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COLD WAR: 1953-60 (13 of 15)

By the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1961 the Russians and Americans had different explanations for the Cold War. It was commonly believed in the Soviet Union that the capitalist nations were encircling their nation and wanted to overthrow the Soviet government. People blamed the capitalist West for the Cold War, seeing their Soviet government as having consistently pursued peace despite hostility from the West. Responsibility for this hostility had class origins, specifically the work of a Wall Street elite, whose mindset at least prevailed in Washington D.C. if they were not pulling strings directly. And it was commonly believed that capitalism was crisis prone, in decline and that the future would see the success of communism, spreading here and there by the choice of local people rather than forced upon them by the Soviet Union.

In the United States, many Americans believed that the Soviet Union was trying to force communism on the world and that it was the duty of the United States to save the world from communism. Many saw international communism -- including communism in China -- as a monolithic conspiracy from Moscow, that negotiating was a waste of time because nothing was going to change the devious intent of the Communists, and that only military force would deter Communists from the goal of world domination.

People in the United States found fault with the old Stalin regime and how it operated at the end of the wa. They saw Stalin as having broken agreements. They saw free enterprise as better than Soviet or Marxist socialism. They believed that it was the responsibility of the United States and others to respond to any Soviet military aggression. And they feared Moscow backed subversion around the world.

Some Americans believed it possible that the Soviet peoples and even Communist leaders preferred peace, and these Americans saw negotiating with Moscow of possible benefit. Vice President Richard Nixon, who was running for President in 1960, had been to Moscow and knew the Russians fairly well, and he was among those holding this view. Also, he was among those who were confident that in the long run capitalism would perform better than the Soviet economic system. Agreeing with Nixon on these matters was his opponent in 1960, John F. Kennedy. Where they mainly disagreed was over a so-called missile gap claimed by Kennedy and on domestic issues.

Into the 1960s some would offer an explanation of the Cold War that put primary blame for the Cold War on the United States. They described Truman as using the U.S. monopoly on atomic bombs to intimidate the Soviet Union into withdrawing from Eastern Europe. Similar to the Marxists in the Soviet Union, some would describe those in power in Washington as having as their primary goal an economic expansion that benefited U.S. corporations. They cited U.S. support for dictators abroad for the purpose of protecting the investments of corporations, and they saw the Cold War as driven by an alliance between the military establishment and defense contractors -- the military-industrial complex -- which had an interest in portraying communism as a menace that needed to be countered by a strong military.

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