AMERICAN PRESIDENTS AND THE COLD WAR

American Presidents and the Cold War

American Presidents and the Cold War

American Presidents and the Cold War

Actually there were eight U.S. presidents during the Cold War officially. The Presidents, in order, are Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, James Carter, and Ronald Reagan. George H.W. Bush is also sometimes counted as participating in the Cold War.

Harry Truman was the first American president to fight the Cold War. Probably the most important, certainly the most forgotten, and surely the most controversial, was the decision to concentrate on the European theater, rather than the Pacific. Avoiding a two front war has long been a fundamental strategic choice. Germany during the 20th Century was bedeviled by two front wars, and the Allies gave preference to the European theater over the Pacific theater [where the Soviets remained at peace with Japan]. Truman was in a sense re-affirming the geographical preferences of the struggle against the Axis in his priorities in the struggle against Communism.

The Cold War was a decades-long struggle for global supremacy that pitted the capitalist United States against the communist Soviet Union.

Successive American presidents 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. 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 ...