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The Perils of the Cold War

Americans, along with the rest of the world, lived under the threat of nuclear warfare during the tense years of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. This 1951 civil defense poster, with the message “It can happen Here,” suggests that Americans should be prepared for such a dire outcome.

he autumn of 1950, a California congressman named Richard M. Nixon stood before reporters in Los Angeles. The little-known Nixon was running for the Senate against his fellow House member Helen Gahagan Douglas, a Hollywood actress and New Deal Democrat. Nixon told the gathered journalists that Douglas had cast “Communist-leaning” votes and that she was “pink right down to her underwear” — meaning nearly red, a symbol of communism. Douglas’s congressional record was not much different from Nixon’s, but the accusation proved potent. Nixon defeated the “pink lady” with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

A few months earlier, U.S. tanks and planes had arrived in French Indochina, a French colonial possession comprised of present-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. President Harry S. Truman authorized $15 million worth of military supplies to aid France, which was resisting an independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese communist. According to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the military help was not meant to preserve France’s empire — but to curtail the influence of communism. Both the Soviet Union and China were supporting Ho’s army. “Neither national independence nor democratic evolution exists in any area dominated by Soviet imperialism,” Acheson warned ominously as he announced the aid.

Though seemingly different events on the surface, Nixon’s political tactics in Los Angeles and American military aid for the French empire in Vietnam were both part of the Cold War — the geopolitical and ideological struggle between the capitalist, democratic United States and the communist, authoritarian Soviet Union. Both also signaled the return of heightened anticommunism to the center of American political life. Beginning in Europe as World War II ended and extending to Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa by the mid-1950s, the Cold War reshaped international relations and dominated global politics for more than forty years (see “Comparing Interpretations”).

As the scope and stakes of the Cold War became clear, the rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union affected Americans at home in a number of ways. A hostility to “subversives” in government, education, and the media gripped the United States. The escalating arms race between the two superpowers prompted Congress to spend heavily on defense, and gave rise to the military-industrial complex, the loose alliance between the Defense Department and the network of large corporations that built planes, munitions, and electronic devices. In politics, anticommunism challenged the liberal agenda of the New Deal coalition. The international and the domestic began to run together, a process that has continued into the twenty-first century as an enduring legacy of the Cold War.

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