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Table of Contents

1. The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin

2. The Berlin Wall: Blockade and Crisis

3. The Berlin Wall: Building the Wall

4. The Berlin Wall: 1961-1989

5. The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall

On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete "Antifascistischer Schutzwall," or "antifascist bulwark," between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep so-called Western "fascists" from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War.

The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin

Berlin's Animal Arms Race

As World War II came to an end in 1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam determined the fate of Germany's territories. They split the defeated nation into four "allied occupation zones": The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union, while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and (eventually) France.

Even though Berlin was located entirely within the Soviet part of the country (it sat about 100 miles from the border between the eastern and western occupation zones), the Yalta and Potsdam agreements split the city into similar sectors. The Soviets took the eastern half, while the other Allies took the western. This four-way occupation of Berlin began in June 1945.

The Berlin Wall: Blockade and Crisis

The existence of West Berlin, a conspicuously capitalist city deep within communist East Germany, "stuck like a bone in the Soviet throat," as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it. The Russians began maneuvering to drive the United States, Britain and France out of the city for good. In 1948, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin aimed to starve the western Allies out of the city. Instead of retreating, however, the United States and its allies supplied their sectors of the city from the air. This effort, known as the Berlin Airlift, lasted for more than a year and delivered more than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel and other goods to West Berlin. The Soviets called off the blockade in 1949.

Did you know? On October 22, 1961, a quarrel between an East German border guard and an American official on his way to the opera in East Berlin very nearly led to what one observer called "a nuclear-age equivalent of the Wild West Showdown at the O.K. Corral." That day, American and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie for 16 hours. Photographs of the confrontation are some of the most familiar and memorable images of the Cold War.

After a decade of relative calm, tensions flared again in 1958. For the next three years, the Soviets-emboldened by the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite the year before during the " Space Race " and embarrassed by the seemingly endless flow of refugees from east to west (nearly 3 million since the end of the blockade, many of them young skilled workers such as doctors, teachers and engineers)-blustered and made threats, while the Allies resisted. Summits, conferences and other negotiations came and went without resolution.

Meanwhile, the flood of refugees continued. In June 1961, some 19,000 people left the GDR through Berlin. The following month, 30,000 fled. In the first 11 days of August, 16,000 East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin, and on August 12 some 2,400 followed-the largest number of defectors ever to leave East Germany in a single day.

The Berlin Wall: Building the Wall

That night, Premier Khrushchev gave the East German government permission to stop the flow of emigrants by closing its border for good. In just two weeks, the East German army, police force and volunteer construction workers had completed a makeshift barbed wire and concrete block wall -the Berlin Wall-that divided one side of the city from the other.

Before the wall was built, Berliners on both sides of the city could move around fairly freely: They crossed the East-West border to work, to shop, to go to the theater and the movies. Trains and subway lines carried passengers back and forth. After the wall was built, it became impossible to get from East to West Berlin except through one of three checkpoints: at Helmstedt ("Checkpoint Alpha" in American military parlance), at Dreilinden ("Checkpoint Bravo") and in the center of Berlin at Friedrichstrasse ("Checkpoint Charlie"). (Eventually, the GDR built 12 checkpoints along the wall.) At each of the checkpoints, East German soldiers screened diplomats and other officials before they were allowed to enter or leave. Except under special circumstances, travelers from East and West Berlin were rarely allowed across the border.

The Berlin Wall: 1961-1989

The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin. (Though he was not happy about it, President John F. Kennedy conceded that "a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.") Almost two years after the Berlin Wall was erected, John F. Kennedy delivered one of the most famous addresses of his presidency to a crowd of more than 120,000 gathered outside West Berlin's city hall, just steps from the Brandenburg Gate. Kennedy's speech has been largely remembered for one particular phrase. "I am a Berliner."

In all, at least 171 people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall. Escape from East Germany was not impossible, however: From 1961 until the wall came down in 1989, more than 5,000 East Germans (including some 600 border guards) managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds.

The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall

On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin's Communist Party announced a change in his city's relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country's borders. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting "Tor auf!" ("Open the gate!"). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints.

More than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration that was, one journalist wrote, "the greatest street party in the history of the world." People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall-they became known as "mauerspechte," or "wall woodpeckers"-while cranes and bulldozers pulled down section after section. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since 1945. "Only today," one Berliner spray-painted on a piece of the wall, "is the war really over."

The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

HISTORY Vault: Declassified: Rise and Fall of the Wall

Mine formerly guarded vaults and archives around the world to reveal untold stories about the brutal life and catastrophic death of the Berlin Wall, a central symbol of the 20th century's longest and deadliest war.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of East Germany began to build a barbed wire and concrete "Antifascistischer Schutzwall," or "antifascist bulwark," between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of the Berlin Wall was to keep Western "fascists" from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West.

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You Will Love History

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What was the Berlin Wall and how did it fall?

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At the end of the Second World War, Germany was divided into four zones of occupation under the control of the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union.

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Answer the Questions

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From Don't Know Much About History

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The rise and fall of the Berlin Wall - Konrad H. Jarausch

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GCSE History Link

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3: GCSE History - the Cuban Missile Crisis

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Answer the Questions

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Answer the Questions

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truman and eisenhower foreign policy chart

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truman and eisenhower foreign policy chart

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Khan Academy

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Korean War overview | The 20th century | World history | Khan Academy

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The Korean War | American Experience | PBS

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Race for the Superbomb | Article

The Korean War provided the first confrontation between two nuclear powers. And as the war progressed the conflict demonstrated how difficult it would be for either side to use atomic bombs decisively in battle.

With her brother on her back a war weary Korean girl tiredly trudges by a stalled M-26 tank, at Haengju, Korea. 6/9/1951, Library of Congress

The war broke out on June 25, 1950 when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel, invading South Korea. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung launched the attack once he had received a promise of support from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. In January 1950, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson haddelivered a speech in which he said South Korea and Taiwan were not part of the American "defensive perimeter," which seemed to indicate the U.S. would keep out of a Korean conflict. And it's clear that Stalin only agreed to support the invasion after being convinced the U.S. would not get involved.

However, Acheson's comments were misleading. The United States reacted to the news of the invasion by immediately taking steps to convene the United Nations Security Council. On June 27th the Security Council asked UN members to provide military assistance to help South Korea repel the invasion. U.S. forces went in on June 30th, by which time the North Koreans had taken the South Korean capital of Seoul. On September 15th, a UN force landed at Inchon and by September 29th, the UN troops had returned Seoul to the South Korean President. But by the end of the year the Chinese had intervened on behalf of the North Koreans halting the UN advance.

While the U.S. Strategic Air Command was well prepared to launch an all-out attack against the Soviet Union, it was less clear how it could use atomic weapons in a limited conflict like Korea. On August 1, 1950, the "decision was made to send the 9th Bomb Wing to Guam as an atomic task force immediately." Ten B-29s, loaded with unarmed atomic bombs, set out for the Pacific. On August 5, one of the planes crashed during take off from Fairfield-Suisun Air Force base near San Francisco, killing a dozen people and scattering the mildly radioactive uranium of the bomb's tamper around the airfield. The other planes reached Guam where they went on standby duty.

At a press conference on November 30, President Truman confirmed that he had been actively considering using atomic bombs in Korea since the beginning of the war. The comments provoked worldwide reaction and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee rushed to Washington to express his concern. Truman reluctantly reassured him that the U.S. had "no intention" of using atomic weapons in Korea except to prevent a "major military disaster."

So while President Truman tried to use his atomic superiority to the United States' advantage in North Korea he was never able to. Ultimately, it was not even clear that atomic bombing in a war against peasant armies would produce decisive results. If the Americans used the bomb and the Chinese forces kept on coming, it would demonstrate the bomb's ineffectiveness and reduce its deterrent effect in other arenas.

The war ended up being a see-saw affair that saw the UN forces retreat from North Korea to the Pusan perimeter in southeastern Korean and then forge forward again across the 38th parallel only to be driven south once more by the Chinese forces. In July 1951 after 13 months of fighting the two sides began armistice talks, which dragged on for more than two years. After Stalin's death in March 1953, the new leadership in Moscow moved more rapidly towards reaching an agreement. The cease-fire was ultimately signed on July 27, 1953.

The human cost of the war was catastrophic. In the first month of their operation alone, the Strategic Air Command groups dropped 4,000 tons of bombs. Besides high explosives, the bombers used napalm. In retirement, Curtis LeMay described the devastation saying, "we eventually burned down every town in North Korea... and some in South Korea too. We even burned down [the South Korean city of] Pusan -- an accident, but we burned it down anyway." Estimates of the casualties vary widely, but there is reason to believe that besides the three and a half million military dead, wounded and missing on both sides, more than two million civilians died in North Korea. In the end the border dividing the two countries remained exactly where it had been before the North Korean invasion.

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The Korean War | American Experience | PBS

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The Korean War provided the first confrontation between two nuclear powers. And as the war progressed the conflict demonstrated how difficult it would be for either side to use atomic bombs decisively in battle.

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Korean War | Combatants, Summary, Years, Map, Casualties, & Facts | Britannica

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The Korean War was a conflict (1950–53) between North Korea, aided by China, and South Korea, aided by the UN with the U.S. as the principal participant. At least 2.5 million people lost their lives in the fighting, which ended in July 1953 with Korea still divided into two hostile states separated by the 38th parallel.

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What Was the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan?

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From Don't Know Much About History

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Magnificent Storyteller Soldier Reveals What He Saw In Vietnam

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BBC

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Sixty years ago this week, French troops were defeated by Vietnamese forces at Dien Bien Phu. As historian Julian Jackson explains, it was a turning point in the history of both nations, and in the Cold War - and a battle where some in the US appear to have contemplated the use of nuclear weapons.

"Would you like two atomic bombs?" These are the words that a senior French diplomat remembered US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asking the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, in April 1954. The context of this extraordinary offer was the critical plight of the French army fighting the nationalist forces of Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu in the highlands of north-west Vietnam.

The battle of Dien Bien Phu is today overshadowed by the later involvement of the Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s. But for eight years between 1946 and 1954 the French had fought their own bloody war to hold on to their Empire in the Far East. After the seizure of power by the Communists in China in 1949, this colonial conflict had become a key battleground of the Cold War. The Chinese provided the Vietnamese with arms and supplies while most of the costs of the French war effort were borne by America. But it was French soldiers who were fighting and dying. By 1954, French forces in Indochina totalled over 55,000.

Find out more

Listen to The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, written and presented by Julian Jackson on the BBC iPlayer

At the end of 1953, French commander in chief Gen Navarre had decided to set up a fortified garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, in the highlands about 280 miles from the northern capital of Hanoi. The valley was surrounded by rings of forested hills and mountains. The position was defensible providing the French could hold on to the inner hills and keep their position supplied through the airstrip. What they underestimated was the capacity of the Vietnamese to amass artillery behind the hills. This equipment was transported by tens of thousands of labourers - many of them women and children - carrying material hundreds of miles through the jungle day and night. On 13 March the Vietnamese unleashed a massive barrage of artillery and within two days two of the surrounding hills had been taken, and the airstrip was no longer usable. The French defenders were now cut off and the noose tightened around them.

It was this critical situation which led the French to appeal in desperation for US help. The most hawkish on the American aide were Vice-President Richard Nixon, who had no political power, and Admiral Radford, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Also quite hawkish was the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was obsessed by the crusade against Communism. More reserved was President Eisenhower who nonetheless gave a press conference in early April where he proclaimed the infamous "domino theory" about the possible spread of Communism from one country to another.

"You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly," he said. "So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."

Saturday 3 April 1954 has gone down in American history as "the day we didn't go to war". On that day Dulles met Congressional leaders who were adamant they would not support any military intervention unless Britain was also involved. Eisenhower sent a letter to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warning of the consequences for the West if Dien Bien Phu fell. It was around this time, at a meeting in Paris, that Dulles supposedly made his astonishing offer to the French of tactical nuclear weapons.

In fact, Dulles was never authorised to make such an offer and there is no hard evidence that he did so. It seems possible that in the febrile atmosphere of those days the panic-stricken French may simply have misunderstood him. Or his words may have got lost in translation.

"He didn't really offer. He made a suggestion and asked a question. He uttered the two fatal words 'nuclear bomb'," Maurice Schumann, a former foreign minister, said before his death in 1998. "Bidault immediately reacted as if he didn't take this offer seriously."

According to Professor Fred Logevall of Cornell University, Dulles "at least talked in very general terms about the possibility, what did the French think about potentially using two or three tactical nuclear weapons against these enemy positions".

Bidault declined, he says, "because he knew... that if this killed a lot of Viet Minh troops then it would also basically destroy the garrison itself".

More from the Magazine

When France lost control of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos nearly 60 years ago, hundreds of people who had served the French colonial system - and were at risk of persecution - were rehoused in a disused army camp in south-west France. It was meant to be a temporary home, but some are still there.
The exiles in 'temporary' homes for 50 years (February 2012)
In the end, there was no American intervention of any kind, as the British refused to go along with it.

The last weeks of the battle of Dien Bien Phu were atrociously gruelling. The ground turned to mud once the monsoon began, and men clung to craters and ditches in conditions reminiscent of the battle of Verdun in 1916. On 7 May 1954, after a 56-day siege, the French army surrendered. Overall on the French side there were 1,142 dead, 1,606 disappeared, 4,500 more or less badly wounded. Vietnamese casualties ran to 22,000.
Listen to Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook The Siege of Dien Bien Phu written and presented by Julian Jackson on the BBC iPlayer
In this year marked by two other major anniversaries - the centenary of the outbreak of World War One and the 70th anniversary of D-Day - we should not forget this other battle that took place 60 years ago. In the history of decolonisation it was the only time a professional European army was decisively defeated in a pitched battle. It marked the end of the French Empire in the Far East, and provided an inspiration to other anti-colonial fighters. It was no coincidence also that a few weeks later a violent rebellion broke out in French Algeria - the beginning of another bloody and traumatic war that was to last eight years. The French army held so desperately on to Algeria partly to redeem the honour it felt had been lost at Dien Bien Phu. So obsessed did the army become by this idea that in 1958 it backed a putsch against the government, which it believed was preparing what the generals condemned as a "diplomatic Dien Bien Phu". This putsch brought back to power Gen de Gaulle who set up the new presidential regime that exists in France today. So the ripples of Dien Bien Phu are still being felt.

It was also in 1954 that France began working on its own independent nuclear deterrent.

For the Vietnamese, however, Dien Bien Phu, was only the first round. The Americans, who had refused to become directly involved in 1954, were gradually sucked into war - the second Vietnam War - during the 1960s.

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Sixty years ago this week, French troops were defeated by Vietnamese forces at Dien Bien Phu. As historian Julian Jackson explains, it was a turning point in the history of both nations, and in the Cold War - and a battle where some in the US appear to have contemplated the use of nuclear weapons.

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You Will Love History

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You Will Love History

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The Need

Europe was devastated by years of conflict during World War II. Millions of people had been killed or wounded. Industrial and residential centers in England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Belgium and elsewhere lay in ruins. Much of Europe was on the brink of famine as agricultural production had been disrupted by war. Transportation infrastructure was in shambles. The only major power in the world that was not significantly damaged was the United States.

Aid to Europe

From 1945 through 1947, the United States was already assisting European economic recovery with direct financial aid. Military assistance to Greece and Turkey was being given. The newly formed United Nations was providing humanitarian assistance. In January 1947, U. S. President Harry Truman appointed George Marshall, the architect of victory during WWII, to be Secretary of State. In just a few months the State Department, under his leadership, with expertise provided by George Kennan, William Clayton and others crafted the Marshall Plan concept, which George Marshall shared with the world in a speech on June 5, 1947, at Harvard University. Read more

Interviews with individuals whose work related to ECA, State Department officials and Congressional Testimonies.

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Europe was devastated by years of conflict during World War II. Millions of people had been killed or wounded. Industrial and residential centers in England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Belgium and elsewhere lay in ruins. Much of Europe was on the brink of famine as agricultural production had been disrupted by war.

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Here's How the Truman Doctrine Established the Cold War | History

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Khan Academy

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Vietnam War | The 20th century | World history | Khan Academy

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Welcome

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LBJ's War is a podcast that tells the story of LBJ's fall from grace in the voices of those who were there. Subscribe now to listen to the premier on September 5!

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Episode 1

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"They started with me on Diem," LBJ told an old friend, "that he was corrupt, and he ought to be killed. So, we killed him." Not quite true, it turns out, but the brutal assassination of South Vietnam's President Diem, just three weeks before JFK met the same fate in Dallas, would cast a long shadow over the Johnson presidency, and shape LBJ's thinking on the war. 1963.

Featured commentator: Ed Miller, author of Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam and Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College

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"They started with me on Diem," LBJ told an old friend, "that he was corrupt, and he ought to be killed. So, we killed him." Not quite true, it turns out, but the brutal assassination of South Vietnam's President Diem, just three weeks before JFK met the same fate in Dallas, would cast a long shadow over the Johnson presidency, and shape LBJ's thinking on the war.

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Episode 2

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Credit:

LBJ Library photo by Cecil Stoughton

Twice in six weeks, in the late summer of 1964, U.S. destroyers reported they were under unprovoked attack, by North Vietnamese PT boats, while on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin. The first incident produced a massive airstrike in retaliation, and three days later, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which changed the course of the Vietnam War. The second attack produced...no response at all. Did Lyndon Johnson learn something along the way?

Featured commentator: Chris Appy, author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides and Professor of History at UMass Amherst.

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Twice in six weeks, in the late summer of 1964, U.S. destroyers reported they were under unprovoked attack, by North Vietnamese PT boats, while on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin. The first incident produced a massive airstrike in retaliation, and three days later, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which changed the course of the Vietnam War.

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What Really Happened in the Gulf of Tonkin

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What Really Happened in the Gulf of Tonkin

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On Tuesday morning, Aug. 4, 1964, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara called President Lyndon Johnson with a report about a possible confrontation brewing in southeast Asia.

"Mr. President, we've just had a report from the commander of that task force out there ... The report is that they have observed - and we don't know by what means - two unidentified vessels and three unidentified prop aircraft in the vicinity of the destroyers," McNamara told the president.
Related: LBJ knew the Vietnam War was a disaster in the making. Here's why he couldn't walk away.
Forty-eight hours earlier, on Aug. 2, two US destroyers on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin - the Maddox and the Turner Joy - were attacked by North Vietnamese boats. Unlike much else that followed, this incident is undisputed, although no one from the US government ever admitted publicly that the attack was likely provoked by its covert actions.

No one was hurt and little damage was done in the attack, but intercepted cables suggested a second attack might be imminent. McNamara was ready to respond.

LBJ's War is a new, limited-edition podcast that unearths previously unheard audio that helps us better understand the course of the Vietnam War and how Lyndon Johnson found himself where he did.

"We have ample forces to respond not only to these attacks on these destroyers but also to retaliate, should you wish to do so, against targets on the land," he told the president.

Unlike McNamara, Johnson, on the morning of Aug. 4, 1964, was in less of a hurry to respond to an attack. Any escalation in the bombing of the North risked provoking the Russians or, more likely, the Chinese. Both countries were backing North Vietnam, but so far they were staying out of the conflict and the White House wanted to keep it that way.

But only a few minutes later, McNamara was back on the line with news of a second incident in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Listen to McNamara's conversation with Johnson.
Over the next 12 hours, as the president's team scrambled to understand what had happened and to organize a response, the facts remained elusive. Around midday on Aug. 4, Adm. Grant Sharp, the top navy commander in the Pacific, made a call to the Joint Chiefs, and it was clear there were significant doubts about this second incident. He read the chiefs a cable from the captain of the Maddox.
Listen to that cable.
As it turns out, Adm. Sharp failed to read to the Joint Chiefs the last line of the cable, which read: "Suggest a complete evaluation before any further actions."

Despite this tremendous uncertainty, by midafternoon, the discussion among Johnson and his advisers was no longer about whether to respond but how.

In a conversation with McNamara on Aug. 3, after the first incident, Johnson indicated he had already thought about the political ramifications of a military response and had consulted with several allies.

"The people who are calling me up, they want to be damned sure I don't pull 'em out and run, and they want to be damned sure that we're firm. That's what all the country wants, because Goldwater's raising so much hell about how he's gonna blow 'em off the moon, and they say that we oughtn't to do anything that the national interest doesn't require. But we sure ought to always leave the impression that if you shoot at us, you're going to get hit," Johnson said.

It was 1964, an election year, and the Republicans had just nominated Barry Goldwater, a former jet fighter pilot, and hardcore hawk, to run against Johnson in November.

Through the evening of Aug. 4, while no new information arrived to clarify the event in the Gulf, the White House narrative was firmly in place. "We're going to retaliate and we'll make an announcement a little later in the evening, in the next hour or so and we'll ask Congress for a resolution of war the next day to support us," Johnson told an old friend.

That night, on national television, Johnson addressed the American people, saying, "Renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to take action and reply. Our response, for the present, will be limited and fitting. We still seek no wider war."

And so, in the course of a single day, and operating on imperfect information, Johnson changed the trajectory of the Vietnam War.

Two days later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution sailed through both houses of Congress by a vote of 504 to 2.

"LBJ was looking for a pretext to go to Congress to ask for a resolution that would give him the authority to do basically whatever the hell he wanted to do in Vietnam, without the intense public debate that a declaration of war would have required," says historian Chris Oppe.

"But, to me, the more pernicious deception was this idea that American ships were sailing innocently in the Gulf of Tonkin and were attacked without provocation," he continues. "In fact, the United States had been waging a small, secret war against North Vietnam since 1961. In the days leading up to the first incident of August 2nd, those secret operations had intensified."

In a conversation with Johnson, McNamara confirmed this, with a reference to OP-CON 34A, a covert operation against the North Vietnamese.
Listen to that exchange.
So, whether by accident or design, American actions in the Tonkin Gulf triggered a response from the North Vietnamese, not the other way around.

Historians still disagree over whether Johnson deliberately misled Congress and the American people about the Tonkin Gulf incident or simply capitalized on an opportunity that came his way. But, interestingly, on Sept. 18, a similar incident occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin. This time, however, President Johnson reacted much more skeptically and ultimately decided to take no retaliatory action.

Two nearly identical episodes six weeks apart; two nearly opposite responses. Did Johnson learn something from the first experience?

"I would not suggest that he learned from the Gulf of Tonkin incident so much as that he got from it exactly what he wanted, which was an enormous bump in approval ratings - 30 percent overnight," says historian Chris Oppe.

"One of the great ironies of the Gulf of Tonkin incident for President Johnson is that it was for him, politically, a great success," he continues. "It set a very terrible precedent, which is that he would go on to escalate further, not with any striking confidence that his objectives will be achieved, but only with the assurance that, unless he embarked on these massive military escalations, America would fail in Vietnam and he might well be labeled the only president in American history to lose a war."
This article is based on the PRI podcast, LBJ's War, hosted by David Brown. Subscribe to LBJ's War on Apple Podcasts.

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What really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964?

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Historians still argue about what exactly happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in August of 1964. What's not in dispute is the aftermath: A resolution from the Senate passed by a vote of 98 to 2 authorizing President Lyndon Johnson to use whatever force he thought he needed against North Vietnam.

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Episode 3

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Credit:

LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

By the spring of 1965, pressure is building on President Johnson to make his case for the war to the American electorate. He resists, preferring to manage the conflict without public scrutiny, but finally agrees to go public, in a speech at Johns Hopkins University. The strategy behind the speech: a little something for everybody. A look at how that strategy works out, and what it reveals about LBJ's congenital bias for secrecy.

Featured commentator: Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam and Professor of History and International Affairs at Harvard University.

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By the spring of 1965, pressure is building on President Johnson to make his case for the war to the American electorate. He resists, preferring to manage the conflict without public scrutiny, but finally agrees to go public, in a speech at Johns Hopkins University. The strategy behind the speech: a little something for everybody.

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On April 7, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to the American public about the escalating conflict in Vietnam.

"We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure," he told the American people.

Through 1964, an election year, LBJ had largely succeeded in keeping Vietnam under the radar, but in the spring of 1965, pressure was building on the president to explain his Vietnam policy to the nation.

"In early April 1965, I think he is getting it from both sides," says Vietnam scholar Fredrik Logevall. On one side were Johnson's key advisers on the war - Robert McNamara at defense, Dean Rusk at state and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy - who all favored expanding the US commitment.

"That [made] a big impression on Lyndon Johnson. I think we also have to acknowledge his personal insecurities when it comes to foreign policy, and his belief that if he's perceived as 'tucking tail and running,' as he would put it, he'll be thought of as somehow lesser of a man, lesser of a politician, lesser of a leader than he would have otherwise," Logevall says.

On the other side were many members of Congress, allied governments and leading voices in the American press, all of whom opposed further escalation. One of Johnson's mentors, Georgia Sen. Richard Russell, had also strongly warned Johnson in mid-1964 about the perils of remaining in the conflict in Vietnam.
Listen to his comments:
A year earlier, Johnson had confided his own doubts to Bundy: "I just stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, and the more that I think of it, I don't know what in the hell - it looks like to me that we're getting into another Korea," Johnson told Bundy. "It just worries the hell out of me. ... I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out, and it's just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw."
Listen to their conversation:
In the spring of 1965, Johnson was warned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who supported a military buildup, that the war would take at least five years and 500,000 troops. "He knew from them that it was going to get worse before it gets better," Logevall says. "This [was] going to cost a lot of lives."

So, why did Johnson opt for continued escalation?

Logevall believes that Johnson feared more the political implications of getting out than he did the implications of going deeper in.

Harry McPherson, LBJ's top speechwriter and aide, agreed: "The real question [was] whether you would ever have been able to get a domestic legislative program - a liberal program - through if you had let South Vietnam go down the drain. Harry Truman found out what it was like to be 'soft on Communists' and to try to push a domestic legislative program of a liberal stripe through the Congress: instinctive, violent reaction, "soft on Communists, social welfare legislation, socialists," et cetera. That was an old experience of Johnson's."

From the other direction, Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was warning Johnson that escalating the war would imperil the social and civil rights legislation Johnson so badly wanted.

So, Johnson tried to thread the needle, using an incremental, ambiguous approach to the buildup, which edged the country ever deeper into a faraway war without quite acknowledging it.

Johnson accomplished this, in part, by offering a "carrot instead of a stick," as his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, put it in her daily White House diary.

"I would hope to initiate as soon as possible with the countries of that area, a plan for cooperation and increased development," he announced in his April speech. "On our part, I will ask the Congress to join in a billion-dollar American investment in this effort as soon as it is underway."

A billion dollars is still a lot of money, but back then it was worth even more - about the same as $8 billion today.

As a young congressman in the 1930s and 1940s, Johnson had first made his mark by bringing electricity to rural parts of Texas. He knew firsthand how useful the electrification projects could be for rural communities. When he visited Vietnam in 1961, he saw a parallel between rural communities in Texas and those in Vietnam. He thought he could do for the Vietnamese farm workers what he had done so many years earlier for the rural poor in Texas.

"The task," Johnson said, "is nothing less than to enrich the hopes and the existence of more than 100 million people. The vast Mekong River can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA," referencing the Tennessee Valley Authority, a Depression-era program that aimed to build infrastructure and give people jobs.

"He really did think that a kind of 'TVA on the Mekong' was something that America could bring to the Vietnamese, but I don't believe that the complexities of Asian history and Asian thought ever came through to him," said his press secretary George Reedy.

In the end, Johnson's speech was neither the game-changer that the White House might have hoped, nor the disaster Johnson himself likely feared. Public support for the war remained where it had been, above 60 percent, and would stay there for some time to come.

As for the president's billion-dollar Mekong Delta dream, it never had a chance.

"I think the tragedy is that that side of Johnson, if you will, never won out," Logevall says. "[He] never could overcome the sense he had, which was, 'I've got to prevail here. I've got to keep South Vietnam alive, whatever it takes, and if that means sending American troops, if that means massive aerial bombardment of not only enemy-held areas in South Vietnam and portions of North Vietnam, but also bombing in Cambodia and Laos, I'm going to do it.' That motivation won out in the end."
This article is based on the podcast LBJ's War, hosted by David Brown.

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The carrot and the stick: LBJ addresses the nation on the conflict in Vietnam

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In an April 1965 address to the nation, President Lyndon Johnson laid out his argument for expanding US involvement in Vietnam. From archival audio, we now know that Johnson had believed for at least a year that the conflict was a disaster in the making.

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Episode 4

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Credit:

LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

For fifteen months, LBJ kept the country largely in the dark about the Vietnam War. Then, in February '66, the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and its chairman William Fulbright, administered a strong dose of sunlight.

Featured commentator: Marc Selverstone, Associate Professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center and chair of the Center's Presidential Recordings Program.

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For fifteen months, LBJ kept the country largely in the dark about the Vietnam War. Then, in February '66, the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and its chairman William Fulbright, administered a strong dose of sunlight. Featured commentator: Marc Selverstone, Associate Professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center and chair of the Center's Presidential Recordings Program.

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How did Lyndon Johnson, one of the most gifted political figures of his time, lose his way in a war he didn't start and didn't end?

Many historians believe that the November 1963 coup that brought down South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem was the event that started Johnson slogging through the morass that became the Vietnam War.

At this point, Johnson was still vice president and, ironically, as far as historians can tell, had not taken part in any high-level discussions about whether the US should support a coup.

"By 1963, he had been more or less cut out of Vietnam policy and of foreign affairs in general," says Dartmouth College history professor Ed Miller. "President Kennedy really didn't trust Johnson and so, therefore, Johnson didn't have a major role in most of the meetings that took place on Vietnam in 1963."

LBJ's War is a new, limited-edition podcast that unearths previously unheard audio that helps us better understand the course of the Vietnam War and how Lyndon Johnson found himself where he did.

The coup that Kennedy had expected only to topple Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, instead ended with their brutal execution. Kennedy made his feelings clear about this in a memo he recorded at the time.

"I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of early Aug. in which we suggested the coup - in my judgment, a wire that was badly drafted," he said.
Listen to Kennedy's personal memo.
"The Aug. 24 cable is the moment at which US policy towards the Diem government changes," Ed Miller says.

Until then, US policy had been strong support for Diem's government, Miller explains. As of Aug. 24, the policy shifted to "'if there is an opportunity to promote a coup, which we think has a good chance of success, then we will support that,'" he says.

Three weeks after he dictated his November memo, Kennedy would meet the same fate in Dallas that President Diem had met in Saigon, and the troubling question of what to do about Vietnam would pass to Lyndon Johnson. And trouble wasn't long in coming.

"Within a few months after the coup, the South Vietnamese government began to come apart at the seams," Miller says. "There was another coup in Jan. of 1964 [and] the Vietcong make huge gains in the countryside."

"It doesn't take very long to come to the conclusion that we were dealing with an absolute sinking ship," recalls Paul Kattenberg, the State Department's leading Vietnam watcher at the time. Prior to the coup, he'd been sent to Vietnam to investigate and had met with Diem, whom he'd known for a decade, and with Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the US ambassador to South Vietnam.

The day after his return to the states, Kattenberg found himself part of a National Security Council discussion about the impending coup.

"It was technocratic talk, instead of real serious political thinking about how to handle this," Kattenberg says. "It would have been far better if we'd had a meeting of area experts who knew the region and knew the forces in contention."

Normally, a staffer of Kattenberg's junior rank wouldn't have spoken in such a high-level gathering, but he was just back from Saigon. He was asked for an assessment.

"I said that, all things being equal, maybe it would be better if we just left with honor. I really did think that, and I thought it more [as] the year went on," Kattenberg recalls.

Later, Kattenberg's remark would be remembered, even celebrated, within the foreign policy community as something of a profile in courage. But at the time of the meeting, the idea of an American withdrawal from Vietnam was, to many in the Kennedy administration, unthinkable.

"The first one, as I recall, to react to this was Johnson," Kattenberg says. "Johnson was very much a kind of a warrior type. He wasn't going to give up. [He thought], 'We haven't gone this far with this whole thing to give it up now.'"

Johnson took a "very dim view" of the coup, recalls Samuel Gammon, a mid-level State Department staffer at the time. "He said, 'This is cops and robbers stuff.' He felt the fact that we knew about it [meant] we obviously could have discouraged it and we should have discouraged it. Diem may have been a son-of-a-bitch, but he was our son-of-a-bitch."

"One of the greatest mistakes that this country ever made was when we encouraged the South Vietnamese to assassinate this president," Johnson said in a private recording made when he was long out of office.
Listen to Johnson's recording.
Johnson's distress over the murder of Diem was personal as well as political. The two men had met in May of 1961 when Kennedy sent Johnson to Asia.

"Right from the outset, Diem and Johnson took a liking to each other," Miller says. "Johnson, especially in public, was not just complimentary but effusive about Ngo Dinh Diem."

In his private recording, Johnson notes that he told Diem he needed "to rise to the occasion and provide the same quality of leadership that Churchill [had]. ... It makes no difference whether it's a fascist aggressor or a communist aggressor, you people have got to stand up here and show some steel [and] not be the Chamberlains of your time. Be the Churchills of your time."

Listen to Johnson's recording.

After Diem's execution and JFK's assassination, Johnson appears to have internalized the message he had communicated in his pep talk to Diem. As Churchill had stood up to aggression in Western Europe, it now fell to him, he seemed to believe, to do the same in Asia.

Ultimately, this deep, almost visceral, need to "show some steel," to be Churchill the warrior rather than Chamberlain the appeaser, would paint the president into a terrible corner - knowing the war was a disaster in the making, but unable or unwilling to walk away.
This article is based on the PRI podcast, LBJ's War, hosted by David Brown. Subscribe to LBJ's War on Apple Podcasts.

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LBJ knew the Vietnam War was a disaster in the making. Here's why he couldn't walk away.

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The Vietnam War was a searing event in the history of the US. According to rarely heard audio recordings, President Lyndon Johnson expressed great misgivings about getting deeply involved in the conflict, but at every crucial juncture made the decision to do so. This series examines how and why that happened.

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In February of 1966, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened a series of public hearings to question a range of experts on the progress of the Vietnam War.

The committee had held hearings before on Vietnam, but never in a televised, open session. On the rare occasions when the president had spoken of it, he had been less than forthcoming about what he knew and what he was doing.

These hearings began to part the curtains. Improbably, they became a national event and, for Lyndon Johnson, an unwelcome challenge to his conduct of the war. That they were presided over by Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, probably the most famous senator of his time and at one point a close ally of Johnson's, made them even harder for the president to tolerate.

"The most proximate reason that the hearings took place was Lyndon Johnson's decision to resume bombing North Vietnam," says historian Marc Selverstone.
Related: The carrot and the stick: LBJ addresses the nation on the conflict in Vietnam
In December 1965, Johnson had reluctantly instituted a bombing pause. He had been encouraged to do so by a number of his closest advisers, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. By the end of 1965, Selverstone says, McNamara was increasingly dubious about America's ability to prevail militarily in Southeast Asia.

The president shared McNamara's desire to bring North Vietnam to the conference table but was unpersuaded that a bombing halt would achieve that objective.

"Johnson [feared] that a bombing pause would only allow North Vietnam to infiltrate more men into South Vietnam," Selverstone says, "and he [recognized] that he [was] going to get incredible heat from conservatives, as well as from the military, the longer this pause [continued]."

After 37 days, the president decided to resume the bombing and sent Gen. Maxwell Taylor to the Hill to try to get Congress and the public behind the decision.

"The Hanoi leadership is not yet convinced that it must mend its ways," Taylor told the committee. "They doubt the will of the American public to continue the conflict indefinitely. Until it becomes perfectly clear to them that we are going to stay on course, regardless of anything they do, I'm afraid we're not likely to see them at a conference table."

LBJ had come to see the hearings as a direct and dangerous assault on his conduct of the war. He defended his actions by repeatedly citing the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the president what he considered virtual free reign to prosecute the war as he saw fit.
Listen to Johnson tell Louisiana Sen. Russell Long how to use the Tonkin Resolution to defend his administration.
Congress had passed the resolution 18 months earlier by an overwhelming majority. But William Fulbright, by this point, had begun to understand that he and the entire Congress had been duped.

Today, most scholars believe the alleged attack on American destroyers that President Johnson used to secure the Tonkin Resolution never happened. Doubts about the White House account began to surface soon after, but Congress had already passed the far-reaching resolution, thanks in no small part to a key endorsement from Fulbright.

"I believed what we were told about it in the committee," Fulbright said. "No one had the skepticism that is essential, I've since discovered. We accepted it. I had no feeling that there would be a disposition to misrepresent what actually happened."

As more intelligence began to emerge about what transpired in the Gulf of Tonkin, and about the conduct of the war itself, Fullbright's attitude changed dramatically.

"I felt that I had been taken," Fulbright said. "They weren't trying to stop the war at all; they were trying to win it. What his motives were and what moved him to pursue that policy has always been a mystery to me. I tried what best I could to persuade him not to."

When Fulbright realized he could not influence Johnson personally, he decided the only hope "would be then to take it public and to have a public discussion of it."

Johnson was enraged. He viewed Fulbright's behavior as unpatriotic and disloyal - and, for Johnson, "being disloyal was probably the highest crime there was," Selverstone says.

The hearings marked the end of Fulbright's influence with Johnson.

"He struck him from the White House invitation list. They never had a personal relationship again," Selverstone says. "They went through the motions to some degree ... but it was the end of their close association. It was the end of their friendship."

In the short term, the hearings did little to change policy. American troops continued to flow into South Vietnam. About 400,000 troops would be in Vietnam by the end of 1966. Johnson would, in fact, intensify the bombing.

On the other hand, Selverstone says, the hearings legitimized public dissent. America began to have a conversation about Vietnam that they hadn't had before. By August 1967, a plurality of Americans came to believe that the war was a mistake. That shift in public opinion began with the Fulbright hearings of February 1966.
Read more on LBJ and the Vietnam War: What really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964? and LBJ knew the Vietnam War was a disaster in the making. Here's why he couldn't walk away. Correction: The caption for this story originally stated that Wayne Morse was the only senator to oppose a congressional resolution giving President Lyndon Johnson wide latitude to prosecute the war in Vietnam. Sen. Ernest Gruening also opposed the resolution. This article is based on the PRI podcast, LBJ's War, hosted by David Brown. Subscribe to LBJ's War on Apple Podcasts.

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The 1966 Fulbright hearings on Vietnam parted the curtains on President Johnson's conduct of the war

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In February of 1966, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened a series of public hearings to question a range of experts on the progress of the Vietnam War. The committee had held hearings before on Vietnam, but never in a televised, open session.

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Episode 5

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Credit:

LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

"I'll try to be worthy of your hopes," LBJ told Martin Luther King, just days into his presidency, and for the next two years, largely made good on that vow. Dr. King, for his part, recognized their common goal - racial and economic justice - and threw his own considerable weight behind it, until finally, the war in Vietnam made it impossible to do so any longer. A look back at the 1967 speech that broke their bond forever.

Featured commentator: Clayborne Carson, Professor of American History at Stanford University and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute.

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"I'll try to be worthy of your hopes," LBJ told Martin Luther King, just days into his presidency, and for the next two years, largely made good on that vow. Dr. King, for his part, recognized their common goal - racial and economic justice - and threw his own considerable weight behind it, until finally, the war in Vietnam made it impossible to do so any longer.

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In early April 1967, an influential voice was raised for the first time in opposition to the Vietnam War: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr..

"I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam," King said. "The world now demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam. In order to atone for our sins, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war."
Listen to King's entire speech here
For the 3,000 anti-war faithful who jammed into New York's majestic Riverside Church to hear King speak, his decision to break his long public silence on Vietnam was cause for celebration. For King, the decision was fraught with political danger.

LBJ's War is a new, limited-edition podcast that unearths previously unheard audio that helps us better understand the course of the Vietnam War and how Lyndon Johnson found himself where he did.

Whatever his private misgivings about the war, taking them public risked antagonizing President Lyndon Johnson, the architect of that war and the man who had done more for the cause of racial and economic justice than any president since Abraham Lincoln.

Andrew Young, a confidant and close aide to King, said in a 1970 interview: "Dr. King was always very optimistic about President Johnson. ... I think we thought that here was a guy who could get things done, who knew the legislative machinery of the government. Dr. King used to always say that if a Southerner ever really gets converted, then there's no better ally."

Recognizing what the new president could mean to the nation's poorest citizens, King was among the first to offer public support after the Dallas assassination put LBJ in the Oval Office.
Listen to their conversation here:
"Certainly, after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, King took him at his word that Johnson was going to go much farther than any other president, before or since, to try to implement programs that he thought were essential as part of his ministry," says historian Clayborne Carson.

For Johnson, striking the right political balance with Dr. King was a tricky proposition. By the summer of 1964, Johnson was already preparing to face Republican Barry Goldwater in the November election. While he needed King's behind-the-scenes help on the legislative agenda, too cozy an association in public could hurt him with the crucial white, Southern vote.

A recorded conversation between Johnson and his press secretary, George Reedy, revealed many years later Johnson's intense agitation with this situation:
Hear how LBJ sought to downplay his contact with King here:
As it happened, LBJ carried the black vote by huge margins and won the white vote as well, beating Goldwater by 23 points. King was among Johnson's first post-election thank you calls.
Listen to LBJ's post-election call to King here:
But in the spring of 1965, the first cracks began to appear in the Johnson-King alliance.

"The whole idea of paying for guns and butter at the same time: That becomes Johnson's dilemma," says Carson. "How is he going to afford the war abroad and the war against poverty at home at the same time?"

As LBJ ratcheted up the war, committing more troops and escalating the bombing of North Vietnam, the elephant in the room became too large to ignore. "We began to see very early that Vietnam was what it's now come to be," Jordan says. "We began to see that the crisis in the cities was demanding the funds that were now being diverted to Vietnam and that the domestic crisis was more dangerous and therefore more important to the country."

From 1965 through 1966, a long struggle ensued for the hearts and minds of the black community. Young says the Democratic Party even started organizing meetings against King's Southern Christian Leadership Council.

"They had a conference of preachers in Detroit. They pulled together all the Negro newspaper editors to support the administration's stand," Young explains. "We then had to do something to counteract that. So, the Johnson administration was pulling the preachers together one week and we pulled them together a month later and explained our side."

Young says by this time, King and his allies had lost faith in Johnson. They didn't doubt the sincerity of his commitment to civil rights, but they felt he had "gotten himself trapped and was basically blind to what was going on around him."

Young's summation of what happened to LBJ in Vietnam still seems valid today. Johnson had indeed gotten himself trapped: between those who wanted to end the war and those who sought to prosecute it more aggressively; between fear of igniting a larger conflict and fear of being the first president to lose a war; and between guns and butter.

"I was determined to be a leader of war and a leader of peace," LBJ told an interviewer not long before he died, "and I believed America had the resources to provide for both."

In this belief, Johnson proved mistaken - a miscalculation that would cost him and the country dearly.
This article is based on LBJ's War, a podcast hosted by David Brown.

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Martin Luther King's 1967 speech opposing the Vietnam War ended a historic partnership with Lyndon Johnson

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Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson worked together to achieve major civil rights victories in 1964 and 1965. But then the Vietnam War got in the way. King's public denunciation of the war was widely condemned, even by many in his own movement, and ruined his relationship with Johnson.

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Episode 6

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Credit:

LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

"Whammo,we got caught with our pants down," a CIA analyst says of the Tet Offensive, the massive surprise attack that North Vietnam launched against American and South Vietnamese forces in the pre-dawn hours of January 31st, 1968. Just what exactly happened and what it signified would take some time to sort out, but the message from Hanoi to the White House was immediate and unmistakeable: We will outlast you. In this final episode of the series: Tet '68 and its transformative impact on American understanding of the war.

Featured commentator: Lien-Hang Nguyen teaches history at Columbia University. Her published work includes Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam.

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"Whammo,we got caught with our pants down," a CIA analyst says of the Tet Offensive, the massive surprise attack that North Vietnam launched against American and South Vietnamese forces in the pre-dawn hours of January 31st, 1968.

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You Will Love History

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Vietnam War Summary – Why did the Vietnam War Start?

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Berlin Airlift - The Story Of A Great Achievement (1949)

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Propaganda

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The Building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 - Propaganda Documentary (1962)

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Jocz Productions

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Jocz Productions

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The Korean War - THE COLD WAR Turns Hot!

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Berlin Airlift and the Formation of NATO

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Berlin Airlift and the Formation of NATO

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JFK on the Cuban Missile Crisis - 1962  | Today in History | 22 Oct 16

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Truman Doctrine Speech

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American Rhetoric: Harry S. Truman - “The Truman Doctrine”

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Full text and audio mp3 of Harry S. Truman - “The Truman Doctrine”

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An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part.

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Primary Source

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An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part.

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Printable Version

The Truman Doctrine
Digital History ID 1235

Author: Harry S. Truman
Date:1947

Annotation: The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to providing aid to countries resisting communist aggression or subversion.

In February 1947, Britain informed the United States that it could not longer afford to provide aid to Greece and Turkey. The situation seemed urgent. The Greek monarchy was threatened by guerrilla warfare and the Soviet Union was seeking to control the Dardenelles in Turkey, a water route to the Mediterranean. The U.S. government feared that the loss of Greece and Turkey to communism would open Western Europe and Africa to Soviet influence. It also worried that if the Soviet Union gained control over the eastern Mediterranean, it could stop the flow of Middle Eastern oil.

President Truman responded decisively. He asked Congress for $400 military in economic and military aid for Greece and Turkey. This was an unprecedented amount of foreign aid during peacetime. He also declared that it was the policy of the United States "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to containing the influence of the Soviet Union and combatting the spread of communism.

Document: At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guaranties of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid, which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.

The world is not static, and the status quo is not sacred. But we cannot allow changes in the status quo in violation of the Charter of the United Nations by such methods as coercion, or by such subterfuges as political infiltration. In helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom, the United States will be giving effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. . . .

The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died.

We must keep that hope alive.

The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world-and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own Nation.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

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Printable Version The Truman Doctrine Digital History ID 1235 Author: Harry S. Truman Date:1947 Annotation: The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to providing aid to countries resisting communist aggression or subversion. In February 1947, Britain informed the United States that it could not longer afford to provide aid to Greece and Turkey.

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1. Drag the marker to wherever you'd like to target.

Note that you can drag the target marker after you have detonated the nuke.

Created by Alex Wellerstein, 2012-2023.
For more about the nuclear past and present, follow @wellerstein on Twitter, and read Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog.

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NUKEMAP is a mapping mash-up that calculates the effects of the detonation of a nuclear bomb.

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textbook

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John: Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course US History, and today we're going to talk about the Cold War. The Cold War is called "cold" because it supposedly never heated up into actual armed conflict. Which means, you know, that it wasn't a war.

Past John: Mr. Green, Mr. Green, but if the war on Christmas is a war and the war on drugs is a war...

Present John: You're not going to hear me say this often in your life, me from the past, but that was a good point. At least the Cold War was not an attempt to make war on a noun, which almost never works, because nouns are so resilient.

And to be fair, the Cold War did involve quite a lot of actual war, from Korea to Afghanistan as the world's two superpowers, the United States and the USSR, sought ideological and strategic influence throughout the world. So perhaps it's best to think of the Cold War as an era lasting roughly from 1945 to 1990.

Discussions of the Cold War tend to center on international and political history, and those are very important, which is why we've talked about them in the past. This, however, is United States history, so let us heroically gaze, as Americans so often do, at our own navel.

Stan, why did you turn the globe to the green parts of not-America? I mean I guess to be fair, we were a little bit obsessed with this guy.

So the Cold War gave us great spy novels, independence movements, an arms race, cool movies, like " Doctor Strange Love" and " War Games", one of the most evil mustaches in history, but it also gave us a growing awareness that the greatest existential threat to human beings is ourselves. It changed the way we imagined the world and humanity's role in it.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner famously said, "Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?" So today we're going to look at how that came to be the dominant question of human existence and whether we can ever get past it.

(Intro plays)

So after World War II the US and the USSR were the only two nations with any power left. The United States was a lot stronger. We had atomic weapons for starters, and also the Soviets had lost twenty million people in the war, and they were lead by a sociopathic, mustachioed Joseph Stalin. But the US still had worries, we needed a strong free market oriented Europe and, to a lesser extent, Asia, so that all the goods we were making could find happy homes.

The Soviets, meanwhile, were concerned with something more immediate, a powerful Germany invading them, again. Germany, and please do not take this personally Germans, was very, very slow to learn the central lesson of world history: do not invade Russia, unless you're the Mongols. [Mongoltage]

So at the end of World War II, the USSR encouraged the creation of pro communist governments in Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland, which was a relatively easy thing to encourage, because those nations were occupied by Soviet troops.

The idea for the Soviets was to create a communist buffer between them and Germany, but to the US it looked like communism might just keep expanding, and that would be really bad for us because who would buy all of our sweet, sweet industrial goods?

So America responded with the policy of containment, as introduced in diplomat George F. Kennan's famous Long Telegram. Communism could stay where it was, but it would not be allowed to spread. And ultimately this was why we fought very real wars in both Korea and Vietnam. As a government report from 1950 put it, the goals of containment were one: block further expansion of Soviet power, two: expose the falsities of Soviet pretensions, three: induce a retraction of the Kremlin's control and influence, and four: in general, foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system.

Harry Truman, who as you'll recall became president in 1945 after Franklin Delano pres-for-life Roosevelt died, was a big fan of containment, and the first real test of it came in Greece and Turkey in 1947.

This was a very strategically valuable region, because it was near the Middle East. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but the United States has been just like a smidge interested in the Middle East the last several decades because of oil, glorious oil.

Right, so Truman announced the so called Truman Doctrine, because, you know, why not name a doctrine after yourself, in which he pledged to support "Freedom loving peoples against Communist threats." Which is all fine and good, but who will protect us against "peoples," the pluralization of an already plural noun.

Anyway, we eventually sent $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey and we were off to the Cold War races.

The Truman Doctrine created the language through which Americans would view the world, with America as "free" and Communists as tyrannical. According to our old friend Eric Foner: "The speech set a precedent for American assistance to anti-communists regimes throughout the world no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union."

It also led to the creation of a new security apparatus: the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, all of which were somewhat immune from government oversight and definitely not democratically elected. And the Containment Policy and the Truman Doctrine also lay the foundations for a military build up, an 'Arms Race', which would become a key feature of the Cold War.

But it wasn't all about the military, at least at first: like the Marshall Plan was first introduced at Harvard's commencement address in June 1947 by, get this, George Marshall, in what turned out to be, like, the second most important commencement address in all of American history.

Yes, yes Stan, okay, it was a great speech, thank you for noticing.

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Nerdfighteria Wiki - The Cold War: Crash Course US History #37

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John: Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course US History, and today we're going to talk about the Cold War. The Cold War is called "cold" because it supposedly never heated up into actual armed conflict. Which means, you know, that it wasn't a war.

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So, we're gonna start today with the place where the Cold War really heated up, at least as far as America's concerned. Mr Green, it's Vietnam. Close, Me from the Past, but like all your romantic endeavors, unsuccessful. The correct answer is of course Korea.

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Harry S. Truman Presidential Library Link

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This collection focuses on the ideals that formed the basis of American policy toward the Soviet Union during the early years of the Cold War. The collection includes 57 documents totaling 681 pages covering the years 1945 through 1952. Supporting materials include photographs, oral history transcripts, biographies and a chronology of events.

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GCSE History Link

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8: GCSE History - Who was to Blame for the Cold War?

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America in the 20th Century Link

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Study Guide

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Graphic Organizer

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