Cold War

Persons to role-play and assigned questions.

  1. You are President Nixon. Explain three reasons why you believe a more peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union is possible and desirable.
  2. You are President Nixon. Explain three reasons why you believe a more peaceful relationship with China is possible and desirable.
  3. You are Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Communist Party and ruler of the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Explain three reasons why you believe a more peaceful relationship with the United States is possible and desirable.
  4. You are Deng Xiaoping, a major leader of Communist China during the late 1970s. Explain three reasons why you believe a more peaceful relationship with the United States is possible and desirable.
  5. You are a journalist whose assignment was the administration of Ronald Reagan. A new reporter has come to work at your magazine. She asks you how the policies of President Reagan toward the Soviet Union in the 1980s were different from those of Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, presidents who had preceded Reagan. You want to be helpful with your answer. What will you tell her?
  6. You are a teacher who wants to explain to your junior high students how the détente of the 1970s was different from the Cold War competition of the 1950s and 1960s. What will you tell your students?
  7. You are asked to explain to some of your fellow students the costs and benefits of President Reagan’s approach toward the Soviet Union. What would you tell them?
  8. You are Mikhail Gorbachev, who was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the years 1985-1991. Some U.S. high school students ask you these three questions:
    1. What was “perestroika”?
    2. Give us two examples of specific actions you had the Soviet government take to carry out “perestroika.”
    3. Explain why you decided the policy of “perestroika” was important for the Soviet Union.
  9. You are the author of a junior high school history textbook. In the book you are given one page to describe how the Cold War came to an end. Write an outline of what you might say on that page, and follow that outline with a first draft of the text.