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US Truman, Richard Nixon, And Ronald Reagan

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U.S. Leaders in the Cold War As World War II ended in 1945, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics began a decades long struggle for global supremacy known as the Cold War, which lasted until 1991. During this 46 year period of time, the United States had the following Presidents: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush. For the purpose of this essay I’m going to focus on three of the more influential Presidents: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. All three of these Presidents played crucial, but very different roles during the Cold War. Truman recognized the threat of Stalin and the expansion of Communism. Nixon realized that the escalation of Mutually Assured Destruction …show more content…

Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. Truman had only a high school education and had only been Vice President for 82 days before FDR’s sudden death. He was so shocked at becoming President he told reporters, “I don’t know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.”( http://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/harry-truman). Truman was thrown into the end of WWII. Germany surrendered on May 8, and Truman also approved of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan in August. In the book The Cold War, by John Lewis Gaddis on page 26, Lewis discusses that Truman believed it was the only way to end the war. He saw the Soviet Union as a threat because they wanted to expand communism. At first Truman thought he could work with Stalin, he wrote in his diary, “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.” (http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/). However this trust quickly deteriorated as the two nations realized they had dramatically different views of the world. The Soviet Union suffered many more …show more content…

In a 1981 news conference he said, "So far détente's been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims. Their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one world communist or socialist state." (http://reagan.civiced.org/lessons/middle-school/presidential-leadership-cold-war). President Reagan didn’t just want to contain the spread of Soviet communism, he wanted to reverse its gains. His strategy was to use the United States free-market economic superiority to invest heavily in military technology and weapons, and challenge the Soviet Union’s communist command economy to try and keep up. He wanted to economically bankrupt the Soviet Union and show all of those countries that the American free-market system was far superior to the communist system, this became know as the “Reagan Doctrine”. The Soviet Union attempted to keep up with the United States military advances, but their economy kept weakening and weakening. Deleted number 14 As the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Center for Civic Education stated, President Reagan provided support to the Solidarity movement in Poland, and helped Afghanistan to force the Soviets to withdraw in 1988. One year later in 1989, the Berlin Wall, a symbol of Soviet tyranny in Germany

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