Question

How did the Cold War shape American politics?

Answer 1

One of the most interesting results is the election of John Kennedy in 1960. Kennedy had little problem inheriting the social policy mantle of FDR, a fellow Democrat, but being taken seriously in foreign policy was much harder. He was, after all, a very young man, who had been only a very junior naval officer in the war, and he was replacing Dwight Eisenhower, who had been Supreme Allied Commander during the closing phases of the war. Furthermore, his opponent, Richard Nixon, had been Eisenhower's Vice President, and had earned considerable respect for his famous "kitchen debates" with Khruschev, and for his knowledgeable positions on foreign policy and containment of Soviet and Chinese aggression generally. It's also to be remembered that the painful loss of victory in Korea in 1953 was a very recent memory, as was the launch of Sputnik and the apparent victory of the USSR in the Space Race in 1957 or so.

JFK's team actually chose to try to outflank Nixon TO THE RIGHT, rather than take the more traditional Democratic approach of suggesting their skills in diplomacy and negotiation would be better than the traditional Republican approach of strong military credibility. So they invented the so-called "missile gap" by arguing that Ike and by extension Nixon were old fogies, stuck in the 1930s with World War II tech, and had allowed the Soviets to surge ahead into the Space Age by developing ICBMs to deliver nukes, while the Americans foolishly relied on slow and old-fashioned bombers. In fact, a famous book published at the time ("Alas, Babylon") played this up, portraying a Soviet first strike on the United States that succeeded because of the "missile gap." (The missile gap was the gap in time between when the Soviets developed working ICBMs and the Americans did.)

In fact, the missile gap was imaginary, and the Soviets were not, in fact, any more advanced than the United States in developing ICBM technology. But the fear that they were -- helped along by the typical Soviet secrecy -- may have been enough to swing the election to Kennedy (recall it was a very, very close election anyway).

As it turned out, JFK actually was pretty incompetent at foreign policy. His disastrous performance at the Vienna conference in 1960 with Khruschev led directly to the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the US and USSR ever came to nuclear war. Fortunately, he learned on the job, and his more hawkish brother RFK helped stabilize US foreign policy. And of course he died with less than three years in office. Still, the damage JFK's naivete did helped to intensify the Cold War in the early 1960s, significantly juicing the arms race. Of course, he also left us Vietnam, which LBJ managed to make even worse.

It's an interesting counterfactual to wonder how the world woulv'e been different if Nixon had won in 1960. He clearly had excellent credentials and credibility on the conservative side, with considerable respect from the Soviets, and, as he later showed in winding up the war in Vietnam and negotiating the first nuclear arms limitations treaties with the Soviets, not to mention his normalization of relations with Communist China, he clearly had the ability to negotiate and compromise effectively at the international level. I think a solid argument can be made that, on a foreign policy basis, the election of Kennedy over Nixon was one of the worst mistakes made in a Presidential election since the election of James Buchanan sped up the outbreak of the Civil War.