Unit 8 Princeton Review Pt. 2 Flashcards
(30 cards)
Containment/liberation
Deterrence
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
Brinkmanship
Domino Theory
Dulles allowed confrontations with the Soviet Union to escalate toward war, an approach called brinkmanship.
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.
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
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.
US tried to expand influence to 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 (but mostly actually was doing it cause he was mad Britain and France didn’t tel him ahead of time)
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. vs. Democrat 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.
Military Industrial Complex
Military Industrial Complex
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.
At the outset, the 1960s seemed the start of a new, hope- filled era.
Kennedy 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.
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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 Black people’s struggle to gain civil rights.
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.
Fidel Castro and insurgents overthrow - Eisenhower
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.
Bay of Pigs Invasion
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.
Berlin Wall
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.
Cuban Missile Crisis
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.
Soviet Response and Cuban Missile Crisis Resolution
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.
Peace Corps
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.
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.
Kennedy and the Black Civil Rights Movemen
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.
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.
Nongovernmental ORganizations, Civil Rights Movement
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 antisegregationist activism.
Resistance to Advocacy Groups
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.
Civil Rigths Act of 1964
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.
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).
Great Society - Equal Rights
Like Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson made an early commitment to the civil rights movement, but unlike Kennedy, Johnson took immediate action to demonstrate that commitment.
Equal Rights Act of 1964
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 Black people 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.
