COLD WAR

After the war, tensions quickly developed between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin promised free elections for all the liberated nations of Europe. The western Allies restored democracy in Western Europe and Japan, but Soviet forces imposed Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe.

In 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a massive aid program to help rebuild destroyed Europe. The U.S.S.R. and the Eastern European nations were invited to participate in the Marshall Plan, but the Soviets rejected the offer. Americans realized that an impoverished Europe in which deprivation and despair was widespread, would be susceptible to social and political movements hostile to western traditions of individual freedom and democratic government. The Marshall Plan was a generous and thoroughly successful program. Over four years it paid out $12.5 thousand million in aid and restored the economies of Westem Europe.

In May 1947, the United States began sending military aid to the Greek government, which was fighting Communist guerrillas, and to Turkey, which was being pressured by the Soviets for territorial concessions. In April 1949 the United States had allied with Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Portugal to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

On June 25,1950, armed with Soviet weapons and acting with Stalin's approval, North Korea's army invaded South Korea. President Truman immediately secured a commitment from the United Nations to defend South Korea, and American troops were sent into battle, later joined by contingents from Britain, Turkey, Australia, France and the Philippines. By September 1950, the North Koreans had conquered most of South Korea. In November, however, Chinese troops counterattacked and forced the U.N. army to retreat. President Truman believed that such a strategy would lead to a wider conflict. Peace talks began three months later, but the fighting continued until June 1953, and the final settlement left Korea still divided.

Frustrated by the Korean stalemate and angered by the Communist takeovers in Eastern Europe and China, many Americans looked for "those responsible" and came to believe that their government too, might have been infiltrated by Communist conspirators. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy asserted that the State Department and the army were riddled with Communists. McCarthy's sensational investigations uncovered no subversives, but his accusations and slanders destroyed the careers of some diplomats. In 1954, in the course of the broadcasts on national television, McCarthy was exposed a fraud, and he later was censured by the Senate. Toleration of political dissent is one of the most fundamental and essential of American traditions. The McCarthy era - like the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the excesses of the Red Scare of 1919-1920 - was a serious lapse from this tradition.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 924