Truman was more open with intimates about his methods for dealing with possible unpopular foreign policy initiatives. When Truman fired Henry Wallace over their differences about Soviet policy, he purposely deceived the public by pretending not to have known the contents of a Wallace speech beforehand. In fact, he encouraged Wallace to give his speech, not to encourage a debate about administration policy but as a way to bring Wallace down for having spoken against White House intentions. An effective president, Truman told his daughter in reference to the Wallace dispute, needed sometimes to be “a liar” and a “double-crosser.”
Yet on January 6, 1947, when Truman gave his second annual State of the Union message before a joint congressional session, he could not have been more straightforward. If nations would cooperate, he saw a chance for “lasting peace.” Moreover, he did not view his status as the twentieth president in U.S. history to have an opposition party controlling Congress during a part of his administration as compelling a breakdown in an effective foreign policy or forestalling bipartisanship to serve the national well-being. Indeed, he described bipartisanship as essential for the country’s continued prosperity as well as for “political stability, economic advancement, and social progress” abroad.
Truman’s hopes of cooperative dealings with the congressional opposition quickly collapsed under the Republicans’ determination to undermine the president in the run-up to the 1948 presidential campaign. In foreign affairs, unless Truman could convince his critics that an initiative redounding to his credit was essential to the national security, it was unlikely that they would cooperate with it.
A crisis in the first months of 1947 immediately tested the limits of bipartisanship. In November 1946 Churchill had told the students at England’s storied Harrow School, “You will be going forth into the world, and you may find it, if I may say so, full of problems, more baffling problems than it has ever had before.” It was a prophesy that events promptly vindicated.
A series of fierce European winter storms at the start of 1947 gave added meaning to Churchill’s description of the postwar continent as “a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.” The weather “paralyzed England. Agricultural production dropped below nineteenth-century levels. Industry shut down. Electricity was limited to a few hours each morning, unemployment rose to over 6 million, and rations were tighter than in wartime.” In London, the cold burst water pipes all over the city, and Big Ben stood frozen in time. Ice halted rail, road, and river traffic across the continent, and people in Berlin and Paris shivered in their homes without heat, some suffering frostbite.
Although the United States had agreed to a $3.75 billion loan to Great Britain in the summer of 1946, the natural disaster afflicting Europe made the loan little more than a down payment on what European leaders and administration sympathizers believed would be needed to rescue the continent from a collapse that could throw it into the Soviet orbit. Former president Herbert Hoover, who had administered humanitarian relief in World War I, returned from an assessment of European conditions Truman had asked him to make with forecasts of disaster unless the United States provided food and fuel to suffering civilians.
The first order of business was Greece, which was an area of traditional British concern in the eastern Mediterranean. In fact, in October 1944, when Churchill and Stalin privately mapped out their Balkan spheres of interest, Churchill had assigned 90 percent of foreign control over Greece to London and Washington. Stalin did not object. Nor did he try in 1945–46 to obstruct Britain’s military mission to install in Athens a conservative government that inhibited Greece’s Communists from a controlling influence. When in March 1946 the left boycotted British-sponsored parliamentary elections that gave the right clear political dominance, the Communists, despite receiving no encouragement from Moscow, resorted to armed opposition. Indeed, fearful that a Soviet hand in a Greek Communist uprising might risk an unwelcome conflict with America and Britain, Stalin had unsuccessfully urged Greece’s Communist Party to participate in the 1946 elections.
Where he would not bend on Eastern Europe, which he saw as a vital sphere of Soviet control, Stalin was highly cautious about a country the West considered part of its defense zone. And this was despite worries that the United States was angling to establish a military presence in southeastern Europe that could threaten southern Russia. In his dispatch of September 1946, Ambassador Novikov cautioned that
the visit of an American fleet to Greece, and the great interest which American diplomacy shows in the problem of the Straits have a dual meaning. On the one hand, it means that the US has decided to consolidate its position in the Mediterranean to support its interests in the countries of the Middle East and that it has chosen the Navy as the tool of this policy. On the other hand, these facts are a military and political demonstration against the Soviet Union. The strengthening of the US position in the Middle East and the creation of the conditions to base the US Navy at one or several places in the Mediterranean (Trieste, Palestine, Greece, Turkey) will therefore mean the appearance of a new threat to the security of the southern regions of the Soviet Union.
In the second half of 1946, American representatives in Athens and State Department officials warned against a successful Communist uprising as certain to bring a pro-Soviet government to power, and with it a surge of Communist control across the Balkans. Nevertheless, requests for U.S. aid were turned aside as Britain’s responsibility and as likely to involve the United States in expensive commitments for which the American public would have little sympathy. The resistance to providing help provoked more heated rhetoric from advocates of aid, who argued that without American support—arms and money—Greece would collapse and turn into a Soviet satellite, which would then facilitate Communist dominance in the Middle East and North Africa.
Although planning for economic and military assistance was now begun, if only as an unwanted contingency, a British warning about its incapacity to bear the responsibility forced the issue to the forefront of Truman’s attention. On February 21, 1947, the British ambassador informed the State Department and White House that the winter storms had intensified London’s financial and economic crisis and made it impossible for Great Britain to maintain a presence that could ward off Communist control in Greece and Turkey.
Truman was entirely receptive to assuming responsibility for a region of the world most Americans considered removed from the country’s traditional overseas involvements. However eager to help, he knew he could not proceed without the agreement of the Republican-controlled Congress. But its promises to reduce current deficits and long-term national debt made any outlay for Greece a large question mark. Moreover, Truman appreciated that he would also need to convince the mass public, which preferred to limit overseas commitments and would see any large grant-in-aid to Greece as an unwanted shift in responsibility to the United States.
During a meeting with congressional leaders on February 27, Truman asked Secretary of State George Marshall, who had taken office in January and enjoyed a reputation for nonpartisan defense of the nation’s security, to make the case for replacing Britain as the principal defender of Greek and Turkish independence. But Marshall’s low-key appeal did not persuade congressional chiefs, who remained reluctant to increase the national debt and become a standin for the British in the Near East. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson rescued the proposal with an apocalyptic monologue on the catastrophe that would befall the United States and all the democracies if Greece succumbed to communism. Acheson predicted that “the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all the East”; but the contagion wouldn’t end there. With Britain and France prostrate, it was up to the United States to stop Moscow’s reach for world power.
Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, urged Truman to make the case to the nation before a joint congressional session. He predicted that Congress would support the president’s appeal, but only if Truman spoke in
language that would “scare the hell out of the country.”
Truman knew smart political advice when he heard it. His speech to the Congress and the country on March 12, which was principally drafted by Acheson, purposely rang alarm bells that challenged Congress and the public to take immediate action to save the United States from a catastrophic defeat in an emerging contest between freedom and totalitarianism. U.S. “assistance is imperative if Greece is to survive as a free nation,” Truman declared. Communist rebellion supported by Soviet-style governments in Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia was threatening the self-determination of the country that had given birth to democracy. Because Great Britain was all but bankrupt and the United Nations lacked the resources to help, it was up to the United States to assume the burden of saving Greece; it would be an act to bolster “the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.”
The choice now was between “free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression” and minority rule relying on “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” For Truman, the choice was clear. The danger was not just to Greece, but to Turkey, “the entire Middle East,” and all the peoples of Europe struggling “to maintain their freedoms.” Only “immediate and resolute action”—$400 million in aid—could save the day. “If we falter in our leadership,” the president ominously ended, “we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.”
Truman’s speech was an exercise in rhetorical overkill. To be sure, Stalin’s pronouncements on Greece and the growing tensions with the West had been highly provocative. But his actions in Greece and Iran bespoke caution and hardly suggested that Britain’s retreat from the Middle East would imperil all of Western civilization.
George Kennan, who was now teaching at the War College in Washington and was slated to become the head of a new State Department policy planning council, was “extremely unhappy” about the president’s apocalyptic language. It was “more grandiose and sweeping than anything” he believed wise. He did not object to the need for a U.S. response to Britain’s retreat from the Middle East. But he “did not view the prospect of such a Communist takeover as ‘in itself any immediate and catastrophic setback to the Western world.’” He doubted that the Soviets would have the wherewithal to support a Greek Communist government economically, and if they tried, he thought it might cause them problems that the West could “ultimately exploit to good advantage.”
Nevertheless, he saw a Greek Communist regime as giving Moscow a long-term regional military or strategic advantage by putting Turkey under considerable pressure that could shake its stability. He doubted, however, that events in Greece and Turkey would presage any significant Communist penetration of the broader Arab world, where Muslims would find no attraction to a godless Communist ideology.
Kennan believed that economic—but not military—aid to Greece and Turkey made perfectly good sense. It would provide assurance to hard-pressed European societies that Communist control of their countries was not inevitable. While he believed that Communist governments in Western Europe would in time be brought down by their ultimate ineffectiveness, he considered it much more preferable for Washington to shore up Greece, Turkey, and all the countries to the west against the sort of economic and political instability that could make them vulnerable to any siren song from the east.
At the same time, however, Kennan saw Truman’s universal promise “to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” as excessive and unrealistic. “It seemed to me highly uncertain,” he wrote later, “that we would invariably find it in our interests or within our means to extend assistance to countries that found themselves in this extremity.” He cited China as just one of several possible examples.
An unfortunate result of Truman’s impassioned call to universal anti-Communist opposition was its encouragement to the country’s most vociferous advocates of repression and intolerance toward anyone even slightly left of center. Mindless conformity and uncritical patriotism were already enough in fashion without a Democratic president giving them a powerful boost by describing a worldwide contest between the forces of good and evil. Truman had little patience with “the Communist bugaboo” or “fear of the Communist penetration of the government.” He understood that it was partly a Republican Party strategy for driving the Democrats from power. Joe Martin, the recently installed Republican Speaker of the House, was anything but subtle when he declared, “The long tenure of the Democratic Party had poisoned the air we Republicans breathed.”
Truman saw no reason to panic over government officials who were allegedly soft on communism or to think that Communists were about to subvert the country’s institutions. America is “perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned,” Truman wrote Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor—“we have far too many sane people.” Yet nine days after his speech on Greece had added to the growing siege mentality in the United States, Truman felt compelled to establish the Federal Employee Loyalty Program. Whatever its political necessity to keep accusations of White House indifference to the Communist threat to a minimum, it facilitated unproductive investigations of some 3 million federal workers: although 212 employees charged with questionable loyalty would be forced to resign, not a single one was ever “indicted and no evidence of espionage would be found.”
Truman’s speech had an even more pernicious effect on the country’s ability to follow sensible, realistic foreign policies. The declaration of a cold war, as many came to see the president’s doctrine, narrowed the country’s international options. It fostered a climate of opinion decrying passive acceptance of a Communist government anywhere, making it impossible to discriminate between Soviet rule in Moscow and a Marxist regime in China or Yugoslavia, whose leaders preferred to keep some distance from Russia. National differences that could have been turned to America’s advantage were now lost from view in a world of undifferentiated Communists. “Is it excessive to expect such intelligence from one’s leaders and such rationality from the public?” Adam Ulam, a critic of Truman’s overheated rhetoric, declared.
Truman’s speech did not surprise Stalin. He told Yugoslavia’s Milovan Djilas, “The uprising in Greece must be stopped and as quickly as possible…. Great Britain and the United States will [not] permit you to break their lines of communication in the Mediterranean Sea.” Nevertheless, his public statements on Greece gave the impression that he would back Greece’s Communists against the West. But London and Washington couldn’t look past the Kremlin rhetoric to its actions to see that Stalin’s private reluctance to challenge Britain and America in a contest for control of Athens was the greater reality. To be sure, the Bulgarian and Yugoslav Communist governments provided limited help to their Greek comrades, but it was more a show of Communist solidarity than a decisive infusion of aid. At any rate, what it demonstrated was how a mindset can dominate action, even if the reality is not in sync with the outlook. The same was certainly true of Stalin, as demonstrated by his dealings with the West on Germany and America’s Marshall Plan.
In March 1947, another Allies’ foreign ministers conference was scheduled in Moscow. The principal topic was Germany’s future. George Marshall, who had been secretary of state for only two months, faced his first big challenge in dealings with the Soviets. He entered the negotiations with considerable skepticism that he could overcome Soviet suspicions of Western motives and aims.
His doubts were partly the consequence of his thirteen months trying to mediate the Chinese civil war. As someone with an impeccable reputation as an architect of victory in World War II and unemotional fairness in dealings with friends and foes, he had won unanimous Senate approval as the president’s chief diplomat. He also enjoyed the good will of China and of Stalin as an
advocate of unconditional victory over Japan and Germany. Yet none of this had been sufficient to disarm the extremists in the Chinese Nationalist and Communist camps. As Marshall complained on leaving China in January 1947, “irreconcilables,” men with fixed ideas who could not be budged, had made his task impossible. They cared less about China’s well-being than their own agendas, and unfortunately they had enough power to dwarf the efforts of more flexible realists opposed to the ideologues in both parties.
Marshall had taken away a meaningful lesson from his China mission. Goodwill was not enough to forge a settlement between competing forces if they refused to see compromise as a superior alternative to a continuing conflict they were convinced they could win.
Yet in spite of Marshall’s antagonism to ideologues unwilling to bend to imperfect realities, he could not bring himself to counsel a break with Chiang’s failing regime. Like the majority of U.S. officials at the time, Marshall resisted the possibility that the United States might be better served by a relationship with the Maoists than the Nationalists; that China’s Communists might be willing to stand apart from Moscow if Washington showed itself receptive to a revolution that ousted Chiang for a reform regime—albeit a Communist one with leaders devoted to economic and social arrangements fundamentally at odds with American ideas about free enterprise and individual rights, but one that seemed more likely to command public approval and serve America’s international position in the emerging Cold War.
It was not as if American officials were purists about repressive regimes on the right. Spain’s Fascist government passed muster as worthy of official relations with the United States, despite its indifference to traditional American ideas about free speech, the press, and elections, as did other undemocratic governments in Latin America. The distinguishing feature that made all the difference in winning U.S. acceptance was anticommunism. Had China’s Communists made their resistance to Soviet domination overt, might it have created greater sympathy for their revolution and potential government? Probably not: the right in America undoubtedly would have rejected professions of Chinese Communist tensions with Moscow as a deception. By 1947, anticommunism in the United States was akin to a faith-based movement; a sort of closed thinking that mirrored the Soviet conviction that there could be no accommodation with capitalists who were determined to destroy communism at all costs.