ABSTRACT
The storied half decade between 1963 and 1968 witnessed a fundamental change in the Cold War. There was also the global impact of the postwar baby boom, when the generation raised in an ideologically divided world began to challenge Cold War ideas and structures. The mid-1960s witnessed the climax of the postwar global economic expansion. The United States too was experiencing economic problems, having lost its postwar dominance of world trade to new rivals. The President John F. Kennedy resolved to make South Vietnam the principal focus of America’s renewed Cold War struggle in order, like his predecessors, to prevent falling dominoes in Southeast Asia and a victory for China. Moreover, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration quickly abandoned the reformist impulses of Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress and in 1965 intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic to overthrow an allegedly leftist government and prevent “another Cuba.”
