THE PRESIDENT AND his entourage filed through the Diplomatic Reception Room on the basement level of the White House, where Franklin Roosevelt had spoken to the American people through the darkest days of the Great Depression and Second World War with this fireside chats. Truman knew the challenge that he faced on this day was every bit as difficult as many that confronted his predecessor, but the current president was self-aware enough to know that he would be facing this challenge without FDR’s winning charm. Exiting under the South Portico, the president was bathed in the sunlight of a warm spring day.
The bright skies were of little comfort. Truman carried with him not just the weight of his office, but the trepidation that comes from having to ask a hostile GOP Congress for their support. Worse, he was feeling under the weather. With the remnants of a nasty cold sapping his energy, this momentous address would be even more difficult than usual for the inartful orator. He gathered his strength for the storm of attention that was sure to follow, and braced himself for the inevitable crush of congressional and press attention.
His daughter, Margaret—who was also feeling under the weather—followed behind to see him off. As an aspiring singer, she too was bracing herself to perform in front of a demanding audience, and said to one of her father’s aides: “I know how Daddy feels.” But doting daughter though she was, Margaret would obviously never know the pressures one felt when carrying the weight of the free world on one’s shoulders. On a president’s most mundane day, the burden is too great for most to contemplate. But in that historic moment, when his speech could shape the future of Europe, the weight Harry Truman had to be carrying must have been unimaginable.
Truman moved into his limousine with Admiral William Leahy, the White House chief of staff, and other assembled aides. The First Lady followed behind in a separate car, and another behind that one carried Clark Clifford, press secretary Charles Ross, and a gaggle of other presidential assistants. Driving up Pennsylvania Avenue, it traced in reverse—and more slowly—the route taken by Truman on the day he succeeded Roosevelt nearly two years before.
On that terrible day in 1945, he had joined his friend Sam Rayburn, then Speaker of the House, and other colleagues at the “Board of Education,” the convivial drinking society of senior politicians that met in the Speaker’s hideaway office for cards and drinks. There the whiskey flowed freely as did the old politicians’ stories. Only after Truman had poured himself a drink did Rayburn remember to pass along a message: White House press secretary Steve Early had called. Truman returned the call with drink in hand, only to hear Early tersely order him to come to the White House at once. Turning pale, Truman gasped, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson.” Though Early provided no further details, Truman suspected the reason for the call.
After their first meeting the previous summer, Truman had been shocked by the president’s condition. Later he told a friend, “I had no idea he was in such feeble condition. In pouring cream in his tea, he got more cream in the saucer than he did in the cup. His hands are shaking and he talks with considerable difficulty. . . . Physically, he’s just going to pieces.” Now, as Truman raced through the Capitol toward his waiting car and driver, he feared that the worst had happened.
Driving through the Washington night, Harry S. Truman was now the president of the United States. He just didn’t know it yet.
Upon his arrival at the White House he was taken upstairs to a waiting Eleanor Roosevelt, who told him the news that he had long dreaded: “Harry, the president is dead.” Overcome with grief and understandable shock, he could only ask the former First Lady, “Is there anything I can do for you?” She replied, “What can we do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”
The man from Independence, Missouri, told reporters the next day, “I felt as though the moon and the stars and all the planets fell on me last night when I got the news.”
Almost two years later, Harry Truman was driving to the Capitol to deliver his momentous speech on the same day that the Senate passed what would eventually become the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, restricting presidents to two terms in office. Still chafing after four defeats in presidential elections and more than a dozen years of Roosevelt in the Oval Office, Republicans were eager to ensure that no future president would prolong their tenure past the eight-year precedent set by George Washington. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, son of a one-term president and one of Truman’s chief antagonists, introduced the amendment in the Senate. A final version would be sent to the states days later, and in February 1951 the amendment would be ratified. Thus Truman was about to address a body focused on restricting—not expanding—the power and scope of future Democratic presidents. As the incumbent, he would be exempt under the terms of the amendment, but Truman was on notice that this Republican Congress resented their treatment while languishing fourteen long years in the minority and were in no mood to meekly submit to the president’s demands. The accretion of executive power often required by the necessities of war would not be maintained in a postwar world without a struggle. Truman would later write of the Twenty-Second Amendment, “The Republican 80th Congress took a sort of revenge on Roosevelt’s memory because he’d made a lot of those people look bad by comparison,” and he considered it, “excepting only the Prohibition Amendment, the worst thing that’s ever been attached to the Constitution.”
In the House chamber, the restless crowd settled slowly into their seats. For those who had been sworn in little more than two months before, the pageantry of a joint session was a new experience. Then as now there were 435 members of the House of Representatives, but on occasions like this the members shared their chamber with senators, members of the cabinet, Supreme Court justices, and other dignitaries. Former members of Congress, availing themselves of their lifetime access to the House floor, were also angling for seats. The galleries above were packed with press and visitors, and even the steps were filled of spectators. When the First Lady appeared, few took notice, and she seemed lost in the crowd until rescued by an alert White House aide.
The president pro tempore of the Senate took a seat on the podium next to the Speaker of the House, Joseph Martin, the only Republican to serve as speaker from 1931 to 1995. That prized position would normally be taken by the vice president of the United States, in his constitutional capacity as president of the Senate, but since Truman’s elevation in 1945, the office of the vice president had been vacant. Twenty years would pass before the Twenty-Second Amendment would allow the president to fill such a vacancy between elections with the approval of both houses of Congress. Thus it was that Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the man who more than any other held the fate of the Truman Doctrine in his hands, found himself watching its unveiling while seated directly behind the president. The president knew that without Vandenberg, his proposal would be dead on arrival.
The chamber had been a constant witness to history since its completion in 1857, after the House of Representatives had outgrown its original quarters in the older section of the Capitol (now Statuary Hall). Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt had both appeared there to request declarations of war in 1917 and 1941, respectively. The vast, windowless room had not pleased everyone when it was first completed; Benjamin B. French, commissioner of public buildings, called it a “monstrous salon” and “a kind of cellar, where none of God’s direct light or air can come in. . . . A piece of gaudy gingerbread work, that will, in the end, do no credit to anyone who has had anything to do with it.” It was certainly elaborate, with a Victorian ceiling of iron and stained glass 139 feet long by 93 feet wide, and a marble speaker’s rostrum, both nineteenth-century remnants that would be replaced soon after Truman’s speech that night.
At one o’clock, the sergeant at arms appeared and in a booming voice announced, “The President of the United States!” The crowd rose to its feet and applauded as Truman made his way down the aisle, escorted by a committee of congressmen and senators and shaking hands on either side of him, a black folder tucked under his arm.
Due to the dramatic circumstances of his elevation, and the unsettled state of the world, Truman had already addressed five joint sessions before this evening. The man who ascended the dais that evening was no longer the machine politician from Missouri, clearly overwhelmed by the responsibilities of his office, but a more confident president determined to rally the public to his cause. After he greeted the Speaker and the president pro tempore, and as the applause died away, Truman began to speak. His tone was clipped and businesslike, a marked difference from the sonorous, patrician voice of his predecessor, but one to which Congress and the country had already grown accustomed. This room had been witness to rhetoric far more soaring that what Harry Truman could provide, but rarely had the stakes been more dramatic.
He began: “The gravity of the situation which confronts the world today necessitates my appearance before a joint session of the Congress.” And in spare, economic prose, he swiftly got to the point: “Assistance is imperative if Greece is to survive as a free nation.”
There were those who would obviously dispute the notion that Greece was free; its government was authoritarian and the means it employed to remain in power in the face of communist agression were far from inspiring.
But what could not be disputed was the fact the Nazis’ occupation coupled with a rising communist insurgency had left that ancient land on the brink of ruin. “When forces of liberation entered Greece they found that the retreating Germans had destroyed virtually all the railways, roads, port facilities, communications, and merchant marine.” He continued setting the bleak scene. “More than a thousand villages had been burned. Eighty-five percent of the children were tubercular. Livestock, poultry, and draft animals had almost disappeared. Inflation had wiped out all savings.”
Amid “these tragic conditions,” the president explained that “a militant minority, exploiting human want and misery, was able to create political chaos which, until now, has made economic recovery impossible.”
Truman explained to the packed House chamber that the government in Greece was no match for the combined challenges facing it. To deal with postwar economic devastation was challenging enough, but to reconstruct a country while fending off a communist insurgency would be unmanageable for any struggling country.
Throughout his remarks, Truman returned time and again to the theme of America as an indispensable nation on the world stage. “There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn. No other nation is willing and able to provide the necessary support for a democratic Greek government.” Regarding American aid to Turkey, he declared, “We are the only country able to provide that help.” British aid to Greece would be stopping at the end of the month, and bluntly added that America’s chief ally was “reducing or liquidating its commitments” around the world.
In an effort to reassure Congress that any aid provided would be spent only as intended, he declared, “It is of the utmost importance that we supervise the use of any funds made available to Greece in such a manner that each dollar spent will count toward making Greece self-supporting, and will help to build an economy in which a healthy democracy can flourish.”
Applause rippled through the chamber with this promise of fiscal oversight, but many in the audience remained skeptical that a large infusion of cash would facilitate Greek recovery rather than lining corrupt politicians’ pockets.
But what of the United Nations, the international body that was only recently founded with great fanfare? The president dismissed the possibility of UN assistance in words that would often find an echo in the future: “We have considered how the United Nations might assist in this crisis. But the situation is an urgent one requiring immediate action and the United Nations and its related organizations are not in a position to extend help of the kind that is required.”
Truman did not paper over the more unsavory aspects of the government in Athens. “No government is perfect,” he acknowledged. But “one of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected.” Acknowledging that the Greek government had “made mistakes,” he refused to condone its actions, condemning “extremist measures of the right or the left.” And he noted that for all its flaws, the government represented “eighty-five per cent of the members of the Greek Parliament who were chosen in an election” the previous year.
Having acknowledged the failings of Greece’s government, the president then turned to Turkey. Though “spared the disasters that have beset Greece,” America still needed to support Turkey to maintain its “national integrity,” which was “essential to the preservation of order in the Middle East.”
Truman then moved to the central message of the speech, the one that would spark the fiercest opposition, and alter America’s 150-year history of remaining aloof from the travails of other countries except in the most dramatic instances of international conflict: “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 pressures.” This sentence, one of the most sweeping and consequential in the era in which it was delivered by an American president, was greeted with silence.
To lose this struggle so soon after surviving the Second World War would be “an unspeakable tragedy,” Truman declared, not only for Greece and Turkey, but for other nations as well. The United States could not turn its back on the free world “in this fateful hour,” for its own national interests depended on peace and stability across the globe.
Having laid out his case in stark and urgent terms, the Democratic president made his request for $400 million for the two afflicted nations. Reminding the Republican majority that the United States had spent a staggering $341 billion in the past war, he called aid to Greece and Turkey “an investment in world freedom and world peace” that was “little more than 1 tenth of 1 per cent” of the price tag of World War II. “It is only common sense,” said the president, “that we should safeguard this investment and make sure that it was not in vain.”
Having attended to the practicalities, Truman then appealed to his audience’s emotions: “The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive.”
His closing words were both a challenge to Congress and a recognition of its pivotal role in shaping the Truman Doctrine: “I am confident that the Congress will face these responsibilities squarely.”
The applause was polite, as it usually is after a presidential address to Congress. But there was little reason to believe at the time that this display of customary courtesy would rise to political support. The tone and temper of Congress had changed dramatically since that fateful day in 1945 when Truman appeared before it for the first time as president. The country was restless after a long Democratic reign, and the new Republican majorities were enjoying the prerogatives that came with their unaccustomed power. And Harry Truman, elevated to the highest office in the land only because of the untimely death of Franklin Roosevelt, had presented to them a proposal as vast and sweeping as could be imagined. He exited the chamber, leaving surprise and consternation in his wake, and raced to the airport to board his waiting plane for a much-needed holiday in Key West.
Though they could not predict public reaction to the president’s radical proposal, Truman, Acheson, and the capital’s foreign policy establishment likely knew that President Truman had sought to alter America’s role in the world over the course of his twenty-minute speech. He was determined that the United States would no longer retreat into the cocoon of isolationism, and that America’s post–World War I contraction that led to the rise of Hitler’s Germany would not be repeated. Now the United States would take its rightful place on the world stage, providing support to the cause of freedom around the world. As Truman’s plane made its way toward Florida, world events hung in the balance.
Harry Truman was keenly aware of the old Washington adage that “The president proposes, the Congress disposes.” He could ask Congress for a down payment on American leadership, but would Congress approve? The currents of isolationism still ran strong through American society, and there was no guarantee that a single speech could overturn more than a century of isolationist instincts. The president’s declarations would now have to be reduced to legislation, and the resulting bills would have to make their way through a tortuous legislative process. The streets of Athens were aflame. The Soviets were circling their prey. Would the Republican Congress act in time?