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Cold War
After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization, but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.
Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off.
In 1959, I was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, a pilot in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), flying B-47s out of Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire.
The first Soviet conductor to tour in the United States had been accused with “anti-democratic tendencies.”
By October 30, 1958, Nikita Khrushchev’s assumption of power over the Soviet Union had already produced a slight, if uneven, warming of the Cold War.
The Cold War was an anomaly. More often than not, the world’s two greatest states have lived together in uneasy amity. And what now?
Exactly 200 years after George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States and 300 years after Peter the Great’s ascent to the Russian throne, a new chapter opened in the history of the relations of the two greatest states of the wor
In the twilight of Castro’s regime, one of the soldiers who put him in power recalls what it was like to be a fidelista up in the hills four decades ago when a whole new, just, democratic world was there for the building.
Like a hurricane spawned in distant waters, the full force of the collapse of world communism has finally reached the island of Cuba and seems poised to sweep away the last vestiges of the Marxist-Leninist structure erected there over the last three decades.
As I watched the lunar landing on television, my part in the whole scenario took on a new meaning.
It’s hard to believe that an entire generation has reached adulthood since that day twenty-one years ago when the world watched those grainy television images of two American astronauts cavorting on the moon.
For 40 years, George Kennan and Paul Nitze, architects of our foreign policy under nine presidents, have squared off over Russia, the atom bomb, arms control, and everything except for their respect and affection for each other.
30 years after judging Eisenhower to be among our worst presidents, historians have now come around to the opinion most of their fellow Americans held right along.
Critics charged that Ike was spineless in his refusal to openly fight Senator Joseph McCarthy.
THE BIRTH OF THE RAND CORPORATION During World War II, America discovered that scientists were needed to win it—and to win any future war. That’s why RAND came into being, the first think tank and the model for all the rest.
ALONG THE jagged coastline of Southern California, past the hills and forests of Malibu, five miles down from the Santa Monica Mountains, just short of Muscle Beach and the town of Venice, there sits some of the most quaintly de
Was the murdered President one of our best, a man of “vigor, rationality, and noble vision” or was he “an optical illusion,” “an expensively programmed waxwork”? A noted historian examines the mottled evolution of his reputation.
The murder of John F. Kennedy twenty years ago last month occasioned an overwhelming sense of grief that may be without parallel in our history.
His newly discovered diary reveals how the President saw the conference that ushered in the Cold War
For the past year and a half, Robert H. Ferrell, a diplomatic historian at Indiana University, has been at work among President Harry S. Truman’s newly opened private papers at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Early last year, working with Erwin J.
The fallout-shelter craze of 1961
It all began on the evening of July 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy went before television cameras to explain to his countrymen the grave meaning and still graver consequences of the deepening crisis over Berlin.
The U-2, Cuba, and the CIA
In the still of the October night, the slender, birdlike plane lifted into the sky from its base in California, climbed sharply on a column of flame, and headed east through the darkness.
The Cold War—we have spent a generation hearing about it, thinking about it, worrying about it.
When and how it got the green light to conduct “subversive operations abroad”
President Nixon’s visit to Peking starts one more surprising turn in an American-Chinese “affair” nearly two centuries old
Richard Nixon’s twenty-thousand-mile pilgrimage to the center of Chinese civilization—“the week that changed the world,” as he put it—may not actually have changed the world, though it quite probably did turn a new page in world history by making it unlikely that the internatio
The job ran in the family; both his uncle and grandfather were Secretaries of State. Home life in a parsonage taught him piety, and the law precision. The rigid views of a world divided between good and evil he worked out, apparently, himself. Private letters and new taped recollections help explain the shaping of the man who set our Cold War foreign policy
About a dozen years ago Carol Burnett’s nightclub repertoire included a number, “I Made a Fool of Myself over John Foster Dulles.” In 1971, in an era of massive discontent with American foreign policy, Miss Burnett would be unwise to restore it to her program
“Almost every time a serious disarmament effort got under way, it barely managed to move forward an inch or two before a great world cataclysm intervened”
As spring moved northward over Europe in 1970, a familiar scene was enacted in Vienna, a city where diplomacy is as much a part of the civic tradition as steelmaking in Pittsburgh.
During World War II, Tunner led the effort to fly supplies from India “over the Hump” of the Himalayas to supply nineteen Chinese divisions, and later commanded the Berlin Airlift operation.
The “conversion” of Arthur Vandenberg, told by a former Secretary of State, his sometime adversary but also his friend
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