13.2 The Cold War: Domestic Politics & the Collapse of the U.S.S.R.

Why This Topic Matters on the GED

This section covers a run of names the official content outline groups directly under "The Cold War" — Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society, Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal, and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. — even though the first two are usually taught as domestic political history. That grouping is intentional and testable: all three events happened while the Cold War was the dominant backdrop of American politics, and each shaped how the Cold War itself eventually ended. Expect GED items to connect a domestic event (like Watergate) to a foreign-policy consequence (like the War Powers Resolution reasserting Congress's check on presidential war-making) — a classic cause-and-effect pattern this test rewards.

LBJ's Great Society: Reform Under Cold War Pressure

After winning a landslide election in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched The Great Society, a sweeping set of domestic programs aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice. Its signature achievements include:

• War on Poverty — launched via the Economic Opportunity Act (1964), creating programs like Head Start and Job Corps.
• Medicare (1965) — federal health insurance for Americans 65 and older.
• Medicaid (1965) — federal-state health insurance for low-income Americans.
• Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) — the first major federal funding for K–12 public schools.
• Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) — abolished the discriminatory national-origins quota system that had governed U.S. immigration since the 1920s.

The catch: Johnson pursued all of this while dramatically escalating U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, a Cold War proxy conflict against communist North Vietnam. The tension between funding ambitious domestic reforms ("butter") and an expensive, increasingly unpopular war ("guns") became known as the guns-and-butter dilemma, and it grew so politically damaging that Johnson declined to run for re-election in 1968.

Nixon: Détente Abroad, Watergate at Home

Richard Nixon, elected in 1968, pursued a paradoxical legacy: genuine Cold War breakthroughs alongside the most damaging domestic political scandal in modern U.S. history.

Foreign Policy Achievements: Détente

Détente — an easing of Cold War tensions — defined Nixon's approach to both major communist powers:

• 1972 visit to China — Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit the People's Republic of China, opening diplomatic relations after 23 years of official non-recognition.
• SALT I (1972) — the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks produced a treaty with the U.S.S.R. limiting each side's anti-ballistic missile systems and freezing the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the first major U.S.-Soviet arms-control agreement.

The Watergate Scandal

In June 1972, operatives connected to Nixon's re-election campaign broke into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., to plant wiretaps. Nixon was not shown to have ordered the break-in itself, but recorded White House tapes later proved he directed a cover-up of the investigation — obstructing justice. As the scandal unraveled through congressional hearings and the "smoking gun" tape, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment. Facing near-certain impeachment and removal, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974 — the only U.S. president ever to resign from office. Vice President Gerald Ford succeeded him and later issued Nixon a full pardon.

Watergate had a lasting civics consequence directly tied to Cold War foreign policy: Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (1973) over Nixon's veto, requiring the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing troops abroad and limiting deployments to 60 days without congressional authorization — a direct response to executive overreach in Vietnam.

The Collapse of the U.S.S.R.

The Cold War's final act unfolded over roughly a decade of mounting Soviet economic and political strain:

Glasnost vs. Perestroika

GED questions frequently test whether you can tell these two Gorbachev-era terms apart:

Common Trap

Do not credit Reagan alone or Gorbachev alone for the U.S.S.R.'s collapse. The GED's own content framing treats it as the outcome of sustained external pressure and internal Soviet reform — a passage describing either factor in isolation is describing only part of the cause.

Exam Scenario

A timeline-based item lists "Fall of the Berlin Wall," "Gorbachev introduces glasnost," and "Dissolution of the U.S.S.R." out of order and asks you to place them chronologically. The correct sequence is glasnost (1985) → fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) → dissolution of the U.S.S.R. (1991) — Gorbachev's reforms came first and made the later events possible, not the reverse.