Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta

Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the first and last president to serve three terms (1933–1945), orchestrated the greatest expansion of executive power in American history. Roosevelt’s implementation of the New Deal—with its many agencies and bureaucracies—sanctioned government intervention in the economic and social crises that stemmed from the Great Depression. When the United States entered the Second World War, in 1941, factories went into high gear, which in turn drove the economy’s recovery.

Harry Truman, who became president following Roosevelt’s death, was the first to lead the country in the postwar era. The threat of the atomic bomb and the ascendance of communist powers brought on the Cold War, which lasted for more than four decades. Wars in Korea and Vietnam demonstrated the lengths to which Truman and his successors felt that communism needed to be contained. Within domestic politics, the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson promoted civil rights legislation. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev, leading a much weakened Soviet Union, began negotiations with Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush to end the Cold War.