It started shortly before the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was our finest hour because it took courage, conviction, financial resources and stamina over five decades. It also took the spilled blood of more than 100,000 Americans who fought abroad for the freedom of strangers in Korea, Vietnam and many other countries. It is not an easy task for a democracy to maintain a bipartisan foreign policy for half a century, but it was achieved. It was a great victory for America and the world.
Freedom reigns in dozens of countries where there used to be tyranny, corruption and death.
This national consensus which existed from the 1940's through the 1980's was nearly aborted by the failure of nerve of the liberal elites, who came to power in American society in the 1960's - the best and the brightest as chronicled in Halbertsam's book of that title about Vietnam. And the consensus came very close to being shattered by the narcissism of a vocal minority of babyboomers, who were not willing to sacrifice in this great war and who tended to blame America first for most problems. During this fifty-year war, the U.S. sought first to contain communism and ultimately to vanquish it. It was often a cold war, but it was punctuated by hot spots. And there were many chapters.