The Cold War & Its Origins, 1917–1960. Vol.I, 1917–1950

The stabilization which took place in December 1946, with final agreement on the satellite treaties, was accompanied by a real relaxation of tension on Russia’s side. The Soviets felt assured that their influence would be predominant in Eastern Europe. Their primary war aim had been achieved.

Signs of Relaxation. In Poland the Russians effaced themselves as much as possible. A correspondent who toured Poland for several weeks found them only 40,000 in number, seldom seen, quiet and well behaved. They were courteous to the Polish troops and sought to treat Poland as a sovereign state.¹ American doctors attending a medical meeting in Czechoslovakia “constantly looked for that iron curtain or evidence of Russian intervention or influence, but never found it.” They moved “as freely as in the United States.” United Nations news broadcasts from Lake Success, in Russian, were also accepted in the Soviet Union and relayed over domestic wave lengths. The broadcasts “complete from controversies to personalities” were approved by Soviet officials as impartial, indicating the the Soviets felt at peace with the world enough to welcome a fairly important contact with it.²

Their sphere of influence having been recognized, the Russians moved to recognize our exclusive-custody, strategic-area trusteeship of the former Japanese mandated islands in the Pacific. A Russian note received in Washington on February 24, 1947, held this arrangement to be “entirely fair.”

Russian production was also putting heavy emphasis on consumer goods.³

New Friction Points

These signs of amelioration, of live-and-let-live, were offset, at least in part, by new points of friction which developed early in 1947. Late in January Pravda chose to regard a speech made by Foreign Minister Bevin as a repudiation of the Anglo-Russian alliance and an exchange of letters between Bevin and Stalin did not clear up the matter. The Soviet press and radio still insisted that Britain and the United States were “coming out in a bloc against the Soviet Union.”⁴

On January 17 this feeling received a sharp boost when John Foster Dulles, Republican adviser to the State Department, with the new authority of a Republican Congress behind him, made a speech urging Western Europe to unite economically around the coal and steel power of the Rhine basin as a bulwark against Soviet Russia.⁵ When Senator Vandenberg repeated the same proposal it was vigorously condemned by Pravda on the 26th.

Three days later the Polish election, which established communist control, was the subject of a strong speech by Vandenberg, in which he went beyond the State Department’s protest that a “free and unfettered election” had not been held and demanded that Russia’s responsibility for the election be fully investigated and established. The UN had full jurisdiction to investigate. While he spoke only for peaceful procedures, Mr. Vandenberg told his Senate colleagues he did not see how there could be a thought of “resting the case on the mere filing of an unpursued indictment.”⁶

The next day Senator Styles Bridges, of New Hampshire, “lashed at Soviet Russia with a bitter accusation” that she planned to turn Germany into a satellite and ally, and on the 26th ex-Govemor George H. Earle, of Pennsylvania, described Russia as “the source of 90 per cent of the evil in the world today.” He urged the United States to “spend two billion dollars annually on atom bombers and then to tell the Russians that if they drop one such bomb on this country we will wipe out their land.”⁷

In Chicago, on February 10, Dulles warned that any appeasement of Russia would bring dire consequences. Soviet dynamism could be kept within tolerable bounds if “it comes up against something that is vigorous, not because it encounters mushiness.” Five days later the Soviet historian, E. E. Tarle, charged that Dulles plotted war. He was seeking to “establish hurriedly a military bloc of the United States, Britain and France.” Echoing Winston Churchill, Dulles was trying to frighten the rest of the world with “the ghost of non-existent Soviet expansion.” Later in the month Drew Middleton reported from Moscow that perhaps nothing had so established the difference of approach to the German problem as the announcement of Secretary of State Marshall that Dulles would accompany him to the approaching Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers, as an adviser on German affairs.⁸

Russia “Aggressive and Expanding.” Simultaneously, on February 10, an incident occurred in a United States Senate Committee which sharply exacerbated relations with Russia. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson was being interrogated by Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, who sought to compel him to make a statement condemning Russia’s role in Eastern Europe. Acheson tried repeatedly to avoid doing so, since the hearing in progress was a domestic matter, saying: “I think it is most ill-advised for me and for the State Department and for the country to get into this sort of general talk,” but McKellar persisted repeatedly, asking finally if Acheson didn’t “believe that if she gets this bomb discovery she would take not only the remainder of Europe but perhaps the remainder of the world?”

McKellar was evidently intent upon committing Acheson to a strong anti-Russian position, regardless of the effect upon Russian-American relations and the strongly worded questions put to Acheson finally drove him into saying:

“Senators, I don’t think that that is a question which is capable of being answered in the way in which you asked it. I am quite aware of the fact that Russian foreign policy is an aggressive and expanding one. I think that one of the great efforts which everyone is making in the United Nations is to attempt to find means of solving problems of that sort. If those means and agreements can be found, then there is hope that there will not be major clashes. If they can’t be found, then I think the situation is very serious.”⁹

Acheson tried hard to avoid a provocative utterance, but he did label Russia as “aggressive,” which was not far from saying that she was an aggressor. The Soviet Union protested promptly that this was inadmissible behavior on Acheson’s part, “rude, slanderous and hostile.” In reply Secretary Marshall quoted the stenographic record of the exchange with McKellar, explaining that Acheson’s comment was not volunteered and that it was restrained. This, however, did not mollify Molotov, who sent a second note saying that our reply was unsatisfactory and that the Soviet Government retained “its opinion expressed in its note of February 14.”¹⁰

The government controlled Soviet press had no grounds for complaint over the incident, since it had frequently vilified the motives of the United States, teaching the Soviet peoples that America tended toward expansion and aggressiveness, giving aid and comfort to reaction everywhere. Because of this preparation one Moscow correspondent wrote that “Few diplomatic incidents have stirred Russian readers more than” Acheson’s remark, and another telegraphed that “the optimistic tone of the Soviet press and radio that was evident in December and early January has disappeared, undoubtedly as a result of Mr. Dulles’ speech and Mr. Acheson’s statement.” The two seemed to the Russians “to be inextricably linked.”¹¹

Vigorous Diplomacy. In its weekly summary of the news on February 23, 1947, the New York Times listed six evidences of friction between ourselves and Russia, including the beginning of regular American broadcasts to Russia in an attempt to counter Russian internal reports about America. To point up the deterioration of relations which had taken place since the first of the year, when “guarded optimism” had prevailed, the Times enumerated five formal notes which our Government had sent to Moscow in a period of six weeks. Two had protested Russia’s failure to begin negotiations for a settlement of her lend-lease account; one called attention to her delay in turning over Dairen to the Chinese; one demanded that Russia join in a Big Three order to Poland requiring her to allow “free and unfettered elections;” and the fifth objected to Russia’s action in limiting to twenty the number of American correspondents at the forthcoming Moscow Conference.

Truman’s Baylor Speech. On March 6, 1947, President Truman made a speech at Baylor University on foreign economic policy which was a virtual declaration of irreconcilable conflict against both communism and democratic socialism. He explained that freedom was more important than peace and that freedom of worship and speech were dependent on freedom of enterprise. Something “deeper than a desire to protect the profits of ownership” was involved.

Freedom of enterprise was limited when governments conducted foreign trade or when the governments planned the economy. In the latter case “Governments make all the important choices and he (the trader) adjusts himself to them as best he can.”

This, said the President, “was the pattern of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” and “Unless we act, and act decisively, it will be the pattern of the next century. . . . If this trend is not reversed the Government of the United States will be under pressure, sooner or later, to use these same devices to fight for markets and for raw materials.” It would find itself in the business of “telling every trader what he could buy or sell, and how much, and when, and where.” This was “not the American way” and “not the way of peace.” The implication was plain that state trading (in the U.S.S.R. and its satellites) and government control of trade (in Britain and much of West Europe) led to war.

This was serious enough, but even more ominous were the assumptions that “the whole world should adopt the American system” and that “the American system could survive in America only if it became a world system.”¹²

It is altogether unlikely that the President wrote this speech. It did not receive much attention in the United States, and to Americans the long passages about the proposed International Trade Organization and the necessity of lowering our tariffs, in a most cautious and orderly manner, stood out. It was abroad that the passages quoted above were noted as a firmly expressed intention of American capitalism to take the offensive.

The Baylor speech was closely studied by every European government as a challenge by the strongest economic unit ever developed on earth, one which had just grown to gargantuan size on government orders. During the four war years, 1942 to 1946 inclusive, the American Government had poured 306 billion dollars into the coffers of American business, taking all the responsibility, building hundreds of new plants for business to operate, guaranteeing unlimited markets and immense profits.

The result of this exhibition of “free enterprise” was the growth of the great American corporations to such power that at the end of the war our Federal Trade Commission reported that the 62 largest manufacturing corporations had accumulated liquid capital sufficient “to purchase the assets of nearly 90 per cent of all the other manufacturing corporations in the United States.”¹³ Many of these tremendous economic giants were more powerful than the entire national economies of dozens of nations, but the Baylor speech declared that they must not have the competition of state owned or state planned economies. If American freedom of worship and speech was to survive, the regimented economies of the world had to go.

Coming from a government which controlled three-fourths of the world’s invested capital, and more than half of its industry, the Baylor speech was a statement which would give all other governments pause. It indicated how easy it would be for the world’s economic colossus to decide that all other economic systems were un-American and threats to American freedom. It indicated that the representatives of American capitalism who had come into key posts in Washington after Roosevelt’s death held the same view about the world that Lenin and other Communist zealots had. The world could not accommodate diverse systems. It must be one or the other: communism or free enterprise capitalism.¹⁴

This ominous challenge, together with the sustained diplomatic pressure described above which Washington had kept upon Moscow, indicated that the Truman Administration was not inclined to accept the equilibrium which had been reached in December. Yet the stabilization attained might have permitted peace to be made in Germany had an act of nature not upset all calculations.

The Occasion for the Doctrine

Paralysis in Britain. The apparently well founded hopes for peace at the end of the year were suddenly upset by a great snow storm which whirled into a high pressure area above northern Russia and descended on the British Isles, late in January 1947, covering them from three to twenty feet deep with snow which promptly froze into ice after one day of thaw.

Britain was paralyzed. Her tired miners, mainly older men, could not get into their deep, narrow, hard-to-work coal seams. The scanty supplies above ground could be moved only with slow, heroic efforts. It was several weeks before anything like normal circulation could be restored to Britain’s economic veins, and by then $800,000,000 of desperately needed export production had been lost and the world had seen clearly that Britain was too weak to resume her former role as a great power. Up to that time the illusion had persisted that the power which had dominated the world for more than a century before 1914, and which had recovered after 1918, would take her place as a fairly strong third in the new galaxy of great powers. Actually, this was impossible. Another huge bite had been taken from her overseas assets. Now they were overbalanced by far larger debts owed to all the dominions—even $4,000,000,000 to India, now emerging into independence. What was left could not support a great navy and 1,400,000 troops scattered around the world, particularly if the British people at home were to have a decent standard of living.

Empire vs. National Health. The war had also taught the British people that they could have a decent life. The vast wealth amassed from the Empire had never reached great numbers of stunted Cockneys and others who lived on the margin of subsistence. But the very existence of the nation compelled fairer sharing after 1941. The young men had first to be well fed before they could become soldiers. The miners and workers had also to be provided with warm food to get the work of production done. Rationing, fairly enforced and universally observed, gave the poor as much as the rich. To give hope for the future the children and expectant mothers received special nourishment. Paradoxically, the health and well being of the British people rose, in a time of submarine blockade and war shortages.

Fundamentally, this was why the British people retired Churchill and the Conservatives in the election of July 1945, giving the Labor Party 393 seats and the Conservatives only 197. Many of the voters remembered the deceptions by which the Tories had won the election of 1935 and the horrible failure of their appeasement efforts, but the experience of fair sharing which war and the coalition government had enforced was fresh in everyone’s mind. The people voted Labor in the hope of continuing it.

Yet Britain was too insolvent to treat her people decently and carry the burdens of a great power. If the winter crisis of 1947 had not forced her to reduce the latter, something else soon would have done so.

British Failure in Greece. The parlous state of affairs in Greece had been known to our government for several months. The British had explained to Secretary Byrnes in the previous summer that they would have to cut their losses in Greece. Since the end of the war the British had poured $760,000,000 worth of supplies into Greece, without doing more than keep the country alive. Nothing was left over for reconstruction. This was due to three reasons: the thorough ruination of Greece by the Germans and Italians; the antagonisms and demoralization left by the civil war a year earlier; and the inability of the corrupt Rightist government to suppress a large scale communist-led guerrilla movement which ruled the mountains and controlled most of the country outside the big cities. The government turned Rightist bands loose in the country, and they did their best to crush the Left, but the net result was to drive to the hills many embittered men who were not communists. The majority of the rebels were “not communists.”¹⁵

The rebels also received aid from communist ruled Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania, Greece’s northern neighbors. Besides arms, munitions and medical help the rebels were permitted to retreat over the border when hard pressed, to rest and be re-outfitted, particularly in Yugoslavia. The Western powers had tried to stop this aid through the United Nations, by sending a commission to investigate, which was still in Greece in March 1947, along with an official American economic mission headed by Paul Porter, but there was not much chance of success by this method against the opposition of Russia and her satellites.

The Greek Problem Presented to Us. This was the general situation when on February 24, 1947, the British Ambassador orally informed Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, that the British Government would evacuate its army and cease to look after Greece on March 31.

As viewed in the State Department this notice created a crisis of the first magnitude, a turning point in world history. The Communist-led guerrilla bands, well supplied by Greece’s communist neighbors, had during the preceding months created a state of chaos in Greece. Though communications were disrupted, refugees streamed into the cities, making a bad psychological administrative and economic situation rapidly worse. It was the combined judgment of Ambassador Lincoln McVeagh, Mark Ethridge of the UN investigating committee and Paul Porter, head of the U.S. Economic Mission to Greece, that skyrocketing inflation, strikes, riots and public panic would soon destroy the Greek government and the Communist would take over, unless large scale financial and military aid arrived soon. A series of cables from the three envoys was climaxed by one on February 23 which could “only be characterized as frantic.”¹⁶

The Preparation of the Doctrine. The first meeting of State Department experts with Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson left some concerned by the responsibility of challenging the Soviet Union, others elated by the prospect, and some filled with awe. Acheson was to lead in the epochal turning point, since Secretary of State George Marshall was being intensively briefed for the approaching Moscow Conference on the future of Germany and would shortly leave for the Conference.

At a meeting with the Congressional leaders of both parties, on February 27, Acheson left them all deeply impressed by his account of the persistent efforts of the Soviet Union to encircle Turkey, thus laying three continents open to Soviet domination, and Germany—through the communists in France, Italy, Austria and Hungary. The Soviet Union was “aggressive and expanding” and Russia and the United States were “divided by an unbridgeable ideological chasm.” Not since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power and it was up to us to block the Soviets in Greece and Turkey.¹⁷

None of the leaders of Congress questioned the assumption of protectorates over Greece and Turkey. Senator Vandenberg, supported by others, insisted that the President should explain the new policy in a message to the Congress and a radio address to the people, in the broad context which Acheson had made, and he reiterated this request later. The radio address was dropped only at the last minute, but on April 27 Acheson had an off-the-record conference with about twenty leading newspaper men, and other briefing sessions prepared the way for public support of the program. A Cabinet committee prepared “a program of communication with leaders throughout the country, particularly business people.”

State Department officials were thrilled not only by the sharpness of the challenge about to be made, but by the fact that this was to be a group effort in which they could all share. Their years of frustration during the personal diplomacy of President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Byrnes had suddenly ended under the new Marshall-Acheson leadership. “Tenseness and controlled excitement grew by the moment,” as Acheson explained the issues to a large gathering of officials on February 28.

On the same afternoon a large meeting of State, War and Navy officials was held in which the view was unanimous that the new policy should be presented to the public in terms of “assistance to free governments everywhere” that needed help against Communist aggression or subversion. This view came from all parts of the assembly, which also wanted the world strategic situation to be explained to the people.

A paper written up after this discussion became the basic document for the President’s address and it contained the statement that it should be “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”¹⁸

The enthusiasm with which Executive officials embraced the Truman Doctrine indicated a receptiveness which had been maturing for some time. Certainly this was true of other high personages. Arthur Krock, dean of Washington correspondents, wrote at the time that Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, the President’s personal chief of staff, was “a major participant in the councils.” Leahy occupied an especially strategic and privileged position. He had a personal relationship to the President which brought them into daily contact. “For months” before March 1947 he had discussed the emerging Doctrine with Truman and, said Krock, “there is reason to believe that he greatly encouraged its development to the present status.” This is probably an understatement, since Krock went on to relate, “on excellent authority,” that Leahy’s influence had “grown greatly with the retirement of James F. Byrnes as Secretary of State,” on January 20, 1947. They had “differed vigorously” on the most effective way to deal with Soviet aggression. With Byrnes out of office Leahy had had no opposition and the evolution of the Truman Doctrine was accelerated, “with the encouragement of the Admiral and much inspiration from the same source.”¹⁹

In Roosevelt’s time Leahy’s anti-Russian views were considered, but they did not determine policy. With Truman he had more success. Leahy briefed him about the Soviet Union, probably far more than anyone else, from Truman’s first day in office.²⁰

Truman’s Long Held Purpose. The President himself was ready to seize the occasion to quarantine Soviet communism. On March 23, 1947, an authoritative article was published in the New York Times by Arthur Krock, who stated that the Truman Doctrine had been in the President’s mind a long time. Krock had unexcelled access to the minds of the highest officials in Washington, and a couple of years later he obtained from Mr. Truman that greatest scoop of a Washington correspondent’s career, an exclusive interview with the President of the United States, which would hardly have been granted if he had set forth the history of the Truman Doctrine incorrectly.

In his article of March 23 Krock stated that after inquiry he had reached the conclusion that Moscow had better disabuse itself of the growing impression that Mr. Truman merely adopted the view of his counsellors. On the contrary, the President began to abandon hope of achieving peace and security by “a continued policy of appeasement and official treatment of Russia as a government friendly to the United States,” as long ago as the London Conference of Foreign Ministers in September 1945 “He made up his mind then that, when a fitting opportunity arose and one which Congress and the people would recognize as such, he would proclaim the new doctrine. On several occasions he thought the time had come, but some of his important advisers talked him out of it.” When the British note of February 24, 1947, announcing withdrawal from Greece, came it pointed to a situation which the President found suited to his “long held purpose.” It only remained to put “Mr. Truman’s now-matured policy” before the world suitably. The alternative of limiting the message to the immediate task in hand was rejected and Clark Clifford, “who must at first hand have heard the doctrine in its long period of oral formulation,” was set to drafting “the global anti-Communist policy.” The President insisted that the important word must, instead of “should,” be inserted in the master-key paragraph of the message, to make it read: “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.” When it was finally finished Mr. Truman “rehearsed its delivery several times with apparently growing satisfaction.” It said what he wanted to say.

Two days later Krock reported the fear of the Republicans and the bipartisan economy bloc that “the President’s anti-communist policy, in the global framework he gave it” would defeat their economies. Then Krock stated unequivocally that “both groups, having been advised that the President decided on the new policy long ago and was merely waiting for a fitting opportunity to launch it,” resented the fact that nothing had been put in the budget for it.

The evidence is accordingly quite conclusive that Mr. Truman decided on the substance of his doctrine soon after the London Conference in September 1945, at which the Russians had refused to agree to anything. The President naturally did not credit his own atomic diplomacy, as applied at Hiroshima two days before Russia’s entry into the war against Japan and afterwards in strong protests concerning Eastern Europe, with having anything to do with Russian obduracy at London. They had been obdurate, and when the first opportunity offered he would cease to treat them “as a government friendly to the United States” and quarantine them.

In his Memoirs (II, 105) Mr. Truman relates that the first draft of the message presented by the State Department “was not at all to my liking.” In spite of all the high purpose recorded above by its draftsman, Joseph E. Jones, it was full of “all sorts of background data and statistical figures,” sounding like “an investment prospectus.” So Truman sent it back asking for more emphasis on general policy and it was rewritten for that purpose, but it still seemed to him “half-hearted.” Therefore in “the key sentence” he scratched out “should” and wrote “must” and did the same thing in several other places. He “wanted no hedging in this speech.”²¹

George Kerman’s Dissent. From this concordance of agreement that the Soviet Union and communism must be publicly quarantined there was one strong and surprising dissent. From our embassy in Moscow George F. Kennan had sent long messages urging a stiffening of our responses to Russia in the post-war period. In March 1947 he was in Washington, already designated by Marshall as head of a new policy planning staff. At the moment he was occupied with lectures to the War College and he had no part in formulating the Truman Doctrine, though he knew it was in preparation.

On the afternoon of March 6 he came over to see how things were going and was shown the third draft, before the message had gone to the White House and been sharply stiffened. In its milder form the message disturbed Kennan deeply. “To say that he found objections to it is to put it mildly,” said Joseph M. Jones. “He objected strongly both to the tone of the message and to the specific action proposed.” He favored economic aid to Greece, but wanted to keep the military aid small. He was opposed to aid of any kind to Turkey, whereas the others regarded the defense of the Straits as the most vital consideration involved, though the Turkish end was softpedalled in the message.

It was the tone and ideological content of the message to which Kennan most objected, “the portraying of two opposing ways of life, and the open-end commitment to aid free peoples.” Moreover, he felt so strongly that he voiced his objections to a number of people in the Department including finally Acheson, but “It was too late.”²²

This first reaction by Kennan to the Truman-Churchill Doctrine of a global quarantine of the Soviet Union and communism would have astonished the world had it been known soon after 1947, for his famous article on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs (which will be discussed later), caused him to be widely regarded as the father of the containment doctrine? Yet in the light of the revelation just quoted it would seem that Kennan was rationalizing and softening the doctrine rather than fathering or inventing it. On the contrary, his initial reaction was that the proclamation of a head-on collision between two ways of life and two great powers was much too sweeping, and that it was dangerous.

That Kennan foresaw the consequences of the cosmic conflict which was being declared is further evidenced by another article which he published in the August 1956 issue of Harpers Magazine, which will be discussed hereafter. No more devastating account of the deadly and self-defeating fixations which gripped the national mind in the years after Churchill and Truman sounded the tocsin for world conflict with the Red devil has ever been written.

Did the Republicans Require Conversion? It has often been said that a planetary declaration of conflict with communism and the Soviet Union was necessary to pry from the famous 80th Congress Republican majorities the $400,000,000 desired as a first instalment for Greece and Turkey. This Congress, which had just taken its seat in January, was undoubtedly bent on reducing the budget and taxes. For two months they had been debating whether to cut the President’s 37 billion budget by 6 billion or somewhat less. They would not like a big appropriation for foreign aid.

Nor was helping the corrupt Greek Government an easy thing to sell to Congress. On February 23 Stewart Alsop cabled from Athens that the main characteristic of this government seemed to be “its total impotence.” Most of the Greek politicians had “no higher ambition than to taste the profitable delights of a free economy at American expense.” Senator Vandenberg was reported to have told the President that if he expected to get the money he would have to “scare hell out of the country”²³—an apt description of the technique which was employed. This motive may also have determined in part Vandenberg’s requirement that the President lay it all down in global terms in both a Congressional message and a radio address.

However, he could have been mainly concerned about acquainting the country with the need for a tough cold war with the Soviets. A great many of the new Republican Congressmen had been elected as stout anti-communists and it was not likely that they would reject a more circumspect request for aid to a country beset by communist revolt. Actually the Congress resented deeply the crisis treatment to which it was subjected, giving it no choice but to appropriate the money or damage irreparably our national prestige.

It would seem that the over-riding reason for the doctrine was a new desire to draw a line publicly around Soviet Communism and stop what was believed to be its constant efforts to expand. Of course it was easy to persuade the Republican leaders to go along with such a crusade. After Acheson’s briefing session with them, on February 28, Representative Charles A. Eaton, Republican of New Jersey, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Herald Tribune correspondent “with feeling” that “the hour is here when the United States must announce that it accepts its own destiny as the chief world power. We must fulfil the demands of that position, no matter what it costs if we eventually, along with other free people, are to survive as free men.”²⁴

On the same day James Reston of the New York Times stated his understanding of the argument advanced to the Congress leaders—that our main objective for the past eighteen months had been the “stern containment” of the Soviet Union, to create a new balance of power in Europe and “to demonstrate to the Moscow Government that the United States was not going to preach and run this time.” If Greece should fall into the Soviet orbit then Turkey would be next. Reston had correctly understood the first exposition of the “falling dominoes” theory which was to determine our action at other stages of the Cold War.

At first, the idea of “holding the bag” in the Mediterranean “struck Congress like a bolt from the blue,” reported Anne O’Hare McCormick. To her this new crisis was “the final proof that the over-all settlement should have been undertaken first.” The long wait and the protracted disputes over minor treaties had “made conditions in Europe worse and poisoned the atmosphere in which the German peace must be negotiated.”²⁵

Premonitions of Containment, Walter Lippmann foresaw the probable failure of underwriting all the old elements against the new forces among the peoples of Asia and urged the alternative of a broad settlement with Moscow. He considered that, like the British, we too are an island people and suggested that we scrutinize very carefully any military commitment on the Eurasian continent, within marching distance of the Soviet Union. We ourselves could become overextended.²⁶

The Nashville Tennessean also anticipated, on March 2, that “given as we have been for more than a century to the making of grandiose commitments with small regard for the necessity to fulfil them,” the British appeal would not lack a responding urge in us. Perhaps, too, we could take over all of Britain’s power positions for twenty-five years or more before the uneasy equilibrium resulting from the attraction of the Moscow pole tipped over into atomic war.

There was still enough objectivity in the world to enable the New York Herald Tribune to recognize, on March 10, that the Soviet Union had much to offer nations like Greece. It “has a great deal more to export than bullets. It has energy and enthusiasm; it has order, full employment, the classless society, the end of grosser forms of social injustice. But the totalitarian subjection and the NKVD inevitably go with them.” We also had many values to offer, but did we have the energy and self-confidence to export them?

Reston explained that hereafter President Truman would be willing to collaborate for peace based on justice, but he had “decided to assume Russian good faith no longer,” a decision which won the solid support of Senators Vandenberg and Taft, and Representative John Taber, the latter a famous watchdog of the treasury. Reston thought it surprising that the relations between any two major countries could have degenerated so far and so fast. The two nations had cooperated throughout their history. Now, however, “mainly because of the growing activity and strength of world communist activities, our government was solemnly meditating a decision to use its resources to block this expansion. It was a surprising fact that the heads of the two governments had not yet made any detailed effort to negotiate a general settlement of their outstanding differences.”²⁷

The Truman Doctrine and Its Reception

The President read the message to a joint session of the two Houses of Congress on March 12, in an even monotone. He received light applause at three points. For the most part the Congress listened grimly and silently. On the same morning the New York Times had predicted that Truman would “ring down the curtain on one epoch in America’s foreign policy.” As he read, there could be no doubt that this was the case.

In Greece, said the President, “a militant minority, exploiting human want and misery was able to create political chaos which until now, has made economic recovery impossible.” The “terroristic activities of several thousand armed men, led by communists,” had created a situation with which the Greek Government could not cope. We had considered how the United Nations might help, but the situation was urgent and the United Nations and its related organizations were not in a position to extend help “of the kind that is required.”

Turkey also deserved our attention. It had been spared the disasters of war but needed modernization. Its integrity was essential to the preservation of order in the Middle East.

We could not “realize our objectives,” unless we were “willing to help free people to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes.”

This had happened, in spite of our frequent protests and in violation of the Yalta Agreement, in Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania and other countries. The time had come when “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life,” one distinguished by free institutions and the other by terror and oppression. He believed “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.” [Italics added.]

“If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority,” confusion and disorder might spread east throughout the entire Middle East and west through the countries of Europe. He therefore asked for four hundred million dollars for Greece and Turkey and authority to detail civilian and military personnel to them.

All Revolution Forbidden. No pronouncement could have been more sweeping. Wherever a communist rebellion developed the United States would suppress it. Wherever the Soviet Union attempted to push outward, at any point around its vast circumference, the United States would resist. The, United States would become the world’s anti-communist. anti-Russian policeman.

This, too, was not the full extent of the Doctrine, for its all inclusive language also forbade every kind of revolution, democratic or otherwise. It would be difficult to find a revolution anywhere which had not been the work of an armed minority. The people might later come to the support of the fighting rebels, but revolutions were notoriously made by comparatively small groups of determined armed men. According to the new doctrine this could not happen, if for no other reason because some communists would almost inevitably be mixed up in the revolution, or an alarmed government would allege they were. The President went on to say that the status quo was not sacred, but he had made it so. So far as the United States was concerned the method by which this nation was born was outlawed. There would be no more revolutions thereafter, in spite of the fact that many hundreds of millions of people lived a miserable existence under the misrule of a few. Revolution was finished. All of these peoples would have to stay put. If their rulers should decide to alleviate their condition somewhat, well and good, but they could not be coerced or subjected to “such subterfuges as political infiltration.”

It is one thing to forbid revolution in a country where the democratic processes of peaceful change are fully established, and quite another to proscribe it where there is no democracy, or only a caricature of it. Instead of being loyal to his revolutionary heritage and welcoming democratic revolution wherever it might come, Truman spoke for the bulk of American conservatives and allied himself with reaction around the globe. This was not only morally wrong; it was blindness on a gigantic scale. For a century and a half it was our revolution, our new way of life, our example which moved the hearts and arms of men around the globe. For us now to declare that revolution was finished was to kill the American dream. It was to shut us out of the future at a time when a billion and a half people, nurtured in our revolutionary tradition, were determined to move upward into a better life. Instead of pitting democratic revolution against Red revolution, Truman presented to the communists the entire field of revolutionary activity and condemned his own people to the sterile and hopeless task of trying to prevent all forcible social change everywhere.

Fortunately there had to be an early retreat from this impossible position. In Indonesia we were soon to assist democratic revolution against Dutch imperialism, but the chief motive was still to save Indonesia from communism, not to give the islanders their just deserts. By placing us on the “anti” side, Truman conceded all dynamism to the Soviets and condemned his countrymen to a world-wide defense of the Western social order, including for many years the dying colonial empires.

Encirclement of the Soviet Union Proclaimed. The wheel had come to full circle with a vengeance. The isolationist United States, desiring only to be let alone, had become the world’s policeman. Wherever public order was disturbed, we would be there. Wherever the Soviet Government or communism attempted an advance the United States would combat it. The most gigantic land power on the face of the globe, living on the opposite side of the earth from the United States, was to be fenced in at all points. Thus far and no farther! In the two previous balance of power struggles Germany had complained constantly that she was being encircled, but no one of her opponents ever dreamed of admitting that she was. Now Mr. Truman had proclaimed from one of the world’s greatest rostrums the most gigantic encirclement ever conceived in the mind of man.

Churchill Triumphant. When the Truman Doctrine was announced Winston Churchill was jubilant. He had every right to be, since it was essentially the same doctrine he had enunciated at Fulton, Missouri, by Truman’s “desire,” only a year before. Not only was his doctrine accepted; it was applied to the one spot on the globe to which he attached most importance and where he had used the most extreme measures to preserve British control and to reinstate the Greek monarchy.²⁸

In Greece, too, the monarchists were equally triumphant. The argument of the Rightists was that since the United States does not want communism it will have to support any regime in Greece no matter how oligarchical. In Turkey a leading newspaper warned that no conditions accompanying the American loan should be accepted, and the statement of William C. Bullitt that the Soviet Union was preparing to attack the United States created a sensation.²⁹

Europe Amazed and Alarmed. From Paris Harold Callender wrote that the ablest diplomatic officials in Europe, of French and other nationalities, regarded Truman’s message as certain to compel a showdown between the Soviet Union and the Western world. They read it “with amazement, since they expected nothing so stern or forthright.” It was “a revolution in United States foreign policy more notable even than American participation in the United Nations.” To a “striking extent professional diplomatic quarters, and other non-Communist or anti-Communist quarters, echoed in only slightly attenuated form the Moscow charge of a new and expanding American imperialism.” French journals commented uneasily on the pessimism of our attitude and on the sharpening of the issue.³⁰

In London “rumbles of protest and ironical cheers from Labor M.P.s punctuated each effort by speakers in the House of Commons to describe President Truman’s program of American aid for Greece and Turkey as a step toward world freedom and democracy.” The Daily Herald, official Labor party newspaper, said: “Our first reaction to President Truman’s speech on Wednesday was one of uneasiness. Our second thoughts are no happier.”

There was no spontaneous enthusiasm in Britain. Mr. Churchill spoke only for a minority. Most people were distinctly disturbed, especially because the United States was tending toward individual rather than collective action in international affairs. The Daily Herald doubted that we should “clap our hands because these two allies of ours are now glaring at each other across Balkan frontiers,” and the Manchester Guardian said: “One feels that, faced with the same situation, President Roosevelt would first have tried to do the same things through the United Nations by enlisting the support of other nations—including Russia, if possible. Peace, the status quo, the integrity of nations—these are not exclusive American interests but the interests of us all.” As on the continent, one reason for lukewarmness was “that the picture, of the United States gallivanting about high, wide and handsome in the field of European power politics has been a rude shock.” Some charged that the American public made too much of the Russian danger and had “become overheated, flustered and jittery as a result.” Well-to-do circles in Britain were jubilant, saying that it was time that somebody stood up to Russia.

Some of the 150 to 200 Labor M.P.’s who were critical of the Government’s foreign policy saw the United States “dragging Britain into a ghastly showdown war with Russia.” The labor critics included “many more members than the left-wing opposition to Mr. Bevin.”³¹

Censure in Britain. On April 7 the Cooperative Party of Great Britain, one of the major arms of the Labor Party, and representing about 7,500,000 working people, “approved by a large majority” a resolution condemning, Truman’s program of aid to Greece and Turkey as “a menace to world peace and the negation of the democratic principles for the preservation of peace for which the grave sacrifices of the last war were made.” The party executive opposed the resolution, but the delegates insisted on its passage. They felt that “this attempt to by-pass the United Nations Organization will seriously impair the authority of the organization and destroy the confidence and hopes of free peoples everywhere.”

Simultaneously a poll of 83 diplomats, representing 38 countries, showed 82 per cent of them regretting as a matter of principle that the United States did not come before the UN with the Greek and Turkish problems. In France General Charles de Gaulle urged the unity of Western Europe, to provide a balance between the world’s “two enormous masses, both expanding.”³²

The Continent Shocked by the “Either-Or” Challenge. On March 30 Mallory Browne made a close survey of European opinion from London for the New York Times. In Britain he thought a vast majority welcomed the Truman Doctrine as evidence that the United States had come of age and would not withdraw into isolation again, but there was fear that Truman’s “blunt challenge to Soviet Russia” might lead to a war in which Britain would be the first and worst victim. Many were afraid that another war would wipe out their island. In France and a number of other continental countries it appeared that “doubts prevailed over hopes.” In Italy the enthusiasm of the favorable opinion was tempered by widespread fear that it meant war. The Czechs were equally fearful. In the Low Countries and Scandinavia, where some of the most politically mature peoples in the world live, most people appeared to have been “shocked by the strong language Truman used,” and decidedly nervous over the consequences. Even the conservatives tended “to ask whether it was wise.” From all the diversity of opinion one overwhelming impression emerged, that the United States had embarked on a course which would bring “either real peace or the annihilation of atomic war.”

This contemporary judgment inescapably raises the question whether there was anything in the world situation in March 1947 which compelled the United States to stake the future of all humanity upon one world-shaking defiance of the Soviet Union.

Doubt and Disapproval from the Columnists. The uneasiness which the Truman Doctrine had stirred abroad was strongly reflected in the reactions of the nation’s leading newspaper columnists. Walter Lippmann asked immediately whether the President had laid down a policy or started a crusade. He found the implications of the second part of the message stated so vaguely that no workable policy could be deduced from them. Calling them “big hot generalities,” he declared that words of that sort “when pronounced by the head of a state in a time of intense crisis and of passionate confusion, are imprudent. The pronouncements of a powerful government should be defined and precise, lest they be taken as threatening more than it intends and as promising more than it can deliver. He quoted the saying: “Today they are ringing the bells: tomorrow they will be wringing their hands,” and warned that a vague global policy which sounded like the tocsin of an ideological crusade had no limits. It could not be controlled or its effects predicted.³³

After its vague globalism Lippmann felt the most serious defect of the message to be its treatment of the United Nations. Even if the UN was unable to act collectively it did not follow that we had the right to act unilaterally, or that it would be wise to do so even if we did. The heart and soul of the UN Charter was its covenant to consult with other members. It was adopted expressly to prevent nations from acting unilaterally and on their own judgment in matters affecting the interests of other nations. Our action threatened to “cut a hole in the Charter” which it would be very difficult to repair. The UN had not been any better equipped to act in Iran yet it had done so successfully. Now we were assuming the whole moral risk, instead of seeking to spread it.³⁴

He was disturbed also that we should have thrown away our bargaining power with the corrupt, reactionary and “obviously unrepresentative” weak government of Greece. The basic fallacy of the Truman Doctrine lay in its assumption that the spread of communism could be checked by subsidizing the reactionary forces of the world. By this course we would “separate ourselves from the masses of the people almost everywhere” when it was our duty to align ourselves with the middle and moderate parties. We were “not rich enough to subsidize reaction all over the world or strong enough to maintain it in power.” It was “an intolerable commitment” to intervene on one side of the Greek civil war, when our object should be “not to support the civil war but to settle it.” Lippmann was almost alone in urging that we ought to look forward to a settlement with the Soviet Union. There had not yet been any serious negotiation. The interminable wrangles we had conducted with the Soviets were not negotiations, because we could not argue the Red Army out of the positions it held. He approved applying our military power at the Dardanelles, but only for the purpose of securing a treaty neutralizing the Straits, establishing boundaries in the region and distributing the oil concessions. Almost no one else had the vision to see that it was neither right nor feasible for us to monopolize indefinitely the world’s greatest oil pool, lying on the doorstep of the Soviet Union.³⁵

William L. Shirer deplored the fact that we had had no inkling of a policy for the valiant Greeks, while Churchill “stumbled from one blunder to another” until he had paved the way for the current tragic situation. The Greeks had been overwhelmingly republican in sentiment, yet we had stood by while Churchill restored the same King George II who had set up the Metaxas fascist dictatorship in Greece. General Marshall had just learned in China that it was folly to give unlimited support to reactionary regimes, yet we were off on that track again. He thought it as absurd for us to try to exert military pressure on the borders of the Soviet Union as it would be for the Soviets to use their military power against us in Mexico. “Even a puzzled civilian could predict the results in both cases with deadly certainty.” He was also highly skeptical of attempts to quarantine the Soviet Union. That had been attempted by all the nations of Western Europe in the “cordon-sanitaire” policy after 1919. It had been attempted again on a gigantic scale by Adolph Hitler, with the support of Italy and Japan. Whether we could now succeed in a third attempt, by our own single efforts, “with a policy so hastily conceived that it was unknown to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ten days ago” remained to be seen.³⁶

Samuel Grafton thought it was significant that those who defended the President’s Greek program found themselves compelled to speak in derogation of the United Nations. When, two weeks later, the Vandenberg amendment to bring the UN into the picture was proposed, he thought that those who had originally decided between minutes that the Truman program was right, to the last comma, “must have been awfully hungry for it.” They had been guilty of “a whale of a brush-off: they had brushed off world organization itself.” He doubted that the Truman Doctrine, “with the ring of the centuries in it,” could be compared with the Monroe Doctrine, which had kept European kings from interfering with American republics.³⁷

Drew Pearson reported a long visit to President Truman by two Greek churchmen, whose presence in the White House “amazed” other Greek Americans. They represented the extreme royalist faction in Greece and one of them had such a long police record, which Pearson quoted, that he was not permitted to enter the St. Sofia Church of Washington, even as a worshipper. Another Greek, John Maragon, also with a police record, and who soon went to prison, had privileged access to the White House. He too had a “passionate devotion to the King of Greece.”³⁸

Thomas L. Stokes, writing from Washington, described the “strange atmosphere of fear about this city.” The basic phobia was communism, but he wondered if the basis of it might not lie in a guilt complex, connected with our undamaged, prosperous condition when the rest of the world was hungry and in ruins. Stokes noted with regret that the Food and Agriculture Organization of UN had spent four months in Greece last year preparing a plan for its reconstruction, which was formally approved by FAO in November. This reconstruction program, to cost about $100,000,000, had been known to officials for some time but had not been published until after the issuance of the Truman Doctrine, thus revealing that an alternative to it had been available all the time.

The FAO report, a 200–page document prepared under the chairmanship of President F. S. Harris, of the Utah State College of Agriculture, had been a complete plan for beginning Greek rehabilitation, the real antidote to communism. Yet, Stokes continued, instead of using it we had seen, almost overnight “the creation of an international ‘crisis’ over Greece.” The dizzy drama had started with “a hush-hush powwow at the White House,” all “very secret” in the usual publicity build-up mode. The “usual leaks providing long authoritative dispatches to whet the appetite” had set the stage for the President’s entrance to the joint session of Congress with his request for military action in Greece.³⁹

Marquis Childs joined in recommending the FAO plan to every Congressman, in preference to the military approach. To him the other way, the way of peace and reconstruction, was clear, and working through the FAO “would make plain that our action in Greece was not a personal and private adventure.”⁴⁰

Stewart Alsop, noting that Britain had long been subsidizing Greece quietly, described the astonishment of an experienced British diplomat at the American way. “My God,” the diplomat exclaimed, “what a way to go about it!” The British had been genuinely surprised and shocked by the “enormous hullaballoo” that had accompanied the President’s request for aid to Greece, and by the fact “that the policy of aid to Greece was made to seem hardly less than a declaration of war on the Soviet Union.” Alsop was sure that the Truman Doctrine must now “be followed to its logical conclusion,” but that a well thought out master plan must avoid the piecemeal approach. World peace would “hardly survive a long series of Greek crises, with the Congress being bludgeoned and frightened every six months or so into sticking a costly finger into some new hole in the dike. The situation was serious because, with one or two exceptions, the existing regimes in the Near and Middle East were a bad bet. They were “rotten” and could not “last over a long period and in the face of Soviet pressure and propaganda.”⁴¹

Under the caption “Appraising the Gamble on Greece and Turkey,” Anne O’Hare McCormick assessed it as a translation into action of the resistance we had not been able to make effective in Eastern Europe. It was “a policy loaded with risks and incalculable costs.” Her “guess was” that the President had made a major issue of the Greek crisis “to warn the Soviet leaders that they were running into the danger of war.”⁴²

R. H. Markham was certain that we dared not falter. We should “encourage all possible reforms, establish contact with the sad, bewildered Greek people, relinquish the belief that we can suddenly impose brotherhood and probity in Athens such as we haven’t imposed on Boston, keep constantly in mind that we are engaged in an urgent campaign against world enslavement and display deep faith, broad understanding and patient heroism rather than the vain superficiality of which one now sees considerable.”⁴³

Urgency and Impartiality Questioned. Among the published comments of private citizens two were outstanding. James P. Warburg, banker and former deputy director of the Office of War Information, questioned the urgency of the Soviet threat to peace, asking: “What is so urgent that we must act alone, without consultation, without knowing how far our first step will carry us, and in such a way as to undermine the very structure of peace, which we have struggled so hard to erect?” He labelled the Doctrine “the lineal descendant of our policy of expediency toward Franco, Pétain, Badoglio and King George of Greece,” and asked whether the obligation to combat totalitarian regimes extended to Spain, Portugal, and Argentina? The country had a right to know if the President was talking “about all totalitarian regimes imposed by the will of the minority or only about a certain variety of totalitarian regimes imposed by a certain kind of minority.”⁴⁴

The Military Strategy Argument. In the New York Times for April 20 there appeared a letter from Professor Gilbert Macbeth, of Villa Nova College, which went to the bottom of the situation. He too argued that from the point of view of democratic principles a communist regime was not more distasteful than any other highly undemocratic system. If we intended consistently to fight communism we would have to withdraw from the United Nations or turn it into an anti-Soviet organization. If we were trying to advance the cause of democracy we would need to change the character of the reactionary Greek and Turkish Governments, yet we were determined to keep them in power.

What was the real reason for our action? It was, said Macbeth, to be found in our rivalry with Russia as another great power, “with whom we would have just about the same differences if Russia were a democracy and not a communist state.” The bugaboo of communism had been conjured up to appeal to the emotions of the American people, rather than to their intelligence. First the people heard about trying to keep Greece and Turkey from going communist, then about aid to the starving Greeks. These things obscured the real issue, which was: “Should we oppose the interests of another great power in these two particular countries?” He thought the practical advantages were doubtful. The airplane, the rocket and other yet unused weapons would “give the Russians almost as much offensive power from their present bases as from bases closer to the Mediterranean,” and he asked whether in peace or war the United States really needed the oil reserves of the Near East? The real question was whether in the atomic age we “should risk the world catastrophe that the next war will be for the sake of some material thing that we do not need now and may never need.”

These considerations suggested the best argument that could be made for the American control of Greece and Turkey, that they comprised a strategic situation which in Russia’s hands would give her the domination of the world. George Fielding Eliot put this case clearly in the Herald Tribune on March 24. The world island—Europe, Asia and Africa—contained about 82 per cent of the world’s people and resources. It was joined together in the Middle East by a land bridge between Europe and Southern Asia and between Asia and Africa. This same position controlled the shortest line of sea communications and the main lines of air communication between the two greatest concentrations of people in the world. Finally, the same area held the world’s largest reserve of oil. If the Soviet Union, with its exclusion of all free commerce in our sense, controlled the Middle East it would be well on its way toward complete domination of the whole world island.⁴⁵

Editorial Reaction. The nation’s newspaper editors were more favorable to the Truman Doctrine than the columnists were. In its first editorial on March 13 the New York Times declared that “Mr. Truman did not challenge communism as such, nor suggest a crusade against it.” He did not mention Russia by name, though he left no doubt about what he meant. “Nor did he detract from support of the United Nations.” His message was “nothing less than a warning to Russia to desist from the physical aggression and the diplomatic attrition that have characterized her policy ever since the war.” The next day the Times combated the principal questions which had been promptly raised. It denied that the new policy meant a crusade against communism, to be fought with the same weapons the communists used, that it was a declaration of war against Russia and that it undermined the United Nations. On the 30th the Times added the appeasement argument. The democracies had incurred the two previous world wars by failing to reveal unmistakably their “point of resistance.” In re-examining the Doctrine on May 11 the Times did not waver in the slightest. “No one in his senses and not deliberately misrepresenting the situation would treat the Truman Doctrine as a military adventure.”

In its opening editorial on March 14 the New York Herald Tribune insisted that the message was not a proclamation of American imperialism and it was “emphatically not a declaration of war upon Russia.” There was probably a good deal of danger of war as a result of the message. That should be the least of our worries, but were we strong and wise enough to make Western capitalist democracy a success in places like Greece? The editor remembered Spain, Argentina and China and added that if we were “to demonstrate the validity of our system we must work constantly to ameliorate such places.” By March 25 the Herald Tribune found the details “not exactly inspiring.” The urgency with which the whole matter was invested was “an obvious deterrent to accurate evaluation of this program.” The danger was “that the American people may come to believe that their security can be achieved by dumping sums of money at threatened points around the periphery of Soviet influence, as the French dumped concrete into their Maginot Line.” On April 18 the editor reassured himself that there was “no reason to assume that this country must spread itself so thinly over the world it will be ripe for defeat.” It was “not the purpose of the United States to challenge the Soviet Union to an unending and mutually exhausting struggle, but to demonstrate to Moscow, as Senator Vandenberg put it, that ‘there is a deadline of ideals beyond which we will not retreat’.”

The Christian Science Monitor had more doubts from the start. It was aware that the United States would be under added pressure to favor Rightist dictators, once the decision was made to direct its policy against Leftist dictators. The next day, March 14, the Monitor thought that the Greek-Turkish move “need not necessarily lead to war any more than does the effort of the United States to hold a line in Korea, or Japan, or Germany.” Any resistance to Russian pressures could eventually lead to war and so could the extension of totalitarian regimes. The issue in Greece had to be met but there should be “less expression of suspicion and hate for Russia” and more efforts to prepare the United Nations to do the policing job, for we could not do it single handedly for long. Nor could the free nations hold Russia by propping up reaction.

The Chicago Tribune had no doubts or hesitations whatever. It declared, on March 13, that “Mr. Truman made as cold a war speech yesterday against Russia as any President has ever made except on the occasion of going before Congress to ask for a declaration of war. He gave notice that Russian communism is regarded as an enemy force which will be resisted wherever it is encountered, and that, if he has his way, the United States will go out of its way to seek encounters.” The outcome would “inevitably be war.” It would probably not come for a time but the issue was “already drawn. The declaration of implacable hostility between this country and Russia is one which cannot be tempered or withdrawn.”

The Chicago newspapers were unanimous in opposition, though for different reasons. On March 15, the Daily News listed six reasons for condemning the President’s speech as fallacious. We were inaugurating a change in foreign policy which committed us “morally to bailing out every tottering nation in Europe and liquidating its communists.” The drain on our national resources would finally make it difficult for us to aid anyone, yet we were “asking for a war with Russia.”

However, the majority of the press followed the President’s lead, urging that the alternatives were worse. Some recognized at the start, like the St. Louis Post Dispatch, on the 14th, that Truman had committed the honor and prestige of the United States. There was now “no turning back.”

Journey Through Congress

The day after the delivery of the message Reston reported that it was “on the whole, a grim and even resentful Congress” which took up the President’s message. His article was correctly headed: “Bewildered Congress Faces World Leadership Decision, Resents Truman Failure to Provide Full Data, Bemoans Need to Take a Stand.” Several influential members were opposed to the military end of the program. Even Senator Vandenberg was resentful that the issue had been presented so quickly and with so little information. Most members were driven to a conclusion which they did not like, namely, that the President “under constant attack in Congress for not standing up to the Russians, must be supported or repudiated.” Action had been asked by the end of March.

Arthur Krock’s article in the Times of March 18 was headed: “Congress Seeks to Sugar its Bitter Pill.” The Congress had been shying away from a new lend-lease financing of world economy. It had also refused to face world facts in the case of the British loan. Now to avoid bankrupting the leadership and reputation of the United States it was “about to embark on a much more serious enterprise than it ever has.”

The next day it was announced that a naval-air task force would visit the ports of Greece and Turkey in the Spring. On the 20th, Acting Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that there was “no possibility” of putting responsibility for extending aid to Greece on the United Nations. Turkey needed help because her army had been mobilized since the beginning of the war and this had put a severe strain upon the national economy which it was no longer able to carry. The general argument on this point later was that partial demobilization would be promoted by supplying modern weapons to the Turkish Army and improving Turkish roads and other communications. Acheson distributed an inch-thick loose-leaf book to the members containing certain materials classified as secret. On learning this two members tossed their copies back, asserting that they were unwilling to base their decision on secret information which would not be available to their colleagues and to the public. Two days later the book was made public.⁴⁶

An analysis of the aid proposals showed that 62 per cent of the appropriation would go into arms. Discussion grew over ways and means to get the program related to the United Nations.

Discriminating Thinking by the Public. On March 27 a Gallup Poll showed 56 per cent of those interviewed favoring aid to Greece and 32 per cent opposed. For Turkey the percentages were 49 and 36. On the question of sending military advisers, only 37 per cent favored aiding Greece in this manner and 33 per cent approved advisers to Turkey, 55 per cent being opposed. The same percentage disapproved of the by-passing of UN.⁴⁷ These percentages comprised a practical rejection of the program. Let economic aid be rendered, but not military, and do it through UN.

UN Cover Sought. This feeling was so strong that the Administration was compelled to go to the UN Security Council on March 28 with a statement on its aims in Greece. Delegate Warren R. Austin’s speech began with references to the UN Commission which was investigating the situation on the northern borders of Greece and went on to give an account of our Greek-Turkish aid program. He maintained that “The United States is giving momentum to the United Nations by its present policy.”⁴⁸

On March 31 Senator Vandenberg proposed an amendment to the aid bill giving the United Nations power to end the program “if requested by a procedural vote in the Security Council or by a majority vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations.” Any government of Greece or Turkey representing a majority of the people could also terminate the program.

At the other end of the Capitol Representative Fred L. Crawford, Republican of Michigan, asserted that the United States must force Russia to disarm under threat of the atomic bomb “even if this means war.” Crawford declared American spokesmen should “shove their chins right up against the chins of Mr. Molotov, Mr. Stalin and Mr. Vishinsky” and “shove their stomachs right up against the stomachs of these gentlemen, physically, and say this is our program.” “Tell them either to disarm or we will proceed.” The next day, Senator Harry F. Byrd, Democrat of Virginia, demanded that the United States seek a “showdown” with Russia in the UN Security Council.⁴⁹

On March 31 King George of Greece died and his younger brother, Paul, ascended the throne. The British Army formally ended its role in Greece, leaving the country “in approximately the same condition in which they found it.” Civil war raged throughout Greece and ruin was being “heaped upon devastation.” There was “little more democracy in Greece than in the brave ‘democracies’ of the Danubian basin.”⁵⁰

Congressional Queries. On April 3 the State Department replied to 111 questions submitted by Senators, in a document containing 96 single-spaced typed pages. To the question “Have we sought or will we seek any guarantees of political freedom in Greece from the Government?” the reply Was “No.” The Greek Constitution contained these guarantees and only the disturbed conditions impeded “the operation of constitutional government.” To the question ”How can America ask Russia to retire within its national boundaries if America has no intention of remaining within her own?” the Department replied that it did not think it “appropriate To comment” on Soviet activities. When asked what evidence this government had to indicate that Soviet Russia was trying to establish governments in Greece or Turkey which Moscow would dominate, the Department replied solemnly that the President had not charged that any specific country was trying to do either. To the suggestion that the United Nations should have been notified before our action rather than after it, “an ingenious answer” was made, that the situations in Greece and Turkey affected the national security of the United States and required Congressional action.⁵¹

Russian World Conquest. Our Ambassador to Turkey, Edwin C. Wilson, told a secret session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on March 30, that Turkey was the key to the Middle East. On April 4 Senator Walter F. George, of Georgia, openly focused the program on checking Russia, saying: “I deliberately place my support of this bill on the belief that it is vital to us to check Russian expansion now.” This was a marked change from his position on March 4, when he had stated that we must act in such a way that “we do not invite any open opposition from our friends the Russians in that area.” Since then he had come to the conclusion that “If unchecked Russia will inevitably overrun Europe, extend herself into Asia and perhaps South America, and that this process of expansion may go on for a full century.”⁵²

This was an excellent example of the manner in which American leaders, especially after March 12, 1947, jumped to the conclusion that Russia was out to conquer the world. She had taken control of certain countries in Eastern Europe, contrary to our expectation that these lands would remain socially and economically in our system. Therefore it was Hitler all over again. The Russians were out to conquer the world. Our leaders, especially the conservatives, found it easy to believe that the two situations were entirely analogous. Thereafter each move made by the Russians in the developing cold war only deepened their conviction that world conquest was Russia’s aim. There could be no other.

Appeasement Analogy. Passage of the bill by the date demanded, March 31, was not attempted. However, on April 5 the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations unanimously urged swift action, “in words flavored with alarm and appeal,” pointing “a warning finger toward the Soviet Union.” The next day President Truman repeated the appeasement-Hitler analogy, saying: “We know how the fire starts. We have seen it before—aggression by the strong against the weak, openly by the use of armed force and secretly by infiltration. And we know how it ends.” To forestall the end he declared that “we must act in time—ahead of time—to stamp out the smoldering beginnings of any conflict that may threaten to spread over the world.” In Paris, the newspaper Le Monde commented upon this statement: “It amounts to saying that an isolated nation may take upon itself to act in place of the United Nations and therefore prejudice in advance the decision they might take.”⁵³

In giving his support to the Greek-Turkish program former Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York said: “I believe that our Government must and does realize that unilateral action alone would prove in the long run to be as unrealistic as it is dangerous and that it recognizes the fact that a country which attempts to gain security exclusively through one nation or independent action may be opening the gates to disaster.”⁵⁴

UN Amendment Adopted. In the Senate, Senator Vandenberg persisted in his attempt to give the UN a veto over the continuance of the program. Before his amendment was adopted he changed it to preclude a veto even by a friendly power, of a UN request for ending the program.⁵⁵

The anti-Russian substance of the Truman Doctrine led Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, one of the most militant opponents of our war against Nazi Germany, to break a long silence. On April 13 he joined those who were demanding Russia’s disarmament, saying, “America’s security depends on preventing the assembly of modem weapons by an aggressive power.” The Herald Tribune viewed “this reinforcement with some alarm,” but it did not go on to point out that Lindbergh represented a very powerful segment of American opinion which had fought fascism with the greatest reluctance but was ready for the strongest measures against Red Russia.⁵⁶

Wallace’s European Tour. The controversy over the Truman Doctrine was sharpened by the bitterness aroused by the continental tour of Henry A. Wallace. Invited to Britain by left-wing members of the Labor Party,”"he had spoken to great crowds and over the radio. The London Times wrote on April 23, 1947, of the snowball effect of his visit in both Britain and France.

In both countries and in Scandinavia he opposed the military aspects of the Truman Doctrine and proposed instead a fifty billion dollar program of aid to war devastated countries, a third of which would go to the Soviet Union. Almost alone, he urged that the problem of the Dardanelles be solved by internationalizing all of the great straits of the world, including the Suez and Panama canals. He asserted that it might be comparatively easy to split the world in two, but neither side would be strong enough to keep it apart. Wherever he went he urged the Europeans to be the bridge between the two worlds, instead of deepening the chasm by joining up.

The effects of this appeal on the advocates of the Truman Doctrine were bound to be strong. There were many demands, in Congress and out, that Wallace be forced to come home, that his passport be revoked and that he be prosecuted under the ancient Logan Act of 1796, passed in another time of reaction and hysteria, to forbid any private citizen to deal with a foreign government. He was accused of being a moral traitor, even though the application of the Logan Act against him was highly dubious. When Winston Churchill had visited the United States a year before to urge an American-British combination against the Soviet Union many people had felt his action highly improper, but no one had denied his right to speak. His government had also stated that he did not speak for it. Now, however, so much passion was vented on Wallace for opposing the Churchill-Truman policy in Europe that the furore sometimes obscured the Doctrine itself. Condemning those who went abroad to oppose their own government, Churchill himself accused Wallace of being a “crypto-communist,” that is, “one who has not got the courage to explain the destination for which he is making.”⁵⁷

Final Enactment. The Greek-Turkish bill became law on May 22, 1947. As the Congress prepared to vote upon it, the Herald Tribune reported that “few if any members of Congress are preparing to vote for the bill with any enthusiasm.” Only a few votes would be cast against it, but that was not a fair measure of the doubts about it. Many members had gone to great extremes to build up an elaborate “out” for their constituents in case the program backfired.⁵⁸

One Representative, Lawrence H. Smith, Republican of Wisconsin, spoke his mind without equivocation. He said: “The bill is a war measure and from now on we move in. Hysteria has swept over us and we can look for a stiffening of our military situation. They rigged this thing up with red herrings and didn’t have the moral courage—yes, the guts—to tell the people that this was really a war measure.”⁵⁹

As the time for final enactment neared, Seymour Freidin, reporting from Athens, described the remarkable “success” of what he called the “appalling” Greek Government. It had “managed to fritter away virtually all its foreign exchange, drive more people into the mountains, because they were being treated as outlaws for having dared to express opposition, and to hold a club over the Western powers that unless abundant aid is immediately forthcoming Greece would go communist.” Then, when the aid was forthcoming, the Minister of the Interior had publicly opposed any international supervision of an amnesty for Greek guerrillas, on the ground that it would offend Greek pride and infringe on Greek sovereignty.⁶⁰

President Truman signed the $400,000,000 Greek-Turkish assistance bill on May 22, 1947. A dispatch recording the event was headed: “Truman Signs Near East Bill, Acclaims U.N., Says Greek-Turkish Aid Shows that U.S. ‘Acts’ to Uphold World Body.”⁶¹

Retaliation in Congress. In the last stages of the bill’s legislative progress the House of Representatives took two steps which betrayed its resentment over the Greek crisis. On April 30, by a vote of 225 to 165, largely on party lines, it cut the European aid bill from $350,000,000 to $200,000,000, and a week later Secretary of State Marshall complained that the proposed $60,000,000 slash in the State Department’s outlay for the coming year was very embarrassing to the government’s drive for world peace. He hoped particularly that the “Voice of America” radio programs would not be silenced.⁶²

Communists Ousted in France and Italy. Early in May the communists were forced out of both the French and Italian cabinets, “the beginning of a kind of chain reaction to the new American line.”⁶³ In Washington Herbert Hoover proposed that separate peace treaties be made with Germany and Japan, without reference to Russia.

In Rio de Janeiro a secret session of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies was called by a petition signed by 121 members. The Chamber spent a tumultuous three hours debating charges that Argentine dictator Peron was supplying arms to the Paraguayan Government for the current civil war.⁶⁴ There were however, no reports that President Truman would move against Peron.

The Hungarian Smallholders’ Party Destroyed. In Hungary several members of the Smallholders’ Party Government were ousted and Premier Ferenc Nagy, then in Switzerland, was forced to resign. The communists moved swiftly to take political control. In Washington, the Herald Tribune noted editorially, on June 6, “President Truman was exploding to his press conference over the Hungarian matter with that amateurishness which is so frequent a feature of his statesmanship. The air was sulphurous with such words as ‘outrage,’ ‘terrible,’ refusal to ‘stand idly by’ and so on.” It was “the amateur touch—acting excitedly in a piecemeal way instead of analyzing problems as a whole.” The texts of the diplomatic protests to Russia on the liquidation of the opposition in Hungary and Bulgaria were published on June 12.

The communist seizure of Hungary was widely regarded as a direct reply to the Truman Doctrine and it was in the sense that the Doctrine made it imperative for the Left to crush the Right in Hungary quickly. The “left parties remembered the blood bath that had followed the return of reaction after World War I.” They knew that the dispossessed warrior-landlords who had ruled Hungary with fierce repression for a thousand years had gone into the Smallholders’ Party and it was not difficult to weave plots around its leadership, some true and others false, and in purging the reactionaries to destroy the party, to such an extent that in the election of August 1947 its share of the national vote fell from 57 per cent to 15. Then the three parties into which the Smallholders had flooded were dissolved one after another as treasonable. Backed by the Red Army two very able communist leaders, one “an industrial genius,” had brought about a complete social overturn, “with only a couple of hundred arrests and one execution.” The Right had been crushed in Hungary more decisively than the Left had been in Greece in 1944–5. This would have happened anyway, without the Truman Doctrine. It only accelerated the process.⁶⁵

X = Containment

In July 1947 the famous article “By X” was published in Foreign Affairs. The title of the article was “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” and the author was soon known to be George F. Kennan. It was widely accepted as the considered justification of the State Department for the containment policy.

It posed two postulates as motivating the conduct of the Soviet police state: (1) “the innate antagonism between capitalism and socialism;” and (2) the infallibility of the Kremlin. Kennan did not find these concepts dangerous in any urgent sense because “the Soviet theory of the inevitability of the eventual fall of capitalism has the fortunate connotation that there is no hurry about it.”

This was the foundation stone of the X article. Being “under the compulsion of no timetable” the Kremlin does not get panicky under the necessity for a retreat.

“Its political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power. But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts them philosophically and accommodates itself to them. The main thing is that there should always be pressure, increasing constant pressure toward the desired goal. There is no trace of any feeling in Soviet psychology that that goal must be reached at any given time.”

Upon this comer stone Kennan built his containment thesis—“long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. No histrionics, no “threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward ‘toughness.’” The Kremlin was “highly conscious that loss of temper and of self-control is never a source of strength in political affairs.” What was called for was “the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Soviet policy.”

Containment of this kind would work because the Soviet peoples were “physically and spiritually tired,” after the long ordeals of forced-pace industrialization, war and devastation. The older generations were burned out. Besides, there was the coming transfer of power, on Stalin’s death, and on the analogy of the determination of the succession to Lenin a weakening struggle of ten years might again occur. “And if disunity were ever to seize and paralyze the Party, the chaos and weakness of Russian society would be revealed in forms beyond description.” We might be witnessing the afterglow of a constellation which is actually on the wane. “This cannot be proved. And it cannot be disproved. But the possibility remains (and in the opinion of this writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its own conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.”

Our job for the next ten or fifteen years was to “promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power,” for no Messianic movement could face frustration indefinitely without adjusting itself “in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.”

This formulation of the containment theory demanded the closest attention, since it was written by a man believed by the highest authorities in Washington to know the answers to our Number One Problem, what to do about the Soviet Union. The X article was written, also, about the time of the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947. Lippmann greeted it as an expression of the State Department’s mind “as of March 15 approximately,” and its author as “the leading expert upon whose observations, predictions, and hypotheses the Truman Doctrine is based.”

Lippmann’s Analysis. During September 1947 Lippmann published a dozen articles analyzing the X bases of the Truman Doctrine, afterwards published in a small book,⁶⁶ in which he accepted the principle that the conflict with the Soviet Union was real, and that Soviet power would expand unless confronted with American power, but disagreed completely on the strategical soundness of the plan. He found it based on an optimistic prediction which left “no margin of safety for bad luck, bad management, error and the unforeseen.” It was asking too much of us to stake our “entire security as a nation” on a long struggle in which Moscow would define the issues, select the ground and choose the weapons.

He doubted that the free and undirected politics and economy of the American people, as well as their temperament, were suitable to such a policy. It might perhaps be enforced by our air and sea power on an island like Japan, but containing the Soviet Union was a giant operation in trench warfare, where great hordes of docile people would surely have the advantage. Actually our “unalterable counter-force” would have to consist of “a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets,” pitted against the monolithic power of the Soviet Union. A weak ally was no asset and the Soviet borderland was “a seething stew of civil strife.”

Already the failure of our diplomatic campaign in the borderlands of Eastern Europe, where the Red Army could not be argued out of its position, had “conjured up the specter of a Third World War” and, if the containment policy were pursued, either Russia would burst through the containment barriers or the diplomatic war would become a full scale shooting war. In either event Europe was lost, and knowing it Europe would act accordingly, seeking to escape by any means.

Containment vs. Peace. Lippmann’s analysis of the containment thesis, which is only indicated above, was devastating. There were other significant things about the article, some of which Lippmann discussed.

1. Red Russia was not aggressive in the Hitlerian sense.

This was one of the things most strongly emphasized in the X article. Unlike the three fascist aggressors the Soviets had no timetable. They believed so strongly that western capitalism had within it the seeds of its own destruction that they saw no need for having any timetables. Why incur the great dangers and devastations of do-or-die wars when final success was inevitable without them?

In this respect Kennan was a true and accurate observer, and because he knew there was no raging-tearing threat to the world’s peace in Russia—on the Mussolini-Hitler-Hirohito model, with its own inner compulsions toward aggression—he did not urge a preventive war with Russia. Far from it. He merely accepted the Soviet’s own method of competition, as he understood it, and advised meeting it with patient containment. He reported accurately that the Soviet peoples were dead tired and had no desire for war. So all that was necessary was just to push them back when the Kremlin sought to push out somewhere. He was not advocating war and didn’t suppose that his policy would lead to it.

If, too, the vital difference between fascism and communism which he set forth could be understood widely enough there would be no third world war. The United States would not be full of powerful people assuming that they were back in the Hitlerian era, faced with “inevitable” war as the alternative to stultifying appeasement.

2. Russia’s permanent interests as a state were ignored.

In his concentration on the current ideology in Moscow Kennan forgot Russia herself. He showed no comprehension that Stalin’s aims were also those of Peter the Great, and that whatever kind of regime ruled the Kremlin it would pursue certain objectives, especially the possession of warm water ports. Control of the Dardanelles was not a communist purpose; it was a permanent Russian. objective, dictated by geography.

3. No settlement of the conflict with Russia was envisaged.

This was the most appalling thing about the article. It assumed that we were dealing with something which could not be reasoned with or dealt with. It could only be contained, patiently and firmly restrained wherever it sought to advance. Soviet communism was conceived as a gigantic amoeba, a huge amorphous mass which had to be dealt with amorphously and impersonally.

In other words, diplomacy was abolished. Its central purpose, to settle conflicts, or at least to compose them for a time, was abandoned. We would not treat the Russian leaders as human beings, very hard headed ones, immensely proud of their achievements in industrializing Russia and winning the war, but as communist zealots who could be contained but not negotiated with.

This assumption mirrored the frustration which overcame nearly all Americans who lived in our Moscow Embassy or who negotiated with the Russians after the war. It was a natural reaction to the never-ending arguments involved, but a fatal one. In later years it grew in Washington into an obsession, one which clearly involved war, for if powerful heads of state are treated as people with whom one cannot reach any agreements they have no alternative but to attempt forcible solutions.

4. The destruction of the United Nations was implicit.

If there could be no settlement of issues and conflicts with Russia the United Nations had no future, for it was designed to operate after the settlements of World War II. If no settlements involving the Soviet Union were to be made, UN would either be pushed aside like the League of Nations or “transformed into an anti-Soviet coalition.” In either event, the United Nations as a universal society capable of ameliorating and resolving the troubles of the world on a world scale, would be destroyed, and we would be left with the nightmare of two giant world coalitions organized against each other.⁶⁷

The Kennan article is of great historic value, because it is the fullest explanation and justification of the containment doctrine, by one who was not its author but who rationalized and justified it for President Truman.

It was the President who had to accept the responsibility for the Truman Doctrine, and it was he who willingly placed upon his countrymen the task of fencing in the largest land power in the world, one which was and is without any controlled access to warm water. To understand why he made this earth-shaking decision requires consideration of several questions.

Truman Doctrine Issues

1. Why was the Doctrine promulgated at the start of the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers?

This meeting had been scheduled months ahead to begin on March 10. It opened on that date and two days later the President delivered his explosive message to Congress. Many people were puzzled by the simultaneity of these two events. Why did Truman choose the opening of the conference, which met to make a beginning on a treaty of peace for Germany, to explode his bomb shell? What to do about Germany was the next question to be decided, and the greatest. Did the President mean to torpedo the conference?

An answer was supplied by Drew Pearson in his report of the White House conference with the Congressional chiefs, which so impressed them that they urged the recall of Secretary Marshall from Moscow for the time being, feeling that he could not accomplish much there. The President refused, saying that “What we are going to do will strengthen his hand in Moscow. A few days later Anne O’Hare McCormick, speaking of the President’s message, said: “The place it was aimed at was the Moscow Conference,” and on March 11 James Reston stated that Secretary Marshall had not gone to Moscow to plead for the writing of German and Austrian peace treaties. He had “not even gone to Moscow primarily to make peace with Germany, but to emphasize the cost of not making peace with the United States.”⁶⁸

These reports indicate fairly clearly that there was no hesitation about blanketing the conference with the Truman Doctrine. It was even expected that a dose of real toughness would bring hard-boiled Russian leaders to terms. If not, well and good, since the Administration did not attach much importance to the conference anyway.

In practice the opposite result was as certain as anything could be. Given their deep suspicions of the capitalist West the Russian attitude in the conference would inevitably stiffen. In Moscow, Howard K. Smith watched the Soviets change from an attitude of “some amicability to a stubborn resistance on every detailed point of discussion.” The Russians concluded that Truman was preparing to solve the depression he had warned about by an armament program.⁶⁹

2. Was the emergency in Greece serious enough to justify the crisis atmosphere created?

Our leaders knew that the Royalist Greek Government was likely to disappear fairly soon, unless we continued the heavy backing which Britain had supplied. Yet the operation in prospect was not a tremendous one, when compared either to the costs of the war or to our current budget. Couldn’t the burden have been accepted as one of the war’s consequences without any great commotion? The Administration began to make headway in converting the rank and file, before the President went before Congress. The collapse of the Greek Government was not likely to occur on April 1. Its position was not that utterly hopeless. Actually it survived another two months with only the promise of further support, while the Congress was deliberating beyond its allotted time. The Congress, too, resented deeply the crisis treatment to which it was subjected, giving it no choice but to appropriate the money or damage irreparably our national prestige. A more normal procedure should have secured authority to take over in Greece, perhaps with the Turkish angle omitted.

More argument with the Congress might have been required, but there does not seem to have been any serious question of taking a milder course, for the reason that the President and his advisers wanted to seize the occasion to draw a line with Russia.

3. Was it necessary to by-pass UN?

The defenders of the Greek-Turkish policy maintained that it was, because the Russians would have vetoed the program. This would have been the case, however, only if a security or “threat to the peace” issue were before the Security Council. The veto did not apply in the Economic and Social Council, whose subsidiary Food and Agriculture Organization had already prepared exhaustive plans for reconstruction in Greece.

It is true that as the Truman plan was presented to Congress, with its military aspects predominating, the Russians might have brought charges in the Security Council that the plan was a threat to the peace and to their security. Yet they could have done this anyway and did not do so, probably for the reason that it would have been very difficult to make a legal case. There was nothing in the Charter which forbade helping another country, even by sending munitions and military instructors to train and advise its army. This was an old custom, practised freely by all of the older great powers. It was a normal procedure in South America. In Greece we were, of course, intervening in a civil war, but the invitation of the Greek Government to do so made our action legal, a cover which the fascist powers never had in Spain.

It was argued, however, that in any event the Russians would have obstructed action in the Economic and Social Council so long that the Greek Government would have been overthrown and they or their friends would have had to be represented in administering the aid program.

It might have been somewhat vexatious to have had the program administered through the UN, but there would have been the enormous advantage of having the direct participation of third parties in the endeavour. The authority of UN might not alone have made civil war unnecessary, without the military aid part of the program since the rebellion was supported by Greece’s neighbors, but UN management would have practically precluded the success of the rebels and might have provided guarantees of amnesty which would have brought the majority of them down out of the mountains.

Actually, of course, our Government did not desire to stabilize Greece through the UN, because it intended to achieve a stroke of power politics on its own, with the maximum of emphasis on the authority of the United States. There was regret that the UN had not been “related” in some way to the move, especially when it developed that the American people strongly disapproved of our unilateral action and demanded that the UN be not ignored. At this stage our Government did its best to “notify” the UN, and under the Republican leadership of Senator Vandenberg it went so far as to give the UN the power to end the program by a simple vote, which we would honor regardless of a veto by friend or foe. This gift of a vetoless veto to UN was made in a body in which our majority was overwhelming on any East-West issue, and this paper concession did not lessen our ability to play the hand ourselves in Greece.

As the X article and the Truman message both demonstrated, we had no desire to bring in UN, because both documents ruled out negotiation and settlement as objectives and relied in the last analysis upon force, force to put down the Greek revolution and force to contain the Soviet Union indefinitely thereafter.

4. Was a domestic political purpose incidentally involved?

Stout defiance of a nation’s chief rival has usually been good politics. There have been exceptions. The power of a government to influence public opinion is so great that even extreme appeasement could be made temporarily popular in Britain and France. But ringing defiance has raised the national hackles and won approval far more often, in democracies as well as authoritarian states.

President Truman was also under a special temptation to seize the anticommunist issue from the Republicans. The press of early 1947 contains many responsible estimates that the Republican cry against communism in the election of 1946, coupled with protests against the too soft Russian policy of the Roosevelt Administration and efforts to link the New Deal and the Democrats with communism, had won votes, probably enough to turn the election to the Republicans.

A leader as politically conscious as Harry Truman could not but be concerned about this development. On March 23, 1947, only a few days after the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, he issued a sweeping order providing for the examination of the loyalty of all government employees, more than 2,000,000 of them. This step was taken to prevent a hostile Republican Congress from playing havoc with his Administration, by hunting for “communists” all through it, but it was also a defensive political move. On April 20, Marquis Childs wrote that after the order was issued President Truman was reported to have said: “Well, that should take the Communist smear off the Democratic party!”⁷⁰

The wholesale loyalty purge was a defensive move, but the Truman Doctrine had the effect of a sweeping political offensive inside the United States, and it is hardly likely that the President was unaware of this aspect of his action. The Republicans did not dare to charge partisan motivation, since the Doctrine had been combined with the Greek question in such a way as to pose the issue of national security and patriotism, but their chagrin was deep. By one bold all-embracing stroke Truman had made himself the world’s leading anti-communist. He would fight its advance, either directly or by infiltration, everywhere on the globe, with money, with arms and with men if necessary. Nobody could go further than that, and because the Republicans had themselves fought communism so recently and so loudly they could do nothing but support the Truman Doctrine.

What appeared to be a winning issue had been taken from their hands. Thereafter they could only attack Truman for not enforcing his own doctrine forcibly enough. This they did, led by presidential candidate Dewey, in the campaign of 1948, with respect to China. After his special mission to China, General Marshall had concluded, before he became Secretary of State and endorsed the Truman Doctrine, that armed aid to Chiang Kai-shek could not win the day for him and he tried to mediate the great Chinese civil war. He failed, and aid to Chiang continued, but his continuing losses led to bitter Republican charges that Marshall should never have meddled and that still more arms should have been thrown into Chiang’s hands (to pass mainly into the hands of the Chinese communists).

The communist victory in China did punch the largest conceivable hole in the Truman Doctrine and the resulting bitterness of one wing of the Republicans was so deep that they had begun to force a revision of our policy in the Far East before the North Korean Reds invaded South Korea in July 1950.

At that point Truman was compelled to accept the full logic of his Doctrine and apply it to the Far East, as well as to the Mediterranean and Europe. Again his popularity rose sharply and impressively as it had after the issuance of the Doctrine, because in both cases a large group of people felt that he had done his duty energetically and courageously. There cannot be any doubt that the controlling reason for the Truman Doctrine was the reaction of Truman and some of his advisers to the acts of the Soviet Government, and its refusal to act, but the domestic political advantages were very obvious.⁷¹

5. Did the international political situation require the issuance of the Doctrine?

In Greece a political vacuum yawned ahead, and in Western Europe a much bigger one was already plainly discernible. Some action was essential if the danger that communism would fill these vacuums was to be averted. The obvious move was large scale economic aid, to enable these countries to recover from the rigors of the great winter and from the deeper damages of the war. Such aid was indispensable, if there was to be any real recovery. Its proffer, too, would have been tangible and weighty evidence that the United States did not mean to abandon Europe to its fate, as after World War I.

On the other hand, there was a good case for a ringing political pronouncement that would tell the European peoples that we were behind them, that we were coming to their aid. Did such a declaration have to be anti-communist and anti-Russian? Was it imperative that global political war be formally declared and joined?

It is difficult to believe that this was the case, even on the showing of the Kennan article, which saw no acute, urgent menace in Soviet communism. The Soviets had achieved great political success as a result of the war, and their achievement in consolidating their hold on East Europe, in spite of our protests, had deeply nettled our leaders. The communist parties were vigorously active in Italy and France, as Fifth Columns if we like. Yet they were only fifth columns. The other four columns were lacking, in the absence of great economic misery. Russia’s satellites were helping the communist-led rebels in Greece, but Moscow gave no sign of throwing decisive strength into that struggle.

On the contrary, the Kremlin had been well satisfied with the world at the start of the year. The satellite treaties had from its standpoint been successfully concluded. From ours the terms were somewhat bitter, but settlements had been made. The Moscow conference was meeting to attempt to settle the real question, what to do with Germany. That would not be easy but it meant a lot to Russia as well as to us. The Russians were not likely to disrupt a major diplomatic conference, at which they were hosts, by any rash, aggressive moves in Western Europe, or in Greece. They were assuming the continuance of peace making so strongly that even after the Truman Doctrine had ended any chance of practical accomplishment at the Moscow conference the Russians went on discussing the issues in Germany, ignoring the world salvo of the Truman Doctrine. Near the close of the conference Stalin told Marshall that the Moscow discussions had been only “the first skirmishes and brushes of the reconnaissance forces” on the German question. “Differences had occurred in the past on other questions, and as a rule, after people had exhausted themselves in dispute, they then recognized the necessity of compromise.”⁷² The Russians had amply proved that they were tough, long, hard bargainers, but they had no thought of abandoning diplomacy and risking their remaining lives and resources on political war.

It was the United States which did that.

The Moscow Conference. As the Moscow Conference adjourned, April 24, 1947, Sumner Welles wrote that it had run about in a vicious circle for six weeks. He urged the United States and the Soviet Union to reach a direct agreement upon the basis for an overall settlement. On the same day, Reston wrote that Washington was “in a black and cynical mood about the Moscow conference.” On Capitol Hill there was nothing but “pessimistic resignation to an endless procession of relief and military appropriations.”

On his way home Marshall said, April 25th, that East-West differences “have got to be reconciled,” adding that “it is only a question how long it will take to do so.” When Marshall had seen Stalin, on April 15, “the meeting was very much in the nature of a military ‘briefing’” reported Joseph C. Harsch, the responsible Washington correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, on April 29. The presentation of the Marshall brief took about thirty minutes. Stalin then made some comments and asked a few questions on specific points, “but there was nothing that could be called a discussion,” or “an attempt to negotiate.” The meeting was “most friendly” and Stalin was courteous to his guest.

In his radio report on the conference, published April 30, Dulles explained why Russia’s demands on Germany could not be accepted by the United States, adding that we had not come home discouraged. This was not the viewpoint of Representative Charles A. Eaton, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, who told the House Rules Committee on April 29 that “two worlds are in head-on collision. One of them is going to survive.”⁷³ It was not difficult to persuade Eaton that this was true, but it is significant that he again posed the “either-or” choice the day after a secret White House conference, just as he had on emerging from the White House gathering on February 28. This horrendous choice was, of course, contained in the Truman Doctrine message when the President said, “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.” No room was left for diversity, for many different kinds of systems. It must be one or the other.

6. Did the military necessity of the United States Justify our guardianship of the Turkish Straits?

This is the most difficult aspect of the Truman Doctrine to assess. The geopolitical argument pushed to its logical conclusion justifies that part of the Truman Doctrine address which was frankly military.

The Soviets in control of Greece could outflank the Straits and dominate them. Then they could dominate Turkey and push on into the great oil fields of the Near East, through Iraq to Iran and down into Arabia. At this point they could control the land bridge between Europe and Asia and between Europe and Africa. They could also control the vital air routes in the same strategic area and end the freedom of the seas at Suez, the shortest sea route between the great populations of Europe and Asia. And everywhere they went their closed economic system could shut out our commerce, certainly our investments.

Then from Suez they could cross over into Africa, take North Africa away from the British and French, carry out social revolution everywhere and sweep down to Dakar, from which they could cross the narrow neck of the Atlantic to Brazil, conquer Catholic South America and come up to the Panama Canal, endangering that American waterway, so vital to our commerce.

This is the kind of fatal progression which we feared from Hitler, rightly and deeply. Once firmly in control of Europe Germany would undoubtedly have taken over Africa and challenged us in Brazil, where large German colonies were already Nazi organized and dominated. In conjunction with a victory of Japan in the East this would have placed us in a fatal squeeze, with the grimmest chances of maintaining our free institutions in the embrace of triumphant fascist empires, assailing us from without and from within.

If the Soviet Union was about to embark on this same raging imperial course, it was our bounden duty to prevent it. Yet the entire Kennan thesis, which rationalized the containment doctrine, denied that Russia was a threat of this character. On the contrary, she was tired, gravely wounded and full of inner contradictions of her own which would probably break her up. She was patient, would readily accept reverses, only needed persistent pushing back.

It is, of course, possible to reconcile these apparently contradictory lines of argument by saying that once in Greece the Russians would have infiltrated and advanced from the Dardanelles to Panama, by patient steps over a long period of time. Nevertheless, the two theories fairly well cancel each other. It would seem that we must choose one or the other as the basic justification for American control of the Turkish Straits.

Previous Negotiations Concerning the Straits. From our standpoint we had been fair and generous to Russia in our note of November 2, 1945, to Turkey proposing: (1) that the Straits be open to all merchant vessels at all times; and (2) to Black Sea-power warships at all times, but; (3) closed to non-Black Sea warships, except for an agreed tonnage in peace time or when acting under the authority of the United Nations; and (4) a revision of the Montreux convention to which the Western powers belonged.

The Soviet counter proposals, presented to Turkey on August 7 and September 24, 1946, naturally accepted the first two points but proposed the control of the Straits solely by the Black Sea powers and their joint defense by Turkey and the Soviet Union, involving a Russian military base on the Straits.⁷⁴

This is the camel’s nose which our military strategists were certain would push down the whole geopolitical tent. It is also the same demand which the Russians made upon Hitler during the period of their truce with him, and may be taken as a permanent objective. Judging from all Russian history it is also the leading unsatisfied Russian territorial aspiration.

Permanent Dilemma. This fixed Soviet objective is also based upon as painful experiences as a great nation could have. The Straits are the Soviet Union’s principal outlet to the sea, yet they have been closed for extended periods by war three times within the last fifty years, first during the Italo-Turkish war, 1911–12, then during the two world wars. During the first world war the Straits were closed by Turkey as an enemy. Winston Churchill almost blasted them open with Allied warships. His strategy was sound and its failure may well have prevented the survival of the Russian Czarist autocracy, since the short, direct route for Allied supplies to the munitions-starved Russians was blocked throughout the war. From the standpoint of the Soviet leaders as communists, this was not such a bad thing. In their capacity as leaders of the Russian state, it was a warning not to be forgotten. They cannot forget, either, that the Straits would certainly have been under full Russian control if the Czarist regime had been among the victors. During World War II the Straits were closed to Russia again, by Turkey’s not too friendly neutrality, and by German air power based upon Greece and its Aegean Islands, including the large island aircraft carrier, Crete. This time the loss of the Straits was not fatal to Russia, because of the timely and heroic work of her allies in sending supplies in through Persia and the other round-about routes, and because of her own developed industrial strength.

Given these repeated and recent experiences Russian statesmen would hardly be human if they did not have a fixed determination to gain an armed foothold at the Straits, and from power politics standards they would be remiss in their duty if they did not have this objective. It is all very well for Russia’s new rivals to make fair proposals concerning the Straits, but the Kremlin knows that if war came they could be closed against her again.

Her companion objective, the political control of the Straits by the Black Sea powers, is not reassuring for Western commerce, which has traditionally been predominant in the Straits. Until the Second World War British shipping led all others in that waterway, closely followed by Italian. After this war American shipping assumed first place, down through 1947. Until then the Straits were clearly a great international water way in which other states had greater commercial interests than Russia, though not as critical ones.

Is there any possible reconciliation between the long term Western rights in the Straits and the right of the Russians to strategic security there? Given any normal confidence among the powers a solution would not be difficult. The Russians could be conceded their base at the Straits, or a genuine internationalization of this waterway could be worked out through the United Nations, to apply also to the Suez and Panama Canals.

Our instinctive feeling about UN control of Panama is a measure of Russian feeling about the Straits. There are differences. We took Panama from Colombia and the Russians have never been able to take the Straits from the Turks, but both are vital life lines, one to us, the other to the Russians. The Russians need not be expected to give up their desire to control the Straits, either, before we surrender the physical control of Panama. Nor will they resent our standing guard over their principal doorway any fess than we would resent their arming of Colombia and Nicaragua to make certain that the United States did not control Panama. Unless the impasse is broken by some impact of creative statesmanship the Russians will bide their time, arm and wait for the day when they can take total and undisputed control of the Straits. We have made no secret that Turkish control of the Straits means our access to Russia’s vitals with atomic bombs, in the event of war. On the other hand, it would be very difficult indeed to prevent the Russians from sweeping down through Greece and closing the Straits as the Germans did, if they did not first seize them by direct attack. Nor would a Russian base on the Straits be likely to last long under Allied air attack from many nearby bases.

Sir Bernard Pares, English historian of Russia, assessed the long-term situation accurately when he wrote that the Truman Doctrine meant simply that the United States was taking over from England “the task of keeping Russia from the sea.” This task had “nothing to do with Russian Communism.” We could not offer friendship to a self respecting country on the principle: “We may do what we like, take what we like, but you may not. Freedom of the seas, yes, but not for you.”⁷⁵

This appraisal should give a fairly clear glimpse of Russian feeling about the Straits. The issue is removed from practical politics at present by the near certainty that the Turks would not concede a base to Russia, even under pressure from us, and that a forcible Russian seizure would precipitate a general war. Yet the issue of our military guardianship of the Straits, on the other side of the world, remains. In the long run it is an untenable commitment, except as a prelude to the disaster of a third world war. In the same perspective our monopoly of the great oil resources of the Near East, on Russia’s doorstep, cannot be maintained permanently, unless Russia’s power is prevented from developing by a third world war.

Power politics being what it is, and national leaders being usually very fallible indeed, we apparently cannot expect reasonable compromises or solutions of problems like these, yet we cannot demand anything less if humanity is to survive, and especially if Western civilization is to continue. It is essential to bear in mind, also, that we assumed the military guardianship of the Straits at a time when we had a monopoly of atomic weapons which precluded any overt Russian move, at the Straits or elsewhere, even if such a move had been contemplated.

7. Was the Truman Doctrine a declaration of war?

Formally and legally it was not. This could be asserted with a perfectly straight face, and with ample legal documentation. The Soviet Union was not mentioned, nor the Turkish Straits. We had a right to aid any friendly government that we wished to help. Turkey felt pressed and there was a crisis in Greece. We had as much right to proclaim an anti-communist crusade—or holding operation—as the Russian controlled press had to proclaim the inevitability of Western capitalism’s collapse and the wickedness of Western “imperialism.”

All this is incontrovertible and, given both our deep vexation over the communist organization of East Europe and the geopolitical argument, some action on our part in Greece was foreordained. Greece would not be allowed to fall into the Soviet orbit. Some anti-communist connotation was also advisable to secure quick congressional approval.

These considerations still leave the question whether it was wise and statesmanlike to issue a global declaration setting limits both to communist expansion and Soviet expansion. It can readily be argued that this was the straightforward thing to do, to draw a line around both. Yet strategically it was a rash and unenforceable commitment. The Soviet Union already occupied the Heartland of Eurasia to its full limits, and all of our sea and air power, plus the A-bomb could not indefinitely prevent her from pushing out if she chose. Worse still, an open direct proclamation of encirclement was one of the best means of causing her to choose to push out.

The global containment Doctrine committed the United States to standing guard, not only at the Straits but all around the vast perimeter of the Soviet Union and its satellites. It pledged the prestige and resources of the United States, and especially the prestige of Mr. Truman, at virtually all points on the earth which mattered, either militarily or politically, leaving the initiative to the Russians and to local communist movements. Wherever either chose to fight we would accept the battlefield, no matter how remote or unfavorable. This was clearly a self-defeating policy, one fitted to squander our resources on the way to an immeasurable, unmanageable war.

Turning Point. The defenders of the Truman Doctrine announced with satisfaction that it was the end of an era, the period of “appeasement,” and the beginning of a new era of firm containment. However, a full appraisal indicated that a much more fateful turn had been made, the turn from a post-war period to a pre-war atmosphere. The Truman Doctrine and the X article both ignored the problem of settling the Second World War, giving the impression that no settlement could be reached, that it was to be hereafter a matter of pressure and counter pressure. Less than two years after the bombs stopped falling in Europe American diplomacy came close to abdicating. Its arguing powers were exhausted. Stronger measures would have to be taken.

In this sense the Truman Doctrine was an effective declaration of war, one which had formed in Mr. Truman’s mind in the autumn of 1945, almost before the fumes of Hiroshima had drifted around the earth. It gave notice to both sides, and to innumerable millions of people all over the world who wanted no fresh conflict, that a new global struggle was joined.⁷⁶ It started trains of fear and hatred and action in many millions of minds, centering around Washington and Moscow, which ran for many years.

The judgment of James P. Warburg is likely to stand the test of history: that the Truman Doctrine message was “an ill-considered, unwise and ambiguous document,” one calculated to arouse fear and aggressive hatreds” rather than to inform and persuade, one which opened “a Pandora’s box of ugly emotions” in the breasts of “extreme Russia-haters, red-baiters and reactionaries of all sorts” and which brought the precariously balanced structure of peace to its moment of greatest jeopardy.”⁷⁷

Two years later Gerald W. Johnson, an experienced editor and biographer, came to the same conclusion. He wrote of President Truman that “the most grievous of all his errors was enunciation of the Truman Doctrine that involved us in the Greek adventure and might have brought on far worse evils had it not been partially retrieved by the Marshall Plan.”

Johnson added that in 1945 the moral hegemony of the world was within Truman’s grasp, “but it has slipped from his fingers.”⁷⁸

This is a measure of the loss involved in Truman’s belligerence. It is easy enough to declare cold war, draw lines and hurl thunderbolts. It requires statesmanship to make peace and draw the nations nearer together.

Diplomacy is also required, an art which was almost forgotten after “we were captured by the illusion that the rivalry of nations can be regulated by public pronouncements, from which as a matter of prestige no one can recede, and the collision of irresistible forces with immovable objects.”⁷⁹

There can be no real understanding of the Cold War unless chronology is kept in mind. What came first? What was action and what reaction? The later event could not be the cause of the earlier.

Especially is it necessary to consider what followed the Truman Doctrine. Not everything which came after it was an effect of the Doctrine, but its effects upon Soviet policy and action were bound to be profound.

There does not seem to be evidence of any sudden turn of Soviet policy to hostility toward the United States or toward the West after World War II. Frederick C. Barghoorn, a student of Soviet policy who works constantly with Russian language sources, speaks of “the gradual process by which the Politburo openly reverted to its pre-war line, and transferred the symbols of ‘reaction,’ ‘aggression,’ and ‘imperialism’ from Germany and Japan to Britain and America.”⁸⁰

The first evidence of such transference which Barghoorn cites was the speech of President Kalinin to Communist Party secretaries in which he asked them to “speak frankly” to the collective farmers about the dangers to “our state structure and social order” still remaining after the elimination of Nazi Germany, which he characterized as “only the most immediate” danger. Then Stalin in his famous election speech of February 9, 1946 boasted of the triumphant survival of the Soviet system in World War II, a war that he ascribed to “the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of modern monopolistic capitalism,” which was incapable “under present capitalist conditions” of peacefully adjusting the conflicts which lead to war.

The admonition by Kalinin hardly seems sensational, as of August 1945, after Truman’s verbal assault on Molotov in the White House on April 23, 1945; after the bitter controversy over Poland and East Europe which followed; after the frictions at the San Francisco conference, the outburst of preventive war talk against Russia in the United States and the sharp turn of the Truman Administration away from the Roosevelt policy of working with Russia—not to speak of the great impact of the Hiroshima A-bomb in Moscow. Nor does Stalin’s February 1946 reassertion of communist dogma about the relation between monopolistic capitalism and war seem extraordinary.

It was not until Andrei Zhdanov’s speech of September 1947 that a postwar division of the world into two camps was proclaimed in Russia, “the anti-democratic and imperialist camp on the one side, and the anti-imperialist and democratic on the other.” Attacking the Marshall Plan as a device for “the enslavement of Europe,” Zhdanov accused the United States of seeking world domination. Because her “monopolists” feared the success of communism they had launched a world-wide crusade against communism, he charged.⁸¹

This was undoubtedly political warfare, but it can hardly be considered remarkable after the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine, Kennan’s elaboration of the American containment drive and the Marshall Plan—altogether the greatest peace time political-economic offensive on record. An offensive of this character was bound to bring replies, both ideological and actual.

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