To paraphrase Second Corinthians: "Europe's despair was Stalin's opportunity" - he delighted in the post-war unemployment, the inflation and the general lack of confidence in their governmental institutions. When the Marshall Plane came to the rescue in rebuilding Europe, the Soviets knew they were licked. This article reveals how totally bummed the Soviets were over the broad European acceptance of the Marshall plan. They hated it. When this magazine profile of Andrei Gromyko (1909 – 1989) appeared on the newsstands in 1946, the man was already a mainstay in the State Department Rolodex. Anyone who came of age during the Cold War (1947 - 1991) will certainly recognize his name, because as Foreign Minister for the Soviet Union (for 28 years), Gromyko was without a doubt one of the architects of the Cold War.
The attached article outlines Gromyko's career highlights up to the Summer of 1946 when he was posted as the first Soviet Ambassador to the newly established United Nations. No sooner had the curtain descended on the tragedy that was World War II when the Allied nations found themselves having to put together a coalition of nations that would be willing to contain Soviet expansion throughout Europe. A COLLIER'S journalist wandered among the rubble of West Germany and found that a great number of draft-age men simply replied "nein" when asked if they would be willing to fight alongside the Americans, French and British. One of the wiser observers opined:
"Remember that Germany is a convalescent country...These people have lost two world wars in a generation. The last one cost them nearly 3,000,000 dead and another 1,000,000 or so still missing, to say nothing of some 4,000,000 wounded. They just don't want to take a chance of being on the losing side again."
The West Germans joined NATO in 1955.
Attached herein is an essay written during the mid-Fifties that briefly summarizes the primary global events spanning the end of World War II through 1955 which set the stage for that period in Twentieth Century history called the Cold War: the global containment of Soviet expansion.
Click here to read about espionage during the Cold War.
Attached is a printable page from an R.O.T.C. primer concerning American Military History outlined the events of 1948 that created the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.). "This pact, called the North Atlantic Treaty, united Great Britain, the United States, and ten western European nations in a common security system. Approved by the Senate in April 1949, the treaty provided for mutual assistance, including the use of armed force in the event of a Soviet attack upon one or more of the signatory powers." This well-illustrated article appeared in a middle class American magazine in 1959 and it reported on the rising international sentiments that signaled to the dominate Western powers that the old diplomacy of the wealthy northern nations had to change. It will help to explain why the United States re-fashioned their immigration laws in 1965.
The Department of State hated it when Radio Moscow would depict Americans as simply a bunch of "lynch-happy bigots"...
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