Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit the People’s Republic of China when he traveled there for one week in 1972. During his visit, Nixon met with Mao Zedong and other Chinese officials. The trip proved a success when China agreed to establish full diplomatic relations with the US.
Bolsheviks were the dominant political power in Russia after the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party seized control of that country’s government in 1917. The Bolsheviks (“Bolshevik” meaning “one of the majority”) were anti-feudal revolutionaries who were described in the United States as radical, anti-capitalist socialists. Under the leadership of Vladimir Leninm the Bolsheviks changed their party name to the “Russian Communist Party” in 1918 (and later to the “Communist Party of the Soviet Union”). In the United States, charges...
The Peace Corps was a product of the Cold War. A week before the 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy observed that the Soviet Union had “hundreds of men and women, scientists, physicists, teachers, engineers, doctors, and nurses . . . prepared to spend their lives abroad in the service of world communism.” The United States had no equivalent. Kennedy feared that the United States was in danger of losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the world’s peoples. He believed that a “peace corps” was the answer. “I am...
Al-Qaeda is the militant Islamist organization founded by Osama bin Laden that was responsible for various acts of terrorism, including the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, as well as the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Bin Laden organized al-Qaeda in opposition to the Soviet Union during the Afghan War of the 1980s. The group merged, moved, and established itself in various capacities and locations following the Soviet withdrawal...
Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965) was the thirty-third vice president of the United States and the Progressive Party nominee in the presidential election of 1948. Wallace served in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as secretary of agriculture and then as vice president. In the 1944 election, he was replaced as vice president by Harry S. Truman. Wallace served as secretary of commerce until Truman dismissed him in 1946 over disagreements about Cold War policy. Wallace helped establish the Progressive Party and ran unsuccessfully as...
Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) was a conservative Republican senator from Arizona who unsuccessfully challenged Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. Goldwater had earned the support of the New Right, but Johnson used the senator’s hardline anti-communist views to portray him as an extremist who might start a war against the Soviet Union. After his unsuccessful campaign, Goldwater returned to the Senate until his retirement in 1987.
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931– ) was the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, briefly, president of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev came to power as general secretary in 1985, following the death of Konstantin Chernenko. As the Soviet leader, Gorbachev implemented major political and economic reforms in an attempt to modernize and restructure the country. In 1989–1990, Gorbachev supported reform in the Soviet-bloc, and as Communist governments in eastern European countries began to collapse, Gorbachev agreed to the...
