The Cold War

During the 1952 election Eisenhower tried to please both sides of the political spectrum by saying 'until the enslaved nations of the world have in the fullness of freedom the right to choose their own path, for then, and then only, can we say that there is a possible way of living peacefully and permanently with Communism. This statement was liked by the strong anti-communist feeling of the Republicans and of people that have eastern Europe descent in them as Eisenhower didn't want to abandon eastern Europe. The statement was also supported by people who were anti-war, they didn't fear communism to the same extent as some people and felt that they could live side by side with Communism. Eisenhower and his soon to be Dulles hated the idea of containment as they felt that it was immoral that countries that had already fell to communist were doomed to stay communist and that it was a treadmill policy. They liked the idea of roll back in eastern Europe and Asia as they felt th...

In April 1951 Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur as the commander of US forces in Korea and replaced him with general Matthew Ridgeway. This happened because of the opposing view that MacArthur had with dealing with the Korea war to Truman. From the start of the war turning in the UN forces side MacArthur in September and October 1950 argued that it was only right for the US not just to contain communism ( which was set out in the Truman doctrine) in Korea by pushing the North Korea's back to the 38th parallel but he thought that it was needed to invade Korea to unify the country under the capitalist leader Syngman Rhee. MacArthur had this view because he was more right wing than Truman and supported the Republicans more which view was that containment was not working like in China which fell to communism in 1949 and he thought that the communist states needed to become capitalist by force. Truman was not keen to give the order to do this because he feared that if the US forces...