UNTIL RECENTLY, a presidential address was the work of a sprawling bureaucratic committee. Often, as in the case of the State of the Union, the staffs of government departments work in concert with the president’s speechwriters to craft the speech, with great energies expended over the drafting of a single sentence or phrase. This process is usually contentious; clashing agendas between agencies and government actors across the city are exposed. Presidential time and attention have long been considered precious commodities, and the exposure resulting from such a speech has been known to launch a program or sustain an initiative that would otherwise die from lack of public support. The battle among federal agencies for the ear of the president has long been a continuous reality around Washington’s bureaucracies. Actors within the realm of foreign affairs, the Departments of State and Defense—along with the National Security Council and intelligence agencies—often fight the hardest to place their policy priorities in a president’s address.
But the drafting of the speech to launch the Truman Doctrine was the Department of State’s responsibility and its leaders’ moment to shine. Under its revered and gifted deputy, State would finally be afforded the opportunity to move past its reputation for pinstriped prevarication. Joseph M. Jones, a State Department official who helped shape the events of 1947 and record them for posterity, reflected later: “All . . . were aware that a major turning point in American history was taking place. The convergence of massive historical trends on that moment was so real as to be almost tangible.” Jones recalled with satisfaction, “Group drafting usually leads to the lowest common denominator of policy content. In this case there were no cautious voices raised. All concerned were agreed that the President should address Congress and the American people in bold policy terms.”
That was Truman’s goal from the start. As he later wrote, “I wanted no hedging in this speech. This was America’s answer to the surge of expansion of Communist tyranny. It had to be clear and free of hesitation or double talk.”
There was not a moment to lose. As Acheson wrote later, “Greece was in the position of a semiconscious patient on the critical list whose relatives and physicians were discussing whether his life could be saved.”
Just as he had upon the delivery of the British messages days before, Acheson took the lead in the administration’s all-important approach to Congress. General Marshall had left State once more in the capable hands of the undersecretary. He ordered Acheson to proceed with the plans for Greece and Turkey with no regard for his negotiations with the Soviets; the Balkans were to take priority even if this led to failure of his mission to Moscow. An admiring Acheson would later marvel, “Many years would go by before an officer commanding in a forward and exposed spot would call down his own artillery fire upon his own position to block an enemy advance.”
Acheson assigned the task of drafting the required legislation to Jack Hickerson, director of the Office of European Affairs.
CONFRONTED WITH PILES of paper—early drafts by Henderson and others, and the “Public Information Program”—Acheson found himself pondering the best way forward. He admired Truman, and would later dedicate his famous memoir, Present at the Creation, to him, using a line from Edwin Markham’s poem about Lincoln: “The captain with the mighty heart.” But as he considered the task before him his mind drifted back to President Roosevelt, telling those around him, “If FDR were alive I think I know what he’d do. He would make a statement of global policy but confine his request for money right now to Greece and Turkey.” Acheson was well aware that America was on the verge of a long-term and costly commitment to freedom throughout the world, and that many future requests would be made of Congress. But legislators needed to be eased into this brave new world, and it simply would not do to abruptly deliver an expansive wish list to Capitol Hill.
The discussion focused mainly on Greece. The situation there was more dire than in Turkey, and Acheson stressed that the speech would have to reflect that reality. The undersecretary read the papers spread before him and chose the most compelling passages that would focus the minds of Capitol Hill leaders on the democratic cause.
Curiously enough there were two words that would not appear in the speech: “Soviet Union.” Nobody listening would have any doubt about the ultimate source of the threats against Greece, Turkey, and global security, but Acheson felt it would be needlessly provocative and diplomatically unwise to mention the Russians directly. Avoiding mention of the Soviets might also marginally shield the administration from accusations of saber-rattling from Republican isolationists and left-wing legislators still ambivalent about Stalin. The address was to be a declaration of support for Western democracy and individual freedoms, rather than one of open opposition to a particular foe.
There were other considerations the Truman administration had to take into account as well. Members of Congress and the general public might be moved by descriptions of suffering in the Balkans, or by a defense of popular democracy. But the Soviet alliance had ended just a year and a half before, and the American public was not as reluctant as the British people to abandon wartime notions of Stalin and his regime; but it would require more time and artful persuasion before most Americans would fully acknowledge the extent of the Soviet threat.
As would be the case over the next four decades, this Cold War the United States was about to enter would require difficult trade-off’s in the fight to contain communism. Not for the last time, the United States would come to the aid of a repressive government in order to prevent a Soviet takeover. Truman would have to convince Congress and the American people not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. The fight to vanquish Hitler’s Nazi tyranny was an unambiguously noble effort; coming to the aid of a Greek regime with thuggish right-wing characteristics was not.
While there were many cooks in the speechwriting kitchen, no one doubted that Acheson was the executive chef. He pushed back on those who thought the speech too provocative and resisted those who wanted an explicit rhetorical attack on the USSR. There was no dewy-eyed sentiment expressed toward the United Nations; international cooperation was all well and good, but could be dispensed with, the undersecretary believed, when reality required it.
Three days of effort went into the address, with Acheson and his lieutenants carefully weighing every word and its impact on their historic mission. Finally on March 6 a draft was ready for the secretary’s consideration, and Acheson cabled it to Marshall in Paris, where the secretary of state had stopped en route to Moscow for a state dinner hosted by the president of France. The general quickly approved the text, with a few sharp edits, which were sent to the White House the next day for review. Marshall was keen to keep the process moving, but as one of his traveling aides was to put it, the general thought “there was a little too much flamboyant anti-Communism in that speech.”
In the midst of the fast-paced drafting of the address, which was far from complete, the president gathered with his cabinet on March 7 to discuss Greece and Turkey and outline his expectations. Acheson provided his colleagues with an update, stressing that for the moment “Turkey is much better off”; “Greece is key to encirclement movements in France, Italy, Hungary, and Turkey.”
Truman took Acheson’s assessment in, paused, and then looked around at his cabinet. He brusquely told them that the United States was “going into European politics,” and that he faced “the greatest selling job” of any president. His cabinet members unanimously affirmed their support of his decision and strategized how best to convince Congress and the public that once again becoming involved in a European conflict was a noble cause.
The man through whose hands the speech would pass next was one of the president’s closest advisers, a tall, forty-year-old lawyer named Clark Clifford. Born on Christmas Day in Fort Scott, Kansas, he grew up in Missouri and received his undergraduate and law degrees from Washington College in St. Louis. Before the Second World War, Clifford was a successful and prosperous attorney. He was to make a life and career out of fortuitous connections; the first was a friend and fellow naval officer who was assigned to President Truman as a naval adviser. Clifford went with him to the White House as an assistant, and then succeeded to the role. Truman found the young attorney so valuable that he named him White House counsel following his discharge from the navy.
Clifford cemented the relationship with Truman by organizing the president’s beloved poker games on the presidential yacht. Thus he found himself in the company of the most powerful men in Washington for hours at a time, surrounded by cigar and cigarette smoke and privy to their personal and political secrets. Clifford also charmed the president’s wife and mother, which further boosted him in Truman’s esteem.
Thus he was launched on a glittering career that would eventually see him become a trusted adviser to four Democratic presidents, and a wealthy and distinguished Washington lawyer. During the Vietnam War, Clifford would step out from behind the scenes to serve Lyndon Johnson as secretary of defense following the resignation of Robert S. McNamara.
But that was in the future. For now, Clark Clifford had to take the State Department’s draft and fashion it into a speech that Truman would be able to deliver with conviction, and that would convey to Congress and the American people the graveness of the situation. The raw material was in the draft, but Clifford’s practiced eye saw ways to increase its dramatic impact.
The Washington lawyer’s knowledge of the issues at hand was extensive, for along with his assistant George Elsey, he had crafted a top-secret, hundred-thousand-word report finished the previous September for an exclusive audience: the president of the United States and his top officials. In “American Relations with the Soviet Union,” which would later become known as the Clifford-Elsey Report, the two former naval officers painted a bleak but accurate picture of the deteriorating relationship between the two wartime allies. If the Truman Doctrine was the public declaration of the Cold War, the Clifford-Elsey Report was its founding document. It contained echoes of Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech and Kennan’s Long Telegram, but the tone was even more urgent than the words contained in either of those documents. The focus of the report was almost exclusively ideological, with no attention paid to legitimate Russian security concerns that Kennan had so carefully illustrated. It warned that the Soviets were “on a course of aggrandizement designed to lead to eventual world domination by the U.S.S.R.” Across the globe, the Soviets were flexing their military strength, and even in those countries where they had no military presence, Stalin’s regime was surreptitiously funding communist parties with a view to undermining those nations from within. Fittingly enough—considering what was to come—the report prominently featured Greece and Turkey:
The Soviet Union is interested in obtaining the withdrawal of British troops from Greece and the establishment of a “friendly” government there. It hopes to make Turkey a puppet state which could serve as a springboard for the domination of the Eastern Mediterranean. . . . The United States should support and assist all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R. . . . Providing military support in case of attack is a last resort: a more effective barrier to communism is strong economic support.
President Truman deemed the Clifford-Elsey report so explosive that he ordered that every copy other than his be put under “lock and key.” Clifford, never burdened by false modesty, considered his work to have been highly influential, while Elsey, who had done the vast majority of the report’s heavy lifting, was less certain.
Whatever the report’s effect on Truman’s mind, the speech that was now in Clifford’s hands borrowed much from it. Though he was not a gifted writer, and would often depend on others to help express himself on paper, Clifford knew Truman’s mind and had a sense of the dramatic. He suggested to Jones that the speech “build up steadily to a climax” by opening with a brief survey of conditions in Greece and Turkey, and then moving toward the “wider situation.” Showing the political savvy that would benefit him throughout most of his career, Clifford also suggested the addition of a paragraph emphasizing that the Truman administration would closely supervise all foreign American expenditures. Finally Clifford advised that the speech conclude with a rousing call to action.
Jones made the suggested changes and returned the speech to Clifford, who spent Sunday the ninth with George Elsey, adding further revisions. In Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine, for which she interviewed Elsey many years later, Denise M. Bostdorff provides an account of how the two presidential aides set about to “Trumanize” the speech that day:
[They] quickly deleted excess verbiage. . . . Simple words also took the place of more complicated terms, so that “rectified” became “corrected,” “expenditure of any funds” became “use of any funds,” and “The government of Greece has its imperfections” became “the government of Greece is not perfect.” . . . Clifford and Elsey also realized that simpler sentences were essential for the president’s formal addresses because Truman’s poor eyesight made it difficult for him to look down at a text, look up at the audience, and then refocus on the text. The president, Elsey reflected, “did not read well. His delivery was not that of a polished orator when he was reading a formal address. It was just a fact of life. We accepted it. This is what you were working with; you play the cards you’re dealt. He did his damnedest, and we did ours.”
Elsey was also concerned about the haste of their deliberations, writing in a memo to Clifford at the time, “I do not believe that this is the occasion for the ‘all-out’ speech,” while lamenting that there was “insufficient time to prepare what would be the most significant speech in the President’s administration. Much more time is necessary to develop the philosophy and ideas and do justice to the subject. I think the President should have two weeks to prepare such a speech.” But the sweep of events rendered Elsey’s objections moot.
On Monday the tenth of March, Clifford crossed West Executive Avenue with a copy of the address, as revised by him and Elsey and approved by the president. This would be the final opportunity for Acheson and his team to influence its contents before Truman went to the Hill two days later. The undersecretary recommended the removal of three new points that the White House staff had added:
A line that explicitly described Greece as a gateway to the Middle East;
A reference to Middle Eastern “resources”; i.e., oil;
A warning that a growing adoption of centrally controlled economies around the world was threatening free enterprise at home.
According to Jones, Acheson was especially concerned with the third item, as Britain itself was undergoing a peaceful and democratic socialist revolution without endangering the freedom of its people. For Acheson, at issue was not the precise economic system chosen by a given nation, but whether it made that choice in a free and democratic way.
Earlier that same day, the president had gathered congressional leaders in the Oval Office for a final discussion of aid to Greece and Turkey before his speech, revealing his plan to ask for $250 million for Greece and $150 million for Turkey. This White House meeting with congressional leaders did not go as well as the first, belying a New York Times story on March 8 that described members of Congress “relieved that some concrete proposal was to be put before them to replace the vague forebodings that have been expressed to them by Administration spokesmen.” Referring to “growing excitement” over the issue of Greece, it described the atmosphere on Capitol Hill as “generally favorable” to the president’s likely proposals, with the expectation of a “full-scale debate on the foreign policy of the United States.”
But in person, it was clear to Truman that opposition to his plans had grown as the state of the European economy had become clearer. Acheson recalled “a cool and silent reception.” The new Republican majorities in the House and Senate were unwilling to grant the president a blank check, having been elected on a platform of small government and foreign policy retrenchment.
As the congressional leaders departed the West Wing, Senator Arthur Vandenberg spoke to the reporters assembled outside, praising Truman’s “great candor” and announcing (somewhat inaccurately) that the president would “discuss the whole situation” before a joint session of Congress two days later, at noon.
In the New York Times the following day, reporter Harold B. Hinton noted that there was speculation on Capitol Hill that Truman “might extend the geographical scope of his advice to Congress to take in China, Korea, and even Italy,” illustrating how Washington’s rumor mill was running on all cylinders. But in a hopeful sign for the administration, Hinton wrote, “Most Republican leaders . . . inclined to the view that Congress would accede to the President’s recommendations.”
Hinton then reported on an “unusual” Republican conference that evening, during which Vandenberg told his colleagues—with even greater boldness than the administration—that aid to Greece “might prove to be symbolic of a general, round-the-world situation in which the same fundamentals were involved.” He claimed, somewhat ingenuously, that he would await the president’s address before making up his mind, but told his audience, “this is a matter which transcends politics. There is nothing partisan about it. This is national politics at the highest degree.”
The statesmanship shown by a once-reluctant Vandenberg was encouraging news for the exhausted but exhilarated leadership manning the stations inside the White House and State Department. Still, political storm clouds remained over the White House. Even colleagues from Truman’s party began feeling restive; a meeting of congressional Democrats—the details of which had leaked to the press—had come out strongly against supporting the regressive Greek regime. There would be no groundswell of enthusiasm for a new and generous program of aid. Truman had seen this showdown coming. He was now facing the greatest “selling job” of his political career. Only presidential leadership of the most vigorous character could marshal the necessary support to pull reluctant Democrats and Republicans to his side. The stakes for the upcoming speech were historic. Truman was as tough a political fighter as there was in Washington, but as his own staff members admitted, he was a poor orator. The substance of his words would have to carry the day more than the style of his delivery. History was now hanging in the balance.