America as a World Power in two minutes
- Eisenhower's New Look of 1953 relied on nuclear weapons and covert action to contain Communism cheaply, and the CIA helped overthrow Iran's government in 1953 and Guatemala's in 1954.
- After the Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957, Congress created NASA and passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958, and Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address warned of the military-industrial complex.
- As European empires ended, many new nations declined to take sides; Eisenhower opposed Britain and France at Suez in 1956 and issued the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957.
- Kennedy promised to pay any price, created the Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress in 1961, and approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which failed in April 1961.
- In Latin America Washington favored anticommunist governments, welcoming a Brazilian coup in 1964, sending troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 and working against Chile's Salvador Allende until his overthrow in 1973.
- Nixon and Brezhnev signed SALT I in 1972, the Church Committee exposed CIA abuses in 1975, and Carter stressed human rights and brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel.
- On the exam: Questions ask you to compare Eisenhower's and Kennedy's containment, explain how covert action and the arms race shaped politics at home, and link Cold War policy to Vietnam.
Topic 8.7 key terms
- Military-industrial complex
Eisenhower's 1961 name for the partnership between a permanent military and the industries that build its weapons. He warned that together they could gain “unwarranted influence” over government and policy.
- Cold War
The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union from the late 1940s to 1991. It was fought with arms races, alliances, spying, aid and wars in other countries, not with a direct war between the two.
- Containment
The U.S. Cold War policy of stopping Communism from spreading to new countries, rather than trying to roll it back where it already ruled. Presidents disagreed about the tools: alliances, aid, covert action or troops.
- New Look (1953)
Eisenhower's defense policy. It relied on nuclear weapons and air power, which cost less than large armies, backed by the threat of 'massive retaliation.'
- covert action
Secret operations to change another country's government or policies, planned so the United States could deny them.
- nationalization
When a government takes over a privately owned company or industry. Iran took over the oil company that Britain owned.
- United Fruit Company
An American company that grew and shipped bananas and was the largest landowner in Guatemala. Its land was the biggest target of the 1952 land reform.
- Sputnik (1957)
The first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. Americans took it as proof that Soviet rockets could reach the United States, and it set off the space race.
- NASA (1958)
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a civilian space agency Congress created in 1958. Military missile programs stayed with the armed forces.
- National Defense Education Act (1958)
About $1 billion for science, math and foreign-language teaching and for student loans. Congress passed it because Sputnik made Americans fear they were falling behind the Soviets.
- Missile gap (1957–1961)
The claim, widely made after Sputnik and used by Kennedy in the 1960 campaign, that the Soviets had pulled ahead of the United States in long-range missiles. In fact the United States was far ahead.
- Military-industrial complex (1961)
Eisenhower's name for the alliance between a permanent military and the industries that supply it. In his farewell address he warned it could gain “unwarranted influence” over government policy.
- Decolonization
The collapse of European colonial empires after World War II. About three dozen colonies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East became independent nations between 1947 and 1960.
- Third World
A Cold War label, coined in France in 1952, for the mostly poorer nations outside both the Western and the Communist blocs. Many were newly independent.
- Nonalignment
A policy of joining neither Cold War bloc. India, Egypt and Indonesia took aid from both sides and chose neither. The Non-Aligned Movement formed at Belgrade in 1961.
- Eisenhower Doctrine
President Eisenhower’s January 1957 pledge to give aid, and to use U.S. armed forces if asked, to help Middle Eastern nations resist Communist aggression. It was aimed at Soviet influence after Suez.
- Embargo
A ban on trade with a country, used to pressure it. On October 19, 1960, the United States banned most exports to Cuba.
- Bay of Pigs invasion (1961)
A failed invasion of Cuba on April 17, 1961. About 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA landed and were beaten in three days. It embarrassed the new president.
- Alliance for Progress (1961)
A U.S.-led aid program for Latin America, announced in March 1961: money for development, housing, schools and land reform. Its charter aimed for $20 billion in outside aid over ten years, with a major part from the United States.
- Peace Corps (1961)
A U.S. government program that sent American volunteers to teach and work in developing countries. Kennedy created it by executive order on March 1, 1961.
- Cold War in Latin America (KC-8.1.I.E, in plain words)
The United States backed non-Communist governments in Latin America whether or not they were democracies.
- Flexible response (1961)
Kennedy’s defense strategy: build up conventional and special forces so a president had choices short of nuclear war. It replaced Eisenhower’s reliance on massive retaliation.
- Mutual assured destruction (MAD)
The idea that each side keeps enough weapons to destroy the other even after being attacked first, so neither dares to start a war. In the late 1960s a critic, Donald Brennan, gave it the acronym MAD, to mock it.
- Anti-nuclear movement (1957–)
Citizens’ groups such as SANE (1957) and Women Strike for Peace (1961) that campaigned against nuclear tests and the arms race, often pointing to fallout in children’s milk and bones.
- SALT I (1972)
The first agreement from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, signed in Moscow. It froze the number of land-based missile launchers and capped submarine launchers. The ABM Treaty was signed with it.
- Plurality
The most votes, but less than half. Allende won 36.6 percent in a three-way race, so Chile’s Congress had to confirm him. It did, 153 to 35, on October 24, 1970.
- Church Committee (1975–76)
The Senate investigation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. It looked at plots against foreign leaders and at spying on Americans, and it made many secret files public.
- Proxy war
A war between local sides in which bigger powers pay for weapons or send troops instead of fighting each other directly. In Angola, the Soviet Union and Cuba backed one movement. The United States, Zaire and South Africa backed the other two.
- Clark Amendment (1976)
A 1976 law that banned covert U.S. aid to groups fighting in Angola. It showed how far Congress had moved, after Vietnam and Watergate, to limit what a president could do in secret. Congress repealed it in 1985.
- Human rights diplomacy
A foreign policy that weighs how a government treats its own people when deciding whether to give it aid and support. Carter made it a stated goal of U.S. policy in 1977.
- Panama Canal treaties (1977)
Two treaties Carter signed in 1977 returning the Panama Canal to Panama. The Senate approved each in 1978, 68 to 32, one vote more than the two-thirds needed. Panama took control at the end of 1999.
- Camp David Accords (1978)
Agreements Egypt and Israel reached at Camp David in September 1978, with Carter as mediator. They led to the 1979 peace treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab country.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Two Sets
January 17–20, 1961
Key terms: Military-industrial complex, Cold War, Containment
January 1961
In January 1961, two presidents went on television three days apart. On Tuesday night, the old general said goodbye.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
On Friday, the young one said hello.
John F. Kennedy
…we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe…
Put the same three questions to both men.
Both men wanted to stop Communism. They disagreed about what that should cost. And the one who warned about the military was the general.
Most of the bill came due far from Main Street.
What did any price mean? And who paid it?
The Cheap Way
1953–1954
Key terms: New Look (1953), covert action, nationalization, United Fruit Company
Eight years earlier, the new president had a price list.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
He wanted to contain Communism for decades without going broke. Bombs cost less than soldiers. So he bought bombs.
Secret operations were cheaper still, and voters never saw the bill.
In 1951, Iran's parliament took over the British-owned oil company.
The prime minister behind it, Mohammad Mosaddegh, became a national hero.
Mohammad Mosaddegh
Our greatest natural asset is oil. This should be the source of work and of food for the population of Iran.
Britain asked Washington to help remove him. Truman said no. Eisenhower said yes. He feared Iran's Communist party would take over. His own intelligence analysts doubted they could.
In August 1953, the CIA and British intelligence organized a coup.
He spent three years in solitary confinement, then the rest of his life under house arrest. The Shah ruled until 1979.
In Guatemala, voters had elected Jacobo Árbenz. He gave unused land from big estates to landless farmers.
The biggest landowner was an American company, United Fruit. Guatemala offered to pay what the company had declared the land was worth for its taxes.
Árbenz had Communist allies, and bought Czech weapons. Washington saw a Soviet beachhead.
In June 1954, a few hundred CIA-backed rebels crossed from Honduras. A rebel radio station claimed to broadcast from deep in the jungle. It was recording in Miami.
Guatemala's army wouldn't fight. Árbenz resigned.
Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán
The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us.
Generals ran Guatemala for most of the next thirty years. A civil war killed or disappeared more than 200,000 people. Most of the victims who could be named were Maya.
Beep
1957–1961
Key terms: Sputnik (1957), NASA (1958), National Defense Education Act (1958), Missile gap (1957–1961), Military-industrial complex (1961)
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite. Radio amateurs could hear it. Within days, people were out at dusk, looking for it.
Sputnik circled the Earth every 96 minutes. A rocket that could put a ball in orbit could put a hydrogen bomb on an American city.
Senate leader Lyndon Johnson later wrote that the sky seemed “almost alien.”
America's answer went up in December. It rose about four feet and blew up. Its little satellite was thrown clear, still beeping.
Congress created NASA, and paid schools to teach more science, math and foreign languages. Even homework became national defense.
Eisenhower stayed calm. His secret U-2 spy flights showed few Soviet long-range missiles. He couldn't tell anyone how he knew.
In 1960, Kennedy campaigned on a “missile gap.” There was a gap. It ran the other way.
Seventeen days after the inauguration, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told reporters, off the record, there was no missile gap. Kennedy said it was too early to judge.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
He had spent eight years holding down the Pentagon's budget. On his way out, he named the problem.
Neither Side
1955–1961
Key terms: Decolonization, Third World, Nonalignment, Eisenhower Doctrine
Europe’s empires were coming apart. Washington and Moscow went looking for friends among the new nations.
Sukarno
This is the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind!
Twenty-nine countries met at Bandung. Many wanted no part of the Cold War.
Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser bought Soviet-bloc arms. Washington then dropped its offer to fund his dam on the Nile.
A week later, he took the Suez Canal.
Britain, France and Israel invaded to take it back. Eisenhower hadn’t been told.
At the United Nations, the United States voted with the Soviet Union against its own allies. The invaders left.
Then Eisenhower promised aid, and troops if asked, to Middle Eastern nations threatened by Communism.
In July 1958, Iraq’s monarchy fell in a revolution. Lebanon, already close to civil war, asked Eisenhower for help.
The Marines came ashore south of Beirut, ready for a fight. They found sunbathers.
Next day, the American ambassador led the Marines into town himself.
In 1960, seventeen African nations won independence. In the Congo, the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, faced a Belgian-backed breakaway province.
He asked the United Nations for help, and then Moscow. Soviet aid arrived in August.
The CIA’s director cabled his station in the Congo. A CIA scientist brought poison to kill Lumumba. It was never used.
His Congolese enemies handed him to Katanga’s leaders, who had him shot on January 17, 1961. The day Eisenhower said goodbye.
Patrice Lumumba
History will one day have its say; it will not be the history taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris, or Brussels…
Ninety Miles
1959–1965
Key terms: Embargo, Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), Alliance for Progress (1961), Peace Corps (1961), Cold War in Latin America (KC-8.1.I.E, in plain words)
Ernesto Guevara, a young Argentine doctor, had watched the Guatemala coup. In Mexico, he joined Fidel Castro. On New Year’s Day 1959, their rebels drove out Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, Washington’s friend.
Castro and Washington traded blows. He seized American-owned businesses, and Washington cut off trade. Castro turned to Moscow, and banned rival parties.
Eisenhower had the CIA train Cuban exiles to invade. Kennedy inherited the plan and approved it.
About 1,400 exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs. Cubans didn’t rise up. Castro’s army came instead. Kennedy refused to send in American air power openly. In three days it was over.
John F. Kennedy
There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.
He took the blame in public. His approval rating went up.
More than a hundred exiles died. Cuba counted 176 of its own soldiers dead.
Nearly 1,200 were captured. At Christmas 1962, Cuba freed the prisoners for $53 million in donated baby food and medicine.
In public, Kennedy offered Latin America an Alliance for Progress.
John F. Kennedy
…a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose…
In private, his aides planned a new secret war on Castro. Castro asked Moscow for protection. In 1962, Moscow sent nuclear missiles.
Kennedy’s other hand was the Peace Corps, created in March 1961. That August, about fifty volunteers landed in Ghana. Peace Corps histories say they sang the Ghanaian anthem in Twi.
In Latin America, though, Washington’s first test was whether a government was anti-Communist. Democracy came second.
Washington welcomed a military coup in Brazil in 1964. In 1965, Johnson sent more than 20,000 troops into the Dominican Republic.
How Much Is Enough?
1954–1972
Key terms: Flexible response (1961), Mutual assured destruction (MAD), Anti-nuclear movement (1957–), Military-industrial complex (1961), SALT I (1972)
Kennedy wanted choices between nuclear war and backing down. He and McNamara added troops, ships and special forces like the Green Berets.
The arsenal kept growing anyway. In 1967 it peaked at 31,255 warheads.
Robert S. McNamara
There is a kind of mad momentum intrinsic to the development of all new nuclear weaponry.
The speech called missile defense against the Soviets pointless. Then it announced one, aimed at China.
His argument was deterrence: each side could destroy the other, so neither would attack.
In 1954, fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test fell on the Marshall Islanders of Rongelap. Children played in it. They weren’t taken off the island for two days.
In St. Louis, families mailed scientists hundreds of thousands of baby teeth. They showed strontium-90 from the bomb tests, rising year by year. In 1963, the superpowers stopped testing in the open air.
Supporters had a strong answer: no nuclear weapon had been used in war since 1945. The arsenal also meant jobs: around Los Angeles, about two in five factory jobs.
In 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev signed SALT I, the first limit on nuclear missiles.
SALT I capped launchers, not warheads. By 1978, the Soviet stockpile passed America’s.
The Files
1970–1975
Key terms: Plurality, Church Committee (1975–76), Proxy war, Clark Amendment (1976)
In 1970, Chileans elected a Marxist president, Salvador Allende. He won just over a third of the vote.
Eleven days later, Nixon met his CIA director. The director’s notes survive. One line reads: “make the economy scream.”
The CIA’s plot to keep Allende out failed. He nationalized the American-owned copper mines. Washington squeezed Chile’s economy and quietly paid his opponents.
Salvador Allende
Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail.
That morning, Chile’s army attacked the palace. Allende died inside.
General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship killed or disappeared over 3,000 people. About 38,000 more were imprisoned or tortured.
The CIA knew about the plotting and didn’t discourage it. Senate investigators found no evidence it was directly involved.
In 1975, after Vietnam and Watergate, a Senate committee under Frank Church opened the CIA’s files.
The committee saw some of these papers. Others stayed secret for decades.
In 1975, Portugal left Angola. Three armed movements fought over it.
Moscow and Cuba backed one. The CIA backed the other two, alongside Zaire and South Africa.
Gerald R. Ford
The Senate decision to cut off additional funds for Angola is a deep tragedy for all countries whose security depends upon the United States.
The Senate had voted 54 to 22 to cut off the CIA’s money for Angola. After Vietnam, Congress had stopped writing blank checks.
Angola’s war lasted twenty-seven years.
Any Price
1977–1979
Key terms: Human rights diplomacy, Panama Canal treaties (1977), Camp David Accords (1978)
Jimmy Carter
Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.
Carter made human rights part of foreign policy. Five weeks into his term, he cut military aid to Argentina and Uruguay.
In 1978, Carter kept Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin at Camp David for thirteen days.
On the last day, Begin's eight grandchildren each got a signed photograph, with their names written on them.
Egypt and Israel made peace the next spring. It still holds.
In 1979, Iranians overthrew the Shah. Students seized the U.S. embassy, saying they feared another 1953.
Kennedy promised any price. Americans paid in taxes, in fear, and later in trust.
Most of it was paid by people with no say in Washington. In Tehran, Guatemala City, the Congo, Santiago and Luanda.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.