Much more, however, was at work in limiting Truman’s freedom to take bold initiatives in foreign affairs. Polls showed that large majorities favored compulsory military training and a standing army of a million or more men. But pressure on the president to “bring the boys home” and dismantle much of America’s wartime force was incessant and politically impossible to resist.
At the same time, public antagonism toward American Communists and Russia had become intense and difficult to alter. In June 1946, 36 percent in a U.S. opinion survey favored killing or imprisoning all American Communists. Another 16 percent preferred curbing them or making them “inactive”; only 16 percent saw them as relatively harmless and wished to “do nothing” about them. As for Russia, few in the United States any longer held her in high regard: 58 percent believed she aimed “to rule the world,” and 71 percent disapproved of her policy in “world affairs.”
Views of the United Nations were changing as well. Its initial hold on Americans as a peace engine largely faded during 1946. In April, only 37 percent of the country had much confidence in the world organization’s ability to contain national aggression. It was seen as lacking the power to turn nations, especially Russia, away from self-serving actions and toward genuine international cooperation. Only one-third of Who’s Who Americans had much confidence that the world would avoid a war in the next twenty-five years.
Any attempt Truman might have made to mobilize the public in support of a major peace initiative was hamstrung not only by current feelings about postwar international developments, but also by a loss of general confidence in his handling of the postwar domestic transition.
In 1945–46, inflation spurred by an end to price controls and shortages of housing, automobiles, and consumer goods, which the production of war matériel had replaced after 1939, led to union demands for higher wages and strikes that angered a majority of Americans. Truman, who found himself in the middle of these clashes between industries and blue-collar workers struggling to maintain their living standards, became the focus of public hostility. Reluctant to oppose the unions, which were principal supporters of his Democratic Party, but determined to restrain inflation that was eating away at the country’s material well-being, he satisfied neither labor nor business chiefs nor a majority of middle-class citizens.
Tensions over southern lynchings of African Americans, denial of their voting rights across the region, and black inequality in jobs, housing, and economic opportunity nationally spurred pressure for civil rights legislation that put additional strains on the president’s party and his image as an effective leader. Demands that Moscow allow the occupied East European countries self-determination provoked Soviet charges of American hypocrisy: a country that denied some of its citizens basic freedoms was in a poor position to complain about democratic rights in Russia’s satellites, where Moscow said there was more freedom than in America’s southern states.
A rising fear of Communist subversion joined with charges that the Democrats had been coddling Communist sympathizers in the federal government for years to further undermine Truman’s standing as a president who could effectively defend the national security.
In the 1930s anti-Communism had become a conservative political weapon in the fight against growing federal involvement in the national economy. New Deal programs were denounced as stealth socialism or an advance wave of communism. By the 1940s, as tensions mounted with the Soviet Union, pressure to ward off Communist subversion by pro-Soviet federal employees allegedly aiming to overthrow the United States government became a disturbing part of the national political discussion. White House resistance to blanket investigations of federal workers became a political liability, and Truman reluctantly agreed to loyalty declarations in which civil servants had to reveal whether they previously or currently favored the violent overthrow of the American government.
The domestic divisions, dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, and the administration’s failure to satisfy hopes for international harmony jeopardized Democratic Party majorities in both congressional houses. After fourteen years of largely one-party rule in the executive and legislative branches, the Republicans seized upon the national discontent to recapture the Congress. Their campaign slogan in the 1946 congressional elections struck exactly the right chord with a majority of voters: “Had enough?” Had enough inflation, enough strikes, enough shortages, enough communism? On November 5 the Republicans turned large Democratic majorities into decisive Republican ones: 246 to 188 in the House, the greatest advantage the Republicans would enjoy in the lower chamber for the next sixty-two years, and 51 to 45 in the Senate. Arkansas congressman J. William Fulbright proposed that Truman resign after appointing as secretary of state Michigan’s Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, who, without a sitting vice president, would become president. The congressman should be called “Halfbright,” Truman remarked.
Yet Fulbright reflected the current view of the president, who now impressed millions of Americans as not up to the job; he was “the little man from Missouri.” His approval ratings declined by 55 points in fifteen months: from a high of 87 percent in June 1945, to 63 percent in January 1946, to 43 percent in June, and to 32 percent in September. The 3 percent of the public that had disapproved of Truman in the initial 1945 survey had swollen to 45 percent a year later. He now became the object of ridicule with comedians joking, “To err is Truman,” and declaring that the popular song “I’m Just Wild About Harry” should be amended to “I’m Just Mild About Harry.” When Gallup asked voters which party they thought would win the 1948 presidential election, only 9 percent said the Democrats, with 79 percent naming the Republicans, suggesting that Truman commanded negligible support for a White House campaign.
A congressional race in southern California that elevated Richard M. Nixon to a House seat reflected the current national mood in the second half of 1946. A World War II navy veteran and a resident of California’s twelfth congressional district, where he had earned a BA from Whittier College, practiced law, and won the respect of local Republicans with whom he shared a conservative ideology, the thirty-three-year-old Nixon seemed to be a sacrificial lamb in a district that had elected liberal Democrat Jerry Voorhis five times. Voorhis’s earlier success had rested on the area’s support for Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that had aided local farmers and small businesses. Voorhis had also profited from patriotic backing for the administration in wartime.
But the political climate in 1946 formed a sharp contrast with the previous ten years. The economic problems of the last eighteen months and growing fears of Communist aggression abroad and subversion in the United States made close identification with the Roosevelt and now Truman White House more a liability than an asset.
Nixon had a keen feel for the anti-Communist sentiment that was so pronounced in his district and across the United States. He turned the campaign into a contest between patriots and “fellow travelers”— men and women who were too critical of traditional American values and too drawn to alien ideas suspiciously close to Soviet thinking. Voorhis, a Yale graduate and well-off elitist, who Nixon pictured as out of touch with ordinary small-town citizens, was a perfect target for a candidate promoting the politics of resentment and patriotism. Nixon also described Voorhis as a close ally of unpopular labor unions, a card-carrying radical who “votes straight down the line for the SOCIALIZATION OF OUR COUNTRY.” He warned against someone “who would destroy our constitutional principles through the socialization of American free institutions.” Voorhis was one of those “who front[s] for un-American elements, wittingly or otherwise”; he would “deprive the people of liberty.” As a congressman, he was casting “pro-Russian votes.”
Nixon’s campaign was essentially a response to current local and national anxieties about the economy and communism. But by exploiting the mood of fear, he gave support to increasingly irrational worries about Communist control of the United States and the impulse to see all left reform movements abroad
as a menace to America’s national security.
It wasn’t only Nixon and conservative Republicans who encouraged a national groundswell of anti-Communist anguish. Some Democrats running for Congress shared the conviction that the “Reds” were an immediate menace to the United States who must be contained at all costs.
Across the United States, for example, in the eleventh congressional district of Massachusetts, which included Cambridge and several Boston wards populated by Irish and Italian dock and factory workers, the twenty-nine-year-old John F. Kennedy was a formidable candidate. Although a political novice with few ties to the district, Kennedy’s biography as a navy veteran cited for bravery in the South Pacific and connections to two famous Boston families made him the front-runner in the Democratic primary. His campaign, however, profited less from his pedigree as the grandson of former mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to Great Britain and Boston’s wealthiest native son, than from Kennedy’s identity as a war hero and proponent of strong national security policies, which was code for combating communism. With some $250,000 to $300,000 of his father’s money to spend in the campaign—a staggering amount in 1946 and six times what future Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill would spend in 1952 to win Jack’s open seat—Kennedy flooded the district with his message. He won a decisive victory, gaining twice as many votes as the closest of ten rivals.
The Nixon and Kennedy victories signaled a shift in the American political landscape. Like Nixon, Kennedy emphasized the Communist danger: “The time has come when we must speak plainly on the great issue facing the world today,” he declared in a typical stump speech and on the radio. “The issue is Soviet Russia,” which he described as “a slave state of the worst sort” engaged in “a program of world aggression.” Unless “the freedom-loving countries of the world” stopped Russia now, they would “be destroyed.”
Unlike in the 1930s, when the country resisted any suggestion of a major U.S. involvement abroad, and especially in the European war that erupted in 1939, political popularity in the postwar 1940s demanded identification with a military record and unqualified commitments to combating the Communist menace. Lyndon B. Johnson, an ambitious Texas congressman since 1937, understood that a successful political future after Pearl Harbor required military credentials and tough talk about national defense. Taking a leave of absence from his House seat in 1941 to serve as a navy lieutenant commander, Johnson arranged an assignment for himself to the Southwest Pacific, where he briefly participated in a combat mission against Japanese forces in New Guinea. Receiving what was later described as the least deserved and most publicly flaunted medal in the country’s military history for his role as an observer in an air raid, Johnson exploited his national security credentials to help propel him into the U.S. Senate in 1948.
No national political figure did more to agitate the anti-Communist issue than Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy. In 1946, the thirty-seven-year-old World War II Marine Corps veteran won a Senate seat after having served as an intelligence officer in the South Pacific and as an elected circuit judge. During his 1946 campaign, he reinvented himself as a war hero who had flown harrowing missions as a tail gunner and a wounded veteran with a permanent limp. His wartime service had in fact been at a desk, debriefing bomber crews, and his injury was the result of an accident during a drunken spree. Building his campaign around promises to “clean up the political mess” in Washington, particularly the Truman administration’s failure to guard against Communist subversion, McCarthy joined the Eightieth Congress ready to exploit the fear and anxiety about the Soviet danger that had become a principal part of the national political mood.
Although Washington correspondents would vote him the worst member of the Senate after his first two years in office, McCarthy would enjoy extraordinary influence. In the words of one contemporary, he held “two presidents captive—or as nearly captive as any Presidents of the United States have ever been held; in their conduct of the nation’s affairs, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, from early 1950 through late 1954, could never act without weighing the effect of their plans upon McCarthy and the forces he led, and in consequence there were times when, because of this man, they could not act at all. He had enormous impact on American foreign policy at a time when that policy bore heavily on the course of world history, and American diplomacy might bear a different aspect today if McCarthy had never lived.” (The reference was to Korea and the war with China.)
A dustup over an alleged espionage case, the Amerasia investigation in June 1945, had joined with Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe to make the Communist danger front-page news across the United States and a forceful campaign issue in 1946. The discovery that State Department China experts had provided “secret” documents to the editors of an academic journal about innocuous subjects like Chinese “rice yields in selected provinces, water tables [and] livestock populations ” produced Justice Department requests that a grand jury issue espionage indictments. Because the documents had been previously released to the press and were hardly “secret,” despite “Confidential” stamps, which were routinely placed on all reports, the indictments were rejected. Nevertheless, in the atmosphere of suspicion that had engulfed the United States after 1945, especially about China, which was locked in a civil war between Nationalists and Communists accused of being Soviet surrogates, the Amerasia episode took on exaggerated importance. It diminished any chance of the accommodation with a potential Mao government that might have avoided much of the later Sino-American strife.
The Amerasia affair triggered other destructive developments. In response to the accusations of Communist espionage, Truman, who saw the charges of subversives in his government as largely bogus, sought political cover in a commission to study allegations of spying by federal employees. In March 1947, when the commission recommended the creation of a federal employee loyalty program, Truman felt compelled to comply by issuing an executive order encouraging congressional investigators to demand State Department personnel files that, if withheld, would intensify suspicions of a White House cover-up to protect Communist sympathizers. Given Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the growing possibility of a Chinese Communist regime, the State Department became the whipping boy for critics of the Roosevelt-Truman foreign policy.
The myth of a giveaway or appeasement of Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam now became a central part of the anti-Communist attack on both Roosevelt and Truman and their administrations. According to this history, a dying Roosevelt ceded Eastern Europe to the Soviet dictator by accepting a meaningless declaration of freedom for these countries liberated from the Nazis, and agreed to a secret deal giving Stalin Japanese and Chinese territory in return for unneeded Soviet participation in the Pacific War. These commitments were either the product of misjudgments about postwar Soviet intentions or the result of pro-Soviet advisers persuading an impressionable FDR to take these unwise actions. Likewise, Truman endorsed Roosevelt’s policies at the Potsdam conference with Stalin by naively trusting Soviet promises.
Members of Roosevelt and Truman’s own party, including freshman congressman John Kennedy, repeated this narrative about their failure to exercise appropriate diligence in dealing with ruthless Communists. Kennedy publicly described Roosevelt as too sick at Yalta to act wisely, agreeing to Soviet territorial claims in East Asia and the inclusion of China’s Communists in a coalition government with Chiang’s Nationalists. “The failure of our foreign policy in the Far East,” Kennedy said, “rests squarely with the White House and the State Department…. They lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-Communist China…. What our young men had saved [in World War II], our diplomats and our President have frittered away.”
Never mind that Soviet troops occupied Eastern Europe, and Roosevelt had no hope of ousting them. Nor could he have known that the atom bomb would end the war without the need for Soviet intervention, which he and his military chiefs assumed
was essential to save American lives in an invasion of Japan’s home islands. The same held true for Truman, who in fact took a tough line with Stalin at Potsdam. None of these rational considerations counted in a politically heated postwar environment in which Republicans were more focused on breaking the Democrats’ fourteen-year hold on the White House and Congress than on realistic assessments of the country’s national interest.
The public clamor against the Communist danger was a demonstration of what Alexis de Tocqueville famously described as democracy’s weakness in the making of foreign policy: “Foreign policies demand scarcely any of those qualities which are characteristic of a democracy and requires, on the contrary, the cultivation of almost all those it lacks,” Tocqueville wrote more than a hundred years earlier. “Democracy cannot, without difficulty, coordinate the details of a great enterprise [abroad], fix on one plan and follow it through with persistence, whatever the obstacles. It is not capable of devising secret measures or waiting patiently for the result.” In sum, it was the predominance of “impulse rather than prudence” and the tendency “to abandon mature design for the gratification of a momentary passion” that he saw as central to America’s dealings abroad.
Whether Roosevelt and Truman ever read Tocqueville is uncertain, but they both understood that to secure steady mass support for great foreign policy undertakings, they would need to engage in considerable manipulation of public opinion. Out of a determination to convert the national outlook from isolationism to internationalism at the end of World War II, FDR knowingly encouraged the false belief that Soviet Russia and Nationalist China would be reliable partners in curbing aggression and promoting democracy. His famous pronouncement to a joint congressional session on Yalta as representing the end of traditional power politics was less an exercise in wishful thinking than a calculated effort to draw Americans into international affairs on a false hope.