The Cold War

by Robert J. McMahon

  Politically, culturally, and psychologically, too, the Cold War altered the contours of American life in manifold ways. The ideological conformity demanded by many of the nation’s political elites led to a narrowing of the permissible boundaries of political discourse, placing many reform movements on the defensive and leaving some liberals vulnerable to accusations of radicalism and disloyalty. ‘Red-baiting’ and guilt by association became common, if deplorable, tactics in local and national elections, trade union politics, and investigations of government employees, teachers, and members of the film industry, among others. Historian Stephen J. Whitfield blames the Cold War for ‘the suffocation of liberty and the debasement of culture itself’ in the United States, especially during the 1950s. It fostered a repression, he argues, which ‘weakened the legacy of civil liberties, impugned standards of tolerance and fair play, and tarnished the very image of a democracy’. Fellow scholars Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert locate the Cold War’s greatest impact within the diffuse realm of social psychology: ‘It persuaded millions of Americans’, they write, ‘to interpret their world in terms of insidious enemies at home and abroad who threatened them with nuclear and other forms of annihilation.’ Widespread fear, in sum, of domestic as well as foreign enemies, stands as a key legacy of the Cold War.

  Plainly, society-wide anxiety about the potential menace communism posed within the United States ranks as one of the most immediate and arresting manifestations of the Cold War at home. That apprehension was incubated by a particular set of elites for their own purposes. There were communists in the United States, to be sure, if not many of them. The American Communist Party boasted only about 32,000 members in 1950, the same year that the most notorious anti-communist, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, first launched his sensational crusade against the presumed hordes of communists who, he charged, resided within the halls of the US government itself. To put that figure in perspective, there were as many members of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1950 as there were dues-paying members of the Communist Party. There also were communists, or communist sympathizers, within the executive branch of the government, albeit never more than a handful. The case of Alger Hiss, a former mid-level State Department official who evidently did spy for the Soviet Union and was convicted of perjury in a closely watched 1948 trial, was the most significant.

  Hiss’s espionage formed part of an extensive Soviet spying operation in the United States. McCarthy and other partisan politicians deliberately exaggerated the problem, however, manipulating public fears to advance their own careers. That the bombastic McCarthy singled out none other than George Marshall for particular vilification at one point is indicative of the senator’s unscrupulous tactics and fundamental dishonesty. The highly respected former general and secretary of state and defence was, McCarthy declared, part of ‘a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man’. Nor was he alone in levelling preposterous charges in order to keep political opponents on the defensive. California Congressman and Senator Richard M. Nixon, for example, Hiss’s principal prosecutor, owed his rise to national prominence to the reputation he developed for pursuing communist subversives with uncommon doggedness. As Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952, Nixon once excoriated Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson as an ‘appeaser’ who was a ‘Ph.D. graduate of Dean Acheson’s cowardly college of Communist containment’.

  That Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York and most prominent Catholic prelate in the country, was an unabashed defender of McCarthy speaks to the supportive role played by organized religion in America’s anti-communist crusade. Spellman equated patriotism with virulent anti-communism and an uncompromising opposition to the godless Soviet Union. ‘A true American’, he insisted in 1947, ‘can be neither a Communist nor a Communist condoner, and we realize that the first loyalty of every American is vigilantly to weed out and counteract Communism …’ In a similar vein, the Reverend Billy Graham regularly railed against communism as ‘Satan’s version of religion’. The most popular US evangelical minister of the Cold War era, Graham charged that communism was ‘master-minded by Satan himself’. Only the brand of muscular Christian revivalism that he championed and personified could save the United States from the scourge of Soviet-fuelled, atheistic communism. ‘Only as millions of Americans turn to Jesus Christ at this hour and accept him as Savior can this nation possibly be spared the onslaught of a demon-possessed communism,’ he cautioned. Church attendance soared in the United States during the early Cold War as even secular leaders framed the Soviet–American struggle as, at heart, a spiritual contest. ‘We are defending the religious principles upon which our Nation and our whole way of life are founded,’ Truman preached in the midst of the Korean War. Communism ‘denies the existence of God and, wherever it can, it stamps out the worship of God’.

  For all the deserved attention McCarthyism, and the communist witch hunt of which it formed the most extreme variant, has received from scholars, other domestic effects of the Cold War actually proved more far-reaching. The massive growth of defence spending, with its explosive effects on the overall national economy, on occupational opportunities, and on population shifts, deserves recognition as the most potent agent of change within Cold War America. During the first two decades of the Cold War, the federal government invested $776 billion in national defence, approximately 60 per cent of the total federal budget. That percentage mounts even higher if one includes indirect defence-related expenditures. Defence needs quickly came to dominate the nation’s research and development priorities, as private and university-based scientists and engineers scrambled to satisfy the government’s needs—and reap lucrative contracts in the process. Wholly new or freshly invigorated industries, including communications, electronics, aircraft, computing, and space exploration, expanded along with, and in large measure because of, the Cold War. Some of these industries, in the apt words of economist Ann Markusen, ‘were to irrevocably alter the American economic, occupational, and regional landscape’. Among the greatest ramifications of Cold War-driven defence spending were the burgeoning of defence plants in the south and the west at the expense of the nation’s older industrial bases in the north-east and midwest. California alone received more than $67 billion in defence contracts between 1951 and 1965, about 20 per cent of the total, as the Cold War helped foster the growth of the so-called Sunbelt. It stimulated, relatedly, a major demographic shift of the American population towards the west and south and an ancillary reweighting of the scales of political power within Congress and within the party system; both have been hallmarks of the post-Second World War era.

  The vast budgetary demands and multiple military obligations that the Cold War imposed upon the American populace required a mobilized and committed citizenry. US leaders from Truman onwards laboured assiduously to forge a domestic consensus supportive of the nation’s new role as the world’s ever-vigilant guardian against any sign of communist-inspired instability or aggression. They managed to do so with consummate skill and success through the mid-1960s, aided by what seemed unmistakable evidence of Soviet and Chinese adventurism from Eastern Europe and Berlin to Korea, Taiwan, and Cuba. As the Cold War entered its third decade, however, that consensus began to crack. The Vietnam War brought home to Americans the high—and, for a growing number, unacceptable—costs of their nation’s global hegemony. The war, which spurred the largest peace movement in US history, triggered a wrenching domestic debate about the price of American globalism. That debate raged fiercely throughout the late 1960s, necessitating a reassessment at the highest levels of the American government of a global Cold War strategy that had left the country both grievously overextended and deeply divided.

  Chapter 7

  The rise and fall of superpower détente, 1968–79

  During the 1970s, a somewhat obscure French term denoting the relaxation of tensions among former rivals suddenly entered the workin
g vocabularies not just of statesmen but of ordinary citizens across the globe. Détente served as a convenient shorthand for the more stable and cooperative relationship being forged by the Cold War’s primary protagonists, a phenomenon that came to dominate the international politics of that decade. Under the leadership, on the Soviet side, of Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev and, on the American side, of Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, and Jimmy Carter, the two superpowers sought to regulate their continuing rivalry more effectively. They worked to lessen the danger of nuclear war through the negotiation of verifiable arms control agreements, a hallmark of détente. At the same time, the two superpowers expanded trade links, technology transfers, and scientific sharing, while also labouring to formulate a core set of ‘rules’ to govern their relationship.

  Détente did not mean replacing the Cold War with a structure of peace, to be sure, despite the pious rhetoric from both sides that so stated. Rather, it meant managing the Cold War in a safer and more controlled manner so as to minimize the possibility either of accidental war or of a destabilizing arms spiral. Competition continued, especially in the Third World, which remained a cauldron of instability and revolutionary change. Each side, moreover, harboured a fundamentally different understanding about the meaning of détente. By the end of the 1970s, those problems had grown so severe that they brought the era of détente to an abrupt close.

  The genesis of détente

  Changing power realities constituted an essential prerequisite for détente. Plainly, the most important of those was the Soviet Union’s achievement, by the end of the 1960s, of relative parity with the United States in strategic nuclear weapons. The product of a Herculean effort by its defence planners and scientists, the USSR’s massive arms build-up had, by November 1969, given it a slight numerical advantage over the United States in ICBMs. Although the Americans still held a sizeable edge in terms of overall nuclear arsenal, thanks to continuing superiority in submarine-launched missiles and nuclear-capable long-range bombers, the trend towards a rough equivalence was by then unmistakable. Two decades of overwhelming US nuclear superiority had come to an end, a fact that held profound implications for future relations between the superpowers. The relative decline not only of America’s military power but of its economic health and vitality as well, trends exacerbated by resource-draining conflict in Vietnam and the economic resurgence of Western Europe and Japan, formed another important precondition for détente. Simply put, the United States no longer had the economic wherewithal, or political will, to sustain the policy of preponderance that had characterized its approach to the Cold War ever since the late 1940s. Finally, the onset of rising tensions between the Soviet Union and China, punctuated by border clashes between their troops and the serious possibility of actual war between the two communist rivals, provided another incentive to place the Soviet–American relationship on a sounder footing.

  A national security strategy aimed at lessening tensions with the Soviet Union appealed to US policy planners on several grounds. Above all, it seemed the most reasonable way to reduce the dangers of nuclear conflict with a now much more formidably armed rival. Détente, moreover, especially if it led to concrete arms control agreements, could lessen the pressure on a US defence budget already overburdened by the costly war in Vietnam. Bowing to that logic, Johnson signalled his administration’s intention to enter into arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union in 1967. In June of that year, he met with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin at a mini-summit in Glassboro, New Jersey, to discuss nuclear issues and other pressing bilateral problems. Johnson had tentatively planned to visit Moscow for further talks with Soviet leaders during the second half of 1968, only to have the trip scuttled in the aftermath of the Soviet military crackdown in Czechoslovakia.

  With his assumption of the presidency in January 1969, Richard Nixon embraced détente with renewed vigour. It constituted a core element of the recalibrated Cold War strategy he was determined to implement. Along with his chief foreign policy aide, National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon worried that the United States had become dangerously overextended globally, its resources stretched perilously thin. The Vietnam War served, in their view, as but the most alarming symptom of a much larger problem. ‘We were becoming like other nations in the need to recognize that our power, while vast, had limits’, Kissinger recalled in his memoirs. ‘Our resources were no longer infinite in relation to our problems; instead, we had to set priorities, both intellectual and material.’ The overriding priority for Nixon and Kissinger remained the containment of the one nation that possessed sufficient power to endanger US national security. Although he had risen to political fame in large part due to his reputation as a crusading anti-communist, the pragmatic Nixon no longer saw communism’s ideological appeal as a serious threat. It was Soviet power, pure and simple, that now concerned him. ‘The problem of our age’, as the like-minded Kissinger phrased it, ‘is to manage the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower.’ Geopolitics trumped ideology; it was, for Nixon and Kissinger, the true currency of international affairs.

  A policy of détente with the Soviet Union flowed naturally from their shared geopolitical vision, as did the hoped-for rapprochement with China. The Nixon administration aimed to restrain Moscow’s nuclear arms build-up and reduce both the costs of competition and the risks of war through arms control negotiations. By simultaneously securing Moscow’s de facto acceptance of the existing world order, the administration could help check the Soviet penchant for an adventuristic foreign policy in the Third World. If it could, at the same time, engineer an opening to long-isolated China, the United States could then assume the role of strategic pivot in the triangular relationship among the three powers. ‘If you have two enemies,’ Nixon reasoned, ‘play them off against each other.’ It was a bold plan, formulated at a time when the Vietnam War’s crippling costs at home and abroad necessitated some readjustment in US Cold War strategy. Nixon hoped that implementation of the plan might also facilitate a graceful American exit from Vietnam, still the nation’s most immediate foreign policy problem. A significant political pay-off beckoned as well; such singular foreign policy breakthroughs would surely enhance Nixon’s prospects for re-election in 1972.

  The Soviet Union desired an improvement in bilateral relations for its own reasons. Fearful of the growing military threat posed by China, the Russians calculated that a relaxation of tensions with the United States would enable them to concentrate on that much more immediate menace to their security. In addition, arms control agreements with the United States would confirm the Soviet Union’s status as a co-equal superpower while locking in its hard-won achievement of nuclear parity before any new technological breakthroughs allowed the United States to recapture its previous lead. It is difficult to overestimate the importance that the Kremlin leadership accorded to matters of status and respect in this regard. As Foreign Minister Gromyko proclaimed proudly to the 24th Communist Party Congress in 1971: ‘Today there is no question of any importance which can be decided without the Soviet Union or in opposition to it.’ More specific needs might also be met by pursuing a relationship of peaceful coexistence with the United States, including expanded access to US grain and technology and facilitation of a settlement of nagging European problems, such as Berlin. Brezhnev, Kosygin, Gromyko, and their Politburo associates remained confident, at this juncture, that history lay on the side of the socialist world; they accepted détente not out of weakness, but as a sign of their growing power. As Brezhnev succinctly, and astutely, put it in a 1975 speech: ‘Détente became possible because a new correlation of forces in the world arena has been established.’

  The flowering of détente

  The opening round of strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) began that November, alternating between Helsinki and Vienna. Almost immediately, though, the negotiations bogged down in mutual suspicion and technical arcana. Nixon’s effort to link progress in the arms control negotiatio
ns to Soviet cooperation in pressuring North Vietnam to reach a diplomatic accommodation posed one strain, at least until Nixon gave up the attempted linkage. A more nettlesome problem arose over the different categories of nuclear weapons—specifically, over whether the proposed agreement should be confined to long-range missiles, or whether medium-range US missiles deployed in Europe, and just as capable of hitting Soviet territory, should be included as well. Fresh technological innovations presented negotiators with another complex challenge. The advent of MIRVs (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles), which allowed numerous nuclear warheads to be mounted on a single missile, promised to deepen significantly the destructive capabilities of each side’s nuclear arsenals. The development of anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) raised the theoretical possibility of defensive systems that could repulse nuclear missile attacks and thus negate the other side’s striking power. In May 1971, Soviet and American negotiators finally achieved a breakthrough. Essentially, the Americans agreed to grant the Soviets a 3-to-2 edge in ICBMs, the Soviets chose to ignore the nuclear missiles that could be launched from Western Europe, and both parties decided not to ban MIRVs. That compromise paved the way for a gala summit meeting and treaty-signing ceremony in Moscow the next year.