Unit 8 - Discussion Questions

Part A

1. How did President Truman establish the cornerstones of American foreign policy for the next forty years?
2. Evaluate containment in Europe and in Asia from 1947 to 1955. What were its successes and failures?
3. How did the Korean conflict change the concept of containment?
4. In what parts of the world was Eisenhower’s foreign policy most successful? The least successful?
5. How did the United States policy toward Indochina/Vietnam from 1945 to 1960 set the stage for the quagmire of the 1960s?
6. How did the Vietnam War destroy the presidency of Lyndon Johnson?
7. How did Richard Nixon bring a fresh vision to America’s place in the world?
8. Why were the American people willing to accept a more active, confrontational approach to world affairs in the 1980s?

Part B

1. How did President Truman attempt to continue the philosophy of the New Deal after World War II?
2. How did President Truman bring African Americans into the Democratic Party in the 1940s?
3. How did President Eisenhower incorporate the New Deal into his “modern Republicanism”?
4. Why did Americans support Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade?
5. What caused the tension between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedy brothers in the early 1960s?
6. How did events and personalities challenge Martin Luther King’s leadership of the Civil Rights Movement after 1963?
7. How did the Great Society make lasting changes in America? Where did it fail and why?
8. How did political assassination alter the history of the 1960s?

Part C

1. How did the rise of the New Left and the counterculture reflect generational differences in America in the 1960s?
2. How did the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War provide the impetus for a new feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s?
3. How well did the political label “liberal” fit the presidency of Richard Nixon? Explain.
4. How did the domestic challenges faced by President Nixon drive his political agenda?
5. Why didn’t President Nixon tell the truth about Watergate?
6. Why didn’t President Nixon destroy the White House tapes?
7. Why did Gerald Ford lose the election of 1976?
8. How did President Carter fail the American people?
9. Would President Carter have won the election of 1980 if the hostages had been freed in Iran? Why or why not?
10. “Ronald Reagan was one of America’s greatest presidents.” Evaluate this statement.