The End of the Cold War, 1961-1991

Robert D. Schulzinger

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
8 (Winter 1994). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 1994, Organization of American Historians

Massachusetts Democratic senator John F. Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election partly by assailing the torpor many contemporary observers believed had overcome the Eisenhower administration. The Cold War held dangers as perilous as any conflict in which shots were fired, and Kennedy raised the horrifying specter that the United States might lose: "I think that there is a danger that history will make a judgment that these were the days when the tide began to run out for the United States," Kennedy stated. "These were the times the Communist tide began to pour in" (1). Over the next thirty years, many high officials voiced variations on this theme of dread and threat. Some leading Americans inside and outside of government expressed doubts about the magnitude of the threat posed by communism and the Soviets, while an even greater number considered the cost of the Cold War born by the United States to be too high. The result was the breakdown of a broad American consensus over the wisdom of a policy of confrontation with the Soviet Union. In the end, of course, the tide ran out on Soviet-style communism.

Surveying the last three decades of the Cold War from the brief period of time that has elapsed since it ended, the following questions stand out. In ascending order of complexity and controversy, they are: What policies did the participants follow? How and why did these policies alter over time? What effects did the policies of the U.S. and the Soviet Union have on altering the behavior of their adversary? What effects did the last thirty years of the Cold War have on the political cultures of the United States and the Soviet Union? Did U.S. policies hasten or prolong the end of the Cold War? What did the Cold War cost--financially, economically, culturally and politically? Was the cost worth it?

Answering all of these questions depends on interpretations of the evidence, and the answers given to the last four of them invariably reflect the political and moral values of the interpreter. The last three questions stand at or near the center of contemporary political discussion.

From the Kennedy administration to the presidency of George Bush, the Cold War alternated between periods of tension--characterized by apocalyptic warnings and anxiety about a devastating nuclear war--and times of detente in which people in both the United States and the Soviet Union believed that the rivalry between the superpowers could be peacefully managed. Under the former scenario, the fate of civilization hung in the balance. Under the latter, superpower competition might be endless, but each side would refrain from pushing its adversary past the brink of war. Yet throughout these thirty years, neither leaders nor most members of the articulate public anticipated that the end of the Cold War would come the way it did: in relative peace and with the disintegration of the social system of one of the rivals.

The pattern began during the Kennedy administration. The first two years, 1961-1962, saw some of the most hostile confrontations of the Cold War between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its partners. Kennedy and his principal advisers saw the Cold War as a global competition, and they moved assertively across a broad front. Kennedy authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to proceed with its ill-fated invasion of Cuba in April, and he asked Congress for increases in the budget for both conventional and nuclear forces. After the failure of the Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy approved a CIA plan for a campaign of covert operations against Fidel Castro. He also oversaw an expansion of the activities of American military personnel advising the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The president and Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev held an unsatisfactory meeting in Vienna in June 1961. A crisis soon followed over access to Berlin. War loomed as Kennedy told the American public that "we cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin. . . . The fulfillment of our pledge to that city is essential to the morale and security of Western Germany, to the unity of Western Europe, and to the faith of the entire free world." A military showdown over the fate of Berlin was averted only after the Soviets surprised the Americans by approving plans of the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) to construct an ugly concrete and barbed wire wall preventing its citizens from fleeing to the West (2).

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came closer to nuclear war than at any other time during the Cold War era. The Soviet Union installed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba in response to frantic pleas from Castro to protect him personally and his government from the CIA's covert operations. Kennedy characterized the installation of the missiles as "a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe." The Soviets, confronted by overwhelming military force, agreed to withdraw their missiles (3).

Yet the real prospect of nuclear war with the Soviet Union presented by the Cuban Missile Crisis also moved the Kennedy administration toward a policy of detente with the Soviets. In the wake of the crisis, the two governments opened a telegraphic "hotline," directly connecting the Kremlin with the White House, to be used to defuse tensions in future crises. In June 1963, Kennedy encouraged Americans to "reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union" (4). In August of that year, the superpowers signed a treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, under the oceans or in outer space. They promised progress on a treaty banning all nuclear testing and future agreements limiting the growth in the number of nuclear armed missiles possessed by both sides.

Similar alterations between confrontation and detente persisted over the next twenty-five years. Changes in leadership in both the United States and the Soviet Union and the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam stalled further movement toward detente from November 1963 to the end of 1968. Two years after the missile crises, the Politburo of the Communist Party replaced the humiliated Khrushchev with the dual leadership of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Party and Alexei Kosygin as Prime Minister of the Soviet Union. The new Soviet leadership resolved never to be intimidated again by the United States, and they embarked on a military construction program aimed at gaining parity with the other superpower. The new American administration of Lyndon B. Johnson became mired in Vietnam, and high officials had little time or intellectual energy to spare on other policy problems. Many U.S. officials believed that the Soviet Union was waging a proxy war against the non-communist world, using North Vietnam as a surrogate. For their part, Soviet leaders expressed similar suspicions that the United States had no real interest in improving relations as long as it fought in Vietnam.

Detente had not died, however. As the sixties progressed, developments in the technology of nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles made both the United States and the Soviet Union feel less secure. Johnson and Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin met in Glassboro, New Jersey in June 1967, and they promised to negotiate a treaty limiting the growth of ballistic missiles. Johnson anticipated visiting the Soviet Union to sign such a treaty in the fall of 1968, but the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of that year once more inhibited movement toward lowering superpower tensions. Johnson called it "a sad commentary on the Communist mind that a sign of liberty in Czechoslovakia is deemed a fundamental threat to the security of the Soviet system" (5).

Despite the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the continuing conflict in Southeast Asia, detente became a major objective of U.S. policy from 1969 to 1976. Disarray within the Democratic party over foreign affairs helped Richard Nixon win the presidency in 1968. Democrats split over the war in Vietnam which began to appear to many Americans as peripheral to containment. When Nixon took office he and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, sought to "manage" relations with the Soviet Union. Their threefold objectives were to assure a peaceful transition in Soviet status from a regional to a global power; to diminish the American public's obsession with the war in Vietnam; and, as a consequence of the first two, to restore domestic consensus over the value of containment as a unifying foreign policy principle (6).

Nixon addressed the U.S.-Soviet arms race at his first press conference. He called for a change in U.S. nuclear capability from "superiority" over the Soviet Union, which might foster an arms race, to a "sufficiency" of military strength (7). Working secretly through a so-called backchannel, Kissinger and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko spent the next three years negotiating agreements on arms control, political relations and trade. Eager to gain favor with voters in the 1972 presidential election year for his foreign affairs acumen, Nixon cautioned Kissinger to delay the announcements of progress on detente until the president met personally with Brezhnev. Otherwise, Nixon feared, "there will be no real news value" to a summit conference (8). Nixon met Brezhnev at a highly publicized summit conference to sign agreements on arms control, trade and the future political relations between the two superpowers in May 1972. Other meetings between Nixon and Brezhnev followed in the summers of 1973 and 1974. These regular summits appeared to validate Nixon's and Kissinger's claim that the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to limit the areas of disagreement between the two countries.

Unfortunately for the hopes of its sponsors, the detente of the 1970s rested on fragile foundations. Critics on both the right and the left of the political spectrum criticized Nixon's and Kissinger's approach. Conservatives argued that the United States yielded too much to the Soviet military in arms control negotiations. Liberals, concerned about the promotion of human rights, stressed that Nixon and Kissinger had done nothing to improve the lot of ordinary Soviet citizens. Detente also provoked criticism among the Soviet military leadership and ardent communists. They cautioned against the "underestimation of the military danger from imperialism" (9). As a result, the improvement in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union began to unravel in the last year of Nixon's presidency. The two powers disagreed sharply over the October 1973 Middle East War. The growing Watergate scandal distracted Nixon in 1974, and the United States and the Soviet Union did not conclude a full-scale Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty by the end of that year as they had promised.

Detente slipped further during the twenty-nine month presidency of Gerald R. Ford. Domestic American politics thwarted the achievement of an arms control treaty before the election of 1976. Detente as well as Kissinger's and Nixon's approach to world politics became increasingly unpopular. Part of the public feared Soviet ambitions, while another segment of opinion believed that the debacle of involvement in Vietnam had raised the cost of the Cold War out of reach. When former California Governor Ronald Reagan challenged Ford for the Republican presidential nomination, he assailed Ford and his predecessor for underestimating the danger posed by Soviet military power. "Despite concessions granted by our government to the Soviet Union while pursuing detente," Reagan argued, "the Soviets' belligerent attitude toward us and our allies has not changed" (10). Ford became so alarmed by Reagan's criticism that the president ordered all of his subordinates to stop referring to detente.

Democrat Jimmy Carter, the eventual winner of the 1976 presidential election, on the other hand, attacked recent U.S. foreign policy for secrecy, inattention to morality, and a fixation on superpower relations. Carter's criticism of Republican foreign policy during the campaign of 1976 lacked tight focus, and this diffusion bedeviled the foreign policy of his administration. Carter supported some elements of detente, notably the effort to reduce military tensions between the superpowers. Early in his term he indicated that the Cold War might even be irrelevant beside other more important foreign policy issues, since "we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism that led us to embrace any dictator in that fear." At the same time, Carter's emphasis on the expansion of human rights abroad led him to excoriate Soviet repression at home (11). These apparently mixed messages confused Soviet leaders who thought that the new U.S. president either lacked foreign policy sophistication or wanted to trap them.

Nevertheless, the United States and the Soviet Union made fitful progress toward arms control from 1977 until the middle of 1979. In June of that year, the two powers signed a treaty setting limits on each sides' ballistic missiles and long-range bombers. Yet six months after the treaty was signed, Carter withdrew it from consideration by the Senate. He did so because Cold War tensions resumed in the latter part of 1979. Americans became fearful of a reassertion of Soviet power in Africa, the Western Hemisphere, and the Middle East. American anxieties increased further after Iranian militants occupied the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, seizing over fifty diplomats and marine guards as hostages in November. Finally, by the end of December, the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, a move which Carter characterized as "the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War" (12).

Ronald Reagan capitalized on public fear of Soviet assertiveness and won the presidency from Jimmy Carter in 1980. Throughout most of his administration, it appeared that the pattern of confrontation and detente of the previous twenty years was to recur. Instead of another turn of an endlessly repeating cycle, however, the 1980s became the final days of the Cold War.

The Reagan administration began by formally declaring detente dead and embarking on the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history. In the eight years—from 1981 to 1988—the United States increased spending on the military from about $117 billion per year to approximately $290 billion per year. "We do not know how much time we have left," Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger regularly warned Congress as he argued for approval of the additional appropriations (13). Reagan employed some of the harshest anti-Soviet rhetoric used by an American official since the early 1960s. He asserted that Soviet leaders "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat." He also reversed John Kennedy's warning of 1960 when he proclaimed in a speech to the British parliament in 1982 that "the Soviet Union runs against the tide of human history" (14). Reagan's strident anticommunism alarmed some Americans and Europeans who feared that war might erupt between the superpowers. During the years 1982 to 1984, some of the largest antiwar demonstrations of the entire Cold War period occurred in cities across Europe and the United States.

Even as he identified in his speech to the British parliament "a great revolutionary crisis" within the Soviet system, Reagan did not predict its imminent collapse (15). The selection of Mikhail Gorbachev as the new General Secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union in March 1985 set in motion the death of Soviet-style communism and the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev quickly recognized that his nation's backward economy could not bear the burden of an arms race with the richer, more technologically advanced United States (16). Gorbachev and Reagan moved slowly and uneasily toward detente with summit meetings in 1985 in Geneva and Reykjavik. Thereafter, the pace of accommodation quickened markedly. The two sides concluded an Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in December 1987, eliminating a whole class of ballistic missiles stationed in Europe. Reagan and Gorbachev received hero's welcomes on visits to each other's capitals. "They've changed," the U.S. president replied when a reporter asked if he still considered the Soviet Union the "evil empire" he had called it in 1982 (17).

Americans, Europeans and Soviets realized that the Cold War ended before the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Revolutions swept across Eastern Europe in 1989, and the Berlin Wall came down in November of that year. George Bush, the new American president, who came of age politically during the Cold War, adjusted slowly to its end. He formed a close friendship with Gorbachev by 1990 and backed him in 1991, even to the point of refraining from verbally supporting democrats within the Soviet Union. The U.S. did, however, help Russian president Boris Yeltsin resist a communist coup d'etat in August 1991. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991, and the Soviet Union finally died on 31 December.

Now that the Cold War has ended, the historical postmortems have just begun. The ocean of original documents from U.S. government archives has now been augmented by rivers flowing from previously closed Soviet and Eastern European depositories (18). This mass of information provides analysts with a basis from which to form answers to the questions raised at the beginning of this essay about the costs and benefits of the Cold War to the societies engaged in it. Those who praise the conduct of American foreign policy believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union validates the actions of U.S. officials and makes the costs of the Cold War worthwhile (19).

Yet this celebration of the intelligence, judgment and competence of the practitioners of recent U.S. foreign policy is not the final word. Some critics of American diplomacy claimed that the Cold War might have ended sooner, at less cost to all participants had the United States pursued more creative and less confrontational policies. The end of conflict with the Soviet Union coincided with a time of profound domestic anxiety inside the United States. As Americans confronted a disorderly world and a fractious society, some observers argued that the Cold War delayed badly needed domestic reforms and damaged the U.S. economy (20). Several political candidates during the 1992 presidential campaign noted the excessive cost of the Cold War when they proclaimed: "The Cold War is over. Japan won." Bill Clinton, the victorious candidate in 1992, implied that America's apparent victory in the Cold War had strained the country's resources when he declared the day after his election that he would "focus like a laser on the economy. Foreign policy in large measure will come into play as it affects the economy" (21).

Earlier postwar periods experienced similar fears of the future leading to reevaluations of the recent past. Whatever synthesis develops over the virtues of the policy of containment, the competence of officials, or the wisdom of the general public, the Cold War remains one of the premier forces in defining the contours of the history of the second half of the twentieth century.

1. Thomas G. Paterson, "Introduction: Kennedy and Global Crisis," in Thomas G. Paterson, ed. Kennedy's Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (New York: 1989), 12.

2. John F. Kennedy, radio and television address on the Berlin crisis, 25 July 1961, in Public Papers of the President: John F. Kennedy 1961-1962, 534. Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (New York: Harper Col-lins, 1991).

3. John F. Kennedy, radio and television address on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 22 October 1962, in Public Papers of the President: John F. Kennedy 1962-1963, 807. James G. Blight and David A. Welch, On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Noonday Press, 1990). Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987, rev. ed. 1989).

4. John F. Kennedy, American University commencement address, 10 June 1963, in Public Papers of the President: John F. Kennedy, 1963, 461.

5. Statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson calling on the Warsaw Pact allies to withdraw from Czechoslovakia, 21 August 1968, in Public Papers of the President: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968, 905. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1990, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991), 255-58.

6. Robert D. Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

7. Richard M. Nixon news conference, 27 January 1969, in Public Papers of the President: Richard M. Nixon, 1969, 18-19. Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), 69-76.

8. Richard M. Nixon to Henry Kissinger, 11 March 1972. Staff Members Office Files. Box 44. Files of H.R. Haldeman. Nixon Presidential Materials Project. National Archives. Alexandria, Virginia.

9. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, 433.

10. Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy, 229.

11. Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 66-68.

12. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, 938-64.

13. Michael Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19-30.

14. Ronald Reagan, news conference, 29 January 1981 in Public Papers of the President: Ronald Reagan, 1981-1982, 57. Ronald Reagan, address to members of the British parliament, 8 June 1982 in Public Papers of the Presidents: Ronald Reagan, 1982-1983, 744.

15. Ronald Reagan, address to members of the British parliament, 8 June 1982 in Public Papers of the Presidents: Ronald Reagan, 1982-1983, 744.

16. Marshall I. Goldman, What Went Wrong with Perestroika (New York: Norton, 1992), 80-92.

17. Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan, 176.

18. P. J. Simmons, "Report from Eastern Europe," and James G. Hershberg, "Soviet Archives: The Opening Door," Cold War History Project Bulletin 1 (Spring 1992): 1, 7-15.

19. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University press, 1992) argues that U.S. policymakers during the last years of the Cold War managed the end of the conflict well.

20. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987). This important book contributed to the debate over whether the United States had entered a period of decline caused by the excessive commitments it had made during the Cold War.

21. John Lewis Gaddis, "The Tragedy of Cold War History," Diplomatic History 17 (Winter 1993): 1-16. Schulzinger, American Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, 3d ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 350-56.

Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: An Evaluation of Postwar National Security Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

------. The United States and the End of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Garthoff, Raymond L. Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985.

Hogan, Michael, ed. The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1990, 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.

Robert D. Schulzinger is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of several books on the history of U.S. foreign relations, including most recently American Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, (3d ed., 1994), Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy (1989), and co-author of Present Tense: The United States since 1945 (1992).