Esoteric Philosopher: Study of the Endless Path of Wisdom

A stand against Soviet Communism

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A world in which the United States proves itself to be the controlling factor, after wiping out Russia, which she can well do if she acts now. EXT 638.

A stand “against” Soviet Communism:

 

JPC: It is widely acknowledged that Stalin funded and impulsed the communist troubles in Korea and Indo-China. Signed documents from Stalin, pushed, funded and supplied weapons to many of these hot spots. So I see a definite underlying occult force, which the USA and British were responding to. Look at the killing fields of Cambodia and Vietnam ect, definite places where the dark forces operated with decomposition as MM tells us.

 

Korean War:

Today, with the opening of Soviet archives, the war is most often blamed on Kim Il-sung who convinced a reluctant Joseph Stalin to support the venture. reference.com

 

What happened in Japan can happen in the rest of the Orient, but whereas Japan was a relatively small country, China, India and their neighbors are vast and populous. Heaven help us if they re-enact the history of Japan. ENA vii.

 

A world in which the United States proves itself to be the controlling factor, after wiping out Russia, which she can well do if she acts now. EXT 638.

 

JPC: DK definitely suggests at one time the USSR should be "wiped out" he well knew the aggressive and destructive nature of soviet totalitarianism this was proved substantiated with North Korea, North Vietnam and communist China. He also knew full well the cleansing of the etheric and astral planes were only achievable by the release of atomic energy. "The totalitarian powers have turned the world into one armed camp - for offence or defence." EXT 184.

 

The atomic bomb:

 

It belongs to the United Nations for use (or let us rather hope, simply for threatened use) when aggressive action on the part of any nation rears its ugly head. It does not essentially matter whether that aggression is the gesture of any particular nation or group of nations or whether it is generated by the political groups of any powerful religious organization, such as the Church of Rome, who are as yet unable to leave politics alone and attend to the business for which all religions are responsible - leading human beings closer to the God of Love. EXT 548.

 

General Douglas MacArthur argued nuclear weapons should be used during the Korean War both Truman and Eisenhower disagreed. wikipedia.org

 

This destruction... and the consequent release of their imprisoned souls, is a necessary happening; it is the justification of the use of the atomic bomb upon the Japanese population. The first use of this released energy has been destructive, but I would remind you that it has been the destruction of forms and not the destruction of spiritual values and the death of the human spirit - as was the goal of the Axis effort. EXT 496.

 

I would remind you that the release of atomic energy has had a far more potent effect in the etheric web than in the dense physical vehicle of the planet. Three times the atomic bomb was used, and that fact is itself significant. It was used twice in Japan, thereby disrupting the etheric web in what you erroneously call the Far East; it was used once in what is also universally called the Far West, and each time a great area of disruption was formed which will have future potent, and at present unsuspected, results. DINA2 61.

 

Every death, in all the kingdoms of nature, has to some extent this effect; it shatters and destroys substantial form and thus serves a constructive purpose; this result is largely astral or psychic and serves to dissipate some of the enveloping glamor. The wholesale destruction of forms which has been going on during the past few years of war has produced phenomenal changes upon the astral plane and has shattered an immense amount of the existing world glamor, and this is very, very good. These happenings should result in less opposition to the inflow of the new type of energy. EH 503

 

world glamor with its devitalizing and depressing results. TWM 307.

 

The Black Lodge is working through the group which is controlling the destiny of Russia. RI 679.

 

As Stalin famously put it in 1945: ''This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. It cannot be otherwise.'' www.

 

In the Soviet Union, after the end of the World War, Stalin carried out the excessive despotism. Not only inland, but also in capital Eastern European nations such as Hungary, Poland, Czech Slovakia, Rumania and Bulgaria that had been slot in the power of Soviet forcibly. The facts were made clear by Khrushchov, the successor of Stalin. Khrushchov suggested the "line of peaceful compromise", and he maintained that the way to reach socialism was through a variety of processes. In April 1956, he dissolved Common form. This caused a flutter in the communist nations, and especially in Eastern Europe the expectation for liberty got larger.

 

In the Soviet and Rumania no riots were raised, but in other place they where. In 1956, the people in Hungary raised a riot, demanding liberation. Hungary recovered the order by bombardment of by the Soviets. The regime of Janos Kadar appearing after that introduced the capitalism element and had economical effect, which surprised the world. East German funds from West German, and prospered relatively. thinkquest.org

 

According to Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, which were published in 1970, Kim went to Moscow for Stalin’s approval. Russian staff officers planned the details, but Stalin, fearing Americans would detect Soviet involvement, withdrew most of the 7,000 Russian advisors in Korea. Khrushchev believed that had they remained, the North would have succeeded. Kim had promised that the war would last only a short time because the South Koreans would rise up against Rhee’s oppressive government and overthrow it. This never occurred. For the most part, South Koreans remained loyal to their government.

 

It appears that Stalin became aware of this change. McLean, Burgess, and Philby, working in British intelligence with access to U.S. information, were later discovered to be Soviet spies. (During the war MacArthur would sense that someone was reading his messages.) Continued success by Mao would make him a rival for the leadership of international Communism. As Stalin had promised to help the North Koreans, he had also offered aid to the Chinese who had massed 200,000 troops opposite Formosa for the invasion. Did Stalin coerce Kim Il Sung to invade first so that he would have an excuse to delay help to the Chinese? Was his support of the Korean invasion an effort to impede U.S./China rapprochement?

 

The Korean War was one of the most important events of the 20th Century because for the first time, force was used to contain communism.  So stated PBS News Hour historians.  Had North Korea succeeded in adding territory to the communist bloc of nations through a force of arms, they would have tried again and again.  A degree of stability came upon the world scene because communistic military aggression was defeated in korea. koreanwar-educator.org

 

The origins of the Korean War have long been a matter of debate. At the time, the American government believed that the communist bloc was a unified monolith, and that North Korea acted within this monolith as a pawn of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s and 1970s, the view that the war was just as much caused by western and South Korean provocation became popular. Today, with the opening of Soviet archives, the war is most often blamed on Kim Il-sung who convinced a reluctant Joseph Stalin to support the venture.

 

The People's Republic of China was wary of a war in Korea. Mao Zedong was concerned that it would encourage American intervention in Asia and would destabilize the region and interfere with plans to destroy the Kuomintang forces under Chiang Kai-Shek which had retreated to Taiwan. Before Kim invaded South Korea, he sought permission from Stalin. Stalin approved of the idea of a united Korea, while saying that he could not give the go-ahead. For that Kim needed to gain Mao's approval. Kim led Mao to believe that Stalin was fully behind war against the south, while not seeking Mao's de facto approval. When Mao seemed as if he was keen on the idea, Kim attacked.

 

The Cold War is usually periodized roughly as having occurred from the end of World War II until the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were some of the occasions when the tension between those two ideologies took the form of an armed conflict. netcharles.com

 

People's Republic of China:

The PRC's response was two-fold: for one they started talks with the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, culminating in high level meetings with Henry Kissinger and later Richard Nixon. These contributed to a PRC shift toward the American camp. Meanwhile, they also supported the Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot in Cambodia. The PRC supported Pol Pot partially for ideological reasons (the Khmer Rouge's philosophy was a radical variant of Maoism) and partially to keep Vietnam "boxed in" between the PRC in the north and Cambodia in the west.

 

The relative success of the two neighboring states would have a powerful effect on opinions of the PRC and USSR in the area: after the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975, Vietnam stabilized, while Cambodia descended into genocidal chaos.

 

Cambodia

Although the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge had once cooperated, the relationship deteriorated when KR leader, Pol Pot, came to power and established Democratic Kampuchea. The Cambodian regime started to demand that certain tracts of land be "returned" to Cambodia, lands that had been "lost" centuries earlier. Unsurprisingly, the Vietnamese refused the demands, and Pol Pot responded by massacring ethnic Vietnamese inside Cambodia (see History of Cambodia), and, by 1978, supporting a Vietnamese guerrilla army making incursions into western Vietnam. Wikipedia.

 

In April 1975, the Communist forces of the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, began a brutal four-year regime in Cambodia.  The human costs of this revolution were horrific. According to conservative estimates a million people --or one in seven of the country's population--died from starvation, malnutrition and misdiagnosed or mistreated illness.  Another 200,000 were executed as enemies of the state.

 

S-21 was a secret prison operated by the Pol Pot regime in the capital city of Phnom Penh from mid-1975 through the end of 1978.  Individuals accused of treason, along with their families, were brought to S-21 where they were photographed upon arrival. They were tortured until they confessed to whatever crime their captors charged them with, and then executed.  The prisoners' photographs and completed confessions formed dossiers that were submitted to Khmer Rouge authorities, so that proof of the elimination of "traitors" was established.  Of the 14,200 people imprisoned at S-21, which held between 1,000 and 1,500 at any one time, only 7 are know to have survived. cambodian_genocide.html

 

The devices of the dark ones must be exposed. For example, sometimes one finds in the vicinity of certain places corpses of some people or animals.

 

The dark ones know that for the attraction of the forces of the lower spheres decomposition is necessary, and they ingeniously arrange such centers of confusion and decay. FW2 69.

 

JPC: One of course recalls the mass graves of Nazi concentration camps, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, Afghanistan and Iraq, also Stalin’s camps of concentration and execution of the Jewish and Polish and other peoples. An estimated 200,000 Cambodian people were executed in genocide after the collapse of the US Saigon government in 1975 as the Kamer Rouge rampaged and Vietnam stabilized into submission to the north, Cambodia descended into murderous chaos caused by south Vietnam being invaded with 20 divisions of the soviet backed north. The establishment of such "centres of confusion and decay" as MM describes the death camps and mass graves by the likes of Saddam, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and the general torturous assault of Kim Il-sung of north Korea and the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh were the product of these. It is widely accepted today that these wars were the hot spots of the overall cold war, which was the legacy of WW2 and the product of the sovietism of Josef Stalin and the soviet communism of Mao. End.

 

The Soviet-supplied North Vietnamese Army is the fifth largest in the world. It anticipates a two year struggle for victory, but Saigon falls in 55 days. ichiban1.org

 

North Vietnam's allies included the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

 

South Vietnam's main allies included the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea. Wikipedia.

 

Eisenhower threatened the USSR with “massive retaliation,” or nuclear war, against Soviet aggression or the spread of Communism. sparknotes.com/history/american/coldwar

 

Korean War:

 

The first military clash of the Cold War and the first United Nations-sanctioned conflict, the Korean War pitted the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its communist clients. The Korean War also inaugurated what became the U.S. policy of containment – the idea that communism could not be allowed to spread beyond a certain geographical point. Because the war was fought for political rather than military objectives, it quickly degenerated into a stalemate as both sides used the battlefield to jockey for political advantage at the negotiating table. Despite heavy casualties, probably two million deaths for the Chinese and North Koreans and 450,360 for the U.S.-led United Nations coalition, the war resolved nothing. More than a half-century after the first shots were fired, the Korean peninsula remains what it was in 1950 – divided, militarized and volatile.

 

Part of the Japanese empire from 1905 to 1945, Korea was liberated at the end of World War II. At that time the United States and the Soviet Union held the country in temporary trusteeship with the Red Army occupying the territory north of the 38th Parallel and the US occupying the south. As the Cold War developed, that division hardened and in June 1950, after several border clashes, North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel into South Korea. The United Nations Security Council responded by adopting a U.S.-sponsored resolution calling the North Korean attack a breach of the peace and designating the president of the United States as its executive agent to prosecute the war. Initially the goals of the conflict were to contain the war; i.e., to keep it from spreading to Asia and Europe and to bar the Soviet Union from joining the North Koreans.

 

Early on, UN forces, under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, were successful in repulsing the North Korean attack. MacArthur's victory at Inchon in September 1950 allowed the UN forces to retake Seoul, the capital of South Korea, which the North Koreans had captured in June. Anxious to pursue the retreating North Koreans, MacArthur moved his troops across the 38th Parallel and ordered them to advance as far as the Chinese border. At the same time the UN passed a resolution changing the war aim from saving South Korea to unifying the peninsula and ridding it of the Communists. The decision to cross the 38th Parallel turned out to be pivotal. MacArthur's attack was not successful. Moreover, the Chinese Communists, at the request of Soviet premier Josef Stalin, sent troops to help the North Koreans. Stunned and outnumbered, the UN forces retreated back across the 38th Parallel. In the process Seoul once again fell to the North Koreans. At this point the war aim changed again. Now the goal became a negotiated settlement that would leave Korea divided. When MacArthur publicly disagreed with that objective and argued that war ought to be expanded into China, President Harry Truman relieved him of command in April 1951. In May, UN forces regrouped, recrossed the 38th Parallel and retook Seoul, inflicting heavy casualties on the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists. That victory and Chinese restraint led to a preliminary conference in June, which soon bogged down over the issues of where to fix the boundary line between the two armies and how to deal with prisoners of war. (The UN wanted voluntary repatriation of prisoners; the North Koreans favored forced repatriation.) The political stalemate led to a military stalemate. While the politicians debated, the two opposing armies engaged in a series of firefights designed to give one side political leverage over the other.

 

The election of Dwight Eisenhower to the American presidency in November 1952, an International Red Cross resolution calling for the exchange of sick and wounded POWs in December, and the death of Joseph Stalin in March of 1953 broke the impasse.

 

Elected on a promise that he would "go to Korea," Eisenhower made it clear that he was prepared to escalate the war unless the negotiations moved forward. At the same time the Soviets, preoccupied with the power struggle Stalin's death presented, were less interested in prolonging the war. The negotiations resumed in April 1953 and the armistice was signed on July 27. The armistice, however, only stopped the shooting. It did nothing to achieve a political solution and no peace treaty was ever signed. Today, Korea remains divided and North Korea, in particular, has become a rogue nation because of its unwillingness to abide by international conventions relating to the testing and inspection of nuclear weapons.

 

Despite the ambiguity of its outcome, the Korean War had important implications for American foreign policy. Short-term, the conflict globalized containment and was the impetus for large U.S. defense budgets and extensive overseas commitments. At the same time the war deepened the U.S. adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union and effectively postponed opening diplomatic relations with Communist China for twenty years. Long-term, the lessons of Korea, particularly the definition of victory as a permanently divided country, shaped the conduct of the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

As an ardent backer of the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt supported the Korean War because she feared to do otherwise would weaken the UN and send a message of appeasement to the Soviet Union, which she blamed for starting the conflict. She did, however, oppose General MacArthur's desire and that of his conservative allies to expand the war into China, and she supported Truman's decision to fire him.

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers."Korean War."

 

Cold War

The Cold War was a decades-long struggle for global supremacy that pitted the capitalist United States against the communist Soviet Union. Although there are some disagreements as to when the Cold War began, it is generally conceded that mid- to late-1945 marks the time when relations between Moscow and Washington began deteriorating. This deterioration ignited the early Cold War and set the stage for a dynamic struggle that often assumed mythological overtones of good versus evil.

 

At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union stood firmly entrenched in Eastern Europe, intent upon installing governments there that would pay allegiance to the Kremlin. It also sought to expand its security zone even further into North Korea, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Similarly, the United States established a security zone of its own that comprised Western Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. From the long view of history, it is clear that both sides were jockeying for a way to secure their futures from the threat of another world war, but it was the threat that each side perceived from the other that allowed for the development of mutual suspicion. It was this mutual suspicion, augmented by profound distrust and misunderstanding that would ultimately fuel the entire conflict.

 

Interestingly, for the first few years of the early Cold War (between 1945 and 1948), the conflict was more political than military. Both sides squabbled with each other at the UN, sought closer relations with nations that were not committed to either side, and articulated their differing visions of a postwar world. By 1950, however, certain factors had made the Cold War an increasingly militarized struggle. The communist takeover in China, the pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine, the advent of a Soviet nuclear weapon, tensions over occupied Germany, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the formulation of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as rival alliances had all enhanced the Cold War's military dimension. U.S. foreign policy reflected this transition when it adopted a position that sought to "contain" the Soviet Union from further expansion. By and large, through a variety of incarnations, the containment policy would remain the central strategic vision of U.S. foreign policy from 1952 until the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

 

Successive American presidents and successive Soviet premiers tried to manage the Cold War in different ways, and the history of their interactions reveals the delicate balance-of-power that needed to be maintained between both superpowers. Dwight Eisenhower campaigned as a hard-line Cold Warrior and spoke of "rolling back" the Soviet empire, but when given a chance to dislodge Hungary from the Soviet sphere-of-influence in 1956, he declined. The death of Stalin in 1953 prefaced a brief thaw in East-West relations, but Nikita Kruschev also found it more politically expedient to take a hard line with the United States than to speak of cooperation.

 

By 1960, both sides had invested huge amounts of money in nuclear weapons, both as an attempt to maintain parity with each other's stockpiles, but also because the idea of deterring conflict through "mutually assured destruction" had come to be regarded as vital to the national interest of both. As nuclear weapons became more prolific, both nations sought to position missile systems in ever closer proximity to each other's borders. One such attempt by the Soviet government in 1962 precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, arguably the closest that the world has ever come to a large-scale nuclear exchange between two countries.

 

It was also in the early 1960s that American containment policy shifted from heavy reliance on nuclear weapons to more conventional notions of warfare in pursuit of a more "flexible response" to the spread of communism. Although originally articulated by President Kennedy, it was in 1965 that President Johnson showcased the idea of flexible response when he made the initial decision to commit American combat troops to South Vietnam. American thinking had come to regard Southeast Asia as vital to its national security, and President Johnson made clear his intention to insure South Vietnam's territorial and political integrity "whatever the cost or whatever the challenge." (1)

 

The United States ultimately fought a bloody and costly war in Vietnam that poisoned U.S. politics and wreaked havoc with its economy. The Nixon administration inherited the conflict in 1969, and although it tried to improve relations with the Soviets through detente – and even took the unprecedented step of establishing diplomatic relations with Communist China – neither development was able to bring about decisive change on the Vietnamese battlefield. The United States abandoned the fight in 1973 under the guise of a peace agreement that left South Vietnam emasculated and vulnerable.

 

Although Nixon continued to negotiate with the Soviets and to court Maoist China, the Soviet Union and the United States continued to subvert one another's interests around the globe in spite of detente's high-minded rhetoric. Leonid Brezhnev had been installed as Soviet premier in 1964 as Kruschev's replacement, and while he too desired friendlier relations with the United States on certain issues (particularly agriculture), genuinely meaningful cooperation remained elusive.

 

By the end of the 1970s, however, the chance for an extended thaw had utterly vanished. Jimmy Carter had been elected president in 1976, and although he was able to hammer out a second arms limitation agreement with Brezhnev, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan significantly soured U.S.-Soviet relations. Seeking to place a greater emphasis on human rights in his foreign policy, Carter angrily denounced the incursion and began to adopt an increasingly hard line with the Soviets. The following year, Americans overwhelmingly elected a president who spoke of waging the Cold War with even greater intensity than had any of his predecessors, and Ronald Reagan made good on his promises by dramatically increasing military budgets in the early 1980s.

 

Nonetheless, by 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had replaced Brezhnev in Moscow, and he quickly perceived that drastic changes to the Soviet system were necessary if the USSR. was to survive as a state. He instituted a series of liberal reforms known as perestroika, and he seemed genuinely interested in more relations with the West, known as glasnost. Although President Reagan continued to use bellicose language with respect to the Soviet Union (as when he labeled it an "evil empire" (2)), the Gorbachev-Reagan relationship was personally warm and the two leaders were able to decrease tensions substantially by the time Reagan left the White House in 1989.

 

Despite improved East-West relations, however, Gorbachev's reforms were unable to prevent the collapse of a system that had grown rigid and unworkable. By most measures, the Soviet economy had failed to grow at all since the late 1970s and much of the country's populace had grown weary of the aged Communist hierarchy. In 1989 the spontaneous destruction of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and two years later the Soviet government itself fell from power.

 

The Cold War had lasted for forty-six years, and is regarded by many historians, politicians, and scholars as the third major war of the twentieth century.

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers."Korean War."

 

Truman’s Postwar Vision

Truman worked tirelessly to clean up the postwar mess and establish a new international order. He helped create the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and funded the rebuilding of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur. After prosecuting Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, Truman in 1947 also outlined the Marshall Plan, which set aside more than $10 billion for the rebuilding and reindustrialization of Germany. The Marshall Plan was so successful that factories in Western Europe were exceeding their prewar production levels within just a few years.

 

Stalin’s Postwar Vision

Although Stalin joined with the United States in founding the United Nations, he fought Truman on nearly every other issue. He protested the Marshall Plan as well as the formation of the World Bank and IMF. In defiance, he followed through on his plan to create a buffer between the Soviet Union and Germany by setting up pro-Communist governments in Poland and other Eastern European countries. As a result, the so-called iron curtain soon divided East from West in Europe. Stalin also tried unsuccessfully to drive French, British, and American occupation forces from the German city of Berlin by blocking highway and railway access. Determined not to let the city fall, Truman ordered the Berlin airlift to drop food and medical supplies for starving Berliners.

 

Containment

The Berlin crisis, as well as the formation of the Eastern bloc of Soviet-dominated countries in Eastern Europe, caused foreign policy officials in Washington to believe that the United States needed to check Soviet influence abroad in order to prevent the further spread of Communism. In 1947, Truman incorporated this desire for containment into his Truman Doctrine, which vowed to support free nations fighting Communism. He and Congress then pledged $400 million to fighting Communist revolutionaries in Greece and Turkey. In 1949, Truman also convinced the Western European powers to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so that they might mutually defend themselves against the danger of Soviet invasion. Threatened, the USSR sponsored a similar treaty of its own in Eastern Europe, called the Warsaw Pact, in 1955.

 

Truman at Home

In the domestic policy arena, Truman signed the National Security Act in 1947 to restructure America’s defenses for the new Communist threat. The act reorganized the military under the new office of the secretary of defense and the new Joint Chiefs of Staff. It also created the National Security Council to advise the president on global affairs and the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct espionage. Truman’s leadership in confronting the Soviet Union and rebuilding Europe convinced Democrats to nominate him again for the 1948 election. His Fair Deal domestic policies and support for civil rights, however, divided the Republican Party and nearly cost Truman the election.

 

Ike’s New Look

In addition to halting “creeping socialism” at home, Eisenhower also wanted to “roll back” Communist advances abroad. Along with Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower devised a New Look at foreign policy that emphasized the use of nuclear weapons, rather than conventional weapons and troops, to contain Communism. Eisenhower threatened the USSR with “massive retaliation,” or nuclear war, against Soviet aggression or the spread of Communism.

Eisenhower also made full use of the newly created CIA to help overthrow unfriendly governments in developing countries. He resolved the Suez crisis peacefully before it led to war and committed American funds to fighting Ho Chi Minh’s pro-Communist forces in Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellites in 1957 started the space race, prompting Eisenhower to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and sign the National Defense Education Act. In his farewell address in 1961, he warned Americans of the growing military-industrial complex that threatened to restrict civil liberties and dominate American foreign policy making.

 

Kennedy and the New Frontier

Facing term limits, Eisenhower endorsed Vice President Richard Nixon for the Republican presidential nomination in 1960. Democrats countered with World War II hero and Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. After a close race, Kennedy defeated Nixon, thanks in large part to the African-American vote and Kennedy’s polished performance in the first-ever televised presidential debates.

As president, Kennedy pushed for a package of new social welfare spending programs that he called the New Frontier. Hoping to inspire a new generation of young Americans, he told them to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Republicans and conservative southern Democrats, however, blocked most New Frontier legislation in Congress.

 

Flexible Response

Because Eisenhower’s threat of “massive retaliation” had proved too stringent and binding, Kennedy and his foreign policy team devised a new doctrine of “flexible response” designed to give the president more options to fight Communism.

In addition, Kennedy committed thousands of American troops to South Vietnam to support Ngo Dinh Diem’s corrupt regime but claimed the troops were merely “military advisors.” In Latin America, Kennedy took a different approach, funneling millions of dollars into the Alliance for Progress to thwart Communists by ending poverty. Despite the new doctrine, Kennedy was unable to prevent Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev from constructing the Berlin Wall in 1961.

 

The Cuban Crises

Kennedy’s greatest Cold War challenge came in Cuba. Hoping to topple Cuba’s new pro-Communist revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, Kennedy authorized the CIA to train and arm a force of more than 1,000 Cuban exiles and sent them to invade Cuba in the spring of 1961. When this Bay of Pigs invasion failed embarrassingly, Kennedy authorized several unsuccessful assassination attempts against Castro. Outraged, Castro turned to the USSR for economic aid and protection.

Khrushchev capitalized on the opportunity and placed several nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy consequently blockaded the island nation, pushing the United States and the USSR to the brink of nuclear war. Khrushchev ended the terrifying Cuban missile crisis when he agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for an end to the blockade. Kennedy also removed American missiles from Turkey and agreed to work on reducing Cold War tensions. Tragically, Kennedy was assassinated in late 1963, just as tensions were rising in Vietnam—which would prove to be the next, and most costly, theater of the Cold War. sparknotes.com/history/american/coldwar

 

JPC 9/9/06.  

 

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