A:

Financier and long-time presidential advisor Bernard Baruch is credited by some historians with having used the term first during a 1947 speech. However, newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann gave the phrase wide currency with his influential book of essays titled The Cold War. We side with Lippmann.

Q: What did Congressional opponents call "Operation Rathole"?

A:

The Marshall Plan. What was the Marshall Plan? Speaking at the June 1947 commencement ceremonies at Harvard, Secretary of State George Marshall proposed that the U.S. shore up democracy in Western Europe through an economic assistance program. The 12 billion dollar effort lasted from 1948 to 1952 and was in part responsible for the early economic recovery of Western Europe. The Marshall Plan was one of the crowning achievements of early post-war American policy.

Q: What American major league baseball team changed its name to demonstrate its anti-communism?

A:

In the early 1950s, The Cincinnati Reds changed their name to the Cincinnati Red Legs. The fans eventually succeeded in having the name changed back.

Q: When was the phrase "under God" added to the American Pledge of Allegiance?

A:

1954. Until then, the first sentence of the pledge read, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Americans who lived through that time may recall the patriotic feeling, and fervor against Godless communists they felt when President Eisenhower signed the bill that added those two words to the pledge, which now read "one nation, under God..."

Q: What was the total membership of the American communist Party in 1960?

A:

In 1960, only 5,000 Americans were members of the communist Party. The "enemy within" hardly seemed worth making a fuss about, in retrospect. However, a conservative would probably have responded that it was the communists who were not publicly registered with the American communist Party that were the real problem.

Q: What was the scenario for America's first national civil defense drill?

A:

Operation Alert, held in June 1955, was based on a scenario in which sixty U.S. cities were under nuclear attack.

Q: Why did the launching of Sputnik shock the West?

A:

By successfully launching the world's first artificial satellite, the Soviets demonstrated that the USSR was ahead of the U.S. in certain advanced technologies. It also proved beyond a doubt that the Soviets could hit the United States with an ICBM. Soviet Premier Khrushchev milked the achievement for all its public relations value, and heralded it as proof that communism was superior to capitalism.

Q: How did America respond?

A:

We responded with alarm and dismay. The U.S. Government, with the support of both the Executive and the Congress, took all of the above actions within about one year of the Sputnik "shock." The National Defense Education Act provided major funding for education at all levels, including student loans, and support for math, science and foreign language fellowships.

Q: Which country first landed a space probe on the moon?

A:

The Soviet probe was crash-landed on the moon in October 1959. In addition to being the first probe, it was noteworthy for sending back the first pictures of the dark side of the moon. The 1950s were not a good decade for the United States in the "space race."

Q: Who was the first American in space?

A:

If you count American primates, it was Ham, a chimpanzee, who made a successful sub-orbital flight in January 1961. Alan B. Shephard was the first American human in space. He made a successful sub-orbital flight aboard Freedom 7 on May 5, 1961. We remember holding our breath as Shephard's Redstone booster lifted from the pad and again as the Mercury capsule parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean upon return.

Q: Under what compromise did the Western powers and the Soviet Union agree to leave occupied Austria in May 1955?

A:

It is important to remember the crises that did not happen in the Cold War, as well as those that did. Khrushchev agreed to allow Austria to become permanently neutral, and occupation forces withdrew. Austria was one potential flashpoint of the Cold War where the two superpowers worked out their differences to the benefit of the country itself.

Q: What did Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev use to get the attention of the United Nations General Assembly during a visit there in October 1960?

A:

Khrushchev, leader of the world's largest nation and of loyal communists everywhere, took the rather undiplomatic step of taking off his shoe and banging it on his desk when the remarks by a Philippine diplomat particularly irritated him. He also shouted, raised his fist, and made uncomplimentary remarks about several international statesmen during a memorable appearance before the United Nations. He showed his appreciation for the United Nations Security Council by referring to it as a "spittoon."

Q: Where did Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev meet for the first time?

A:

Castro stayed at a run-down hotel in Harlem, New York, during the 1960 United Nations General Assembly. Khrushchev later delivered a speech committing the Soviet Union to support all wars of "national liberation." The notion of the leader of international communism joining forces with the charismatic and cocky Castro was a chilling one for many Americans.

Q: Seven Soviet Pentecostal Christians entered the American Embassy in Moscow in June 1978 in an attempt to win support for their efforts to obtain Soviet exit visas. How long did they remain there?

A:

American embassies seem to have been the refuge of choice during the Cold War. All of the Pentecostals finally left in April 1983 and received exit visas shortly thereafter, after personal intervention by President Ronald Reagan.

Q: How many Soviet leaders had a college education?

A:

The first and last, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Q: Who was the longest serving foreign minister or secretary of state in either the United States or the Soviet Union?

A:

Gromyko, by a long shot. The dour-faced diplomat served as a senior Soviet figure in U.S.-USSR diplomacy beginning in 1939 when Joseph Stalin sent him to Washington, D.C., as Stalin's special emissary. He accompanied Stalin to the February 1945 Yalta Conference, and became Foreign Minister under Nikita Khrushchev in 1957. He served in that post for 28 years, until Mikhail Gorbachev replaced him with Eduard Shevardnadze in 1985. Khrushchev once said of Gromyko, "When I tell Gromyko to take off his pants and sit on a cake of ice, he does it. And he keeps sitting there until I tell him to get up."

Q: Who laid out the Domino Theory?

A:

President Eisenhower used the phrase for the first time during a White House press conference in early 1954 in speaking of the communist threat to Indochina. "You have a row of dominoes set up,'' he argued, "and you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly."

Q: How many troops did the U.S. have in Vietnam in late 1963?

A:

16,500. By December 1965, the number had risen to 180,000, and by December 1967 the force level had reached 450,000.

Q: Who is Nicholas Daniloff?

A:

Daniloff, Moscow correspondent for U.S. News & World Report , became the focus of a U.S.-Soviet confrontation when he was arrested by Soviet authorities on espionage charges on August 30, 1986. He was almost certainly framed by the Soviets in retaliation for the arrest of a Soviet international civil servant at the United Nations, Gennadi Zakharov, on similar charges. In a complex arrangement not characterized as a "swap," Daniloff finally left Moscow September 29, but not until after protracted personal negotiations by Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.

Q: What was NSC-68?

A:

President Truman approved National Security Council memorandum 68 in April 1950. The highly classified document, incorporating the doctrine of "containment" of Soviet expansionism, called for a peacetime buildup of U.S. defenses in response to the communist challenge.

Q: What was "Looking Glass"?

A:

The U.S. nuclear button went airborne in a jet circling over Omaha, Nebraska to ensure that we could retaliate in the event of a surprise Soviet attack on Washington and our other nuclear command and control centers. We kept planes, on a rotating basis, airborne for twenty four hours a day for thirty years, until President Bush ended the practice in late 1991.

Q: Where did Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty live for twenty years after the 1956 Hungarian uprising?

A:

Mindszenty, the head of Hungary's Roman Catholic Church, who was sought by communist authorities, took refuge in the American Embassy after the revolt failed. He eventually won safe passage out of the country.

Q: Who was Soviet Ambassador to Hungary at the time of the 1956 uprising?

A:

Andropov, who "distinguished" himself for his handling of this crisis, later became head of the KGB, and served briefly as Soviet leader before his death in 1985.

Q: Who was Mathias Rust?

A:

Rust, a twenty-one-year old West German, managed to fly a single-engine Cessna from Helsinki to Moscow's Red Square without being detected by the Soviet military. He served one year of a three-year term in the Soviet Union before being returned to West Germany. The daring act had major political repercussions in the Soviet Union since it exposed its vaunted air defenses to international ridicule. President Gorbachev used the embarrassing incident as justification to fire many senior military officials, including many opposed to his reform policies.

Q: What anniversary did more than one million citizens of the Baltic republics mark by linking arms on August 23, 1989?

A:

On the fiftieth anniversary of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Pact, which led directly to the dismemberment of Poland and the forced incorporation of the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) into the USSR, citizens of the Baltic republics formed a human chain 430 miles long to demonstrate their solidarity and remembrance of the past.

Q: What became the name of Germany after East and West unified at midnight on October 2, 1990?

A:

West Germany's formal name, the Federal Republic of Germany, became the name of unified Germany. Germany had been divided since the end of the Second World War. West Germany's constitution made specific provision for reunification.

Q: What is Solidarity?

A:

The Polish free trade union, started in the face of severe communist repression in 1980. Lech Walesa, Solidarity's leader, demonstrated uncommon courage and dignity at a time when Soviet military power and aggressiveness appeared to be at its zenith. Walesa became president of Poland in 1989, when free elections were held. Solidarity is now a trade union in free Poland.

Q: What did the diplomats at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., hang on the door of their chancery in winter 1991 that symbolized the end of the Cold War?

A:

The wreath, hung without ceremony, said it all.

Q: When did the Cold War actually end?

A:

Some historians hold that the Cold War ended in 1962 after the great risks of the Cuban Missile Crisis convinced the leaders of both the United States and the USSR that they could no longer take their nations to the brink of nuclear conflict. One could also argue that the unprecedented degree of U.S.-Soviet cooperation in managing the Persian Gulf crisis in 1900 and 1991 marked the end of the Cold War. However, we vote for 1989 when the Eastern European communist regimes fell and presidents Bush and Gorbachev showed the world how much U.S.-Soviet relations had changed.