Who were the political figures involved in the Cold War?

The Cold War dominated world politics from about 1947 until about 1991.  This means that practically every important figure in world politics during this time was in some way involved in the Cold War.  In this answer, I will list some of the most important figures of the Cold War era.

We can start by mentioning every US president who served during this time.  This would include Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush.  All of these men were very important in the Cold War.  Other important American leaders of the era were George Marshall, who proposed the Marshall Plan, John Foster Dulles, who was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, and Henry Kissinger, who was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for Nixon and Ford.

We can then list leaders of the Soviet Union.  These included Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev.  Of these men, Andropov and Chernenko are less important because they were not in power for very long.

Although the US and the USSR were the most important countries in the Cold War, there were important leaders from other countries as well.  A list of these leaders could include

•         Mao Zedong, leader of communist China


•         Kim Il-Sung, leader of North Korea during the Korean War


•         Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Vietnamese communists


•         Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egyptian leader who tried to play the superpowers off against one another.


•         Charles de Gaulle, who pulled France out of NATO and tried to be independent of US power


•         Fidel Castro leader of communist Cuba


•         Marshal Tito, who tried to have Yugoslavia be communist, but independent of Moscow

There are many other people who could be included on this list.  We could talk about Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Jonas Savimbi, and many others.  As I said, anyone who was at all important in world politics during this time was involved in the Cold War in some way.