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The
United StatesJoe McCarthy (1953-1954)
Dwight D. Eisenhower
John Foster Dulles
John F. Kennedy
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Robert Kennedy
Lyndon B. Johnson
Hubert Humphrey
Richard Nixon
Henry Kissinger
Nelson Rockefeller
Gerald Ford
Jimmy Carter
Paul Volcker
Ronald Reagan
Bob Dole
George Bush
Bill Clinton
Newt Gingrich
Bill Gates
The
Soviet Union / RussiaNikita Khrushchev
Leonid Brezhnev
Alexei Kosygin
Nikolay V. Podgorny
Mikhail Gorbachev
Boris Yeltsin
EnglandAnthony Eden
Harold Macmillan
Alec Douglas-Home
Harold Wilson
Edward Heath
James Callaghan
Margaret Thatcher
John Major
Tony Blair
FrancePierre Mendes-France
Charles De Gaulle
Georges Pompidou
Giscard-d'Estaing
François Mitterand
Jacques Chirac
GermanyKonrad Adenauer
Willy Brandt
Helmut Schmidt
Helmut Kohl
Gerhard Schröder
Other
European Community NationsPaul-Henri Spaak
The
English-Speaking CommonwealthRobert Menzies
Malcolm Fraser
Bob Hawke
Paul Keating
John Howard
PolandLech Walesa
Other
East European or Warsaw Pact NationsMarshall Tito
Nicholas Ceaucescu
Latin
AmericaFulgensia Batista
Fidel Castro
Papa Doc Duvalier
Anastasio Somoza
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Alberto Fujimori
Hugo Banzer
Alfredo Stroessner
Juan Peron
Augusto Pinochet
Edouardo Frei
JapanEmperor Michinomiya Hirohito (1926-1989)
Emperor Tsugu Akihito (1989- )
ChinaMao Zedong
Deng Xiaoping
Jiang Zemin
Zhu Rongji
IndiaJawaharlal Nehru (1947-1964)
Indira Gandhi (1966-77; 1980-84)
Sanjay Gandhi
Rajiv Gandhi (1984-1989)
Other
AsiaChiang Kai Shek
Syngmun Rhee
Kim Dae Jung
Kim Il Sung
Ferdinand Marcos
Ho Chi Minh
Ngo Den Diem
Prince Norodim Sihanouk
Pol Pot
Hun Sen
Sukarno
Suharto
Dalai Lama
Middle
EastShah Reza Pahlavi
Ayatollah Khomeini
Muhammad Khatami
Saddham Hussein
Hafez Assad
King Hussein of Jordan
Yassir Arafat
David Ben Gurion (1948-1953, 1955-1963)
Levi Eshkol (1963-1969)
Golda Meier (1969-1974)
Yitzhak Rabin (1974-1977; 1992-1995)
Menachem Begin (1977-1983)
Shimon Perez (1984-1986; 1995-1996)
Binyamain Netanyahu (1996-1999)
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia
Gamel Abdul Nassir
Anwar Sadat
Hosni Mubarak
Muammar Qaddafi
King Hassan of Morocco
Sub-Saharan
AfricaKwame Nkrumah
Jomo Kenyata
Daniel arap Moi
Idi Amin
Mobutu Sese Seku
Robert Mugabe
Hendrik Verwoerd (1949-1966)
P.W. Botha
F.W. de Klerk
Desmond Tutu
Nelson Mandela
The
United NationsDag Hammarskjold
U Thant
History
of the Second Half of the 20th Century: General Sources
THE UNITED STATES
1909-1957.
Joe McCarthy (1953-1954)
A Senator from Wisconsin in the early in1950s, who, in a Congressional committee that he himself directed, made wild accusations against an ever-growing list of people--in the American government as well as outside of it--of being communist or pro-communist.
He himself was being investigated for financial fraud in late 1951--and fearing his non-reelection to the Senate in 1952 he took up the anti-communist tirade as a way of drawing fire away from himself and toward others. Once having made the claim of possessing a list of known communists in the State Department that he himself was going to expose (he never did reveal who those might be) he took up in early 1953 his attacks in order to made good some of his claim of being the country's best anti-communist crusader.
For a while he terrorized the Eisenhower Administration--claiming that a number of Eisenhower's diplomatic appointees had communist connections (as vaguely defined by McCarthy). Then in April and May of 1954 he even took on the US Department of Defense, claiming that it was widely infiltrated by pro-communist insiders. His accusations became so outrageous that he finally embarrassed himself before the new TV-viewing public and gave the Senate an opportunity to silence him in December with a motion of censure for his behavior.
In the meantime McCarthy presented American politics with a new name for the technique of attempting to intimidate or destroy your political opponents by accusing them of being soft on communism: "McCarthyism."
1890-1969. President of the United States, 1953-1961.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe (1942-1945).
Links to other information on Eisenhower:
Dwight D. Eisenhower: Thirty-Fourth President 1953-1961 (White House)
Dwight D. Eisenhower: Biography (Grolier Interactive)1888-1959. Secretary of State, 1953-1959. John Foster Dulles (1953-1959)
A militant anti-Communist and even an anti-neutralist who viewed the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union (Russia) as a great moral crusade of good against evil--in which there could be no neutral ground.
1917-1963. United States President, 1961-1963.
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy: Thirty-Fifth President 1961-1963 (White House)1929-1968.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King (Time 100: Jack E. White)1925-1968.
Robert F. Kennedy (1961-1968)
Robert Kennedy's major works or writings:
The EnemyWithin (1959)1908-1973. United States President, 1963-1969.
Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969)
Lyndon B. Johnson: Thirty-Sixth President 1963-1969 (White House)
Hubert Humphrey
1913-1994. United States President, 1969-1974.
Richard M. Nixon
The Memories of Richard Nixon (1978)
The Real War (1980)
Beyond Peace (1994)Richard M. Nixon: Biography (Grolier Interactive)
Richard Milhous Nixon (Encyclopedia of American Political Parties)
Richard M. Nixon: Thirty-Seventh President 1969-1974 (White House)
Richard M. Nixon: "Tricky Dick"1923- .
Henry A. Kissinger (1969-1977)
National Security Advisor (1969-1973) and Secretary of State (1973-1977) under the Presidential Administrations of Nixon and Ford.
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957)
The Necessity for Choice (1960)
American Foreign Policy (1969)
The White House Years (1979)
For the Record (1981)Nelson Rockefeller
1915- . United States President, 1974-1977.
Gerald Ford
Gerald R. Ford: Thirty-Eighth President 1974-1977 (White House)1924- . United States President, 1977-1981.
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter (TheCarter Center)
Jimmy Carter: Thirty-Ninth President 1977-1981 (White House)Paul Volcker
1911- . U.S. President, 1981-1989.
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan: Fortieth President 1981-1989 (White House)
Ronald Reagan (Time 100: Peggy Noonan)Bob Dole
1924- .
George Bush
George Bush: Forty-First President 1989-1993 (White House)
George Bush Biography
Bill Clinton
Ronald Reagan: Fortieth President 1981-1989 (White House)1943- .
Newt Gingrich
The Long March of Newt Gingrich (PBS)
Newt Gingrich, 1943- (US House of Representatives)1955- .
Bill Gates
The Road Ahead (with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson,1995)William H. Gates: Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Microsoft Corporation
Biography of Bill Gates (Brian Hornburg)
Bill Gates (1st Person)
SOVIET UNION / RUSSIA1894-1971.
Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964)
Became First Secretary of the Communist Party shortly after Stalin's death in 1953. In 1957 he ousted his colleague Nikolai Bulganin and took for himself the State position as Premier, thus holding the top party and state posts.
But his diplomatic miscalculations in placing Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962--and then having to remove them--and the worsening performance of Soviet agriculture and industry under his leadership finally led to his ouster in October of 1964.
Nikita Khrushchev (Grolier Encyclopedia)
The Rise of Khrushchev (WestNewEnglColl: Gerhard Rempel)(1906-1982)
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (1964-1982)
The honorary "President" of the USSR, 1960-1964 under Khrushchev. With the ouster of Khrushchev in 1964, he was elevated to the all-important Communist Party position of First Secretary (later General Secretary)--a position he would hold until his death in 1982. In 1977, upon the ouster of his collegue Nicolay Podgorny he once again took up the position of President of the USSR--combining supreme positions in both the state and party.
Author of the "Brezhnev Doctrine," which affirmed the USSR's right to intervene in the political affairs within any country within the Soviet bloc when Moscow perceived that the country was threatened by anti-socialist forces--as was the case in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, when that country started to show signs of a drift away from Russian domination.
1904-1980. Alexei Kosygin (1964-1980)
Soviet Premier: President of the Soviet Council of Ministers, 1964-1980. Kosygin was part of a Soviet triumvirate composed of Brezhnev, Podgorny, and himself which jointly ruled the Soviet Union--though Brezhnev's position was paramount, becoming even moreso as the 1970s advanced.
1903-1983. Nikolay V. Podgorny (1964-1977)
Podgorny was Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1963-1965. But he was deposed from this key position in a power struggle with Brezhnev. Nonetheless, he was granted the lesser position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, 1965-1977, and supposedly formed part of a joint rulership of Brezhnev, Kosygin and himself. In 1977 he was ousted from this state position as Brezhnev took it for himself.
1931- .
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1985-1991)
A Communist Party bureaucrat with a specialization in economic matters, in 1980 he was brought into the inner circle of Soviet politics (the Politburo) as a protege of Yuri Andropov. When Andropov became Soviet leader Gorbachev was placed in charge of the stumbling Soviet economy.
In 1985 Gorbachev became Soviet leader and party chief as the Communist Party General Secretary. He removed old party economic planners and replaced them with younger, reform-minded economic ministers, ones willing to work with his program of liberalizing the Soviet economy (perestroika) and culture (glasnost).
This liberalization extended to the lightening of the military hand of the Soviet Union on its neighbors--both in Asia (Afghanistan) and in Eastern Europe (the entire Soviet bloc)--in order to relieve the Soviet economy of the huge economic burden of maintaining such a huge an imperial presence at a time when its own economy was collapsing under years of State planning. In 1989 he pulled the Soviets out of Afghanistan--and let an independence-minded Eastern Europe go its own way--much to the amazement of everyone.
Further internal reforms to reduce the Party's grip on the Soviet economy did little to breathe new life into the Soviet economy and disillusionment set in against his leadership. Old-guard communist officers staged an attempted military coup against him in August of 1991. Though the coup failed--popular support shifted to the Russian President Boris Yeltsin. With Gorbachev's dissolution of both the Communist Party and the Soviet Union in late 1991, he no longer held any real political offices--and simply retired from Russian politics.
Mikhail Gorbachev (Time 100: Tatyana Tolstaya)
1931- .
Boris Yeltsin (1991- )
Russian President, 1991- . Elected to that position in 1991 and again in 1996, despite rumors of his worsening health and despite the miserable showing of Russian troops in the Chechnya war and the very obvious deterioration in the Russian economy.
Boris Yeltsin (Dmitri Gusev)
ENGLANDConservative Party. British Prime Minister, 1955-1957 Anthony Eden
1894-1986. Conservative Party. British Prime Minister, 1957-1963.
Harold Macmillan
1903-1995. Conservative Party. British Prime Minister, 1963-1964. Alec Douglas-Home
1916-1995). Labour Party. British Prime Minister, 1964-1970 and 1974-1976.
Harold Wilson
1916- . Conservative Party. British Prime Minister, 1970-1974.
Edward Heath
1912- . Labour Party. British Prime Minister, 1976-1979. James Callaghan
1925- . Conservative Party. British Prime Minister, 1979-1990. Led the British to victory over Argentina in the 1982 Falkland Islands War.
Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990)
Margaret Thatcher (Time 100: Paul Johnson)
Lady Margaret Thatcher Biography (UnionUniv: Nedra Kanavel)1943- . Conservative Party. British Prime Minister, 1990-1997.
John Major
1953- . Labour Party. British Prime Minister, 1997- .
Tony Blair
FRANCE
Pierre Mendes-France
1890-1970.
Charles De Gaulle (1940-1969)
General Charles De Gaulle (Lynn Bradick)
Charles De GaulleGeorges Pompidou
Giscard-d'Estaing
1916-1996.
François Mitterand (1981-1995)
President of France, 1981-1995 (two terms; he also ran as the Socialist candidate for President in 1965 and 1974, coming close to victory both times).
1932- .
Jacques Chirac
Gaullist. President of France since 1995 (defeating Lionel Jaspin in a fairly close election). French Prime Minister, 1974-1976 and 1986-1988.
GERMANY1876-1967. He was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied in Freiburg, Munich and Bonn--eventually returning to Cologne to begin practicing law there. In 1917 he was elected Burgomeister (Mayor) of Cologne. During the early years of the Weimar Republic after World War One he was an active member of the Catholic Center Party and was elected to the Provincial Diet (Legislature) and to the Prussian State Council. Of the last-mentioned, he served as President from 1920 until 1933. A Nazi takeover of power in Germany forced him from that position. The following year he was imprisoned--and also again in 1944.
Konrad Adenauer (1949-1963)
This record of opposition to the Nazis was to stand hinm in good stead for political service in post-war Germany. Once again he became mayor of Cologne. He also took the leading role in founding the Christian Democratic Union--a centrist party of Christian values pleasing to both the occupying authorities--and to the German electorate. In 1949 he was named as Chancellor (Prime Minister), and was reelected to that office again after national elections in 1953 and 1957.
He attempted to restore German dignity by putting the country in loyal service to the United States during the Cold War. He hoped that this would be rewarded by equally strong backing by the United States for the reunification of Germany--by ending the Communist rule in East Germany and the return of the whole country under the free-democratic government of West Germany.
But when Kennedy did nothing to stop or respond to the building of the Berlin Wall, which only isolated East Germany all the more from the West, Adenauer began to distance himself somewhat in this pro-American relationship. He began to appear in close harmony with Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960s--as de Gaulle took on a more strident anti-American foreign policy.
This raised complaints in Germany that Der Alte or "Old One" was in fact losing touch with reality. In 1963 Adenauer thus stepped down from his party offices and retired to private life. he died in 1967.
Konrad Adenauer (Pro-Europa)
Konrad Adenauer: Staatsmann (Muntzinger Personen) [auf Deutsch]1897- . German Chancellor, 1963-1966. Ludwig Erhard
1904 - . German Chancellor, 1966-1969 Kurt Georg Kiesinger
1913- . German Chancellor, 1969-1974 Willy Brandt
1918- . German Chancellor, 1974-1982. Helmut Schmidt
1930- . German Chancellor, 1982-1998 Helmut Kohl (1982-1998)
German Chancellor, 1998- . Gerhard Schröder (1998- )
OTHER EUROPEAN COMMUNITY NATIONSPaul-Henri Spaak
THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING COMMONWEALTH1894-1978.
Robert Menzies (1949-1966)(Liberal) Australian Prime Minister, 1949-1966.
Sir Robert Menzies (1894-1978)1930- . Malcolm Fraser (1975-1983)
(Labor) Australian Prime Minister, 1975-1983.
Malcom Fraser (1930-present)1929- . Bob Hawke (1983-1991)
(Labor) Australian Prime Minister, 1983-1991.
Rob ert "Bob" Hawke (1929-present)
Bob Hawke1944- .
Paul Keating (1991-1996)
(Labor) Australian Prime Minister, 1991-1996.
Paul Keating
Pa ul John Keating (1944-present)
(Liberal) Australian Prime Minister, 1996 to the present. John Howard (1996- )
The Honourable John Howard PM
POLAND
Lech Walesa
Lech Walesa (Time 100: Timothy Garton Ash)
OTHER EAST EUROPEAN NATIONS
Marshall Tito
Nicholas Ceaucescu
LATIN AMERICAFulgensia Batista
Fidel Castro
Papa Doc Duvalier
Anastasio Somoza
President of Brazil, 1994 to the present. Widely appreciated as having brought Brazil's soaring inflation under control. Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Alberto Fujimori
Bolivian General and dictator of Bolivia, 1971-1978. Present elected civilian President of Bolivia. Hugo Banzer
Dictator of Paraguay, 1954-1989. Alfredo Stroessner
Juan Peron
1916- . Augusto Pinochet
Chilean General who seized power in Chile in 1973 and ran that country as a dictator until 1990. In 1990 he returned power to a civilian government but stayed on as army commander. In March of 1998 he resigned his military position to become a senator for life. In October 1998 he was arrested while in England (for medical reasons) in response to the orders of a Spanish court which claimed jurisdiction to try him for his political crimes.
President of Chile. Eduardo Frei
JAPAN
1901-1989. Emperor Michinomiya Hirohito (1926-1989)
Emperor, 1926-1989.
1933- .
Emperor Tsugu Akihito (1989- )
Emperor, 1989 to the present.
CHINA1893-1976.
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong (Time 100: Jonathan D. Spence)1904-1997. Deng Xiaoping
Began the liberalization of the Chinese economy in 1978.
Current President of China.
Jiang Zemin
Prime Minister of China. Zhu Rongji
INDIA
1889-1964. Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-1964)
Head of the Indian Congress Party and Indian Prime Minister, from India's independence in 1947 until his death in 1964.
1917-1984. Indira Gandhi (1966-77; 1980-84)
Daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi; "Gandhi" was her married name). At the death of her father in 1964 she became head of the Indian Congress Party. Two years later she became Indian Prime Minister, serving during the periods 1966-1977 and 1980-1984. She died in office at the hands of a Sikh assassin.
1946-1980. Sanjay Gandhi
The younger son of Indira and Feroze Gandhi. He became very active in his mother's cabinet--one of the more radical voices in her government and perhaps the driving force behind her national state of emergency, 1975-1977. It was clear that he was being groomed to inherit the political "dynasty" begun by his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, when Sanjay died in a plane crash in 1980.
1944-1991. Rajiv Gandhi (1984-1989)
Head of the Indian Congress Party, 1984-1991, and Indian Prime Minister, 1984-1989.
Rajiv was the older son of Indira and Feroze Gandhi. Rajiv was quite content to let his younger brother Sanjay take the lead in promoting the family's political fortunes--until his brother's death in 1980. At this point Rajiv was brought forward to take his brother's political place. When his mother was assassinated in 1984 Rajiv Gandhi was immediately appointed head of the Indian Congress Party and became India's new Prime minister.
His governance was not strong and he was not effective in handling two of India's major regional problems: separatism in the Punjab and in Kashmir. His governemnt was also plagued by financial scandals--and in 1989 he stepped down as Indian Prime Minister.
He remained head of the Indian National Congress--and in 1991, as he was campaigning in South India, he was assassinated by a woman with possible (but unproved) links to a radical Tamil separatist group.
OTHER ASIAChiang Kai Shek
Syngmun Rhee
Kim Dae Jung
Kim Il Sung
Ferdinand Marcos
1890-1969.
Ho Chi Minh (1941-1969)
Ho Chi Minh (Time 100: Stanley Karnow)Ngo Den Diem
Prince Norodim Sihanouk
Pol Pot
Hun Sen
Sukarno
Suharto
Dalai Lama
MIDDLE EASTShah Reza Pahlavi of Iran
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1979-1989)
Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini (Time 100: Milton Viorst)Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
President of the Islamic Republic (Iran), 1997- . Muhammad Khatami
1937- . Saddham Hussein
President of Iraq and leader of the Baath Party in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein (1st Person)Hafez Assad
King Hussein of Jordan
1929- . Yassir Arafat
Palestinian Leader.
Yasser Arafat (1st Person)1886-1973. David Ben Gurion (1948-53, 1955-63)
David Ben-Gurion (Time 100: Amos Oz)Levi Eshkol (1963-1969)
1895-1969.1898-1978. Golda Meier (1969-1974)
1922-1995. Yitzhak Rabin (1974-77; 1992-95)
1913-1992. Menachem Begin (1977-1983)
1923- . Shimon Perez (1984-86; 1995-96)
1949- . Binyamain Netanyahu (1996-1999)
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia
Gamel Abdul Nasser
Anwar Sadat
Hosni Mubarak
Muammar Qaddafi
King Hassan of Morocco (-1999)
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA1891- . Emperor of Ethiopia, 1930- (but exiled by the Italian authorities, 1936-1941). Ras Taffari Haile Selassie
Marxist dictator who overthrew the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. He was forced out of power in 1991 and is in exile in Zimbabwe. Mengistu Haile Mariam (1974-1991)
1909- . First President of the Republic of Ghana. Kwame Nkrumah (1960-1966)
1893- . Anthropologist, teacher, leader of Kenyan independence movement and first President of the Repubic of Kenya. Jomo Kenyatta
President of Kenya Daniel arap Moi
General and dictator of Uganda, whose regime killed approximately 300,000 people. Now in exile in Saudi Arabia. Idi Amin
Mobutu Sese Seku
President of Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe
1901-1966. Born in the Netherlands. Major architect of the apartheid (separateness) policy undertaken after the electoral victory of the National Party in 1949. Became South African Prime Minister, 1958-1966. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd (1949-1966)
Pieter W. Botha
President of South Africa, -1994. F.W. de Klerk (1988-1994)
Anglican Archbishop. Winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.
Desmond Tutu
Long-time leader in the battle against the Afrikaner policy of apartheid.
Chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (created in 1995) that called upon South Africans of all races to step forward and admit their roles in the racial turmoil of the 1949-1994 apartheid era--as part of a national healing process. The fact that Tutu did not spare Black perpetrators of violence, even though the violence was done in the name of liberation, was itself a point of deep tension between Tutu and the ANC.
1918- . President of the Republic of South Africa from 1994 to 1999
Nelson Mandela (1994-1999)
"No Easy Walk to Freedom" Presidential Address (1953) (Third World Traveller)
"I am Prepared to Die" (Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock) (from the Rivona Trial)
Freedom (reflections just prior to release from prison)
"Our Greatest Fear" (Nelson Mandela 1994 Inaugural Speech) (selections in poetry form)
Nelson Mandela: Inaugural Address, May 10, 1994 (larger version)Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (ANC)
Nelson Mandela (Time 100: Andre Brink)
THE UNITED NATIONS1905-1961. Swedish statesman. United Nations Secretary-General, 1953-1961. Dag Hammarskjold
Winner of Nobel Peace Prize in 1961 (working to settle the Congo crisis that marched the world up to the brink of war between the Soviet Union and the United States). Was killed when his plane crashed while on a diplomatic peace mission in Africa in 1961.
U Thant
HISTORY OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20th CENTURY: GENERAL SOURCES
The Second Half of the 20th Century (Spiritual Pilgrim)
Other Sources:
Continue on to the next section: The Early 21st Century
Return to the Home Page: The Spiritual Pilgrim
