Cracks in the Cold War Order

Across the social and political spectrum came calls to reduce cold war tensions in this age of unprecedented technological advance. In the Soviet Union, the new middle class of bureaucrats and managers demanded a better standard of living and a reduction in the cold war hostility that made everyday life so menacing. In Germany, Social Democratic politicians had enough influence to shift money from cold war defense spending to domestic programs. Willy Brandt (1913–1992), the Socialist mayor of West Berlin, became foreign minister in 1966 and worked to improve frigid relations with Communist East Germany to open up trade. This anti–cold war policy, known as Ostpolitik, gave West German business leaders what they wanted: “the depoliticization of Germany’s foreign trade,” as one industrialist put it, and an opening of consumerism in the Soviet bloc. West German trade with eastern Europe grew rapidly, but it left the relatively poorer countries of the Soviet bloc strapped with mounting debt. Nonetheless, commerce began building bridges across the U.S.–Soviet cold war divide.

To break the superpowers’ stranglehold on international politics, French president Charles de Gaulle poured huge sums into French nuclear development, withdrew French forces from NATO, and signed trade treaties with the Soviet bloc. However, de Gaulle protected France’s good relations with Germany to prevent further encroachments from the Soviet bloc. At home, de Gaulle’s government sponsored the construction of modern housing and ordered the exterior cleaning of all Parisian buildings—a massive project taking years—to wipe away more than a century of industrial grime and to demonstrate community, not cold war, values. With his haughty pursuit of French grandeur, de Gaulle offered the European public an alternative to obeying the superpowers.

Brandt’s Ostpolitik and de Gaulle’s independence had their echoes in Soviet-bloc reforms. After the ouster of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, the new leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (1909–1982) and Alexei Kosygin (1904–1980) initially continued attempts at reform, encouraging plant managers to turn a profit and using consumer goods to alleviate the discontent of an increasingly educated and informed citizenry. The government also allowed more cultural and scientific meetings with Westerners, another move that relaxed the cold war atmosphere in the mid-1960s. Like the French, the Soviets set up “technopoles”—new cities devoted to research and technological innovation. The Soviet satellites in eastern Europe seized the economic opportunity presented by Moscow’s relaxed posture. For example, Hungarian leader János Kádár introduced elements of a market system into the national economy by encouraging small businesses and trade to develop outside the Communist-controlled state network.

Soviet-bloc writers sought to break the hold of socialist realism on the arts and reduce their praise for the Soviet past. Some dissident artists’ paintings rejected brightly colored scenes and heroic figures of the socialist realist style and instead depicted Soviet citizens as worn and tired in grays and other monochromatic color schemes. East Berlin writer Christa Wolf challenged the celebratory nature of socialist art when she showed a couple tragically separated by the Berlin Wall in her novel Divided Heaven (1965). Repression of artistic expression returned in the later 1960s and 1970s, as the Soviet government took to bulldozing outdoor art shows. For their part, writers relied on samizdat culture, a form of protest activity in which individuals reproduced government-suppressed publications by hand and passed them from reader to reader, thus building a foundation for the successful resistance of the 1980s.

Other issues challenged U.S. leadership of the western bloc during the cold war. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 shocked the nation and the world, but only momentarily did it halt the escalating demands for civil rights for African Americans and other minorities. White segregationists murdered and brutalized those attempting to integrate lunch counters, register black voters, or simply march on behalf of freedom. In response to the murders and destruction, Kennedy had introduced civil rights legislation and forced the desegregation of schools and universities. Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973), Kennedy’s successor, steered the Civil Rights Act through Congress in 1964. This legislation forbade racial segregation in public facilities and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to fight job discrimination based on “race, color, national origin, religion, and sex.” Southern conservatives had tacked on the provision outlawing discrimination against women in the vain hope that it would doom the bill. Modeling himself on his hero Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson envisioned what he called the Great Society, in which new government programs would improve the lot of the forty million Americans living in poverty. Johnson’s many reform programs included Project Head Start for educating disadvantaged preschool children and the Job Corps for training youth. Black novelist Ralph Ellison called Johnson “the greatest American president for the poor and the Negroes.”

Still, the cold war did not go away, and the United States became increasingly embroiled in Vietnam (Map 28.1). After the Geneva Conference of 1954, which divided Vietnam into North and South, the United States increased its support for the corrupt leaders of non-Communist South Vietnam. North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union backed the rebel Vietcong, or South Vietnamese Communists. By 1966, the United States had more than half a million soldiers in South Vietnam, yet the strength of the Vietcong seemed to grow daily. Despite massive bombings by the United States, the insurgents, who had struggled against colonialism for decades, rejected a negotiated peace.