People of the Revolution and the USSR

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1884–1972 ○ Natural causes

The 33rd president who framed the Cold War with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan

On his Oval Office desk sat a sign reading 'The buck stops here,' and from the atomic bomb to MacArthur's dismissal, he lived by it.

Truman was the 33rd president of the United States, who succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt and ordered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In March 1947 he declared the Truman Doctrine (that 'it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures') and in April 1948 he signed the Marshall Plan into law, building the institutional framework for Western Europe's reconstruction and the containment of Soviet power. When North Korea invaded the South in 1950, he led the UN military response and later fired General Douglas MacArthur, reasserting civilian control of the military at the cost of his own popularity. Widely reviled at the end of his presidency, Truman was posthumously rehabilitated as a 'near great' president whose Cold War architecture outlasted the Soviet Union.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1908–1973 ○ Natural causes

A Cold War president caught between reform and war

In July 1968, he announced that the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to begin talks on limiting strategic weapons.

Lyndon B. Johnson was a president whose congressional mastery joined an ambitious program of domestic reform to a strategy of Cold War containment. He expanded the Great Society through civil-rights and voting-rights laws, Medicare, education, and anti-poverty programs, while the escalation of the Vietnam War became the defining responsibility that overshadowed those achievements. He also pursued arms control within continued rivalry, using the 1967 Glassboro summit and the July 1968 agreement to begin strategic-arms discussions to open a path that later led to SALT. In his final year he combined peace efforts in Vietnam with arms-control diplomacy, but the agreements were completed by his successor.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1916–2009 ○ Natural causes

The quantitative defense secretary who led the Vietnam War and helped prevent nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis

The major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.

The eighth U.S. Secretary of Defense (1961–1968), and its longest-serving holder, leading the Pentagon under both Kennedy and Johnson for over seven years. In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he was the first in EXCOMM to propose a naval 'quarantine' over an airstrike and became its fiercest advocate, arguing it would show Khrushchev resolve while remaining a controlled choice that need not escalate into military conflict. Yet in Vietnam, the same quantitative analyst who championed escalation grew privately skeptical, and 27 years after leaving office he confessed in his memoir that the war was 'wrong, terribly wrong.' He later served as president of the World Bank (1968–1981), redirecting its focus from infrastructure to poverty reduction.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1917–1963 ✕ Assassinated

The youngest U.S. president, who took the world to the brink of nuclear war and back

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

The 35th president of the United States (1961–1963), elected at 43 as the youngest president and the first Catholic. He authorized the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and later that year his tense Vienna summit with Khrushchev helped convince the Soviets to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he chose a naval 'quarantine' over an airstrike and, through his brother Robert, secretly traded the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles, pulling the world back from nuclear war. He was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963; after his death, his civil rights and tax-cut agenda passed through Congress.