With the two major exceptions of the Korean War (1940–1953) and the Vietnam War (1965–1973), the Cold War involved little actual military conflict. It was primarily a war of nerves in which the United States sought both to prevent war with the Soviet Union and China—war that could have escalated to nuclear war—and at the same time contain communism within its existing boundaries, where presumably it would eventually wither away on its own.

Heightened Awareness of Events Abroad

Fearing both nuclear annihilation and the spread of communism, Americans were strongly influence by events abroad during presidential elections. This was particularly true at the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s and 1960s. In a June 1951 Survey Research Center poll on foreign affairs, in which respondents were asked how often they thought about world affairs, 55 percent said they thought about them a great deal...