Part i. on the brink

1968 was a year of revolution. History had accelerated. In just twelve months, a series of great disruptions threatened the domestic stability of the Cold War powers. In the act of desperate self-preservation, leaders abandoned the post-war path to nuclear annihilation and established a new system of international politics that persists today. The Civil Rights movement soured. Freedom in the spring faced suppression in the fall. This series intends to reveal how international embarrassment in Vietnam and Czechoslovakia provoked the politics of détente. International leaders traded an aggressive rivalry for a fraternity of leaders, working in conjunction to preserve domestic stability. 

This series offers historical lessons very relevant in the spring of 2022. Once more, leaders are stretching beyond agreed spheres of influence, risking expulsion from the fraternity to pursue their prized obsessions. The diplomatic changes of 1968 withstood the Soviet Union’s collapse. The red and blue divide in the fraternity washed away, allowing leaders to enjoy the security of the unipolar moment. That moment ended long ago. The legacy of 1968 is currently facing the threat of upheaval, making a study of that year all the more useful. 

Critical to this period was the nuclear shadow hovering above the post-war population. Unlike in previous wars, technology removed any sense of security provided by ocean frontiers and geographical distance. Strapped with such deadly power, the leaders of nuclear powers flaunted their warheads as symbols of national greatness. By 1968, however, decades of foreign policy incapable of balancing political ambitions with the risk of thermonuclear war had crippled domestic faith within the US and the USSR.

Additionally, In the crowds witnessing the 1968 assassinations of MLK and RFK was an emerging student class determined to share their concerns. Likewise, in Europe, calls of injustice could be heard from Paris to Prague as the first generation born into a nuclear standoff reevaluated the promises of those in charge.

Political scientist Albert Wohlstetter described the nuclear politics of the era as a “delicate balance of power” in a 1959 article in Foreign Affairs. Recognizing the glaring flaws in post-war US foreign policy, he made two predictions. First, that the “late 1960s will be… hardest both for ourselves and our allies wherever we use forces based near the enemy,” and second, that disguising deterrence as foreign policy would not soften the horrors of a nuclear attack.

When John F. Kennedy met Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, both leaders ignored the stress further nuclear jousting would place on their societies. Meeting to discuss an end to the threat of nuclear war, JFK and Khrushchev could not escape the ideological differences that pitted them in a cold-war struggle. 

Khrushchev arrived in Vienna convinced that “his society and political thinking were in ascendance, and that Kennedy,” a prime example of the US “monopolist” class, “could be brought to recognize this historical ascendancy.” However, Khrushchev’s confidence in his political authority would soon be uprooted violently against him. 

The post-Stalin Soviet Union became stagnant. The collective leadership that held little authority, power, or wisdom to decide all policy issues struggled to combat waves of insecurity rushing out of the highly bureaucratic political system. Unlike the President, the General Secretary was required “not only to persuade but also to identify himself with, or even better, to create a “winning” coalition in the Politburo.” By 1964, no one wanted to play on Khrushchev’s team. A disastrous series of nuclear negotiations with China and revolts in East Berlin and Hungary had left Stalin’s successor bleeding on the doorstep with a coup led by Brezhnev circling.  

JFK responded to Khrushchev’s false confidence with aggression, rooted in his desire to view the globe as a frontier for American democracy. 

A Kennedy advisor said of the era, “we were activists. We believed that individual effort could change the world; that one man’s efforts did make a difference. Pragmatic, idealistic, activist. This was an interventionist administration.”

However, Kennedy’s short time in the Oval Office proved this strategy as antiquated and dangerous. With the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s leadership could not handle the frontier off the coast of Florida, let alone in south-east Asia. Following his assassination, JFK’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson doubled on this rapidly decaying foreign policy by rapidly expanding JFK’s insurgency in South Vietnam. 

Two statistics prove the crisis facing the political elite in both Cold War powers. 

First, by 1966, students accounted for less than half a percent of the Czechoslovakian communist party as the general population’s affiliation plummeted by 33%. In 1967, this statistical warning materialized in the shouts of student protesters proclaiming, “we want light!”.

Second, when LBJ’s presidency began, the number of US soldiers in Vietnam was 28,000. By January 1968, that number had reached its peak at 535,000. 1968 would mark the bloodiest year of the conflict. 

The domestic stability afforded to post-war leaders by the threat of nuclear war had evaporated when LBJ and Brezhnev took power from their predecessors. No longer could figureheads rely on a mandate from a public growing ever-more frustrated with remaining obedient as their leaders played volleyball with warheads. 

In two countries - Czechoslovakia and Vietnam – Brezhnev and LBJ watched the end of the Cold War’s first era as the policies they fought to pursue evaporated into thin air. Civil unrest, nuclear terror, institutional collapse, political indifference, and civilian anger revealed to each leader that his country had overplayed its hand. 

By years end, rooted in an inability to manufacture consent, the great leaders of the Cold War closed the door on the post-war era, opting for détente and retreat rather than continuing down a path of mutually assured destruction.