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 1888–1959 ○ Natural causes

An American diplomat who drove the Cold War through alliance-building

At the 1954 Berlin Conference, he rejected an all-German government without free elections and upheld the Western electoral procedure.

John Foster Dulles was an American diplomat and lawyer who sought to organize the postwar order through alliances and military deterrence. As Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, he pressed beyond containment toward rolling back communist influence and consolidated the Western bloc around NATO. At the 1954 Berlin Conference, he opposed Molotov’s collective-security proposal and call for an all-German government, insisting on reunification through free elections; later that year he secured West German entry into NATO, choosing institutionalized division in Europe over an unguaranteed settlement. The policy strengthened Western cohesion and American influence, but also carried responsibility for interventionism, including support for coups in Iran and Guatemala and reliance on nuclear threats.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1890–1969 ○ Natural causes

The five-star general who led D-Day and warned America against the military-industrial complex

There is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing. It must be a success.

A five-star general who served as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, leading the D-Day invasion, and later became the 34th President of the United States. As president he pursued Cold War containment, backing coups in Iran and Guatemala, and in March 1960 authorized the CIA's covert program to overthrow Fidel Castro. After the Bay of Pigs failure, he told Kennedy that 'there is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing: it must be a success,' warning that hiding US involvement out of fear of emboldening the Soviets would only make them bolder. His farewell address warned against the 'military-industrial complex,' leaving a lasting caution about the machinery of permanent warfare.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1892–1979 ○ Natural causes

A U.S. general whose offensive command was bound to racial prejudice

“Don't let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you.”

Edward Almond was a United States Army general who served in two world wars and Korea, leaving a record that combines an aggressive command style with racial prejudice. In World War II he commanded the largely African American 92nd Infantry Division, then blamed its combat performance on the soldiers' race and opposed using Black troops in combat. In Korea, as Douglas MacArthur's chief of staff, he was placed in command of X Corps after the Inchon landing force was formed, contributing to the capture of Inchon and Seoul. His wide dispersal of forces in the northeast and underestimation of Chinese strength helped deepen X Corps' crisis in late 1950.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1893–1969 ○ Natural causes

The American intelligence official who institutionalized covert war

In 1945, negotiations for the surrender of northern Italy hastened the war's end while excluding the Soviet representative and Italian partisans.

Allen Dulles was an American diplomat, lawyer, and intelligence chief who linked wartime secret negotiations to the covert interventions of the Cold War. As head of the OSS station in Bern, he advanced Operation Sunrise, the negotiation of the German surrender in northern Italy, while its exclusion of the Soviet ally and implications for Italian partisan power exposed the tensions within the Allied coalition. He later led the CIA through coups in Iran and Guatemala and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, expanding both the reach of the American intelligence state and the questions of responsibility attached to it. His resignation after Cuba did not end his influence, which remains emblematic of the union of intelligence gathering and imperial intervention.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1893–1977 ○ Natural causes

A Marine commander whose caution helped save a surrounded division

“Retreat, hell! We're just attacking in another direction.”

Oliver P. Smith was a U.S. Marine general who served in World War II and the Korean War, known for expertise in amphibious operations and a cautious command style. As commander of the 1st Marine Division, he led the Inchon landing and the advance to Seoul in 1950, then directed the division’s breakout from Chinese encirclement at the Chosin Reservoir. Against speed-first orders from MacArthur and Almond, he prepared supply lines and an airfield, choices that helped preserve his force and sustain the operation.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1896–1984 ○ Natural causes

An Allied commander caught between military gains and civilian cost

On 27 July 1953, Mark W. Clark signed the Korean Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom for the United Nations Command.

Mark W. Clark was a United States Army general who commanded in both world wars and the Korean War, combining staff work with field command in coalition warfare. In Italy he led the capture of Rome and accepted the German surrender, but his decisions around the Rapido-Garigliano crossing and the bombing of Monte Cassino remained subjects of criticism. As Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command during the final phase of the Korean War, he combined military pressure with armistice negotiations and signed the agreement on 27 July 1953 for the UNC side. His career shows how the pursuit of American military advantage could expose both the workings of coalition command and the destructive costs of war.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1904–2005 ○ Natural causes

The American diplomat and historian whose 1946 Long Telegram and X article laid the intellectual foundations of containment

'The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,' from the 1947 X article.

An American diplomat and historian who, in his 1946 'Long Telegram' from Moscow and his 1947 X article in Foreign Affairs, articulated the strategy of long-term, patient, and vigilant containment of Soviet expansion. As the first Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, he played a central role in designing the Marshall Plan and laid the intellectual groundwork for the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and the architecture of the early Cold War. Yet he spent the rest of his long life as a critic of what containment became: opposing the militarization of his ideas, the Vietnam War, and NATO enlargement, and insisting that the Soviet threat had always been political, not military.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1906–1990 ○ Heart attack

The Air Force general who firebombed Japan and urged nuclear war on his adversaries

When Clay asked whether he could haul coal into Berlin, LeMay answered, 'We can haul anything.'

The architect of America's strategic bombing of Japan, whose March 1945 fire raid on Tokyo began the incineration of 66 cities. As commander of US Air Forces in Europe in 1948, he answered Lucius Clay's call during the Berlin Blockade with 'We can haul anything,' setting in motion the first phase of the Airlift. He then rebuilt Strategic Air Command into an all-jet nuclear force and, as Air Force Chief of Staff, pressed for bombing Cuba's missile sites in 1962. In retirement he ran as George Wallace's running mate in 1968.

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 1908–1987 ○ Heart disease

The Mongoose architect whose six-phase Cuba overthrow plan convinced the Soviets invasion was coming

When McNamara asked what the 'x-factor' on his metrics list was, Lansdale replied: 'The feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people.' McNamara erased it and said he couldn't measure it.

A U.S. Air Force major general who turned advertising into a doctrine of psychological warfare, Lansdale first made his name helping crush the Hukbalahap rebellion in the Philippines by weaponizing local folklore, then ran the Saigon Military Mission as a close confidant of Ngô Đình Diệm. In February 1962 he submitted to President Kennedy the six-phase Cuba Project, a schedule that aimed for open revolt and overthrow of the Castro government by the first two weeks of October. The document became a crucial piece of Soviet intelligence: it convinced Moscow that a U.S. invasion of Cuba was imminent and helped trigger the missile crisis. Forced to retire in 1963 after refusing to abandon Diệm, Lansdale was later recognized as a founding figure of modern counterinsurgency and psychological operations.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1911–2004 ○ Natural causes

The Cold War's last American president, who genuinely believed in nuclear abolition but would not yield on SDI

On the afternoon of October 12, 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to eliminate every nuclear weapon on earth by the year 2000. Forty minutes later, the talks collapsed when Reagan refused Gorbachev's condition that SDI research be confined to the laboratory.

Ronald Reagan went from Hollywood actor to governor of California to the 40th president of the United States, inaugurating the 1980s with Reaganomics and the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. Early in his first term he denounced the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire,' yet he also held a genuine, long-standing conviction that nuclear weapons should be abolished, a conviction he brought to four summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. At Reykjavik in October 1986 the two leaders came within reach of eliminating all nuclear weapons, only for the talks to collapse when Reagan refused to confine his Strategic Defense Initiative to the laboratory. A year later they signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons, and the Cold War ended months after he left office.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1913–1994 ○ Stroke

The Cold Warrior who opened détente with Moscow and Beijing, then became the only U.S. president to resign

At the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, standing before a model kitchen, Nixon told Khrushchev, "There may be some instances, for example, color television, where we are ahead of you," in an impromptu debate that became known as the Kitchen Debate.

A tenacious politician who rose from anti-communist congressman to vice president, Nixon overcame two bitter defeats to capture the presidency in 1968. The quintessential Cold Warrior, he unexpectedly became the architect of détente, visiting Moscow in May 1972 to sign the ABM Treaty and the SALT I Interim Agreement with Leonid Brezhnev; the first legally binding limits on the superpowers' nuclear arsenals. He ended U.S. combat involvement in Vietnam and opened relations with Mao's China, yet his presidency collapsed in the Watergate scandal; on August 9, 1974, he became the only U.S. president to resign. He spent his final decades rehabilitating his image as an elder statesman, but his legacy remains suspended between the achievement of détente and the crimes that destroyed his presidency.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1914–2005 ○ Natural causes

US Army general who commanded American forces in South Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and pursued a strategy of attrition measured by body count

Westmoreland adopted attrition and “search and destroy” in Vietnam, treating enemy body counts as a key measure of success. U.S. forces grew to more than half a million, but the enemy replenished its losses; his optimistic claims of progress lost credibility after the 1968 Tet Offensive.

From South Carolina, he graduated first in his West Point class in 1936 and served in the European theatre of the Second World War and in Korea. Sent to South Vietnam in January 1964, he took command of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam in June. After the Marines landed he argued for abandoning a defensive posture in favour of an attrition war in which US forces sought out and destroyed the enemy, using artillery and air power on a huge scale. In November 1967 he said “the end comes into view”; after the Tet Offensive his request for 200,000 more troops leaked and he was replaced in March 1968. He was Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972.

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.