West, thus dividing the city until 1989.

In October 1962, these crises culminated in the most severe confrontation of the entire Cold War when the United States detected a covert Soviet attempt to place intermediate range ballistic missiles in Cuba. This effort to alter the strategic balance of power brought the U.S.S.R. and the United States to the brink of war as Kennedy block-aded Cuba, overtly prepared for an invasion, and ultimately forced missile-carrying Soviet freighters to turn back. This reckless Soviet gamble marked the closest the two nations came to a direct clash. After 1962, conflict continued, increasingly through proxies, however.

The crisis led to several important milestones. First, the clear Soviet defeat, coupled with domestic economic failures, led to Khrushchev's 1964 ouster and replacement by Leonid Brezhnev. Second, it gave impetus to the effort by the U.S.S.R., successful by the end of the decade, to achieve nuclear parity with the United States. Third, it led to the signing of the first nuclear arms control measure, the August 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which permitted only underground nuclear tests. This last, hopeful development was overshadowed by Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963.

Vietnam

His successor, Lyndon Johnson, faced the aftershocks of another assassination, that of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem on November 1, 1963. Diem had led South Vietnam since its 1954 independence from French colonial control. With American support, in 1956, he refused to cooperate with North Vietnam to coordinate previously agreed upon elections that would have addressed the unification of the country. Both Diem and his northern counterpart, Ho Chi Minh, consolidated control in their respective halves of the country through the late 1950s. Diem's efforts to eliminate communist elements in the south escalated by 1961 into full-blown civil war against southern insurgents (“Viet Cong”) armed and supplied by the North. Kennedy, fearing the fall of Vietnam's capital, Saigon, as the first “domino” in the region, dramatically increased the number of advisers aiding South Vietnam, although this deployment did little to stem its disintegration. Following Diem's assassination, communist advances and continued domestic instability threatened to eliminate the South Vietnamese government.

In August 1964, North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, prompting Johnson to request and receive authorization from Congress to “take all necessary measures … to prevent further aggression.” Johnson's rapid escalation against North Vietnam aimed at compelling it to withdraw support from the insurgency. Air strikes in immediate retaliation for the Tonkin attacks quickly transformed into a coercive but indecisive air campaign (“Rolling Thunder”), which lasted until 1968. As American Air Force personnel and aircraft came under attack at their air bases in South Vietnam, the United States introduced ground troops, first to defend the bases and then to conduct offensive operations against the Viet Cong.

American troop levels increased from under 25,000 advisers in 1964 to more than a half million combat soldiers in 1968, largely pushing aside the South Vietnamese Army. Massive search and destroy missions obliterated the South Vietnamese countryside with increasingly frantic efforts to root out the insurgents. The indiscriminate operations, while inflicting grievous casualties on the Viet Cong, alienated the population from both the American forces and the Saigon government, increasing insurgent support. Half-hearted (but heavy-handed) attempts to win “hearts and minds” faltered on the insurgents' strong appeal to Vietnamese nationalism and their depiction of the Americans as another in a succession of imperial, colonial intruders.

As American force levels increased, domestic support soured. Protest took root at universities and, together with a growing civil rights movement, blended with a counterculture movement that rejected previous social norms. Critically, Vietnam undermined Johnson's War on Poverty by draining support and resources from what he had hoped would be his primary legacy. The final blow to his presidency fell on January 30, 1968, when the Viet Cong, whose imminent defeat had been repeatedly predicted, launched a countrywide offensive during the Vietnamese Tet New Year holiday. Although the offensive failed to topple the Saigon government, and American military response badly bloodied the insurgents, the Tet Offensive was widely regarded as a communist victory because it fatally undercut the eroding domestic American support for the war. Johnson's decision not to run for a second term created a dramatic split in the Democratic Party and paved the way for Richard Nixon's 1968 victory.

Nixon, and his national security adviser (later secretary of state) Henry Kissinger, sought peace in Vietnam through initiatives both inside and outside Southeast Asia. In South Vietnam, Nixon accelerated the training and arming of the South Vietnamese forces, with the ultimate goal of using them to replace American troops in combat operations. This policy, dubbed “Vietnamization,” was one example of the “Nixon Doctrine,” in which American-armed regional proxies would maintain stability in lieu of direct American intervention. Although permanent stability in Southeast Asia would be preferable, Nixon and Kissinger, at a minimum, wanted a “decent interval” between the departure of American combat troops and the fall of South Vietnam.

Engaging in these regional initiatives was only possible by exploiting the growing Sino–Soviet split. The cooling friendship between the two communist giants had frozen into mutual hostility by the mid-1960s as Mao's Cultural Revolution demonized Moscow, and Beijing developed nuclear weapons in 1964. In 1969, when China and the Soviet Union clashed on their border, Nixon used the split to U.S. advantage. Stealthy “shuttle diplomacy” led to Nixon's 1972 visit to Beijing and a dramatic warming in Sino–American relations. Nixon's and Kissinger's successful balancing of Beijing against Moscow brought about better relations with both powers as they jockeyed for American favor, fearing that the other would receive it. This triangular relationship changed the Cold War's basic dynamic and opened a period of lessened tensions, referred to as détente.

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