John Kennedy was elected president by a slim majority:  100,000 votes changed in the state of Illinois would have made Nixon president.  Kennedyís razor-thin victory gave him no clear mandate for anything.   In foreign policy, Kennedy followed the idea of brinksmanship: go eyeball to eyeball and the first one to blink, loses.  The peaceful Kennedy is rarely seen in the White House.   The young presidentís mistakes in his early administration caused Khrushchev to believe he could control him.  Khrushchevís mistaken evaluation led to tragic consequences.
     As a minority president, Kennedy faced a stalemated Congress where getting any legislation passed was difficult.  In fact, it was Johnson, following Kennedyís death, who actually passed most of the former presidentís domestic program.  Kennedy was unwilling to tackle Congress since he was husbanding Congressional support for his foreign policy.  (Kennedyís embrace of civil rights came in June, 1963, a mere five months before his assassination.)  The Kennedy administration maintained a ìcan-doî philosophy, that is, that all problems could be solved if enough energy and thought were put into them.  He surrounded himself with so many professors, they became known as the ìHarvard Mafia.î But many of these academics had little experience in the real world of power politics, and their suggestions, while creative, were at times unrealistic.  As Eisenhower prepared to leave the White House after eight years, he warned about the creation of a ìmilitary industrial complexî which might keep the arms race going for its own economic benefit, but Kennedy chose to ignore the warning as he chose to dismiss most of the Eisenhower presidency.
     Kennedy as president encouraged a rivalry between the State and Defense Departments on the grounds that competition breeds excellence.  But in this competition the State Department was bound to lose, having been savaged by McCarthyism and facing the Defense Department run by Robert McNamara, one of the most brilliant men ever to serve in government.  Moreover, Kennedy had accused Eisenhower of being ineffective, confusing Eisenhowerís restraint with ineffectiveness, and the new president was determined to prove himself. This would be difficult, for Kennedy saw power as perception as much as hardware; it was not enough to be strong, one had to recognized as such.  Kennedy fully accepted a global responsibility for the United States as one can see clearly in his inaugural speech in January, 1961. When the U2s proved the Soviet lead in missiles was imaginary, Kennedy feared the Russians would now emphasize conventional wars which the United States was not ready to fight. The president thus dumped ìmassive retaliationî for ìmeasured response,î a program which would allow him to rely less on nuclear weapons that had proved useless in insurgencies like Guatemala and Iran, and more on upgraded conventional forces, especially the ìspecial forcesî specifically trained in counterinsurgency techniques.   An upgraded conventional force would give the president a choice between annihilation and surrender, but it also indicated Kennedy was getting ready to fight the very wars Eisenhower had avoided: civil wars in Asia.
     In the summer of 1961, Kennedy met Khrushchev in the disastrous Vienna summit where the Soviet leader successfully bullied him.  This was unfortunate, since a challenge soon developed over Berlin.  The East German government was moving more people to the cities to engage in industrialization, but the collectivized agriculture the Soviets had been mandated could not feed the growing urban population, especially with fewer people on the land.  As the situation deteriorated, the best and the brightest left, crossing to the West at Berlin.  Between 1950 and 1962, 2.5 million East Germans out of a population of 17.5 million voted with their feet and defected.  Rather than admit collectivized agriculture was wrong and then change it, or let East Germany go, the Soviets built a wall around Berlin to keep the East Germans from escaping.  The  wall advertised the failure of the Soviet system to the world, and made the Chinese look good since they had no such problem.  Kennedy went to Berlin and offered moral support, but he could not stop the building of the wall.  When Khrushchev saw that no real help was forthcoming, he decided that Kennedy could easily be pushed around.  And West Germanyís Willy Brandt took American failure to act as proof that the United States would not really vigorously defend German national aims, and he began his ostpolitik diplomacy to the East as a result.
     The crisis came in Cuba.  Kennedy gave the go-ahead for the invasion of the island Eisenhower had put on the back burner, resulting in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961.  Suffering from poor planning and no air cover, the invasion decapitated the CIA when the skilled agents leading the invasion forces were either killed or captured.  In total, 1500 people were involved and 1198 captured.  Those stil left alive were later ransomed for $10 million in medical supplies.  While the invasion had been a bust, it nonetheless frightened the Soviet Union.  How could Cuba be protected thousands of miles from Soviet shores and only 90 miles off the coast of the United States, should the Americans decide to invade properly the next time?
     In the summer of 1962,  Khrushchev quietly began moving short and medium range missiles into Cuba to protect the island.  Only 30 years later did we learn that the Soviets had stationed Frog nuclear missiles in Cuba and that Soviet commanders were authorized to use them in the event of an American invasion.  Although these short and medium range missiles did not change the strategic balance between the two superpowers, which was heavily in American favor, the missiles would make it impossible for the United States to invade Cuba, proving to Soviet hardliners that the cheap rocket alternative to expensive conventional forces that Khrushchev had been pursuing would work and allowing the Soviets to spend the money saved on consumer goods.  Khrushchev in his memoirs stated categorically that the missiles were there only to defend Cuba.  The show of strength would allow the Soviets to take the lead against China, proving how ìtoughî they were on capitalism, and it might make up for the humiliation of the Berlin Wall.  Had Khrushchev succeeded, it would have given him a powerful bargaining tool to get Western forces out of Berlin,  but the Soviet leader had misjudged Kennedy and the American response; when the president would not negotiate, he denied Khrushchev a propaganda victory or a bargaining chip.
     The United States had evidence of missiles going into Cuba long before it was publicly announced; trucks carrying long cylindrical objects were tying up traffic in Cuba since late summer.  In July and August, the United States discovered electronic and construction equipment usually associated with missile launchers, but we assumed no missiles were going into Cuba because the Soviets had never given missiles to any satellite country before. In September, the American government announced that the Soviets were setting up SAMS (surface to air missiles) and radar, but again we did not fear missiles.  When Kennedy finally saw the assembled missiles, his options were limited.  In October, American spy planes saw launch pads and realized that the missiles in fact were operational.
     The Kennedy administration rejected a plan to invade Cuba to remove the missiles, but also refused to swap our missiles in Turkey and Pakistan (which were no longer necessary since we had targetable long range missiles in the United States) for Soviets ones in Cuba.  Instead, the president blockaded Cuba and threatened the Soviet Union with nuclear attack if the missiles were not removed.  After about a week, in return for a Russian pledge to remove the missiles, the United States publicly agreed not to invade Cuba again, and secretly pledged to remove our missiles from Turkey and Pakistan.
     Khrushchev had been publicly humiliated.  This sealed his doom, especially when the Virgin Lands program failed, leading to his removal from power in October, 1964.  A Test Ban treaty was concluded with the Soviets and a telephone ìhot lineî installed to permit instant communication between Washington and Moscow. The Democrats won big in the November off year elections.  But there was a downside.  Those who believed the Soviet Union only understood the language of force seemed to be confirmed in their beliefs.  The pledge not to invade left Castro free to make trouble elsewhere in Latin America and later Angola, thus increasing the expense and difficulty for the United States.  Castro himself felt betrayed when neither European nor Latin American governments would support him.  He was not consulted about putting the missiles in nor about their removal; his status as a complete satellite of the Soviet Union was broadcast to the world.  Most important, the world also now knew the United States had a four-to-one superiority over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons; the Soviets began a crash program to build missiles and subs to achieve parity.
     Especially after the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy was searching for a way out of the Vietnam morass, but he accepted the domino theory and thus ended up committing troops to the area with devastating results.  He did allow for the neutrality of Laos in 1963, but this solution would not work in Vietnam with the latterís fierce nationalism as embodied in Ho Chi Minh.  Kennedy may even have been backing away from his idea that the loss of ground anywhere meant the loss of American prestige and thus hurt deterrence with the Soviet Union, but his ideas never fully matured because the president was assassinated November, 1963.
     Kennedyís death followed by a few weeks the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem had enjoyed a brief honeymoon in the late 1950s when Ho was trying to build his new government in the North, but in 1960 the Viet Cong was formed in the South, devoted to the overthrow of the Diem regime.  There were serious disagreements between Hoís government and the Viet Cong which was never completely under the Northís control; the southerners were fighting for a coalition government in which the communists would play a role, but not necessarily dominate, and their first concern was removing Diem and his puppet government.  As the Viet Cong, supplied by the North, began to make inroads in the southern population, Diem struck back, and by 1963 had become an embarrassment to Washington.  Several Buddhist monks committed suicide by burning themselves to death and Diem machine-gunned their pagodas. This reminds us that Diem was a Catholic in a  country overwhelmingly Buddhist; he was fighting a 9 to 5 war and his regime was corrupt.  But the United States had committed our prestige to him and we were unable to rid ourselves of the problem until Vietnamese army officers offered to overthrow Diem.  Kennedy okayed the coup, with assurances that Diem and his family would not be harmed.  But Diem and his brother-in-law were killed in the back of an armored personnel carrier.  The murder of Diem plunged Vietnam into chaos from which Johnson would attempt to rescue it in the spring of 1965 with allied bombing and the build-up of American troops.
     Kennedy did not lessen the tensions of the Cold War and in fact only intensified them.  He was less restrained than Eisenhower, having great faith in controlled and measured response.  Unlike Eisenhower, he felt he had to prove himself and may have been willing to take risks to do so, especially after the disasters of the Vienna summit and Berlin wall.  Kennedy could not translate American power into diplomatic success, anymore than Khrushchev could translate his advances in rocketry and space into diplomatic success in Berlin.  With the removal of both Khrushchev and Kennedy, new leaders emerged who began a process of détente, at least as much accidental as planned, that would persevere until the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Vietnam, the American Obsession

          South East Asia proved to be the endgame of the Truman Doctrine and NSC-68.  Lyndon Johnson committed American prestige to an area not vital to American security, diverting attention from the real threatóthe Soviet Union. The tragedy of LBJ was not that he tried to duck his commitments, but that he tried to carry them out.   By the time the United States had lost in Vietnam, the world had changed; America had exhausted itself physically and emotionally, entering the détente period divided and weakened.
     Between 1963 and 1965, governments, mostly run by the military, came and went in South Vietnam. At this point, the main enemy was the Viet Cong, primarily composed of rebels from the south who disagreed with the South Vietnamese government. This was a case of domestic subversion, a far cry from the armed invasion seen in Korea.    By the early 1960s, Ho had enough stability in the North to begin to send more military aid to the South, some of which came across the Ho Chi Minh trail, part of which ran through neighboring Cambodia. By early 1964, then, repeated Viet Cong attacks put the South Vietnamese governments in danger of collapse.
     It was against this background that the August, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution was passed.  The Republicans had put up Barry Goldwater for president.  He was convinced that massive ground forces would have to be used to win in Vietnam, and that air power was simply not enough.  Johnson, the Democrat, wanted to win the presidential election big in his own right, and he had staked his reputation on saving South Vietnam.  Although the United States had been helping South Vietnam in secret for some time, two incidents which occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin were presented by Johnson to the American people as unprovoked North Vietnamese aggression.  A later military investigation showed the incidents did not occur as Johnson had presented them, but the President chose to bury that information, and instead asked for and received the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, empowering the president to ìrepel North Vietnamese aggression by any and all means.î  Although never passed as a declaration of war and based on misinformation to boot, this resolution became the basis of American activity in Vietnam.  Johnson won the 1964 election by making Goldwater look like a nuclear cowboy, while himself being tough on communism as evidenced by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.  Johnson remembered what the ìlossî of China had done to the Democratic party in 1952, and from the Munich conference, he had ìlearnedî that democratic countries had to fight the small war to keep the big one from taking place.
     Once safely reelected, Johnson began Operation Rolling Thunder in April, 1965, a bombing campaign over the North, in spite of the fact that there was no real proof bombing would cause the other side to surrender.  There was no real discussion of targets either, nor how these targets related to the end of the war.  Bombs worked best against cities, but the North Vietnamese had virtually no cities to speak of, and they quickly rebuilt bombed bridges with pontoons which were suitable for the supplies they carried on their backs but not for heavy American tanks.  American war games showed that no amount of pounding would let the United States win.  But once the planes arrived in Vietnam for the bombing sorties, they would have to be protected.  Escalation had begun.
     Johnson believed that American combat forces were better equipped and motivated to fight than the South Vietnamese who were fighting a nine to five war.   On the advice of his generals, the president thought he could win the war quickly with the introduction of American combat forces.  Moreover, it would reassure out allies, especially in Europe, that we could and would defend out them.  Johnson was determined to prevent the dominoes from falling, fearing pressure from conservatives far more than questions raised by his liberal friends.   Moreover, there was no question in his mind that he could prevail after American ìsuccessesî in Greece in 1948, Korea in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Iran in 1953.  The only question to Johnson was whether the United States should get involved, not whether, once having done so, we might actually lose.   Moreover, Johnson was equipped with a new domestic economic theory that said he could have both guns and butter, that the economy was constantly growing so there was no need to choose between domestic and military spending.  Nonetheless, Johnson delayed ordering the bombing runs, and then concealed the full scope of the bombing at his press conferences when he finally did order it, because he feared endangering his Great Society programs by sucking money away from them for the war.  And he remained baffled by North Vietnamese intransigence and their defying of American might.  The president could simply not understand Vietnamese nationalism.
     Unfortunately for Johnson, the war in Vietnam was different from wars that had gone before.  Unlike Korea, Vietnam was not an isolated peninsula which could easily be sealed off.  The terrain was different as well, giving the enemy plenty of places to hide.  Here foreign support would not leave, as Tito had done in Greece in 1948 or Mao in Korea in 1953.  Rheeíís South Korean government ahd at least been stable in a way that South Vietnamese governments were not.  Moreover, in Vietnam the CIA could not win the hearts and minds of the people;  here the CIA would not be enough as it had been in Guatemala and Iran.  Moreover, North Vietnamese tactics would not mass troops where they might be vulnerable to American firepower; instead, they bled American forces by destroying isolated units.
     Johnson's escalation in Vietnam was what resulted from Kennedyís measured response, for as the other side increased its support, so would the United States.  Thus, American force would not be brought to bear until the enemy was ready.  This was a reactive policy which allowed the other side to decide when and where to strike; the United States had lost control over her own military decisions.  LBJ came to relay almost exclusively on military force in a theater chosen by the adversary.   Prosecuting such a war would have been difficult, but the purposes remained ill defined making prosecution all but impossible.  Was our goal to reunite Vietnam, to save the South Vietnamese government (even if it was not popular with the people), establish democracy, defend democracy?  Or was it just to hold on until something, anything, happened?
     Because our purposes were ill defined, our methods were not well suited to winning.  Search and destroy missions emphasized body counts, usually inflated, of enemy dead, but this made pacification of the south almost impossable and disrupted southern society.   Heavy bombing of the north strengthened Hoís popularity, as bombing in England in WWII had strengthened Churchillís.  The bombing also killed Americans; bombs killed perhaps 100 Viet Cong per year, but we left 27,000 tons of unexploded ordinance which the Viet Cong turned into booby traps which killed 1000 Americans a year.   Defoliation campaigns destroyed Vietnamese ecology and may have injured American servicemen.  Ironically, slow-moving propeller planes were actually more effective than jets in bombing (as they had been in Korea); studies showed propeller planes were three times as effective while costing five to thirteen times less.  But since the United States had been planning to fight the Soviet Union, we had almost given up propeller planes in favor of the ever faster--and sexier--jets. The United States had no overarching strategy for applying military force to bring war to a satisfactory end.  Americans should have considered how the enemy would be forced to surrender, or failing that, what bargain could be struck to end the war. 
     Johnson claimed the United States was winning slowing, berating those who disagreed as ìnervous nellies.î  But in January, 1968, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies hit 27 key South Vietnamese cities in the Tet offensive.  The North at first feared it had been a failure since the southern population had not revolted as northern propaganda predicted they should, and Americans did regain ground quickly.  But it was psychologically devastating for the United States, for it proved the enemy could strike at will, in spite of years of bombing and thousands of American combat casualties.  The Viet Cong in the south was killed off in great numbers, to the delight of the North which now exerted more effective control of the war.  Eugene McCarthy won the New Hampshire primary, forcing Johnson to halt the bombing and offer to negotiate with the North Vietnamese.   Hubert Humphrey eventually won the Democratic nomination, however, following the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June, but Nixon, the Republican,  won in November, 1968.
     Once elected, Nixon began Vietnamization, a process by which he hoped to build up the power of the South Vietnamese army so as to allow American forces to withdraw. He wanted to show the South Vietnamese were willing and able to fight their own war.  He also wanted to stop the loss of American life by removing Americans from combat roles.  And he wanted to stop the trouble the war was causing at home.  The massacre at My Lai which had occurred in 1968 became public only in 1970, at about the same time as Nixon invaded Cambodia.  Both created howls of protest.
     The invasion of Cambodia especially represented a major widening of the war and led eventually to the overrunning of the country by the Khmer Rouge in 1975.  The latter killed some 3 million people, or 40% of Cambodiaís population.  The invasion contradicted Nxon's confident assertion that Vietnamization was working.  Nixonís invasion angered an already resentful Congress which had not been informed beforehand, and it led to a wave of student strikes, the most deadly of which was at Kent State University in Ohio where the National Guard opened fire on student protesters, killing four.
     Nixon was trying to extricate the United States from Vietnam, but he would not do so in a way which clearly left the North in charge.   As it turned out, China played an important role in allowing the Americans to withdraw.  The Soviet Union had asked for permission for a preemptive nuclear strike against China in 1969, news the Nixon administration soon shared with China.  This was especially worrisome for China because some 15% of the total Soviet nuclear arsenal was aimed at China.  Mao was also worried by the 1968 Breshnev doctrine in which the Soviets had claimed the right to intervene in any country which did not accept its brand of communism, which the Chinese clearly did not.  In February, 1972, Nixon visited China, scaring the North Vietnamese who feared their main ally was deserting them.  However, Vietnam had to await the death of Ho Chi Minh, who, after having been welched on by the French in 1945 and the Americans in 1956, was determined to win on the ground.  January, 1973, saw both sides accept the final peace proposals.  These involved a cease fire in place and the return of American POWs.
     Although some protested that Americans were still "Missing in Action" (MIA), this issue proved to be a dud.  2273 MIAs were recorded in Vietnam of which 1101 were known dead although their bodies had not been recovered.  Even the figure of 2272 represents only 3% of Americans killed in action.  In World War II MIAs represented 19.4% of those killed and even Korea, years later and with better recovery methods, saw American MIAs represent 15% of those killed in action.
     Trying to defend democracy in South Vietnam was impossible, in part because there was no democracy to defend.  The area was not vital to American security; when South Vietnam fell and the country was reunited, American security was actually enhanced.  The war did, however, create inflation which the United States then exported to Europe.  The war also encouraged a drive for secrecy that may have played a role in Watergate in 1972, and without doubt the war helped to kill off the civil rights movement which was hopelessly divided over the wisdom of the war.  Other areas of the world fell off the American mental map during our obsession with Vietnam.
     The Soviets responded to Vietnam with great caution.  In fact, the Soviet Union was the only country to actually have benefited from the war.  Her economy had not been growing very fast in the early 1960s, but with Americans tied up in Vietnam, the Soviets could use their money more effectively.  They were especially effective in South East Asia where Ho could inflict a great deal of damage for very little Soviet investment.  The Soviets also took advantage of the split in the western alliance Vietnam produced, especially when France under de Gaulle condemned the war.  The Soviets took the opportunity to increase their influence in the Mediterranean, especially in Egypt.  But the Soviet Union was careful to avoid provoking the United States.  And that has a great deal to do with the new Soviet leadership of Breshnev, for whom  holding the line and defending the status quo were the centerpieces of his policy.

Détente

     Détente means relaxation of tension, not peace, although it was frequently sold to Americans as meaning the end of hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union.   Americans remained dominant both economically and militarily, but we could not translate that power into influence with the Soviet Union, let alone with the developing world.  Indeed, as the tensions with the Soviet Union were reduced, problems in the Third World became more obvious.  The United States could not control events there, however, with a policy designed for the Soviet Union. Our nuclear weapons were of no use, for example, and simple communism/anti-communism rhetoric failed in a milieu of ethnic squabbles, religious divisions, and hit and run terrorism.  Worse, the Nixon administration could not demonstrate that the Soviet Union had really changed her behavior.  As Watergate sapped the presidentís strength, détente became one of its victims.
     The period of détente is usually seen as beginning in 1963, following the Cuban missile crisis. In part, the policy of détente was as much accidental as planned, in that both sides became embroiled in domestic issues. The United States dealt with the assassination of President Kennedy, the growing civil rights movements, decaying American cities, street violence, and, from 1965 on, a series of urban riots.   The Soviet Union faced the overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964, the failure of his Virgin Lands program, and the increasing obsolescence of its industrial infrastructure.  Americansí obsession with Vietnam diverted our attention from the Soviets as well.  And both superpowers were plagued by economic woes; inflation gripped the United States as a result of Vietnam, as did a bad balance of payments problem from buying more abroad than we sold, while Soviet farmers could produce only one sixth as much as American farmers.   Concern for domestic economic difficulties left less time for superpower confrontation.  Finally, a new set of leaders helped to calm tensions; Johnsonís expertise lay in domestic policy where he intended to make his mark on history, and Breshnev was far more cautious than Khrushchev and unlikely to challenge the West directly.
     But surely the most important factor in developing détente was the Sino-Soviet split.  There had long been hostilities between China and the Soviet Union. As early as the 1950s, Secretary of State Dulles had known of them, but he had found it hard to exploit them.  These hostilities came to a head over the Cuban Missile crisis when the Chinese criticized Khrushchev for putting the missiles into Cuba in the first place, thus provoking the United States needlessly, and they lambasted him for taking them out, caving in to American pressure.  Moreover, China continued to support wars of national liberation, and when the Soviets tried to compete, their only reward was to see their advice ignored and their coffers drained.
     China had taken at face value Khrushchevís claim that the Soviet Union was superior to the United States in terms of missiles, at least until the Cuban Missile Crisis, if for no other reason than significant segments of American public opinion agreed that the ìmissile gapî created a Soviet advantage.  Thus, the Chinese could not understand why the Soviets would not support wars of national liberation with impunity, since the United States could make no response, fearing a nuclear missile attack if she did.  But the Soviets knew the U-2s had discovered their missile poverty and that the American nuclear threat was not, therefore, neutralized.  Khrushchev was loathe to admit publicly, however, that his boasts had been hollow.
     Major economic differences also separated China and the Soviet Union.  China was prepared to improve the life of the Chinese consumer, as in Shanghai, in return for political obedience.  This was exactly the emphasis on consumer goods Khrushchev himself had first spoken of but been unable to achieve.  Instead, the Soviets were now sacrificing almost everything to their military deterrent, and consumers were worse off than ever, providing a much less appealing model to Third World countries than China.
     Coming to see the Soviets as unreliable, overly cautious, and potentially dangerous, the Chinese now decided to use the United States as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.  As the Chinese distanced themselves from their ìfraternal socialist brother,î the three thousand miles long border between them became more vulnerable.  Border wars flared up between Chinese and Soviet troops, especially in Sinkiang which was claimed by both.  Having to defend her eastern border against the Chinese made the Soviets even more cautious in their dealings with the United States.
     In 1958, Mao had begun massive industrialization in what he called the ìGreat Leap Forward.î  Using ideas borrowed from Ghandi, Mao wanted to use all his natural resources wisely, and in China, one of the most abundant of these was a huge manpower pool.  Instead of finding ways to do more labor using fewer people, as occurred in the United States and Western Europe, China would use labor methods sometimes centuries old to give everyone a job.   And her own industrial revolution would allow China to break free from the Soviets, because China would no longer be as dependent upon their industrial products.  To allow the Great Leap Forward to proceed, Mao intended to revolutionize the people, especially the young. Such revolutionary ardor and the mass party it produced discomfited the Soviets,  whose theoretician Lenin had never believed in a mass party to begin with.  A mass party smacked of Stalinís cult of personality.
     Under Mao's new ideas, the Chinese economy became increasingly decentralized, unlike the Soviet model.  But the new Chinese economy did not benefit from economies of scale and inevitably, local authorities arose who questioned how the central government was allocating resources.  Transportation failures, uneven quality, inconsistency in supplies were all named as reasons the central government had failed to meet its production quotas.  Managerial staff in the factories and farms began to criticize Mao and his polices.
     In addition, Mao’s program proved to be an ecological disaster. China was deforested to get wood to burn in her new steel mills.  Even today, China has not recovered from the consequences of this Great Leap forward.  Desertification affects one quarter of all Chinese land, and her energy efficiency is only half that of the West.  Paper production alone consumes twice as much water as in the West.   In fact, by 1965, Mao had lost control of the Chinese Communsit party whose ledership passed to the "Thermidorians," that is those interested more in technical expertise than "redness."  But Mao and other communists were horrified to discover that the country was producing two systems of education and health care, the better one for the wealthy urban folk and the other poor one for rural peasants.
     Mao responded with the 1965 Cultural Revolution. He sought to regain contol of ìhisî revolution and the Chinese government. The Cultural Revolution may also have been done in part to cover up a series of disasters in Chinese foreign policy.  The pro-Beijing government in Indonesia was overthrown in a blood bath.  Cuba, Algeria and Nasserís Egypt all criticized China.  Even in Vietnam, the Soviets became the main suppliers to Ho Chi Minh instead of the Chinese, whom Ho regarded as unreliable when arms deliveries were disrupted by their Cultural Revolution.
     As Mao tried to revive a revolution he thought was dying, Chinese intellectuals and managers who had dared to criticize the government were sent back to the land to be ìre-educated,î since Maoís philosophy was based on the peasants.  But this process was highly disruptive, since the most intelligent and well educated were no longer doing their jobs, from universities, to hospitals, to technocratic expertise in the factories and farms.  Industrial production fell and education suffered.  It was such a disaster that the whole process was over by 1968 when the army was called out to restore order.  We in the West used to believe that the Cultural Revolution was almost bloodless, but even the Chinese government now admits as many as 34,000 people were killed.  Newer data, however,  shows that 40,000 were killed in one province alone, and the current consensus suggests the true death toll may have been 400,000.  And this Cultural Revolution would be copied later in Cambodia's killing fields with even more lethal results as 40% of the population was killed by the Khmer Rouge to ìrevolutionizeî the country.
     The unpredictability of the Cultural Revolution, on top of other long standing differences, caused the Soviet Union to fear the Chinese almost as madmen, and their fear reached even greater heights when China exploded her first atomic bomb in 1964.  While not nearly as sophisticated as the weaponry the Soviets and Americans possessed, it was nonetheless deadly. With thousands of miles of indefensible and thus vulnerable border with the Chinese, and with the reality of sporadic border wars, the Russians decided to eliminate the Chinese threat once and for all.  Thus, in 1969, the Soviets secretly asked the United States for permission to stage a preemptive strike on Chinaís nuclear capabilities.  Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor to Nixon, simply refused to respond.  Indeed, the Russians were not sure the message had actually gotten through.  To have approved such a strike would have had grave moral implications, and anybody the Soviets wanted to nuke was someone the United States wanted to know, and quickly.  To have denied permission would have put the United States in the position of defending a nation, China, with whom we did not even have diplomatic relations.  Nonetheless, Kissinger took the opportunity to share the note with the Chinese, encouraging them to move farther away from the Soviets and to use the Americans as a counterweight.  And of course, the same unpredictability and chaos in China which worried the Soviets made any meaningful negotiations between them and the American government impossible.
     While the Soviets had to contend with the Chinese, the United States had to contend with an increasingly independent Europe.  It was ironic that Kissinger, himself a European, proclaimed 1973 the Year of Europe, because his policies failed to calm our allies who remained resentful of the big deals the United States had signed with the Soviets and Chinese.  Europe was emerging as a distinct power in her own right, dissatisfied with her second class citizenship in NATO and foreign policy generally.  Moreover, the Europeans had developed the Common Market which turned the continent into a potent economic force.
      In 1966, France tapped into that resentment when she withdrew from NATO, objecting to the fact that an American general was always in charge and that NATO nuclear missiles on French soil were not under the French governmentís control.  De Gaulle feared that the United States would not really launch those missiles if the Soviets attacked.  Would Washington really sacrifice the United States to save Europe?  France went on to develop her own independent nuclear strike force with her own missiles and her own major arms industry.  She refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, because she wanted to maintain complete freedom of action.  French arms sales set off an arms race in the Middle East, much to American displeasure, and by creating different, non-integrated weapons systems, made coordination between NATO and French forces in time of war more difficult.  (By contrast, in the Soviet bloc, all weapons systems of different satellites were fully interchangeable.)
     This issue of weaponry bring us to arms control which was the lynch pin of détenteóand its greatest success.  When the United States allowed the Soviet Union to achieve parity with them, the Americans were in essence recognizing the Soviets as a legitimate partner.  The Communists hungered for legitimacy, especially after their near loss of power under Lenin, and this legitimacy further confirmed their messianic view of themselves as the ìleader of worldwide socialism.î  Arms control, moreover, was increasingly necessary since the Soviets had undergone a massive buildup following the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In 1965, for example the Soviets had 262 ICBMs to the Americansí 854, but by 1969, the Soviets had 1198 ICBMs to the Americansí 1054.  With a rough equality achieved, it was in the best interests of both superpowers to limit the arms race for fear of bankrupting themselves.  Détente went forward as parity was achieved, unlike the early Cold War when, after the Soviets exploded their first A Bomb, the United  States raced pell mell into the hydrogen bomb project.
     In the Soviet Union, Breshnev had replaced Khrushchev in 1964.  The new Soviet leader was far more cautious than Khrushchev had ever been, in part because of deep divisions within the Soviet leadership.  Some wanted to continue the former leaderís emphasis on consumer goods while others now wanted to put the first priority on the military, arguing that this was the only way for the Soviets to have any prestige abroad.  The full extent of this disagreement is just now coming to light as Soviet sources gradually are declassified.  But Breshnev soon discovered he would have as many problems with his allies as the United States had with theirs.
     With the western alliance strained after Franceís defection and with China snapping at Soviet heels, Czechoslovakia decided that the time had come to make a play for more independence.  In the spring of 1968, known as the Prague spring, the Czechs experimented with major political changes, such as allowing a multi-party government and relaxing repression of students and intellectuals.  At first the Soviets seemed willing to tolerate this maverick state, as they had tolerated Tito, but in June, the Soviet hardliners prevailed and the Soviets moved in with tanks in November 1968.  The invasion saw 200 Soviet tanks and 60,000 Soviet soldiers enter Czechoslovakia.  The official Russian position was that no one had died when faced with overwhelming Soviet military supremacy, but newly released data suggest that at least 4000 died in the operation, including 700 Soviet military personnel.
     Breshnev justified this invasion with what became known as the Breshnev Doctrine, in which he claimed the right to intervene to ìsaveî any socialist state.  Of course, Czechoslovakia was already a socialist state and had promised loudly to remain one.  She only wanted liberalization and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.  Thus, the Breshnev Doctrine allowed the Soviets alone to decide what brand of socialism was acceptableóand invade if they determined it was not.  The Doctrine frightened China which certainly had a different system.  China forcefully condemned both the invasion and the Doctrine. The United States found it hard to respond logically since the wording of the doctrine was so close to that of the Monroe Doctrine.   In fact, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia disgraced her in world opinion; clearly this was no willing ally, but instead an occupied country held against her will.
     When Nixon was elected president in November, 1968, he entered the White House with Henry Kissinger first as his National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State.  Kissinger had long been a theorist of the Cold War and had come to believe that the Cold War was not a war to be won, but a problem to be managed.  His views were informed by his very European experience of living next to the enemy, as opposed to the American luxury of living thousands of miles away.   Kissinger believed all players would have to be secure in their spheres of influence to avoid wars, and that would mean recognizing the legitimate defense needs even of the Soviets.
     One way Kissinger would induce Soviet cooperation was to renew ties with China so he could concentrate on the economic rivalry with Europe and Japan.  Japan was especially annoying to the Nixon administration because she would not reduce textile imports to the United States, thus endangering Nixonís ìSouthern Strategy.î  Thus, neither Nixon nor Kissinger informed Japan in advance of their moves to reopen relations with China.
     Kissinger grasped that the Soviet economy was crumbling.  If the Soviets behaved, they would receive American aid for their economy, not enough to fix it upóif that could even be doneóbut enough to keep the people from starving.  Called linkage, this policy tied Soviet cooperation to American food and money. American trade with the Soviet Union shot up from $220 million in 1971 to $2.8 billion in 1978.  Kissinger specifically wanted Soviet cooperation in showing restraint in Vietnam. He also wanted an arms control agreement; if the United States could spend less on arms or war, we would be free to focus our attention on the economic challenge presented by Japan and Europe.  But the Soviets saw this economic pressure as humiliating, feeling it did not treat them as a ìworld classî power.
     To save money and to reduce the possibility of American and the Soviet troops actually fighting one another, Nixon put forward the Nixon Doctrine.  The idea was to build up the military forces of indigenous peoples around the world so that they could protect themselves. The United States would be spared more Vietnams, since American troops would not be needed.  Further, the United States would benefit financially from selling arms overseas.
     The Nixon Doctrine led to a massive arms buildup worldwide, especially in the mid-East and Africa, nearly bankrupting some countries.  Those with oil revenues especially were prone to spend their profits on arms, rather than on domestic projects or industrialization.  Armed to the teeth, these countries were now more willing to use force to solve their problems, rather than diplomacy.  Thus the Nixon Doctrine ended up spreading the arms race, heretofore restricted to the superpowers, into the Third World which could ill afford it.
     Evaluating linkage and détente is difficult.  True, by 1972, Kissinger had SALT I(Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty), one of the main successes of détente.  This treaty ended the arms race in anti-ballistic missile systems that were expensive and not very reliable, and it froze the number of missiles.  The United States had 1054 and the Soviets 1600.  With MIRVs (multiple independent reentry vehicles), however, the United States actually had more warheads than the Soviets did, since several independently targeted warheads could be put aboard each missile.  In fact, the United States maintained a two-to-one superiority in deliverable warheads.  The Soviets, not surprisingly, scrambled to deploy their own MIRVs in the mid-1970s.
     But the Soviets did not change their ways internally.  The Soviet state continued to jail people without cause, especially intellectuals who challenged the government or Jews wishing to emigrate.  Others were locked up in insane asylums.  Breshnev would not challenge the United States, but he would brook no opposition in his own country either.   It was hard for Nixon to maintain a policy of cooperation with the Soviets, given their bad behavior.  After Progressivism, the United States had become accustomed to evaluating the morality of foreign nations, not just whether such a country posed a threat to American security.  Clearly the Soviet Union was an unrepentant dictatorship that Americans found reprehensible.
     Nixon did benefit from his former anti-communism as he opened relations to the Soviet Union, since he could not be criticized for being ìsoft on communismî as more liberal politicians might have been.  His history as the prosecutor of Alger Hiss, his kitchen debate with Khrushchev, and his identification with Eisenhower all spared him from criticism.  But his involvement in Watergate sapped the strength of the Nixon presidency and further eroded the domestic consensus the president would need to conduct his risky foreign policy.  Further, Watergate puzzled most foreigners who never understood why the American public would attack a president who had done so much to calm tensions between the superpowers, and their confusion weakened the American bargaining position overseas.  Nixon finally resigned the presidency in August, 1974.  Ford, the new president, retained Kissinger and the same foreign policy, but he never enjoyed the prestige abroad Nixon had before him.

Fall of Détente

     Even before Ford entered the White House, dissatisfaction with Nixonís détente policy  began to come out into the open.  Congress increasingly emphasized the immorality of the Soviet government and the lack of tangible results from détente.  Ford and Kissinger, who stayed on to serve the new president, were forced to argue that the situation could have been much worse without détente.  The increasing emphasis on morality helped lead to the election of Carter, a born again Christian, in 1976.
     The attack on détente may be symbolized by the Jackson-Vanik amendment. This bill made it difficult to trade with the Soviet Union unless she allowed all Jews to leave who wanted to. The Soviets had slapped what they considered an ìexit taxî on Jews wanting to leave, thus feeding money into their sorely depleted coffers, and she refused to allow Jews who were hihgly educated, especially in nuclear matters, to leave for any reason, fearing a breach of security.  The Jackson-Vanik amendment also limited the money available to the Soviets for credit or loans.  The Ford administration argued in vain that such policies interfered with the domestic arrangements of a sovereign foreign nation, and would not be tolerated by Americans if the Soviets had done the same to us
      As early as 1973, with Nixon increasingly entangled in Watergate, the War Powers Act prevented the president from dispatching American troops for more than 60 days without Congressional authorization.  While such a proviso can be read as part of a traditional move to get power back from a wartime president (Vietnam having just ended), it is best seen as a warning shot that Congress wanted its power back. The gasoline crisis of 1973-4, following the Yom Kipper war, further eroded respect for the presidentís policy, since many argued that Nixon had been so consumed with the Soviet Union and China that he had left other areas of the world, like the Middle East, to languish.  Worse, the gasoline crisis split the western alliance even more, with the United States continuing to support Israel while Western Europe supported the Arabs.
     In April, 1975, Vietnam was reunified by force, as the North Vietnamese used Soviet weapons to topple the corrupt South Vietnamese regime.  Ford could not honor the letter written by Nixon in 1973 in which the president promised American troops would be dispatched if the South were ever attacked; it was politically impossible to do so given American hostility to the war and the weakness of the Ford presidency.  The 1975 Helsinki accords further discredited détente by appearing to cave in morally to the Soviet Union for very little gain.  Western Europe and the United States recognized the boundaries of Eastern Europe in return for the Soviets pledging more civil rights inside the Soviet Union, something the Soviets never had any intention of doing.  This meant that in return for the West recognizing the Sovietsí seizure of eastern Poland and hunks of Rumania, as well as a divided Germany and Berlin, the Soviets were to allow greater civil rights in areas under their control.  The Sovietsí failure do so simply confirmed the opinion of those, like Reagan, who believed the Soviets could not be trusted to live up to any agreement, and that, therefore, negotiations with the Soviets were useless.  And the Soviets continued to support Castro and a communist insurgency in Angola.
      Congress hammered home the idea that détente had provided very few if any tangible results.  Ford and Kissinger were left to argue that the situation would have been much worse without détente.  Ford was unable to explain to the satisfaction of most Americans why it was so vitally important not to risk a Third World War with the Soviets over what the Soviets did inside their own country or in areas of the world not vital to American security.  Instead, Congress noted that the Soviet Union was still heavily armed, her troops were still in Eastern Europe, Soviet citizens were denied basic human rights, and Castro remained as entrenched in power as ever.  The United States had forged close ties with foreign dictators like the Shah of Iran and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.  And we had become the worldís biggest arms salesman.  Something was morally wrong with the United States for accepting Soviet Union immorality.  A ìborn againî Christian, Jimmy Carter, would question it all.