The World Since 1914

Part 7​—1960-1969 The 1960’s—​A Period of Turbulent Protest

THE plane crashed into the ground, taking with it any hopes that Cold War tensions could soon be relaxed. It was a United States U-2 spy plane, and it was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev demanded an apology and a promise from the United States that such flights cease. Dissatisfied with President Eisenhower’s answer, he protested by refusing to attend the East-West summit meetings scheduled to begin in Paris on May 16.

It was not an auspicious beginning to the 1960’s. But it was typical of a period that would be characterized by a spirit of protest and an inability of people to agree​—to agree about almost anything.

Despite Peace, Three Kinds of War

The Cold War was still very much alive. Subsequent events would keep it so. In August 1961 the Soviets cut off their occupation zone in Berlin from the Western sectors by erecting the Berlin Wall. A year later they attempted to install Soviet missiles in Cuba. This failed in the face of a U.S. naval “quarantine,” or blockade. Student unrest in Czechoslovakia helped lead to the formation of a new government. But in 1968 the Soviets intervened, lest government reforms turn the so-called Prague Spring into a full-blown summer.

In 1946 a war of independence against the French colonial power had broken out in Indochina, of which Vietnam was a part. Eight years later a cease-fire agreement divided the country, a temporary arrangement until elections could be held to reunite it. One part came under communist, the other under noncommunist control. As in Germany and Korea, the superpowers found themselves involved in a Cold War being fought across a politically expedient border.b

Cold War tension finally erupted into open warfare in Vietnam.