In the mid-1960s, the United States was governed by what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the “Vital Center”—a liberal consensus that believed in the New DealThe New Deal Full Description:A comprehensive series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It represented a fundamental shift in the US government’s philosophy, moving from a passive observer to an active manager of the economy and social welfare. The New Deal was a response to the failure of the free market to self-correct. It created the modern welfare state through the “3 Rs”: Relief for the unemployed and poor, Recovery of the economy to normal levels, and Reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. It introduced social security, labor rights, and massive infrastructure projects. Critical Perspective:From a critical historical standpoint, the New Deal was not a socialist revolution, but a project to save capitalism from itself. By providing a safety net and creating jobs, the state successfully defused the revolutionary potential of the starving working class. It acknowledged that capitalism could not survive without state intervention to mitigate its inherent brutality and instability.
Read more at home and the containmentContainment The US foreign policy doctrine articulated by diplomat George Kennan in 1946–47, holding that Soviet expansion should be blocked at every point rather than directly confronted. It defined American grand strategy throughout the Cold War. The doctrine of containment emerged from Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ of February 1946 and his anonymous ‘X Article’ in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, which argued that Soviet expansion was not driven by genuine security needs but by ideological imperatives — that the Soviet state required external enemies to justify its domestic repression, and that it would expand wherever it found a vacuum of power. The policy response was not war but patient, firm resistance at every point of Soviet pressure: economic aid to rebuilding Western Europe (the Marshall Plan), military guarantees to countries facing communist insurgencies (the Truman Doctrine), alliance systems (NATO), and the forward deployment of American military power. Containment as Kennan conceived it was primarily political and economic; as implemented, it became heavily militarised — a drift that Kennan himself criticised throughout his long life. The doctrine was applied, with varying degrees of consistency, in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, and dozens of other theatres, sometimes protecting genuine democracies against genuine Soviet-backed subversion, sometimes overthrowing democratic governments that Washington decided were insufficiently anti-communist. Containment’s central ambiguity was whether it was a defensive strategy or an offensive one in disguise. Kennan argued it was defensive — preventing Soviet expansion, not threatening Soviet territory. Critics on the left argued that ‘containment’ was often a codeword for maintaining American dominance over the developing world regardless of whether Soviet influence was actually present. The interventions it was used to justify — Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam — were not all responses to Soviet expansion; several were responses to nationalist movements that threatened American economic interests. Kennan spent decades arguing that the militarised version of containment he had supposedly invented was a betrayal of his original concept. The doctrine achieved its stated purpose — the Soviet Union collapsed without a direct superpower war — but at a cost measured in the democratic governments destroyed and the civil wars fuelled in the name of fighting communism. of communism abroad. Yet, by 1968, this center had collapsed, assailed not just by the conservative right, but by a ferocious “New Left” that viewed liberalism as morally bankrupt.

In this week’s podcast, I explored this pivotal moment using Kim McQuaid’s excellent book, The Anxious Years. The critique launched by the New Left was blistering: they argued that Cold WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War had fully ended: American and Soviet disagreements over the post-war order in Europe were visible at Yalta in February 1945 and had hardened into open confrontation by 1947, when the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion and the Marshall Plan began binding Western Europe to American economic leadership. The term itself was popularised by journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947, capturing the essential quality of a conflict that neither side could allow to become hot — because both possessed nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the other’s cities. The resulting stalemate was managed through deterrence, alliance systems (NATO in the West, the Warsaw Pact in the East), and the deliberate avoidance of direct superpower confrontation even while both sides fought intense proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and dozens of other theatres. The Cold War was simultaneously a strategic competition and an ideological one: each side claimed to represent the future of humanity, and each used development aid, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and covert action to advance its model in the non-aligned world. It ended not with a military defeat but with the internal collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. The Cold War’s most important characteristic was its globality: what began as a European dispute about occupation zones became a worldwide competition that shaped the politics of every continent. For the United States, it justified interventions that overthrew democratic governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) on the grounds that any leftist government was a Soviet beachhead; for the Soviet Union, it justified the crushing of reform movements within its own bloc (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) on the grounds that any deviation threatened the socialist camp. The Cold War’s legacy is therefore not only the fall of the Berlin Wall but the long list of democracies destroyed, developmental alternatives foreclosed, and civil wars fuelled in the name of containing the other side. The Third World paid the price for a confrontation between two powers that never actually fought each other. liberals were merely “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” terrified of being red-baited by the right and thus eager to prove their toughness through imperialist aggression.

The Trap of “Toughness”

The tragedy of the Democratic Party in this era was its fear of the shadow of McCarthyismMcCarthyism Full Description The wave of anti-communist suspicion, accusation, and persecution that swept the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy claimed — without evidence — that the US government and army were riddled with communist agents. The period saw the blacklisting of suspected communists from Hollywood and academia, loyalty investigations of federal employees, and the destruction of careers through innuendo. McCarthy was finally discredited during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Critical Perspective McCarthyism has been so thoroughly discredited that it is easy to forget it enjoyed genuine popular support. The fear of Soviet espionage was not entirely irrational — the Rosenbergs had passed nuclear secrets to the Soviets, and Soviet intelligence had penetrated the US government. McCarthy exploited a real anxiety for political purposes, but the mechanisms he used — guilt by association, demands for loyalty oaths, the destruction of careers without due process — were symptoms of a democratic culture that had partially suspended its own principles in the face of perceived existential threat.. As McQuaid notes, figures like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson felt trapped in an “escalatory duet” with the right. To pass domestic reforms, they had to prove their anti-communist bona fides.

This led to a perverse logic where liberals started wars to prevent conservatives from starting bigger ones. Kennedy’s adventures in Cuba and Vietnam were driven, in part, by a belief that if he didn’t act, the right would crucify him. As Gary Wills summarized: “The only way to become a peacemaker is first to disarm the warmakers by making a little successful war.” Of course, in Vietnam, the “little war” became a catastrophe.

The Credibility Gap

The turning point was 1968. The Tet OffensiveTet Offensive tet-offensive The coordinated surprise attacks launched by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces on 30 January 1968 against more than 100 South Vietnamese cities and towns, including Saigon. Although the military offensive was repelled with heavy communist losses, its political impact in the United States was decisive — it destroyed public confidence in the official narrative that the war was being won. The Tet Offensive — timed to coincide with the Vietnamese lunar new year — violated the informal ceasefire that normally accompanied the holiday and targeted urban centres that the US military command had described as pacified. The assault on the US Embassy compound in Saigon, where Viet Cong sappers briefly penetrated the compound before being killed, was broadcast live on American television. The battle of Hue — where North Vietnamese forces occupied the imperial capital for 25 days before being driven out at enormous cost — destroyed one of South Vietnam’s most historic cities and produced documented evidence of communist executions of civilians. Khe Sanh, a US Marine base besieged for 77 days, created fears of a second Dien Bien Phu. In military terms, the offensive was a failure for North Vietnam: the expected popular uprising in South Vietnam did not materialise, the Viet Cong suffered catastrophic losses (approximately 40,000 dead), and most objectives were held only briefly before being recaptured. But militarily the offensive was not primarily designed to win territory — it was designed to demonstrate that the Johnson administration’s optimistic briefings were false, that the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ did not exist. In this psychological and political objective, it succeeded completely. Tet demonstrated that in a democratic society, the relationship between military reality and political reality is mediated by narrative — and that a narrative sustained by institutional credibility can be destroyed in a single news cycle by events visible to television cameras. The ‘credibility gap’ between official optimism and battlefield reality had been building for years; Tet collapsed it in 72 hours. Walter Cronkite’s editorial broadcast from Vietnam on 27 February 1968 — ‘It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate’ — reflected and accelerated a shift in establishment opinion that made the war politically untenable. Johnson announced he would not seek re-election on 31 March 1968. The lesson American military strategists drew — that the media had lost the war by undermining public support for a militarily sound effort — misread the causality. The problem was not that the media showed the gap between official claims and reality; the problem was the gap itself, and the institutional decisions to maintain false optimism in official communications that made the gap unsustainable when reality arrived. shattered the illusion that the “best and brightest” in Washington knew what they were doing. When North Vietnamese commandos breached the US Embassy in Saigon, they didn’t just attack a building; they attacked the credibility of the entire foreign policy establishment.

For the New Left—groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—this confirmed what they had long suspected: the “experts” were frauds. They adopted C. Wright Mills’ term “The Power Elite” (or “The Establishment”) to describe an unelected oligarchy of bureaucrats, generals, and corporate leaders who ran the country regardless of election results. This critique of a “Deep State” long predates the modern populist right; it began as a scream of frustration from the radical left.

The Failure of the New Left

However, while the New Left succeeded in diagnosing the rot at the heart of American liberalism, they failed to offer a viable alternative. They could disrupt, protest, and expose, but they could not govern. As the war dragged on and the backlash mounted, the movement fractured into sectarianism and violence, eventually clearing the path for the conservative counter-revolution of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Understanding this era is crucial because it reveals the fragility of the “center.” When the political establishment prioritizes maintaining its own status over telling the truth to the public, it doesn’t just lose elections; it loses its legitimacy.

The A-Level History Masterclass Series: January – June 2025

• Jan 25: The Russian Revolution & Stalinism
• Feb 8: Nazi Germany
• Feb 22: Post-War America (1945-1974)

Stop Memorising. Start Arguing.

Most students lose marks not because they lack knowledge, but because they lack structure. They treat the exam like a memory test, not an argument.

In this live series, we are skipping the basics. We are focusing entirely on the high-level skills that separate a Grade B from a Grade A*:

• Essay Architecture: The exact paragraph structures that force examiners to give top marks.
• Applied Historiography: How to use academic debate to strengthen your argument, not just fill space.
• Deep Context: The nuance and detail that textbooks leave out.

This is the system for turning historical knowledge into exam results.

Booking Opens: First Week of January.