Is it just me, or does anyone else miss the old Soviet Union? As far as I’m concerned, if you were looking for a first-rate, grade A, good- time war, you just couldn’t beat the cold war.
There were a lot of things that made the cold war a special time in world history, but the most important was probably the historic figures involved. Americans, weary of the past decade’s global conflicts, chose as their leader in 1952 the reassuringly low-key Dwight Eisenhower. The former general was so wildly popular that Americans took to showing their support for him by sporting campaign buttons that read simply I LIKE IKE--a far less complicated sentiment than would be exhibited in the far more analytical 1990s (I THINK I LIKE IKE; I’M NOT SURE I’M READY TO MAKE A COMMITMENT TO IKE; I’M IN A CODEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP WITH IKE). The Soviet Union was equally passionate about its leaders, choosing as its premier the charismatic Nikita Khrushchev. A stirring political orator, Khrushchev was perhaps best known for removing his shoe and banging it on his desk at the United Nations, thus instantly easing world tensions by replacing the long- feared jackboot of fascism with the lace-up wing tip of communism.
Just as dramatic as the people of the era was the language of the era. It was during the cold war that America saw the emergence of McCarthyism, a bold political movement in which courageous government investigators fought to keep the country safe from Zero Mostel, Burl Ives, and Gypsy Rose Lee. It was during the cold war too that Vice President Richard Nixon faced off against Khrushchev in the now-legendary kitchen debate, besting the Soviet leader with the memorable declaration, I am not a cook! Most important, it was during the cold war that the nation first started to worry about its various--and ominous--gaps.
