| Term | Definition |
|---|
| United Nation | a group of 51 nations of the world that promont peace and security around the globe is |
| Harry S Truman | President of United States upon death of FDR |
| George Marshall | United States general and statesman who as Secretary of State organized the European Recovery Program (1880-1959) |
| satellites | -Eastern European countries controlled by Moscow, Russia |
| containment | Policy that required the United States to try and keep communism from spreading around the world |
| George Kennan | US State Dept. Employee who authors the Containment Doctrine |
| iron curtain | a political barrier that isolated the peoples of Eatern Europe after WWII, restricting their ability to travel outside the region |
| Cold War | " War of words and threats" between the US and USSR from 1945-1990. It was a political and economic stuggle between these nations. |
| Truman Doctrine | President Truman's policy of providing economic and military aid to any country threatened by communism or totalitarian ideology |
| Marshall plan | a United States program of economic aid for the reconstruction of Europe (1948-1952) |
| Berlin Airlift | airlift in 1948 that supplied food and fuel to citizens of west Berlin when the Russians closed off land access to Berlin |
| NATO | an alliance made to defend one another if they were attacked by any other country; US, England, France, Canada, Western European countries |
| Warsaw Pact | treaty signed in 1945 that formed an alliance of the Eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain; USSR, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania |
| Chiang Kai Shek | former Nationalist leader of China who fled to Taiwan after Mao Zedong took over |
| Mao Zedong | Chinese communist leader (1893-1976) |
| 38th parallel | line of latitude that separated North and South Korea |
| Douglas MacArthur | United States general who served as chief of staff and commanded Allied forces in the South Pacific during World War II |
| HUAC | The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was an investigating committee which investigated what it considered un-American propaganda, |
| Joseph McCarthy | United States politician who unscrupulously accused many citizens of being Communists (1908-1957) |
| Hollywood Ten | group of people in the film industry who were jailed for refusing to answer congressional questions reguarding communist influence in Hollywood |
| Blacklist | list of ppl in the hollywood film industry who were refused jobs bc they did not cooperate with HUAC |
| Alger Hiss | state department offical. was accused of giving secret government documents to the Soviets |
| Brinkmanship | the policy of pushing a dangerous situation to the brink of disaster (to the limits of safety) |
| Julius & Ethel Rosenberg | US couple who were spys for the USSR |
| Dwight Eisenhower | United States general who supervised the invasion of Normandy and the defeat of Nazi Germany;34th President of the United States (1890-1961) |
| CIA | an independent agency of the United States government responsible for collecting and coordinating intelligence and counterintelligence activities abroad in the national interest |
| John Foster Dulles | United States diplomat who (as Secretary of State) pursued a policy of opposition to the USSR by providing aid to American allies (1888-1959) |
| Eisenhower Doctrine | policy of the US that it would defend the middle east against attack by any communist country |
| Nikita Khrushechev | leader of the Soviet Union, serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, following the death of Joseph Stalin |
| U-2 | U.S. spy plane shot down by the Soviets |
| John F. Kennedy | the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963 |
| Fidel Castro | Cuban socialist leader who overthrew a dictator in 1959 and established a Marxist socialist state in Cuba (born in 1927) |
| Inchon | a battle in the Korean War (1950) |
| Bay of Pigs | CIA trained Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro |
| Cuban Missle Crisis | US and USSR on brink of nuclear war |
| Berlin Wall | a wall separating East and West Berlin built by East Germany in 1961 to keep citizens from escaping to the West |
| Peace Corps | Fed. program to send volunteers to help developing nations around the world |
| Geneva Accords | agreement that divided Vietnam into North and South |
| Lyndon Johnson | 36th pres. Took over when JFK died |
| Domino Theory | the political theory that if one nation comes under Communist control then neighboring nations will also come under Communist control |
| Ho Chi Minh | Vietnamese communist statesman who fought the Japanese in World War II and the French until 1954 and South vietnam until 1975 (1890-1969) |
| Dien Bien Phu | The place that the final battle took place that forced the French out of Vietnam |
| War Powers Act | lets the President use the military for 60 days, without a formal declaration of war by Congress. It also grants an additional 30 days upon a formal request by the President, whether Congress agrees or not. |
| 17th parallel | line of latitude that separated North and South Vietnam |
| Ngo Dinh Diem | South Vietnam non-Communist leader |
| Vietcong | South Vietnam Communists |
| Ho Chi Minh Trail | Trail that ran through neutral countries that allowed the N.V. to get more supplies even during a blockade. |
| Tonkin Gulf Resolution | two Am. ships had been attacked and this resolution ordered that the president take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the US to prevent further aggression |
| Robert McNamara | secretary of Defense sent to Vietnam on fact-finding mission |
| William Westmoreland | General that continued to request more troops |
| Agent Orange | a herbicide used in the Vietnam War to defoliate forest areas |
| Naplam | a gasoline-based substance used in bombs that US planes dropped in Vietnam in order to burn away jungle and expose Vietcong hideouts. |
| Search and Destroy | startegy to locate and kil viet cong forces. policy by westmoreland. |
| New Left | a youth-dominated political movement of the 1960s, embodied in such organization as Students for a Democratic Society and the Ree Speech Movement. |
| SDS | an antiestablishement New Left group, founded in 1960, that called for greater individual freedom and responsibility. |
| Doves | those who opposed the war |
| Hawks | those who supported the war |
| Tet Offensive | surprise attacks on cities all over South Vietnam |
| Robert Kennedy | JFK's brother and was assassinated before being able to finish his political race |
| Richard Nixon | Vice President under Eisenhower and 37th President of the United States |
| Henery Kissinger | the secretary of the state during the nixion presidency |
| Vietnamization | policy of equipping and training of the South Vietnamese to fight for themselves |
| My Lai | location of the killing of over 400 Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers |
| Kent State | 4 students killed by National Guardsmen after violent protesting in this university |
| Pentagon Papers | A 7,000-page top-secret United States government report on the history of the internal planning and policy-making process within the government itself concerning the Vietnam War. |
| detente | French word meaning an easing of tensions between the world's superpowers during the Cold War |
| Mikhail Gorbachev | Soviet statesman whose foreign policy brought an end to the Cold War and whose domestic policy introduced major reforms (born in 1931) |
| Glasnost | a Soviet policy permitting open discussion of political and social issues and freer dissemination of news and information |
| perestrokia | a policy of government and economic reform in Soviet Union in the mid-1980s |
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