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The American Century
Introduction
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Truman for the most part carried on Roosevelt's policies at home and abroad; his first challenge was demobilization after the war and a reconversion of the economy. Although he vacillated, the transition went smoothly, aided by pent-up demand and wartime savings. The postwar era was extremely prosperous in America, the trend toward early marriage continued and births boomed, and government policies encouraged large families and home ownership. The era was also the beginning of the Cold War, in which the United States adopted a policy of containment toward communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. This led to American aid Greece and Turkey and then to the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe. Conflict with the Soviets occurred when they closed the West’s surface access to Berlin; Truman countered with an airlift and after a year the Soviets relented. To secure mutual defense and further combat the Soviet threat, the United States and Western Europeans formed NATO in 1949. Containment was not so successful in Asia, where Japan became a prosperous and democratic American ally but China was "lost" to Mao's communists. Containment also led the United States, as the major player in a UN peacekeeping intervention, into a dubious conflict in Korea. Fear of communism made Americans paranoid and directly resulted in the rise of Joseph McCarthy, who was discredited only after he had ruined many people. In 1952 Eisenhower was elected president, and he and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, discontinued the containment policy in favor of a reliance on America’s nuclear arsenal and "massive retaliation." Vestiges of the containment policy, however, were present in U.S. aid to France in Vietnam and the subsequent partitioning of that country and in the standoff in the Suez Crisis of 1956, which prompted the "Eisenhower Doctrine." Nevertheless, tensions with the Soviets appeared to be on the wane when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev spoke of "peaceful coexistence" and he and Eisenhower met in 1955 and Vice President Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1959. Before anything substantial could happen, though, an American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. In 1959–60, the United States also saw the revolutionary government in Cuba, which it had initially supported, ally itself with the Soviets. Meanwhile, in the United States, the civil-rights movement gathered momentum from the mid-1950s on, under the charismatic leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. Key events include the Montgomery bus boycott, the Supreme Court's Brown decision, and Eisenhower’s decision to use federal power to enforce Brown in Arkansas. In 1960 Kennedy defeated Vice President Nixon for the presidency.
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