Description
A “synopsis” is a brief overview that provides readers insights into a larger/more complex issue. In a 250 word essay, please write a synopsis covering the materials that we studied in this module. You may focus on whatever event/person/idea you found most compelling. To earn the full credit, students will need to (a) write a cogent essay (b) meet or exceed the required word count and (c) cite two examples of supporting evidence from the assigned texts or module lecture. No need for formal citations; just parenthetical notes like (Demsky lecture) or (Starr, 56).
The U.S. and World War Two
As was the case in WW I, the U.S. was not an original participant in the Second World War either. Isolationist attitudes remained common into the 1940s, although President Roosevelt demonstrated in clear and purposeful ways that he was committed to opposing fascism even if it meant sending the U.S. Army to fight overseas. As is well known, however, the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor in December 1941 pushed the issue toward its conclusion. The U.S. would declare war against the Japanese, and would respond in kind to Hitler’s unexpected declaration of war against the U.S. The U.S. entered WW II allied to the British and Soviets. What joined these very different countries together was a common opposition to Germany. It would be a costly, four-year war.
World War II cost America 1 million casualties and over 300,000 deaths. In both domestic and foreign affairs, its consequences were far-reaching. It had an immediate positive impact on the economy by ending Depression-era unemployment. The war accelerated corporate mergers and the trend toward large-scale agriculture. Labor unions also grew during the war as the government adopted pro-union policies, continuing the New Deal’s sympathetic treatment of organized labor. Presidential power expanded enormously during World War II. This suited Franklin Roosevelt just fine as his ideas of Progressivism meant that the government (under his direction) should have the power to influence all aspects of life in the U.S. The Democrats Party, in addition to Roosevelt, reaped a positive political windfall from WW II. Roosevelt rode the wartime emergency to unprecedented third and fourth terms. For most Americans, however, the war proved disruptive and upsetting. There were separating families as men went off to fight and women went off to work. There were in some cities, overcrowding in housing, and nationwide there was a shortage of consumer goods.
What was in like in the U.S. during WW II? World War II produced important changes in American life–some trivial, others profound. One striking change involved fashion. To conserve wool and cotton, dresses became shorter and vests and cuffs disappeared, as did double-breasted suits, pleats, and ruffles. Even more significant was the tremendous increase in mobility. The war set families in motion, pulling them off of farms and out of small towns and packing them into large urban areas. Urbanization had virtually stopped during the Depression, but the war saw the number of city dwellers leap from 46 to 53 percent.
War industries sparked the urban growth. Detroit’s population exploded as the automotive industry switched from manufacturing cars to war vehicles. Washington, D.C. became another boomtown, as tens of thousands of new workers staffed the swelling ranks of the bureaucracy. The most dramatic growth occurred in California. Of the 15 million civilians who moved across state lines during the war, over 2 million went to California to work in defense industries. The war had a dramatic impact on women. The sudden appearance of large numbers of women in uniform was easily the most visible change. The military organized women into auxiliary units with special uniforms, their own officers, and, amazingly, equal pay. By 1945, more than 250,000 women had joined the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), the Army Nurses Corps, Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES), the Navy Nurses Corps, the Marines, and the Coast Guard. Most women who joined the armed services either filled traditional women’s roles, such as nursing, or replaced men in non-combat jobs.
Women also substituted for men on the home front. For the first time in history, married working women outnumbered single working women as 6.3 million women entered the work force during the war. The war challenged the conventional image of female behavior, as “Rosie the Riveter” became the popular symbol of women who abandoned traditional female occupations to work in defense industries. Social critics had a field day attacking women. Social workers blamed working mothers for the rise in juvenile delinquency during the war.
In 1941, the overwhelming majority of the nation’s African American population–10 of 13 million–still lived in the South, primarily in rural areas. During the war, more than one million blacks migrated to the North–twice the number during World War I–and more than two million found work in defense industries. Black leaders fought discrimination vigorously. In the spring of 1941 (months before America entered the war), the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph, with strong backing from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), called for 150,000 blacks to march on Washington to protest discrimination in defense industries. Embarrassed and concerned, Roosevelt issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination in defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). This was an example of Progressivism in race relations as the hope was that a government commission could get people to change their racial attitudes.
Almost 400,000 Mexican Americans served in the armed forces during the war. For many Mexican Americans, jobs in industry provided an escape hatch from the desperate poverty of migratory farm labor. In New Mexico, about one-fifth of the rural Mexican American population left for war-related jobs. The need for farm workers rose dramatically after Pearl Harbor. To meet the demand, the United States established the Bracero (work hands) Program in 1942, and by 1945, several hundred thousand Mexican workers had immigrated to the Southwest. Commercial farmers welcomed them; labor unions, however, resented the competition, leading to animosity and discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike.
In Los Angeles, ethnic tensions erupted into violence. Anglo society feared and resented newly formed Mexican American youth gangs, whose members celebrated their ethnicity by wearing flamboyant “zoot suits.” In June 1943, hundreds of Anglo sailors, on liberty from nearby naval bases, invaded downtown Los Angeles. Eager to put down the Mexican American youths, they attacked the zoot suiters, and riots broke out for several nights. The local press blamed the Mexican American gangs, and the riots did not end until military police ordered sailors back to their ships.
Discrimination and bigotry was not known only to the U.S. Nazi Germany had only intensified its ant-Jewish measures during the 1940s as hateful speech soon evolved into a program of murder known today as the Holocaust. The U.S. did not fight in WW II to end the Holocaust. The soldiers did fight, however, to ensure that regimes steeped in anti-democratic hatreds would not prosper during the 20th century. The Nazis operated six death camps in Eastern Europe between December 1941 and the end of 1944: Chelmno, Belzek, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. At Auschwitz in Poland, gas chambers and crematorium ovens killed 20,000 victims a day. Zyklon B crystals were injected into gas chambers by small openings in the ceiling or on the side of the wall. Altogether, 1.6 million people were killed at Auschwitz–1.3 million were Jews and 300,000 were Polish Catholics, Gypsies, and Russian prisoners–and their ashes were dumped in surrounding ponds and fields. The ashes of about 100,000 people lie in a small pond near one of the crematories. The total numbers of non-combatants killed by Nazi forces during the 1940s is simply staggering. The estimated number for Jews killed is six million; there were six million more Slavs, Gypsies, physically challenged and aged peoples killed as well.
This purposeful murdering of non-combatants helps situate the U.S. treatment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt authorized the Department of War to designate military areas and to exclude any or all persons from them. Armed with this power, military authorities immediately moved against Japanese aliens. In Hawaii, the military did not force Japanese Americans to relocate because a large portion of the population was of Japanese ancestry and the local economy depended on their labor. On the West Coast, however, military authorities ordered the Japanese to leave, drawing no distinction between aliens and citizens. Forced to sell their property for pennies on the dollar, most Japanese Americans suffered severe financial losses. Relocation proved next to impossible as no other states would take them. The governor of Idaho opposed any migration, declaring: “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats. We don’t want them.”
Roosevelt created the War Relocation Authority when voluntary measures failed. It resettled 100,000 Japanese Americans in ten isolated internment camps scattered across seven western states. Called relocation camps, they resembled minimum-security prisons. In these concentration camps, American citizens who had committed no crimes were locked behind barbed wire and crowded into ramshackle wooden barracks. The families lived one family to a room that was furnished with nothing but cots and bare light bulbs. They were forced to endure bad food, inadequate medical care, and poorly equipped schools. Of course, they were not exterminated, as was the case with Nazi prisoners in the Holocaust.
It might strike you as strange, but nearly 18,000 Japanese American men won release from those camps to fight for the United States Army. These men went off to fight for a country that had just imprisoned their families. Most served with the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. In Italy, the 442nd sustained nearly 10,000 casualties, with 3,600 Purple Hearts, 810 Bronze Stars, 342 Silver Stars, 123 divisional citations, 47 Distinguished Service Crosses, 17 Legions of Merit, 7 Presidential Unit Citations, and 1 Congressional Medal of Honor. In short, they fought heroically, emerging as the most decorated military unit in World War II. In one of the most painful scenes in American history, Japanese American parents, still locked inside concentration camps, received posthumous Purple Hearts for their sons.
Japanese Americans, of course, protested their treatment in court. Citing national security considerations, the Supreme Court upheld the internment order by a six to three vote in the case known as Korematsu v. U.S. (1944). In a dissenting opinion, however, Frank Murphy admitted that federal policy had fallen “into the ugly abyss of racism.” On December 18, 1944, in the Endo case, the Supreme Court ruled that a civilian agency (the War Relocation Authority) had no right to incarcerate law-abiding citizens. Two weeks later, the federal government began closing down the camps, ending one of the most shameful chapters in American history. This episode should be instructive when viewing treatment afforded Muslim citizens in the U.S. following September 11th. No forced re-locations took place as had occurred in the 1940s. One might argue the country has grown in its tolerance, or at least somewhat in its respect for civil rights, during the fifty years.
By 1943, aided by good leadership, skillful fighting, and superior technology, British and American troops had liberated North Africa and pressed on into Italy. Soviet troops had turned the tide at Stalingrad and were slowly reclaiming their territory. The English Channel was virtually free of Nazi submarines, and American and British planes were bombing German industrial centers around the clock. Still, Hitler refused to surrender and hid behind his Atlantic Wall. American military leaders began to favor an aggressive approach to attacking Germany. Specifically, the Supreme Allied Command led by American General Dwight Eisenhower wanted to launch a cross-channel invasion of France from Britain that would strike at the heart of Nazi strength. It would be the largest/riskiest amphibious landing in global history. Anyone familiar with the story of the Spanish Armada attacking Britain in the 1580s should see the inherent dangers American war planners faced with their proposed landing.
However, the die was now cast. The U.S. was going to try and attack Germany from the West while the Russians pushed the Nazis back from the east. If all succeeded as planned, the two Allied armies would meet somewhere inside Germany. Indeed, this is the famous D-Day landing depicted in such popular Hollywood movies as Saving Private Ryan. To be clear: D-Day surely helped bring hat helped bring WWII to a close.
Just after midnight on June 6, three U.S. airborne divisions parachuted behind the Nazi’s troop lines to disrupt paths of communications. As the German lookout sentries scanned the English Channel at daybreak, they saw the largest armada ever assembled in history heading toward the French shore. There were five points of attack. Gold and Sword Beaches were taken by the British, and Juno Beach was captured by Canadian forces. The American task was to capture Utah and Omaha Beaches. The troops at Omaha Beach met fierce resistance and suffered heavy casualties. Still, by nightfall a beachhead had been established. German troops had been forced to yield ground and retreat.
After D-Day, the Nazis’ days were numbered. Paris was liberated in August 1944 as the Allies pushed slowly eastward. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was moving into German territory as well. Hitler, at the Battle of the Bulge, launched a final unsuccessful counteroffensive in December 1944. Soon the Americans, British, and Free French found themselves racing the Soviets to Berlin. When the Allies entered Berlin, they discovered that the mastermind of all the destruction, Adolf Hitler, had already died by his own hand. With little left to sustain any sort of resistance, the Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, hereafter known as V-E (Victory in Europe) Day. Soldiers in the Russian Army, which had entered Berlin before the U.S. Army, and which held tactical military authority in the city, engaged in a week-long rape of Berlin’s (defenseless) female population that is well documented by historians. It was a brutal and terrible war in Europe.
In May 1945, American soldiers and civilians were weary from four years of war. Yet the job was only half day. The Japanese military was refusing to give up their fight and American forces were facing a huge challenge as far as invading mainland Japan was concerned. Earlier in 1945, the U.S. Army Air force had basically burned Tokyo to the groud via massive napalm drops. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese people died during the Battle of Tokyo. But militarily the Japanese were still formidable. They had an army of 2 million strong stationed in the home islands guarding against invasion. And they remained committed to their fascist leaders and the idea of Japanese greatness. President Harry Truman (Roosevelt had died in April 1945) learned from U.S. scientists that the country now how a weapon with the capacity to rapidly end the war with Japan. He just was unsure about unleashing the most terrible weapon (atomic nuclear bomb) ever know to humankind.
For Truman, the choice whether or not to use the atomic bomb was the most difficult decision of his life. First, an Allied demand for an immediate unconditional surrender was made to the leadership in Japan. Although the demand stated that refusal would result in total destruction, no mention of any new weapons of mass destruction was made. The Japanese military command rejected the request for unconditional surrender, but there were indications that a conditional surrender was possible. Regardless, on August 6, 1945, a plane called the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Instantly, 70,000 Japanese citizens were vaporized. In the months and years that followed, an additional 100,000 perished from burns and radiation sickness. Two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. On August 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, where 80,000 Japanese people perished. On August 14, 1945, the Japanese surrendered.
Critics have charged that Truman’s decision was a barbaric act that brought negative long-term consequences to the United States. A new age of nuclear terror led to a dangerous arms race. Some military analysts insist that Japan was on its knees and the bombings were simply unnecessary. The American government was accused of racism on the grounds that such a device would never have been used against white civilians. Other critics argued that American diplomats had ulterior motives. The Soviet Union had entered the war against Japan, and the atomic bomb could be read as a strong message for the Soviets to tread lightly. In this respect, Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been the first shots of the Cold War as well as the final shots of World War II. Regardless, the United States remains the only nation in the world to have used a nuclear weapon on another nation.
WW II was over. Nazism and fascism had been defeated. Nevertheless, 1945 marked the end of one war and the start of another. Both the US and USSR emerged from WWII clearly the strongest nations in the world. They never had liked each other, had only joined together to defeat a common Nazi enemy, and now would engage in a protracted “Cold War” that would last until the 1990s. This history of WW II is a linkage point in modern American history. It connect the lessons of WW I with what will be the Cold War lessons.
US During the Cold War, 1945-91
In March 1946, Winston Churchill announced that “an iron curtain has descended across” Europe. On one side was the Communist bloc; on the other side were non-Communist nations. This was essentially what the Cold War involved. The world divided into a bi-polar balance of power that saw the US and its allies facing down the USSR and its friends. Rather than retreat into isolationism, the U.S. and its people took on the heady challenge of trying to limit the spread of another anti-democratic system called Soviet Communism. If you are thinking that the U.S. had just fought WW II to stop Nazism, and as their reward received an equally hostile for called Soviet Communism, then you are making progress in your studies. It is indeed a sad irony that everything the U.S. mobilized to defeat in Germany took firmer root under the Soviets.
The Soviet Union had showed it was not committed to free and democratic elections in Eastern Europe or elsewhere. The Soviet Union had annexed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and parts of Czechoslovakia, Finland, Poland, and Romania. Albania established a Communist government in 1944, and Yugoslavia formed one in 1945. In 1946, the Soviet Union organized Communist governments in Bulgaria and Romania, and in Hungary and Poland in 1947. Communists took over Czechoslovakia in a coup d’etat in 1948. There was nothing anyone (U.S.) could do about it. The Red Army was without question the largest and most aggressive fighting force in Europe. Surely, the U.S. Army understood the reality of the situation in Europe following the end of WW II. The Soviets, for their part, were convinced that the United States was trying to preserve its monopoly on nuclear weapons. Modern historical scholarship accepts as valid the claim that President Truman’s decision to bomb Nagasaki signaled the USSR that the U.S. possessed alone atomic weapons.
Additional conflicts centered on money. The U.S. was economically stable and growing fast during the post-war period. American leaders offered aid to many foreign nations, but refused a Soviet request for massive reconstruction loans. The claim for a successful capitalist government to aid a communist state committed to the destruction of capitalism was too steep for many to ponder. Tension first flared in 1947 over the country of Greece. Both the US and the USSR felt that having Greece as an ally was vital to their prestige and prosperity. By the way, this competing for allies rather than fighting each other directly is the reason the name Cold War took hold. The war was not a “hot” fighting war between the US/USSR. It was a long “cold” struggle that involved lots and lots of intermediaries.
In February 1947, Britain informed the United States that it could not longer afford to provide aid to Greece and Turkey. The situation seemed urgent. The Greek monarchy was threatened by guerrilla warfare, and the Soviet Union was seeking to control the Dardenelles in Turkey, a water route to the Mediterranean. The U.S. government feared that the loss of Greece and Turkey to communism would open Western Europe and Africa to Soviet influence. The U.S government also worried that if the Soviet Union gained control over the Eastern Mediterranean, it could stop the flow of Middle Eastern oil.
President Truman responded decisively. He asked Congress for $400 million in economic and military aid for Greece and Turkey. This was an unprecedented amount of foreign aid during peacetime. He also declared that it was the policy of the United States “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Truman’s overarching message described two ways of life that were engaged in a life-or-death struggle, one free and the other totalitarian. The United States would help free people to maintain their free institutions and their territorial integrity against movements that sought to impose totalitarian regimes.
The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to providing aid to countries resisting communist aggression or subversion and provided the first step toward what would become known as the Containment Policy. First outlined in a 1947 scholarly article, the containment idea was aimed to prevent Soviet expansion. Its author and his many supporters in the U.S. government were convinced that if the Soviet Union failed to expand, its social system would eventually break down. This was the goal: do not allow communism to spread past the places it already existed. This was the basic theme of the Cold War from an American perspective. Stopping the spread of communism became the goal of soldiers and citizens for the next four decades.
Containment Policy would adopt two approaches. One approach was military; the other was economic. In 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a program to funnel American economic aid to Europe. Faced with a rapid growth in the size of Communist parties, especially in France and Italy, the U.S. proposed a program of direct economic aid. In June 1947, George C. Marshall proposed to give financial aid to European countries. He called on Europeans to collectively agree on what kind of assistance they needed. Even the Soviet Union was invited to participate in the planning.
The Marshall Plan committed more than 10 percent of the federal budget and almost 3 percent of the United States’ gross national product to rebuilding Western Europe. Over the next 40 months, Congress authorized $12.5 billion in aid to restore Western Europe’s economic health and to halt the spread of communism. Marshall’s plan actually cost the United States very little, since it was largely paid for by European purchases of American coal, agricultural crops, and machinery.
From the military side, the U.S. Armed Forces took equally large steps toward becoming a global superpower. In April 1949, the United States, Canada, Iceland and nine European nations formed NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Member states pledged mutual assistance against an armed attack and cooperation in military training and strategic planning. The U.S. stationed troops in Western Europe, assuring its Allies that it would use its nuclear deterrent to protect Western Europeans against a Soviet attack. It also named its most decorated WW II general, Dwight Eisenhower, to serve as NATO Supreme Commander.
This did not, lamentably, keep global peace. In September 1949, President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had successfully detonated an atomic bomb. The Cold War was now really becoming dangerous to global peace and the fate of humankind. A “hot” war soon broke out between the two superpowers in Korea. On June 25, 1950, Communist North Korean forces invaded South Korea, beginning a three-year war. Three days later, the South Korean capital of Seoul fell to the North Koreans. President Truman immediately ordered U.S. air and sea forces to “give the Korean government troops cover and support.”
For three months, the United States was unable to stop the communist advance. Then, Douglas MacArthur successfully landed two divisions ashore at Inchon, behind enemy lines. The North Koreans fled in disarray across the 38th parallel, the pre-war border between North and South Korea. By November, U.S. Army and Marine units thought they could end the war in just five more months. China’s communist leaders threatened to send combat forces into Korea, but the U.S. commander, Douglas MacArthur, thought they were bluffing. He was incorrect and in mid-October, the first of 300,000 Chinese soldiers slipped into North Korea. When U.S. forces began what they expected to be their final assault in late November, they ran into the Chinese army. There was a danger that the U.S. Army might be overrun. By mid-January 1951, Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway succeeded in halting an American retreat 50 miles south of the 38th parallel. A week and a half later, he had the army attacking northward again. By March, the front settled along the 38th parallel and the South Korean capital of Seoul was back in South Korean hands.
The Korean War was filled with Cold War lessons for historians. First, it demonstrated that the United States was committed to the containment of communism, not only in Western Europe, but throughout the world. Second, the Korean War proved how difficult it was to achieve victory even under the best circumstances imaginable. In Korea, the United States faced a relatively weak adversary and had strong support from its allies. The United States possessed an almost total monopoly of sophisticated weaponry, and yet, the war dragged on for almost four years. Third, the Korean War illustrated the difficulty of fighting a limited objective rather than a grand theme. These wars can become unpopular at home because it is difficult to explain precisely what the country is fighting for. Yet these would be the types of wars that defined America’s Cold War years. In Korea and Vietnam specifically, the U.S. committed massive amount of money and men to achieving unclear objectives.
To be clear: there were communist trying to harm the U.S. and some had even been in the U.S. government. But a quick review of the Joe McCarthy contribution to Cold War history reveals as many new questions as it provided clear answers. Senator Joseph McCarthy did not create the national obsession with communist subversion.
In fact, most Americans believed there was a legitimate threat of domestic and global communism. Investigations by executive agencies into the loyalty of federal employees began as early as 1941. In 1947, the first general loyalty program was established by executive order. Executive Order 9835, signed in 1947 by President Truman, called for a loyalty investigation of all federal employees. The issue became more politically charged in 1948 after California lawmaker Richard Nixon began pressing a case that a former government official named Alger Hiss passed classified documents to Soviet agents.
But Joseph McCarthy could destroy political careers on a whim. Even the president of the United States treaded warily around him. Dwight D. Eisenhower said of McCarthy: “Never get in a pissing match with a skunk.” McCarthy indeed had an unsavory side. While a Marine, he forged a letter from his commander to obtain a citation for a phony combat wound. He also cheated on his taxes and violated campaign laws. McCarthy’s stock-in-trade was reckless accusations. Centering on Communist victories in China and Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, McCarthy charged nearly anyone and everyone in the U.S. government and military with aiding communists. By1954, the U.S. Senate had enough of these antics. That year, his colleagues voted to condemn McCarthy for conduct unbecoming to his office. He died from liver cancer shortly thereafter.
One main impact of the Cold War, still felt by Americans today, is the rise of the “military-industrial complex” that funds the U.S. war machine. The Cold War ended in 1991 and the USSR lost as it no longer exists etc. However, the U.S. economy and society is still geared for a long and never-ending military campaign. This was exactly what the country’s two most respected military leaders and presidents stated as their opinion. This was what Washington said in 1796; Eisenhower echoed the ideas in 1960. President Eisenhower knew that a high level of military spending and the establishment of a large arms industry in peacetime were something “new in the American experience.” He warned that the country “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower worried that presidents who did not have his military experience would be poor judges of the country’s defense needs. Taking the country to war for no good reason other than you have the capability to do so (at that time) is something for which historians generally judge presidents poorly.
One president from the Cold War that faced these issues was President Kennedy. In 1959, rebel leader Fidel Castro toppled Cuban dictator Fugencio Batista. The next year, the Soviet Union agreed to provide Cuba with $100 million in credit and to purchase five million tons of Cuban sugar. After President Eisenhower declared that the United States would not allow a regime “dominated by international Communism” to exist in the Western hemisphere, Havana nationalized all banks and large commercial industrial enterprises in Cuba. The United responded by imposing a trade embargo. In April 1961, a U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba led by anti-Castro Cuban émigrés turned into a rout. The members of the invasion force, who had been trained by the CIA in Florida, Louisiana, and Guatemala, were defeated in just three days. The Soviets had succeeded in winning a major ally, less than one hundred miles from the U.S., in their Cold War strategy. The next year, the Soviet Union and the United States went eyeball-to-eyeball and were on the brink of nuclear war. Surveillance photographs taken by a U-2 spy plane over Cuba revealed that the Soviet Union was installing intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Once operational, in about 10 days, the missiles would need only five minutes to reach Washington, D.C.
President Kennedy decided to impose a naval blockade. Soviet freighters were steaming toward Cuba. The president realized that if the ships were boarded and their cargoes seized, the Soviet Union might regard this as an act of war. Soviet Premier Khrushchev sent a signal that he might be willing to negotiate. In exchange for the Soviets agreeing to remove the missiles, the United States publicly pledged not to invade Cuba and secretly agreed to remove its aging missiles from Turkey. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War tensions eased somewhat. In July 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain approved a treaty to halt the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. The following month, the United States and Soviet Union established a hotline (red phone) providing a direct communication link between the White House and the Kremlin.
Nevertheless, by the 1960s, the Cold War was reality in the U.S. and across the globe. Would the American democratic system prosper; or would Soviet Communism rule the future. American society underwent changes as a result of the Cold War. It became an activist global power, it provided massive foreign aid, made a new military alliance called NATO, and also challenged its citizens to reject (and suspect) communism wherever dissent was heard.