History of the United States in the Twentieth Century — Spring

The passing of the baton from JFK to LBJ is one of the most painful moments in all of USA history and it is especially difficult for the of us who were alive on November 22, 1963 and therefore remember the event.  But before we arrive at that date, we will first look back on the three years of the Kennedy administration: Bay of Pigs, Vienna Summit, Berlin Wall, October Missile Crisis and other events of those three years and we will try to come some evaluation of the effect on the United States of its handsome young president and his all too brief life and career. After our analysis of these three years, the Kennedy Years, we will then turn to the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973). Lyndon Baines Johnson also known as LBJ, was the 36th president of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, under whom he had served as the 37th vice president from 1961 to 1963. A Southern Democrat, Johnson previously represented Texas in Congress for over 23 years, first as a U.S. representative from 1937 to 1949, and then as a U.S. senator from 1949 to 1961. Born in Stonewall, Texas, Johnson worked as a teacher and a congressional aide before winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1937. In 1948, he was declared the winner in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate election in Texas before winning the general election. He became Senate majority whip in 1951, Senate Democratic leader in 1953 and majority leader in 1954. Senator Kennedy bested Johnson and his other rivals for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination before surprising many by offering to make Johnson his vice presidential running mate. The Kennedy–Johnson ticket won the general election. Vice President Johnson assumed the presidency in 1963, after President Kennedy was assassinated. The following year, Johnson won reelection to the presidency in a landslide, winning the largest share of the popular vote for the Democratic Party in history, and the highest for any candidate since the advent of widespread popular elections in the 1820s.

REQUIRED READING FOR THE WHOLE YEAR OF HISTORY OF THE USA

 

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The civil rights movement started among blacks (and their white liberal allies), mainly in the South, and emerged from the frustration felt by many blacks at the slow pace of their acquisition of civil rights, especially educational and voting ones, through court process and legislative change. The first outbreak of physical activity began in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955. Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her bus seat to a white rider, thereby defying a Southern custom which required blacks to yield seats at the front to whites. When she was jailed, a black boycott of the company’s buses was begun, and lasted a year. ‘Freedom riders’ and sit-in movements followed in a number of Southern states. The boycott, which ended in a desegregation victory for blacks (December 1956) was led by Martin Luther King (1929–68), from Atlanta, Georgia, who was pastor of a black Baptist church in Montgomery. King was a non-violent militant of a new brand, who followed the example of Mahatma Gandhi in India in organizing demonstrations which used numbers and passive resistance rather than force and played the religious card for all it was worth. In 1957 he became the first president of a new umbrella group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King’s house was bombed and he and some colleagues were convicted on various conspiracy charges, but King slowly emerged as a natural leader whom it was counterproductive for Southern sheriffs and courts to touch, and whose outstanding oratory was capable of enthusing enormous black crowds.136 The Montgomery boycott was followed by the first anti-segregation sit-in, February 1, 1960, when four black college students asked to be served at Woolworth’s whites-only lunch-counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, were turned down, and refused to leave. Sit-ins spread rapidly thereafter. On May 4, 1961 the tactic was reinforced when the first Freedom Riders, seven blacks and six whites, tested equal access to services at bus terminals from Washington DC to New Orleans. These tactics proved, on the whole, highly successful, with private companies usually ending segregation after initial resistance (and some white violence), and the courts ruling that discrimination was unlawful anyway. Such activities almost inevitably involved the use or threat of force, or provoked it, and, as the Sixties wore on, urban violence between blacks and whites grew, and King himself came under competitive threat from other black leaders, such as the black racist Malcolm X and the proponent of ‘black power,’ Stokely Carmichael. It was important for King to be seen to succeed in getting civil rights legislation through Congress. He backed the campaign of James Meredith (1961–2) to be enrolled at the whites-only University of Mississippi, and Meredith succeeded in getting himself admitted (and graduating). But his appearance on campus led to riots, September 30, 1962, in which two died, and Meredith himself was later shot and wounded on an anti-segregation ‘pilgrimage’ from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi (June 6, 1966). In the spring of 1963 King’s organization embarked on a large-scale desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, which produced scenes of violence, widely shown on TV, and some memorable images of the local white police chief, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, directing his water cannon and police dogs at the black protesters. King was briefly jailed and later an attempt to bomb him led to the first substantial black mob riot of the campaign (May 11, 1963). Mass demonstration in black communities throughout the nation culminated on August 28, 1963 in a march of 250,000 protesters, led by King, to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, where King delivered a memorable oration on the theme of ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by…their character.’137 This demonstration was part of the process which led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1964). The Act restored the federal government’s power to bar racial discrimination for the first time since the 19th century. Title 11 requires open access to gas stations, restaurants, lodging houses and all ‘public accommodations’ serving interstate commerce, and places of entertainment or exhibition. Title VI forbids discrimination in programs accepting federal funds. Title VII outlaws any employment discrimination and creates the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.138 The Civil Rights Act gave the blacks much more than they had ever had before, but not everything, and the rise of the Black Panther party, with its strategy of ‘picking up the gun,’ inspired militancy in many inner cities and serious rioting.

 

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A three-volume series, RECOMMENDED READING

 

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It was under Kennedy and Johnson that the American tragedy in Vietnam really began to unfold. When Kennedy reached the White House, Vietnam was already one of America’s largest and costliest commitments anywhere in the world, and it is hard to understand why he made no attempt to get back to the Geneva accords and hold free elections, which by that stage Diem might have won. In Paris on May 31, 1961, General de Gaulle, who knew all about it, urged him to disengage: ‘I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire.’94 Kennedy had a hunch that Southeast Asia would prove a trap. The Bay of Pigs débâcle made him think twice about further involvement, especially in Laos, where the Communists were threatening. He told Sorenson in September 1962, ‘Thank God the Bay of Pigs happened when it did. Otherwise we’d be in Laos by now—and that would be a hundred times worse.’95 He also said to Arthur Schlesinger that he was worried about sending in troops to Vietnam. ‘The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.’

Nevertheless, in November 1961 Kennedy did send in the first 7,000 US troops to Vietnam, the critical step down the slippery incline into the swamp. That was the first really big US error. The second was to get rid of Diem. Diem was by far the ablest of the Vietnam leaders and had the additional merit of being a civilian. Lyndon Johnson, then Vice-President, described him with some exaggeration as ‘the Churchill of Southeast Asia,’ and told a journalist, ‘Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.’97 But Kennedy, exasperated by his failure to pull a resounding success out of Vietnam, blamed the agent rather than the policy. In the autumn of 1963 he secretly authorized American support for an anti-Diem officers’ coup. It duly took place on November 1, Diem being murdered. The CIA provided $42,000 in bribes for the officers who set up a military junta. ‘The worst mistake we ever made’ was Lyndon Johnson’s later verdict.98 Three weeks later Kennedy was murdered himself, Johnson was president, and began to make mistakes on his own account. Warning signals ought to flash when leaders engage in historical analogies, especially emotive ones. LBJ compared the risk of Vietnam going Communist to the ‘loss’ of China in 1949: ‘I am not going to lose Vietnam,’ he declared. ‘I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.’ He drew, for the members of the National Security Council, a still more dangerous parallel: ‘Vietnam is just like the Alamo.’99 And again, to the so-called ‘Tuesday Cabinet:’ ‘After the Alamo, no one thought Sam Houston would wind it up so quick.’100

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People (pp. 879-880). (Harper Collins)

 

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The 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco was a peak counterculture phenomenon where approximately 100,000 young people converged on the Haight-Ashbury district. Seeking an alternative to mainstream American life, they embraced "free love," communal living, psychedelic drugs, and anti-Vietnam War sentiment, defining a major social shift. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was the epicenter, while Golden Gate Park acted as a central gathering spot for concerts and, according to Real San Francisco Tours and YouTube, happenings. The "Human Be-In" occurring in January 1967 at Golden Gate Park drew 30,000 people, launching the Summer of Love and blending politics with spirituality. Cultural Focus: Hippies rejected 1950s conformity and materialism, embracing communal lifestyles, "flower power," and psychedelic drug use (LSD, marijuana). The music was Psychedelic rock with San Francisco bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane emerging from the scene and playing at the "headquarters" of the movement: Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium. By October 1967, the scene's creators held a fake funeral, the "Death of the Hippie," to protest the commercialization and overcrowding of the Haight, reports History.com. This period is now widely recognized as a "social experiment" that fostered lasting changes in gender equality, social consciousness, and ecological awareness.

 

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"In the 1970s, protest bombings in America were commonplace, especially in hard-hit cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decade. The underground groups of the 1970s were a kind of grungy, bell-bottomed coda to the protests of the 1960s; their members were mostly onetime student leftists who refused to give up the utopian dreams of 1968. While little remembered today, there was a time during the early 1970s when the U.S. government—the Nixon Administration—considered these groups a genuine threat to national security. Alarmed by a series of Weatherman attacks, Nixon told J. Edgar Hoover during a June 1970 Oval Office meeting that “revolutionary terror” represented the single greatest threat to American society. Hoover promised to do what he could, which wasn’t much. As paranoid as Nixon could be, it was hard to argue with his line of thinking: Bombing attacks were growing by the day. They had begun as crude, simple things, mostly Molotov cocktails college radicals hurled toward ROTC buildings during the late 1960s. The first actual bombing campaign, the work of a group of New York City radicals led by a militant named Sam Melville, featured attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan between August and November 1969, when Melville and most of his pals were arrested. Weather’s attacks began three months later, and by 1971 protest bombings had spread across the country. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance. The deadliest underground attack of the decade, in fact, killed all of four people, in the January 1975 bombing of a Wall Street restaurant. The epidemic of bombings eased as the decade wore on, though this wasn’t readily apparent in San Francisco, where explosions remained so prevalent that, after an especially nasty series of attacks in 1976, an FBI spokesman termed the city “the Belfast of North America.’” And the violence actually grew more deadly as the number of underground groups dwindled and grew more desperate; the deadliest year for underground violence was 1981, when eleven people were killed in bombings and bank robberies gone bad."
Brian Burrough, Days of Rage

 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING

 

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Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he represented California in both houses of the United States Congress before serving as the 36th vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961. His presidency saw the reduction of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, détente with the Soviet Union and China, the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon's second term ended early when he became the only U.S. president to resign from office, as a result of the Watergate scandal.

Nixon was born into a poor family of Quakers in Yorba Linda, Southern California. He graduated from Whittier College with a Bachelor of Arts in 1934 and from Duke University School of Law with a Juris Doctor in 1937, practiced law in California, and then moved with his wife Pat to Washington, D.C., in 1942 to work for the federal government. During World War II, Richard Nixon served in the U.S. Navy (1942–1946), primarily in the South Pacific as an aviation logistics officer with the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command (SCAT). He commanded cargo detachments on New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, Vella Lavella, Bougainville, and Green Island (Nissan Island). He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946. His work on the Alger Hiss case established his reputation as a leading anti-communist. In 1950, he was elected to the Senate. Nixon was the running mate of Eisenhower, the Republican Party's presidential nominee in the 1952 and 1956 elections. Nixon served for eight years as vice president, and his two terms saw an increase in the notability of the office. He narrowly lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy. After his loss in the 1962 race for governor of California, Nixon announced his retirement from politics. However, he ran again for the presidency in 1968 and defeated the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Seeking to bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, Nixon ordered military operations and carpet bombing campaigns in Cambodia. He covertly aided Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and ended American combat involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and the military draft the same year. His visit to China in 1972 led to diplomatic relations between the two nations, and he finalized the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. During the course of his first term, he enacted many progressive environmental policy shifts, such as creating the Environmental Protection Agency and passing laws, including the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts. In addition to implementing the Twenty-sixth Amendment that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, he ended the direct international convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold in 1971, effectively taking the United States off the gold standard. He presided over the end of the Space Race by overseeing the triumphant USA Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. He was re-elected in 1972, when he defeated George McGovern in one of the largest landslide victories in American history.

In his second term, Nixon ordered an airlift to resupply Israeli materiel losses in the Yom Kippur War and thereby saved Israel from what appeared total destruction. But the conflict led to the international oil crisis of 1973. From 1973, ongoing revelations from the Nixon administration's involvement in Watergate eroded his support in Congress and the country. The scandal began with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee office, ordered by administration officials, and escalated despite cover-up efforts by the Nixon administration, of which he was aware. On August 9, 1974, facing almost certain impeachment and removal from office, Nixon resigned. Afterward, he was issued a controversial pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford. During nearly 20 years of retirement, Nixon wrote nine books and undertook many foreign trips, rehabilitating his image into that of an elder statesman and leading expert on foreign affairs. On April 18, 1994, he suffered a debilitating stroke, and died four days later.

 

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Best all-round biography of Nixon

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The Watergate scandal, or simply Watergate, was a political scandal in the United States involving the administration of President Richard Nixon. On June 17, 1972, operatives associated with Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign were caught burglarizing and planting listening devices in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington, D.C.'s Watergate complex. Nixon's efforts to conceal his administration's involvement led to an impeachment process and his resignation in August 1974.

Emerging from the White House's efforts to stop leaks, the break-in was an implementation of Operation Gemstone, enacted by mostly Cuban burglars led by former intelligence agents E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. After the arrests, investigators and reporters like The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—guided by the source "Deep Throat"—exposed a White House political espionage program illegally funded by donor contributions. Nixon denied involvement but his administration destroyed evidence, obstructed investigators, and bribed the burglars. This cover-up initially worked, helping Nixon win a landslide re-election, until revelations from the burglars' 1973 trial led to a Senate investigation.

Mounting pressure led Attorney General Elliot Richardson to appoint Archibald Cox as Watergate special prosecutor. Cox subpoenaed Nixon's Oval Office tapes—suspected to include Watergate conversations—but Nixon invoked executive privilege to block their release, triggering a constitutional crisis. In the "Saturday Night Massacre", Nixon fired Cox, forcing the resignations of the attorney general and his deputy and fueling suspicions of Nixon's involvement. Nixon released select tapes, although one was partially erased and two others disappeared. In April 1974, Cox's replacement Leon Jaworski reissued the subpoena, but Nixon provided only redacted transcripts. In July, the Supreme Court ordered the tapes' release, and the House Judiciary Committee recommended impeachment for obstructing justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. The White House released the "Smoking Gun" tape, showing that Nixon ordered the CIA to stop the FBI's investigation. Facing impeachment, on August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign. In total, 69 people were charged for Watergate—including two cabinet members—and most pleaded guilty or were convicted. Nixon was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

Watergate, often considered the greatest presidential scandal, tarnished Nixon's legacy and had electoral ramifications for the Republican Party: heavy losses in the 1974 midterm elections and Ford's failed 1976 reelection bid. Despite significant coverage, no consensus exists on the motive for the break-in or who specifically ordered it. Theories range from an incompetent break-in by rogue campaign officials to a sexpionage operation or CIA plot. The scandal generated over 30 memoirs and left such an impression that it is common for scandals, even outside politics or the United States, to be named with the suffix -gate. (Wikipedia)

 

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Best book on Watergate

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Best all-round biography of Nixon

Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. A member of the Republican Party, he became an important figure in the American conservative movement. The period encompassing his presidency is known as the Reagan era.

Born in Tampico, Illinois, Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and was hired the next year as a sports broadcaster in Iowa. In 1937, he moved to California where he became a well-known film actor. During his acting career, Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild twice from 1947 to 1952 and from 1959 to 1960. In the 1950s, he hosted General Electric Theater and worked as a motivational speaker for General Electric. During the 1964 presidential election, Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech launched his rise as a leading conservative figure. After being elected governor of California in 1966, he raised state taxes, turned the state budget deficit into a surplus and implemented crackdowns on university protests. Following his loss to Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican Party presidential primaries, Reagan won the Republican Party's nomination and then obtained a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election.

In his first term as president, Reagan began implementing "Reaganomics", (a term invented by his political enemies that turned out to be an advertisement for success) a policy involving economic deregulation and cuts in both taxes and government spending during a period of of massive un precedented inflation left over from the Carter administration. Reagan intentionally increased military spending so as to motivate the Soviets to come to the negotiating table, a policy that worked. Reagan's first term was also notable for his survival of an assassination attempt, a well-publicized fight with Air Traffic controllers union, and an expansion of the war on drugs. In the 1984 presidential election, Reagan was elected to a second term upon defeating former vice president Walter Mondale in one of the largest landslide victories in American history. He won every single state except Mondale's Minnesota. Foreign affairs dominated Reagan's second term, and most important were the ongoing negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which culminated in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.

Reagan left the presidency in 1989 with the American economy having seen a significant reduction of inflation, a fall in the unemployment rate, and the longest peacetime economic expansion in US history at that time. Reagan's foreign policy brought an end of the Cold War when the Soviet Union recognized that it could not afford to keep up with the pace of US rearmament and thus decided to sign the disarmament treaty of 1987. His Presidency constituted a realignment toward conservative policies in the United States, and he is often considered an icon of American conservatism. Democratic Party historians have typically placed Reagan in the middle to upper tier, but the American people rank him at the top. His post-presidential approval ratings by the general public are usually high. And upon his death in 2004, the US demonstrated an extraordinary affection for a president long out of office during the days of his Washington DC state funeral and his burial at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.

 

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The 1980s Cold War, often called the "Second Cold War," was a period of intense U.S.-Soviet rivalry (1980–1985) followed by rapid de-escalation, culminating in the Soviet collapse. President Reagan’s confrontational "evil empire" stance and military buildup, including the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), contrasted with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and domestic decline, leading to a shift under Mikhail Gorbachev toward reforms (Glasnost/Perestroika) and improved relations by 1985. The decade ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the end of the Soviet Union.

Key 1980s Cold War Developments:

Heightened Tensions (1980–1983): Following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, detente ended. The U.S. boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics and began a massive military buildup.

Reagan’s Strategy: President Reagan focused on rolling back Soviet influence, characterizing the USSR as an "evil empire". He supported the Mujahideen against Soviet forces in Afghanistan (Operation Cyclone).

1983 Crisis Year: Tensions peaked in 1983 with the Soviet shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), and the NATO exercise Able Archer 83, which Soviets misinterpreted as a real attack, highlighting the danger of nuclear war.

Soviet Decline & Change: The Soviet Union faced severe economic issues, including poor industrial performance, food shortages, and the strain of the Afghanistan war.

Rise of Gorbachev (1985): Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, initiating economic (perestroika) and political (glasnost) reforms.

Ending the Conflict (1985–1989): Gorbachev and Reagan signed the INF treaty in 1987 to eliminate intermediate-range missiles. By 1989, Eastern European nations were breaking away from Soviet influence, and the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. And the decade ends with the triumph of freedom and the reduction of tension with the greatest disarmament treaty ever signed with Reagan and Gorbachev sharing the credit for the historic disarmament treaty signed in Washington, D.C. by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. This is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed on December 8, 1987, with implementation and inspections occurring around that time. It eliminated an entire class of ground-launched missiles. It eliminated all U.S. and Soviet ground-launched nuclear and conventional ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. It was the first nuclear arms control treaty to abolish an entire category of weapons, rather than just capping growth, according to the National Security Archive and the Wilson Center. It included a rigorous on-site inspection regime that lasted through 1991. By May 1991, 2,692 such missiles were destroyed. The Reagan-Gorbachev friendship survived to the end of their lives with visits to Russia for Reagan and visits of Gorbachev to the United States including a trip up into the Santa Barbara mountains to Reagan's ranch.

The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.[1] It also brought an end to the Soviet Union's federal government and CPSU general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted from several factors: chronic economic stagnation, the unsustainable financial burden of the arms race and foreign conflicts, intense ethnic nationalism within its republics, and the destabilizing effects of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms (particularly glasnost and perestroika).

The Soviet Union had experienced internal stagnation and ethnic separatism. Although highly centralized until its final years, the country was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as the homelands for different ethnicities. By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and Gorbachev continuing the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members, the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian SSRs, declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to dissolve the union the following day.

The process began with growing unrest in the country's various constituent national republics developing into an incessant political and legislative conflict between them and the central government. Estonia was the first Soviet republic to declare state sovereignty inside the Union on 16 November 1988. Lithuania was the first republic to declare full independence restored from the Soviet Union by the Act of 11 March 1990 with its Baltic neighbors and the Southern Caucasus republic of Georgia joining it over the next two months.

During the failed 1991 August coup, communist hardliners and military elites attempted to overthrow Gorbachev and stop the failing reforms. However, the turmoil led to the central government in Moscow losing influence, ultimately resulting in many republics proclaiming independence in the following days and months. The secession of the Baltic states was recognized in September 1991. The Belovezha Accords were signed on 8 December by President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, President Kravchuk of Ukraine, and Chairman Shushkevich of Belarus, recognizing each other's independence and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to replace the Soviet Union as a community.[2] Kazakhstan was the last republic to leave the Union, proclaiming independence on 16 December. All ex-Soviet republics, with the exception of Georgia and the Baltic states, joined the CIS on 21 December, signing the Alma-Ata Protocol. Russia, as by far the largest and most populous republic, became the Soviet Union's de facto successor state.

On 25 December, Gorbachev resigned and turned over his presidential powers – including control of the nuclear launch codes – to Yeltsin, who was now the first president of the Russian Federation. That evening, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the Russian tricolor flag. The following day, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union's upper chamber, the Soviet of the Republics, formally dissolved the Union. The events of the dissolution resulted in its 15 constituent republics gaining full independence which also marked the major conclusion of the Revolutions of 1989 and the end of the Cold War.

 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING

This account of the last days of the Soviet Union is brilliant, riveting and as good as any novel.

The passing of the baton from JFK to LBJ is one of the most painful moments in all of USA history and it is especially difficult for the of us who were alive on November 22, 1963 and therefore remember the event.  But before we arrive at that date, we will first look back on the three years of the Kennedy administration: Bay of Pigs, Vienna Summit, Berlin Wall, October Missile Crisis and other events of those three years and we will try to come some evaluation of the effect on the United States of its handsome young president and his all too brief life and career. After our analysis of these three years, the Kennedy Years, we will then turn to the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973). Lyndon Baines Johnson also known as LBJ, was the 36th president of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, under whom he had served as the 37th vice president from 1961 to 1963. A Southern Democrat, Johnson previously represented Texas in Congress for over 23 years, first as a U.S. representative from 1937 to 1949, and then as a U.S. senator from 1949 to 1961. Born in Stonewall, Texas, Johnson worked as a teacher and a congressional aide before winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1937. In 1948, he was declared the winner in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate election in Texas before winning the general election. He became Senate majority whip in 1951, Senate Democratic leader in 1953 and majority leader in 1954. Senator Kennedy bested Johnson and his other rivals for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination before surprising many by offering to make Johnson his vice presidential running mate. The Kennedy–Johnson ticket won the general election. Vice President Johnson assumed the presidency in 1963, after President Kennedy was assassinated. The following year, Johnson won reelection to the presidency in a landslide, winning the largest share of the popular vote for the Democratic Party in history, and the highest for any candidate since the advent of widespread popular elections in the 1820s.

REQUIRED READING FOR THE WHOLE YEAR OF HISTORY OF THE USA

 

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The civil rights movement started among blacks (and their white liberal allies), mainly in the South, and emerged from the frustration felt by many blacks at the slow pace of their acquisition of civil rights, especially educational and voting ones, through court process and legislative change. The first outbreak of physical activity began in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955. Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her bus seat to a white rider, thereby defying a Southern custom which required blacks to yield seats at the front to whites. When she was jailed, a black boycott of the company’s buses was begun, and lasted a year. ‘Freedom riders’ and sit-in movements followed in a number of Southern states. The boycott, which ended in a desegregation victory for blacks (December 1956) was led by Martin Luther King (1929–68), from Atlanta, Georgia, who was pastor of a black Baptist church in Montgomery. King was a non-violent militant of a new brand, who followed the example of Mahatma Gandhi in India in organizing demonstrations which used numbers and passive resistance rather than force and played the religious card for all it was worth. In 1957 he became the first president of a new umbrella group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King’s house was bombed and he and some colleagues were convicted on various conspiracy charges, but King slowly emerged as a natural leader whom it was counterproductive for Southern sheriffs and courts to touch, and whose outstanding oratory was capable of enthusing enormous black crowds.136 The Montgomery boycott was followed by the first anti-segregation sit-in, February 1, 1960, when four black college students asked to be served at Woolworth’s whites-only lunch-counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, were turned down, and refused to leave. Sit-ins spread rapidly thereafter. On May 4, 1961 the tactic was reinforced when the first Freedom Riders, seven blacks and six whites, tested equal access to services at bus terminals from Washington DC to New Orleans. These tactics proved, on the whole, highly successful, with private companies usually ending segregation after initial resistance (and some white violence), and the courts ruling that discrimination was unlawful anyway. Such activities almost inevitably involved the use or threat of force, or provoked it, and, as the Sixties wore on, urban violence between blacks and whites grew, and King himself came under competitive threat from other black leaders, such as the black racist Malcolm X and the proponent of ‘black power,’ Stokely Carmichael. It was important for King to be seen to succeed in getting civil rights legislation through Congress. He backed the campaign of James Meredith (1961–2) to be enrolled at the whites-only University of Mississippi, and Meredith succeeded in getting himself admitted (and graduating). But his appearance on campus led to riots, September 30, 1962, in which two died, and Meredith himself was later shot and wounded on an anti-segregation ‘pilgrimage’ from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi (June 6, 1966). In the spring of 1963 King’s organization embarked on a large-scale desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, which produced scenes of violence, widely shown on TV, and some memorable images of the local white police chief, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, directing his water cannon and police dogs at the black protesters. King was briefly jailed and later an attempt to bomb him led to the first substantial black mob riot of the campaign (May 11, 1963). Mass demonstration in black communities throughout the nation culminated on August 28, 1963 in a march of 250,000 protesters, led by King, to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, where King delivered a memorable oration on the theme of ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by…their character.’137 This demonstration was part of the process which led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1964). The Act restored the federal government’s power to bar racial discrimination for the first time since the 19th century. Title 11 requires open access to gas stations, restaurants, lodging houses and all ‘public accommodations’ serving interstate commerce, and places of entertainment or exhibition. Title VI forbids discrimination in programs accepting federal funds. Title VII outlaws any employment discrimination and creates the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.138 The Civil Rights Act gave the blacks much more than they had ever had before, but not everything, and the rise of the Black Panther party, with its strategy of ‘picking up the gun,’ inspired militancy in many inner cities and serious rioting.

 

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A three-volume series, RECOMMENDED READING

 

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It was under Kennedy and Johnson that the American tragedy in Vietnam really began to unfold. When Kennedy reached the White House, Vietnam was already one of America’s largest and costliest commitments anywhere in the world, and it is hard to understand why he made no attempt to get back to the Geneva accords and hold free elections, which by that stage Diem might have won. In Paris on May 31, 1961, General de Gaulle, who knew all about it, urged him to disengage: ‘I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire.’94 Kennedy had a hunch that Southeast Asia would prove a trap. The Bay of Pigs débâcle made him think twice about further involvement, especially in Laos, where the Communists were threatening. He told Sorenson in September 1962, ‘Thank God the Bay of Pigs happened when it did. Otherwise we’d be in Laos by now—and that would be a hundred times worse.’95 He also said to Arthur Schlesinger that he was worried about sending in troops to Vietnam. ‘The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.’

Nevertheless, in November 1961 Kennedy did send in the first 7,000 US troops to Vietnam, the critical step down the slippery incline into the swamp. That was the first really big US error. The second was to get rid of Diem. Diem was by far the ablest of the Vietnam leaders and had the additional merit of being a civilian. Lyndon Johnson, then Vice-President, described him with some exaggeration as ‘the Churchill of Southeast Asia,’ and told a journalist, ‘Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.’97 But Kennedy, exasperated by his failure to pull a resounding success out of Vietnam, blamed the agent rather than the policy. In the autumn of 1963 he secretly authorized American support for an anti-Diem officers’ coup. It duly took place on November 1, Diem being murdered. The CIA provided $42,000 in bribes for the officers who set up a military junta. ‘The worst mistake we ever made’ was Lyndon Johnson’s later verdict.98 Three weeks later Kennedy was murdered himself, Johnson was president, and began to make mistakes on his own account. Warning signals ought to flash when leaders engage in historical analogies, especially emotive ones. LBJ compared the risk of Vietnam going Communist to the ‘loss’ of China in 1949: ‘I am not going to lose Vietnam,’ he declared. ‘I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.’ He drew, for the members of the National Security Council, a still more dangerous parallel: ‘Vietnam is just like the Alamo.’99 And again, to the so-called ‘Tuesday Cabinet:’ ‘After the Alamo, no one thought Sam Houston would wind it up so quick.’100

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People (pp. 879-880). (Harper Collins)

 

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The 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco was a peak counterculture phenomenon where approximately 100,000 young people converged on the Haight-Ashbury district. Seeking an alternative to mainstream American life, they embraced "free love," communal living, psychedelic drugs, and anti-Vietnam War sentiment, defining a major social shift. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was the epicenter, while Golden Gate Park acted as a central gathering spot for concerts and, according to Real San Francisco Tours and YouTube, happenings. The "Human Be-In" occurring in January 1967 at Golden Gate Park drew 30,000 people, launching the Summer of Love and blending politics with spirituality. Cultural Focus: Hippies rejected 1950s conformity and materialism, embracing communal lifestyles, "flower power," and psychedelic drug use (LSD, marijuana). The music was Psychedelic rock with San Francisco bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane emerging from the scene and playing at the "headquarters" of the movement: Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium. By October 1967, the scene's creators held a fake funeral, the "Death of the Hippie," to protest the commercialization and overcrowding of the Haight, reports History.com. This period is now widely recognized as a "social experiment" that fostered lasting changes in gender equality, social consciousness, and ecological awareness.

 

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"In the 1970s, protest bombings in America were commonplace, especially in hard-hit cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decade. The underground groups of the 1970s were a kind of grungy, bell-bottomed coda to the protests of the 1960s; their members were mostly onetime student leftists who refused to give up the utopian dreams of 1968. While little remembered today, there was a time during the early 1970s when the U.S. government—the Nixon Administration—considered these groups a genuine threat to national security. Alarmed by a series of Weatherman attacks, Nixon told J. Edgar Hoover during a June 1970 Oval Office meeting that “revolutionary terror” represented the single greatest threat to American society. Hoover promised to do what he could, which wasn’t much. As paranoid as Nixon could be, it was hard to argue with his line of thinking: Bombing attacks were growing by the day. They had begun as crude, simple things, mostly Molotov cocktails college radicals hurled toward ROTC buildings during the late 1960s. The first actual bombing campaign, the work of a group of New York City radicals led by a militant named Sam Melville, featured attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan between August and November 1969, when Melville and most of his pals were arrested. Weather’s attacks began three months later, and by 1971 protest bombings had spread across the country. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance. The deadliest underground attack of the decade, in fact, killed all of four people, in the January 1975 bombing of a Wall Street restaurant. The epidemic of bombings eased as the decade wore on, though this wasn’t readily apparent in San Francisco, where explosions remained so prevalent that, after an especially nasty series of attacks in 1976, an FBI spokesman termed the city “the Belfast of North America.’” And the violence actually grew more deadly as the number of underground groups dwindled and grew more desperate; the deadliest year for underground violence was 1981, when eleven people were killed in bombings and bank robberies gone bad."
Brian Burrough, Days of Rage

 

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Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he represented California in both houses of the United States Congress before serving as the 36th vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961. His presidency saw the reduction of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, détente with the Soviet Union and China, the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon's second term ended early when he became the only U.S. president to resign from office, as a result of the Watergate scandal.

Nixon was born into a poor family of Quakers in Yorba Linda, Southern California. He graduated from Whittier College with a Bachelor of Arts in 1934 and from Duke University School of Law with a Juris Doctor in 1937, practiced law in California, and then moved with his wife Pat to Washington, D.C., in 1942 to work for the federal government. During World War II, Richard Nixon served in the U.S. Navy (1942–1946), primarily in the South Pacific as an aviation logistics officer with the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command (SCAT). He commanded cargo detachments on New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, Vella Lavella, Bougainville, and Green Island (Nissan Island). He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946. His work on the Alger Hiss case established his reputation as a leading anti-communist. In 1950, he was elected to the Senate. Nixon was the running mate of Eisenhower, the Republican Party's presidential nominee in the 1952 and 1956 elections. Nixon served for eight years as vice president, and his two terms saw an increase in the notability of the office. He narrowly lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy. After his loss in the 1962 race for governor of California, Nixon announced his retirement from politics. However, he ran again for the presidency in 1968 and defeated the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Seeking to bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, Nixon ordered military operations and carpet bombing campaigns in Cambodia. He covertly aided Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and ended American combat involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and the military draft the same year. His visit to China in 1972 led to diplomatic relations between the two nations, and he finalized the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. During the course of his first term, he enacted many progressive environmental policy shifts, such as creating the Environmental Protection Agency and passing laws, including the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts. In addition to implementing the Twenty-sixth Amendment that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, he ended the direct international convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold in 1971, effectively taking the United States off the gold standard. He presided over the end of the Space Race by overseeing the triumphant USA Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. He was re-elected in 1972, when he defeated George McGovern in one of the largest landslide victories in American history.

In his second term, Nixon ordered an airlift to resupply Israeli materiel losses in the Yom Kippur War and thereby saved Israel from what appeared total destruction. But the conflict led to the international oil crisis of 1973. From 1973, ongoing revelations from the Nixon administration's involvement in Watergate eroded his support in Congress and the country. The scandal began with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee office, ordered by administration officials, and escalated despite cover-up efforts by the Nixon administration, of which he was aware. On August 9, 1974, facing almost certain impeachment and removal from office, Nixon resigned. Afterward, he was issued a controversial pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford. During nearly 20 years of retirement, Nixon wrote nine books and undertook many foreign trips, rehabilitating his image into that of an elder statesman and leading expert on foreign affairs. On April 18, 1994, he suffered a debilitating stroke, and died four days later.

 

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Best all-round biography of Nixon

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The Watergate scandal, or simply Watergate, was a political scandal in the United States involving the administration of President Richard Nixon. On June 17, 1972, operatives associated with Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign were caught burglarizing and planting listening devices in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington, D.C.'s Watergate complex. Nixon's efforts to conceal his administration's involvement led to an impeachment process and his resignation in August 1974.

Emerging from the White House's efforts to stop leaks, the break-in was an implementation of Operation Gemstone, enacted by mostly Cuban burglars led by former intelligence agents E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. After the arrests, investigators and reporters like The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—guided by the source "Deep Throat"—exposed a White House political espionage program illegally funded by donor contributions. Nixon denied involvement but his administration destroyed evidence, obstructed investigators, and bribed the burglars. This cover-up initially worked, helping Nixon win a landslide re-election, until revelations from the burglars' 1973 trial led to a Senate investigation.

Mounting pressure led Attorney General Elliot Richardson to appoint Archibald Cox as Watergate special prosecutor. Cox subpoenaed Nixon's Oval Office tapes—suspected to include Watergate conversations—but Nixon invoked executive privilege to block their release, triggering a constitutional crisis. In the "Saturday Night Massacre", Nixon fired Cox, forcing the resignations of the attorney general and his deputy and fueling suspicions of Nixon's involvement. Nixon released select tapes, although one was partially erased and two others disappeared. In April 1974, Cox's replacement Leon Jaworski reissued the subpoena, but Nixon provided only redacted transcripts. In July, the Supreme Court ordered the tapes' release, and the House Judiciary Committee recommended impeachment for obstructing justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. The White House released the "Smoking Gun" tape, showing that Nixon ordered the CIA to stop the FBI's investigation. Facing impeachment, on August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign. In total, 69 people were charged for Watergate—including two cabinet members—and most pleaded guilty or were convicted. Nixon was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

Watergate, often considered the greatest presidential scandal, tarnished Nixon's legacy and had electoral ramifications for the Republican Party: heavy losses in the 1974 midterm elections and Ford's failed 1976 reelection bid. Despite significant coverage, no consensus exists on the motive for the break-in or who specifically ordered it. Theories range from an incompetent break-in by rogue campaign officials to a sexpionage operation or CIA plot. The scandal generated over 30 memoirs and left such an impression that it is common for scandals, even outside politics or the United States, to be named with the suffix -gate. (Wikipedia)

 

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Best book on Watergate

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Best all-round biography of Nixon

Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. A member of the Republican Party, he became an important figure in the American conservative movement. The period encompassing his presidency is known as the Reagan era.

Born in Tampico, Illinois, Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and was hired the next year as a sports broadcaster in Iowa. In 1937, he moved to California where he became a well-known film actor. During his acting career, Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild twice from 1947 to 1952 and from 1959 to 1960. In the 1950s, he hosted General Electric Theater and worked as a motivational speaker for General Electric. During the 1964 presidential election, Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech launched his rise as a leading conservative figure. After being elected governor of California in 1966, he raised state taxes, turned the state budget deficit into a surplus and implemented crackdowns on university protests. Following his loss to Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican Party presidential primaries, Reagan won the Republican Party's nomination and then obtained a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election.

In his first term as president, Reagan began implementing "Reaganomics", (a term invented by his political enemies that turned out to be an advertisement for success) a policy involving economic deregulation and cuts in both taxes and government spending during a period of of massive un precedented inflation left over from the Carter administration. Reagan intentionally increased military spending so as to motivate the Soviets to come to the negotiating table, a policy that worked. Reagan's first term was also notable for his survival of an assassination attempt, a well-publicized fight with Air Traffic controllers union, and an expansion of the war on drugs. In the 1984 presidential election, Reagan was elected to a second term upon defeating former vice president Walter Mondale in one of the largest landslide victories in American history. He won every single state except Mondale's Minnesota. Foreign affairs dominated Reagan's second term, and most important were the ongoing negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which culminated in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.

Reagan left the presidency in 1989 with the American economy having seen a significant reduction of inflation, a fall in the unemployment rate, and the longest peacetime economic expansion in US history at that time. Reagan's foreign policy brought an end of the Cold War when the Soviet Union recognized that it could not afford to keep up with the pace of US rearmament and thus decided to sign the disarmament treaty of 1987. His Presidency constituted a realignment toward conservative policies in the United States, and he is often considered an icon of American conservatism. Democratic Party historians have typically placed Reagan in the middle to upper tier, but the American people rank him at the top. His post-presidential approval ratings by the general public are usually high. And upon his death in 2004, the US demonstrated an extraordinary affection for a president long out of office during the days of his Washington DC state funeral and his burial at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.

 

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The 1980s Cold War, often called the "Second Cold War," was a period of intense U.S.-Soviet rivalry (1980–1985) followed by rapid de-escalation, culminating in the Soviet collapse. President Reagan’s confrontational "evil empire" stance and military buildup, including the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), contrasted with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and domestic decline, leading to a shift under Mikhail Gorbachev toward reforms (Glasnost/Perestroika) and improved relations by 1985. The decade ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the end of the Soviet Union.

Key 1980s Cold War Developments:

Heightened Tensions (1980–1983): Following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, detente ended. The U.S. boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics and began a massive military buildup.

Reagan’s Strategy: President Reagan focused on rolling back Soviet influence, characterizing the USSR as an "evil empire". He supported the Mujahideen against Soviet forces in Afghanistan (Operation Cyclone).

1983 Crisis Year: Tensions peaked in 1983 with the Soviet shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), and the NATO exercise Able Archer 83, which Soviets misinterpreted as a real attack, highlighting the danger of nuclear war.

Soviet Decline & Change: The Soviet Union faced severe economic issues, including poor industrial performance, food shortages, and the strain of the Afghanistan war.

Rise of Gorbachev (1985): Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, initiating economic (perestroika) and political (glasnost) reforms.

Ending the Conflict (1985–1989): Gorbachev and Reagan signed the INF treaty in 1987 to eliminate intermediate-range missiles. By 1989, Eastern European nations were breaking away from Soviet influence, and the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. And the decade ends with the triumph of freedom and the reduction of tension with the greatest disarmament treaty ever signed with Reagan and Gorbachev sharing the credit for the historic disarmament treaty signed in Washington, D.C. by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. This is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed on December 8, 1987, with implementation and inspections occurring around that time. It eliminated an entire class of ground-launched missiles. It eliminated all U.S. and Soviet ground-launched nuclear and conventional ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. It was the first nuclear arms control treaty to abolish an entire category of weapons, rather than just capping growth, according to the National Security Archive and the Wilson Center. It included a rigorous on-site inspection regime that lasted through 1991. By May 1991, 2,692 such missiles were destroyed. The Reagan-Gorbachev friendship survived to the end of their lives with visits to Russia for Reagan and visits of Gorbachev to the United States including a trip up into the Santa Barbara mountains to Reagan's ranch.

The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.[1] It also brought an end to the Soviet Union's federal government and CPSU general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted from several factors: chronic economic stagnation, the unsustainable financial burden of the arms race and foreign conflicts, intense ethnic nationalism within its republics, and the destabilizing effects of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms (particularly glasnost and perestroika).

The Soviet Union had experienced internal stagnation and ethnic separatism. Although highly centralized until its final years, the country was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as the homelands for different ethnicities. By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and Gorbachev continuing the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members, the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian SSRs, declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to dissolve the union the following day.

The process began with growing unrest in the country's various constituent national republics developing into an incessant political and legislative conflict between them and the central government. Estonia was the first Soviet republic to declare state sovereignty inside the Union on 16 November 1988. Lithuania was the first republic to declare full independence restored from the Soviet Union by the Act of 11 March 1990 with its Baltic neighbors and the Southern Caucasus republic of Georgia joining it over the next two months.

During the failed 1991 August coup, communist hardliners and military elites attempted to overthrow Gorbachev and stop the failing reforms. However, the turmoil led to the central government in Moscow losing influence, ultimately resulting in many republics proclaiming independence in the following days and months. The secession of the Baltic states was recognized in September 1991. The Belovezha Accords were signed on 8 December by President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, President Kravchuk of Ukraine, and Chairman Shushkevich of Belarus, recognizing each other's independence and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to replace the Soviet Union as a community.[2] Kazakhstan was the last republic to leave the Union, proclaiming independence on 16 December. All ex-Soviet republics, with the exception of Georgia and the Baltic states, joined the CIS on 21 December, signing the Alma-Ata Protocol. Russia, as by far the largest and most populous republic, became the Soviet Union's de facto successor state.

On 25 December, Gorbachev resigned and turned over his presidential powers – including control of the nuclear launch codes – to Yeltsin, who was now the first president of the Russian Federation. That evening, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the Russian tricolor flag. The following day, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union's upper chamber, the Soviet of the Republics, formally dissolved the Union. The events of the dissolution resulted in its 15 constituent republics gaining full independence which also marked the major conclusion of the Revolutions of 1989 and the end of the Cold War.

 

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This account of the last days of the Soviet Union is brilliant, riveting and as good as any novel.