American History: The Presidency of George H. W. Bush

08 February 2012

President H.W. George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Helsinki, Finland, 1990

STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. I’m Steve Ember.

This week in our series, we continue the story of President George Herbert Walker Bush. He was elected the forty-first president of the United States in nineteen eighty-eight.

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George H.W. Bush was president when the Cold War ended between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War had lasted more than forty years. Both sides were heavily armed with nuclear weapons. People worried that one wrong move could lead to the end of the world.

But by the late nineteen eighties, the world was changing. The Soviet Union was dying.

On November ninth, nineteen eighty-nine, East Germany opened the Berlin Wall for the first time since it had been built. The wall had divided communist East Germany from democratic West Germany since nineteen sixty-one.

Citizens and soldiers together soon began tearing it down.

Tensions continued to ease as communist rule in most of the former Soviet republics ended by the early nineteen nineties.

Fifteen republics had belonged to the Soviet Union. By the end of nineteen ninety-one, most had declared their independence. They became a loosely formed group called the Commonwealth of Independent States.