THE PRESIDENT HAD made his case to Congress and the country. Now it was time for the Senate and House to begin the debate on altering America’s future role in the world. Should the United States, having just emerged victorious in another costly European war, take up the cause of that chaotic continent yet again? The rising tide of communism in the postwar world did not afford America or its allies the luxury of celebrating the spoils of that victory. Millions of soldiers had returned home looking for jobs. The reconstruction of Germany and Japan was still ongoing, costing untold millions of dollars. Most Americans believed that winning two European wars in a single generation was more than should be required of American troops, and many impatiently wondered when the arsenal of democracy would finally enjoy the windfall of a peace dividend.
Given what we know today about Stalin’s crimes against his own people, it is hard to imagine that as late as 1947, most Americans saw “Uncle Joe’s” USSR as an ally. Since Germany’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, the Soviet Union joined with the Allies and bore the brunt of the fighting. The United States had provided vast amounts of aid to Russia during the war, as America’s economic juggernaut churned out thousands of tanks, planes, weapons, and other matériel that was shipped in convoys to Archangel and Murmansk. As the United States slowly prepared to join the fray in North Africa in late 1942, and Italy in 1943, it was the Soviet Union that met Nazi forces in the unspeakably brutal battles of Stalingrad, Moscow, and Kursk. Stalin was angered by what he considered America’s cynical alliance with his country, allowing the Russians to shed rivers of blood against the Nazi war machine as the United States fought in large part through economic means. The Soviet’s sacrifice also made some Americans reluctant to contemplate war against the Soviets. But in time, Stalin’s aggressive moves in Europe would eventually move American opinion.
Perhaps the only man who could successfully move reluctant Republicans on Capitol Hill toward supporting the Doctrine was Senator Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and president pro tempore of the Senate. It was Vandenberg who, in that latter capacity, had sat on the dais behind Truman as the president delivered his speech on aid to Greece and Turkey. The Michigan senator was not opposed to the broad outlines of Truman’s plan, but what concerned him most, as he looked out upon a sea of troubled faces in the House chamber, was whether reluctant Republican colleagues and progressive Democrats who too often held a sympathetic view toward Russia would agree. Though a converted internationalist, he could well understand the reservations of his fellow members, for he had once been a staunch isolationist as well.
THE MOST VIGOROUS Republican champion of the Truman Doctrine seemed to have much in common with the president. Both were midwesterners born in 1884 to doting mothers who possessed great ambitions for their sons. Both saw their educational opportunities limited by the financial failure of their fathers. And both inherited political creeds from their families.
But there were profound differences between the two leaders’ background and outlook. Vandenberg carried with him an intense passion for journalism and politics throughout high school, and confidently expected a successful career in both fields to unfold. Aged only twenty-two, he became editor of the Grand Rapids Herald, throwing himself into the political scene and plotting his own future ascent, with a seat in the Senate as his goal. For all his youthful enthusiasm, Truman never seriously contemplated a career in politics until he had failed in countless other ventures. The seminal experience in his life was service as an artillery officer in the First World War, a conflict which Vandenberg fervently supported at the time but one in which he never fought. In fact, he later came to see American involvement in the war as a tragic foreign policy mistake driven by profit-hungry corporations. Truman’s election to the Senate was hard-fought and surprised most observers; Vandenberg enjoyed the luxury of being appointed to fill a vacancy.
Their differences deepened in the 1930s and beyond. Truman was a staunch supporter of FDR and based his 1934 Senate campaign on devotion to the New Deal. Vandenberg was a virulent critic of Roosevelt, especially as FDR carefully moved the United States toward involvement in the Second World War. After the passage of the Lend-Lease bill, a massive program of aid to Britain, Vandenberg raged, “We have tossed Washington’s Farewell Address into the discard. . . . We have taken the first step upon a course from which we can never hereafter retreat.”
But in most personal dealings, Vandenberg was courtly and magnanimous, while Truman could be cutting and more likely to hold a grudge. Unlike the plainspoken Truman, Vandenberg absorbed the old traditions and mannerisms of the Senate, delivering ponderous orations. Truman’s biographer David McCullough painted a memorable portrait of Vandenberg: “Large and hearty, he had the mannerisms of a somewhat pompous stage senator—the cigar, the florid phrase, and more than a little vanity, carefully combing a few long strands of gray hair sideways over the top of his bald head. When making a point on the Senate floor, he favored the broad gesture, grandly flinging out one arm in a sweeping arc.” Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune observed, “Politicians as a class are vain but he was vain beyond most of the tribe.” Like many of his colleagues, but perhaps more than most, Vandenberg was said to be in love with the sound of his own voice. And as the United States became more supportive of the Allied cause, seeming to edge ever closer to joining the war, Vandenberg used that voice to pillory FDR and call for America to refrain from involvement in Europe’s latest bloodbath.
He had undergone what Acheson archly dismissed as “a political transubstantiation” in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which Vandenberg later said “ended isolationism for any realist.” Gradually, the future Republican chairman shed his limited worldview and embraced America’s new roles as the “arsenal of democracy” and defender of world freedom.
In 1943, in characteristically self-congratulatory fashion, he portrayed himself as “hunting for a middle ground between those extremists at one end of the line who would cheerfully give America away and those extremists at the other end of the line who would attempt total isolation which has come to be an impossibility.” His most famous utterance was pithier: “Politics stops at the water’s edge,” a motto that may sound impossibly idealistic in today’s partisan climate but was a guiding principle for most politicians throughout the postwar era. He was keen to involve himself in the details of the war effort, believing that the Senate should wield nearly as much influence over its conduct as the commander in chief. While this did not always endear him to the administration, it augured well for those who wished to see the United States remain a force for good in the world once Hitler was vanquished and the time for rebuilding Europe began.
During the war, British philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin penned a revealing portrait of Vandenberg for the Foreign Office:
A member of an old Dutch family and a respectable Mid Western Isolationist. A very adroit political manipulator, and expert parliamentarian and skillful debater. He has perennial presidential ambitions, and is grooming himself into a position of elder statesman. He is something of a snob, not at all Anglophobe, and is a fairly frequent visitor at the White House and the State Department. In common with the rest of his State delegation he votes against the Administration’s foreign policies, but has nothing virulent in his constitution and is anxious to convey the impression of reasonableness and moderation. He denies that he is or ever was an Isolationist, and describes himself as a Nationalist (“like Mr. Churchill”).
Vandenberg’s most famous pronouncement of his new worldview took the form of a Senate speech delivered three months before V-E Day, in which he announced his profound conversion. It became known, at least among his admirers, as “the speech heard around the world”:
I do not believe that any nation hereafter can immunize itself by its own exclusive action. Since Pearl Harbor, World War II has put the gory science of mass murder into new and sinister perspective. Our oceans have ceased to be moats which automatically protect our ramparts. Flesh and blood now compete unequally with winged steel. War has become an all-consuming juggernaut. If World War III arrives, it will open new laboratories of death too horrible to contemplate. I propose to do everything within my power to keep those laboratories closed for keeps.
There were cynics in Washington who attributed Vandenberg’s new perspective at least in part to his affair with Mitzi Sims, whose wealthy husband, Harold Sims, was an attaché (and likely a spy) stationed at the British embassy in Washington. The New York Times correspondent Arthur Krock later wrote waspishly, “Vandenberg’s romantic impulses led to gossip at Washington hen-parties, where the hens have teeth and the teeth are sharp, that Vandenberg had been ‘converted’ from isolationism by the pretty wife of a West European diplomat, a lady of whom, as the saying goes, he saw a lot.” Trohan of the Tribune, a paper unsympathetic to Vandenberg’s new internationalism, tartly referred to the Michigan legislator as the “Senator from Mitzi-Gan.”
Whatever the cause of his conversion, the president now could expect cooperation from Vandenberg, however difficult the senator might sometimes prove to be. But a struggle ahead remained along partisan and ideological lines since Vandenberg was still a member in good standing of the party that wished to see federal expenditures drastically reduced.
Not long after the White House meeting of February 27, Vandenberg wrote to a colleague:
I am frank in saying that I do not know the answer to the latest Greek challenge because I do not know the facts. I am waiting for the facts before I say anything. . . . But I sense enough of the facts to realize that the problem in Greece cannot be isolated. . . . On the contrary, it is probably symbolic of the worldwide ideological clash between Eastern communism and Western democracy; and it may easily be the thing which requires us to make some very fateful and far-reaching decisions.
Dean Acheson was forever grateful for Vandenberg’s support of the aid bill, but looked upon his legislative method with a mixture of amusement and condescension. As he put it, Vandenberg would “go through a period of public doubt and skepticism; then find a comparatively minor flaw in the proposal, pounce upon it, and make much of it; in due course propose a change, always the Vandenberg amendment. Then, and only then, could it be given to his followers as true doctrine worthy of all men to be received. . . . Its strength lay in the genuineness of each step. He was not engaged in strategy; rather he was a prophet pointing out to more earthbound rulers the errors and spiritual failings of their ways.”
Despite those shortcomings, Vandenberg soon proclaimed his support for Truman’s plan, declaring after the speech,
The President’s message faces facts and so must Congress. The independence of Greece and Turkey must be preserved, not only for their own sakes but also in defense of peace and security for all of us. In such a critical moment the president’s hands must be upheld. Any other course would be dangerously misunderstood. But Congress must carefully determine the methods and explore the details in so momentous a departure from our previous policies. . . .
The immediate problem may be treated by itself. But it is vitally important to frankly weigh it for the future. We are at odds with communism on many fronts. We should evolve a total policy. It must clearly avoid imperialism. It must primarily consult American welfare. It must keep faith with the pledges to the Charter of the United Nations to which we have all taken. . . .
We cannot fail to back up the President at such an hour. . . . We must proceed with calm but determined patience to deal with practical realities as they unfold. We must either take or surrender leadership.
Truman and his congressional supporters were fortunate that most of the press coverage of the president’s speech had been, in the words of the government’s Division of Press Intelligence, “exceedingly favorable,” with opinion running “4 to 1” in favor of such action.
The New York Times opined after the speech that it would “launch the United States on a new and positive foreign policy of worldwide responsibility for the maintenance of peace and order.” A Washington Post story called the president’s address “one of the most momentous ever made by an American Chief Executive.” An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune said that Truman “was asking for dollars; but he was also asking for the enthusiasm, the willingness to venture, the belief in our own values, which can prove to the shattered peoples of the world that the American system offers a working alternative to the totalitarian order which is otherwise their only refuge.”
Of course, there were dissenters. The most strident among them was, to nobody’s surprise, the communist New York Daily Worker, which lamented “a day of national shame for our country,” and condemned “the empire-grab, masked by anti-Communist hysteria.”
The phrase “Truman Doctrine” had appeared nowhere in the president’s speech, and the State Department aides who had so hurriedly prepared for this moment had seen it as a new diplomatic stance and national policy. But the press soon christened it as such; possibly the first journalistic reference to it was in the Washington Daily News two days after the speech. “President Truman’s message to Congress on relief to Greece and Turkey in effect is a corollary of the Monroe Doctrine. . . . While the implications of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ are as grave as any the people of the United States ever were called upon to face, they are no more than those to which they were committed by the doctrine of Monroe. . . . Both the Monroe and Truman Doctrines are thoroughly and peculiarly American.”
President James Monroe had laid out what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine on December 2, 1823, in his annual State of the Union address to Congress. As was the custom then, such messages were delivered to Congress in writing, and read by a clerk. Just as the Truman Doctrine was largely the work of Dean Acheson, so the Monroe Doctrine was fashioned by the then secretary of state, John Quincy Adams. It declared “as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. . . . We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”
Momentous though it was, the Monroe Doctrine was then largely aspirational. The United States lacked the economic and military might to enforce Monroe’s vision. And it was also an outgrowth of American isolationism, a desire not only to steer clear of involvement in European affairs, but also to keep European powers at bay. But the Truman Doctrine was declared by the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, a giant among the ruins of a war-torn world, with more than sufficient means to back it up. And rather than declaring a desire to steer clear from the rest of the world, Truman’s “Doctrine” was a blueprint for global leadership. Thus it was much more than an echo of the Monroe Doctrine—it was an emphatic successor.
The Senate chamber that was Vandenberg’s stage and theater was smaller than that of the House, but was historically vast nonetheless. It had become the home of the Senate in 1859, leaving behind the old chamber that had echoed with the oratory of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. The senate moved its operations the same time the House moved into its current quarters. Robert Caro has evocatively described the Senate space as it was in the late 1940s:
From its upper portion, from the galleries for citizens and journalists which rimmed it, it seemed even longer than it was, in part because it was so gloomy and dim—so dim . . . when lights had not yet been added for television and the only illumination came from the ceiling almost forty feet above the floor, that its far end faded away in shadows—and in part because it was so pallid and bare. Its drab tan damask walls, divided into panels by tall columns and pilasters and by seven sets of double doors, were unrelieved by even a single touch of color—no painting, no mural—or, seemingly, by any other ornament. . . . The only spots of brightness in the Chamber were the few tangled red and white stripes on the flag that hung limply from the pole on the presiding officer’s dais, and the reflection of the ceiling lights on the tops of the ninety-six mahogany desks arranged in four long half circles around the well below the dais.
But the plain chamber possessed a grandeur nonetheless; it was apparent to those on the floor, who could appreciate the marble of the dais, “deep, dark red lushly veined with grays and greens, and set into it, almost invisible from the galleries, but, up close, richly glinting, were two bronze laurel wreaths, like the wreaths that the Senate of Rome bestowed on generals with whom it was pleased, when Rome ruled the known world—and the Senate ruled Rome.”
The Senate may not have ruled the United States—it was, after all, just one of two chambers in Madison’s constitutional system of checks and balances spread across three branches. But in this particular moment, the chamber would determine the fate of Truman’s post-war vision. Vandenberg may have given his blessing in advance, but there were stormy seas to navigate before the bill to aid Greece and Turkey could be safely steered into port.
The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee sought to avoid any legislative “rocks” that might appear on that journey by making the process as transparent as possible. Before introducing the Senate version of the bill, he summoned members of the administration to address the committee in private on the day after the president’s speech. Many questions would have to be answered before the debate could be thrown open to the glare of public scrutiny.
In an unusual move, Vandenberg invited every senator to submit questions about aid to Greece and Turkey that would be referred to the State Department for detailed replies. In a measure of the importance attached to the issue, senators submitted four hundred questions, which the committee staff edited down to 111. The resulting questionnaire was delivered to State on March 20. The harried bureaucrats of the State Department, determined to expedite the process on Capitol Hill, returned detailed answers nine days later.
Senator Vandenberg formally began the deliberative process by introducing S. 938 on March 19, one week after Truman’s speech. The six-page bill authorized the president to “from time to time when he deems it in the interest of the United States furnish assistance to Greece and Turkey, upon request of their governments, and upon terms and conditions determined by him.” The legislation reserved the right of American government officials to confirm that funds provided were spent properly. The total authorization granted for the program was $400 million, and the president was given full authority to determine the proportion of aid for the two countries. It was a historically sweeping grant of power to the executive, recognizing the president’s longstanding authority in the realm of foreign policy.
But the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would soon demand its own day in the sun.
On Monday, March 24, Senator Vandenberg gaveled the committee to order in Room 318 of the Senate Office Building (today the Russell Building). The committee had made its home in a suite of elegantly appointed rooms in the Capitol building since 1933, but they were small and intimate, suitable only for private hearings and hosting foreign visitors. For consideration of an issue of such overwhelming interest, the much larger hearing room across Constitution Avenue was necessary.
That room was full of spectators and reporters as Vandenberg began the hearing by announcing the American Legion’s support for the bill, and inserting a statement by the Legion’s national commander in the record. The Legion was founded in the wake of the First World War to represent American veterans, and with a million members it wielded immense influence in communities around the country. The statement urged that America be “world-minded in its statesmanship,” and “become the great rallying center for democracies everywhere in the struggle to preserve and to secure the freedom of all peoples.”
The chairman then recognized the undersecretary of state, who would lay out the administration’s case for the legislation. Acheson read at length from a prepared statement, again stressing publicly that aid to Greece was a necessary national security measure.
Acheson vividly described the devastation that years of war had inflicted on Greece, and the “severe strain” on the Turkish economy. He assured the members that the proposal did not involve sending troops to Greece or Turkey: “We have not been asked to do so. We do not foresee any need to do so. And we do not intend to do so.” Only “observers and advisers” would be sent—true enough in this case, but words that would later echo ominously in the build up to the Vietnam War.
Responding to concerns that the Truman Doctrine was too sweeping, Acheson reassured the committee that “any requests of foreign countries for aid will have to be considered according to the circumstances in each individual case.” And to those who thought that the policy risked war with the Soviets, he said simply, “Quite the opposite is true.” The promotion of stability and democracy would lead not to war, but “in the other direction.”
During his statement, he quoted the American statesman Daniel Webster, who during his tenure in the House of Representatives spoke in support of aid to Greece in its struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Webster’s words, spoken in 1823, seemed suited to the situation in 1947: “Mr. Chairman, there are some things which, to be well done, must be promptly done. If we even determine to do the thing that is now proposed, we may do it too late. . . . With suffering Greece, now is the crisis of her fate—her great, it may be, her last struggle. Sir, while we sit here deliberating, her destiny may be decided.”
A number of committee members returned to the issue of the bill’s broader implications. The ranking member, Senator Tom Connally of Texas, pressed Acheson further, saying, “This is not a pattern out of a tailor’s shop to fit everybody in the world and every nation in the world, because the conditions in no two nations are identical. Is that not true?” Acheson agreed and repeated his earlier contention that any future requests for aid would “have to be judged . . . according to the circumstances of each specific case.” “It cannot be assumed,” he reiterated, “that this Government would necessarily undertake measures in any other country identical or even closely similar to those proposed for Greece and Turkey.” He cynically rejected the notion that the aid bill was a “doctrine” in the spirit of Monroe’s pronouncement of 1823. His caution was understandable, but given the president’s sweeping rhetoric in his March 12 address to Congress and Acheson’s central role in crafting it, the undersecretary of state was being more than a little disingenuous.
Chairman Vandenberg, the former isolationist with the zeal of the converted, expressed concern at Acheson’s restrained interpretation: “A good deal of emphasis has been put this morning upon localizing this project in Greece and Turkey so far as precedent is concerned,” he said with disapproval. He quoted the president’s assertion that “totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples . . . undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States,” and asked Acheson to “broaden the concept which we are discussing this morning.”
Vandenberg’s fervent support had the effect of putting Acheson in an awkward position. Under the glare of the press, in the first and most important Senate hearing on the matter, he was being encouraged by the administration’s most important congressional ally to echo the president’s sweeping tone. But many in both houses of Congress were concerned about granting the administration carte blanche to intervene in countries spread across the globe. The undersecretary responded cautiously by denying that the president intended to launch an “ideological crusade,” and that while Truman had expressed a “broad principle” in favor of free institutions, the matter at hand was restricted to Greece and Turkey.
The chairman persisted: “I think what you are saying is that whenever we find free people having difficulty in the maintenance of free institutions, and difficulty in defending against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes, we do not necessarily react in the same way each time, but we propose to react.”
In his dramatic firsthand account of the birth of the Truman Doctrine, Joseph Jones highlighted the importance of Vandenberg’s last five words, marveling that the former isolationist was “insisting upon, and himself restating, the global implications of the Truman Doctrine.” There would be many times in the future when a committee chairperson would try to restrain the executive in the arena of foreign affairs, but in this instance a powerful senator was encouraging an undersecretary of state to be bolder and more assertive.
Still, the chairman was content with the administration’s performance that day. Vandenberg appreciated Acheson’s powerful testimony and tireless assistance, saying later, “I have never seen such willingness to cooperate with the legislature. I think if I called him at ten in the morning and asked him to deliver the Washington Monument to my office by noon he would somehow manage to treat this as a proper request and deliver it.”
On April 28, it was Ambassador Lincoln MacVeagh’s turn to appear before the committee in the second of eight executive sessions it held on the bill. The ambassador had just flown in from Athens before the hearing. No other American was as familiar with events on the ground in Greece as MacVeagh, and his diplomatic dispatches over the previous year had been enormously helpful in preparing his government for the trial to come. But in his testimony before the Senate, the ambassador displayed far less nuance and sophistication in his presentation. A good political soldier, he knew that a more direct approach was required, one that focused on the growing communist influence in Greece. In keeping with the administration’s line, he painted a vivid picture of the ongoing subversion in the country, highlighting outside pressures. And given the private nature of the hearing, in the committee’s gilded and intimate room in the Capitol, he could afford to be more freewheeling in his account. His warning to the committee was stark:
At the present moment, the situation is exceedingly grave and critical, actually critical. Any delay . . . is very dangerous if we are going to avoid a total collapse of the country, both economically and socially, which will bring the country into the satellite orbit of the Russian Empire.
The ambassador made clear the harm that Greek society had already suffered, in terms more stark than he could have used in public, calling Greece “a country that is full of people who have not got any sense of responsibility. . . . It is an awful mess.”
Questioned by Vandenberg about the difficulty of putting down the communist guerrillas, MacVeagh said he remained optimistic:
I think that the organizers, these fellows who are organizing the unfortunates in Greece, and that is what it amounts to—the unfortunates and miserable have gone into the mountains and are organized and tightened up and being formed into a weapon by an international Communist group. You break down their organization and you chase out or capture the fellows who are organizing them, and you will have a certain amount of banditry in Greece for a great many years, but it will not be an organized subversive political movement. It will be just fellows in the hills like Robin Hood, who occasionally come down and carry somebody off for ransom.
The breezy confidence and informal approach that had characterized his testimony before the committee were nowhere in evidence in the secret telegram he sent the Greek prime minister soon thereafter. The government’s extreme right-wing nature and the harsh measures being employed from Athens continued to weigh on the minds of those tasked with deciding whether to send aid to Greece, and MacVeagh, in diplomatic but unmistakable terms, read him the riot act:
While every effort is being made here to secure implementation of the President’s program for aid to Greece, public opinion is being constantly disturbed by reports of official toleration of rightist excesses and the application of security measures to non-subversive political opponents of the govt. The impression created by these reports is that the President’s program aims to assist a reactionary regime with all the earmarks of a police state, which is an idea unacceptable to the American people.
You will remember my concern over this matter expressed to you on numerous occasions. You will also remember your assurance to me that in my absence your policy would be in accord with the President’s message. I would now respectfully emphasize again, but with a new urgency born of a critical moment, the advisability (1) of your Govt.’s giving some clear factual evidence of its political tolerance and broad national character by proceeding with equal vigilance and severity against all lawlessness whether of the right or left, and (2) of its giving its actions in this respect the fullest and most persistent publicity. That the Government of Greece is “fascist” in mind and action is the argument which is telling more potently than any other against the President’s program and it can be effectively answered only by the observed conduct of that Govt. itself.
The bipartisan cooperation between Vandenberg and the administration was impressive by any measure, but this special relationship had its limits as well. Keen to maintain his position in the eyes of his Republican colleagues, the chairman clashed with Truman on matters both minor and major.
In Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World, Lawrence J. Haas tells the tale of a hapless Democratic National Committee official who asked his Republican counterpart to sign with him a statement “reaffirming both parties’ support of America’s foreign policy as outlined by President Truman with the concurrence of Arthur H. Vandenberg.” This inartful lurch by the DNC was a step too far for Vandenberg, who, as Haas relates, responded angrily on the floor of the Senate:
When bipartisan foreign policy gets into the rival hands of partisan national committees, it is in grave danger of losing its precious character. No matter how worthy the announced intentions, it can put foreign policy squarely into politics which, under such circumstances, are no longer calculated to stop at the water’s edge. . . . Bipartisan foreign policy is not the result of political coercion but of nonpolitical conviction. I never have even pretended to speak for my party in my foreign policy activities.
An issue of more lasting impact was the United Nations. Judging by the written evidence, Vandenberg seemed of two minds on the issue, writing in the aftermath of the president’s speech, “I am frank to say I think Greece could collapse fifty times before the United Nations itself could even hope to handle a situation of this nature,” and at the same time declared, “The Administration made a colossal blunder in ignoring the UN.”
Whatever Vandenberg’s view, the UN’s haplessness was already a growing political problem: the White House faced the awkward fact that the American people had quickly taken the United Nations to heart. President Roosevelt’s vision of international cooperation found favor with a world weary of war, and the American people were happy to share the burdens of postwar leadership with others. Left-wingers and GOP isolationists in both houses were eager to seize upon the oversight, whether out of sincere regard for the UN or simply a desire to sabotage a policy with which they disagreed.
The United Nations Conference on International Organization had been held in San Francisco just two years prior, in 1945, at the end of the European war but before Japan was defeated. Representatives of fifty nations gathered in Northern California to formalize arrangements that had been agreed to at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington the year before. Roosevelt had died less than two weeks before the San Francisco gathering.
Dumbarton Oaks had produced the United Nations Charter, the treaty by which every member state would be bound. Its preamble pledged that the “peoples of the United Nations” would, among other things, “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,” and “employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”
Given the administration’s determination to act unilaterally in aiding Greece and Turkey, it is ironic that the closing remarks of this historic conference on collective security were delivered by none other than Harry Truman himself. On only his twelfth day as president, Truman flew to San Francisco and declared to the delegates: “You have created a great instrument for peace and security and human progress in the world. The world must now use it! If we fail to use it, we shall betray all those who have died in order that we might meet here in freedom and safety to create it.” He went on to laud the Charter’s “machinery of international cooperation which men and nations of good will can use to help correct economic and social causes for conflict.”
Thus it was politically predictable that a Gallup poll published on March 27 reported that 56 percent of respondents opposed American aid to Greece and Turkey without consultation with the UN. In the weeks following Truman’s address, the number of Americans who believed that the UN should take the lead continued to increase.
The administration did what it could to finesse the issue. The US representative to the UN, Warren R. Austin, released a statement on the day after the president’s speech declaring, “Support of the freedom and independence of Greece and Turkey is essential” to collective security, and “prompt approval by Congress of the President’s proposal would be new and effective action by the United States in supporting with all our strength our policy in the United Nations.”
But to Joseph Jones, “Popular American support of the United Nations during its first two years of existence was sentimental and unrealistic, an escape from the responsibilities of our unique power.” American policy makers likely knew that the UN would never relieve the United States of the burden of moral, economic, and military leadership. The talking shop soon to be based at Turtle Bay would always be viewed by the DOD and state to be ill equipped to deal with “modern forms of aggression: infiltration, subversion, economic pressures, wars of nerves, aid to rebel groups,” the very problems afflicting Greece at that time.
On March 25, James Reston wrote of the administration’s dilemma in the New York Times, explaining that while legislators were nearly unanimous in their desire to protect the United Nations, they were “disagreeing violently” over the best way to achieve this. In order to set a precedent, should the United Nations be consulted regarding aid to Greece and Turkey, even though it was ill equipped to deal with the situation? Or would it be best to avoid involving the UN at all, so as not to highlight its weaknesses? Reston warned his readers, “In the course of arguing about how to help it, both sides are advertising its weaknesses and hurting the one thing they all agree they want to help.”
The famed syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann, who later that year would introduce the term “Cold War” into the popular lexicon, supported the president’s aims but also worried about the already diminished role of the UN:
It was, to put it conservatively, an oversight to have discussed our proposed action before the President announced it to the world only with the British government, and not also with the French, the Chinese, and the Russian. That, however, is water over the dam. . . . A full explanation, and a willingness to consider objections, would meet the obligation to consult. . . . We could inform the secretary-general of the United Nations about our proposals, and invite him to take notice of the explanations which will be offered to Congress. Mr. Austin could go before the Security Council and explain the proposals, not waiting until Mr. Gromyko attacks them. We could notify the United Nations that we shall not only explain what we intend to do and why, but also that we shall report to them at regular intervals what we have done and why. We could, moreover, invite the leading interested nations to send official observers to Greece to see for themselves what we are doing.
The great advantage of some such action on our part is that it would at once rehabilitate the moral authority of the United Nations and would reaffirm our loyalty as a member of the organization. It would not interfere with the efficiency of our action. . . . This is the best way to answer the charge that we are doing what we have so often charged others with doing—that we are acting unilaterally and for the purpose of domination and aggrandizement.
Vandenberg had been one of the chief congressional champions of the UN, and whatever his private estimation of its abilities, he wished to do nothing now that would undermine its international reputation. Besides, if the bill’s opponents were successful in mobilizing pro-UN sentiment against it, disaster might follow. Thus for both personal and philosophical reasons, Vandenberg was keen to address the issue.
And if, as Acheson wryly observed, it allowed him to pose as “a prophet pointing out to more earthbound rulers the errors and spiritual failings of their ways,” so much the better for him.
Thus, in consultation with Acheson and his House counterpart, Vandenberg introduced on March 21 an amendment to S. 938 that added a lofty preamble about the importance of the United Nations:
Whereas the Governments of Greece and Turkey have sought from the Government of the United States immediate financial and other assistance which is necessary for the maintenance of their national integrity and their survival as free nations; and . . .
Whereas the Security Council of the United Nations has recognized the seriousness of the unsettled conditions prevailing on the border between Greece on the one hand and Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia on the other, and, if the present emergency is met, may subsequently assume full responsibility for this phase of the problem as a result of the investigation which its commission is currently conducting; and . . .
Whereas the Food and Agriculture Organization mission for Greece recognized the necessity that Greece receive financial and economic assistance and recommended that Greece request such assistance from the appropriate agencies of the United Nations and from the Governments of the United States and the United Kingdom; and . . .
Whereas the United Nations is not now in a position to furnish to Greece and Turkey the financial and economic assistance which is immediately required; and . . .
Whereas the furnishing of such assistance to Greece and Turkey by the United States will contribute to the freedom and independence of all members of the United Nations in conformity with the principles and purposes of the Charter: Now, therefore be it . . .
This great senatorial gust of hot air was a genuflection before the UN, and gave its backers a fig leaf to help camouflage the uncomfortable reality that the United States was taking decisive and unilateral action.
So as to remove doubt among those who feared the nascent UN might be compromised by the Truman Doctrine, Vandenberg introduced another, more elaborate amendment on the following day. It read:
The President is directed to withdraw any and all aid authorized herein under any of the following circumstances:
If requested by the Governments of Greece or Turkey, respectively, representing a majority of the people of either such nation;
If the President is officially notified by the United Nations that the Security Council finds (with respect to which finding the United States waives the exercise of the veto) or that the General Assembly finds that such action taken or assistance furnished by the United Nations makes the continuance of such assistance unnecessary or undesirable;
If the President finds that any purposes of the Act have been substantially accomplished by the action of any other intergovernmental organizations or finds that the purposes of the Act are incapable of satisfactory accomplishment.
This emollient language represented no risk to the process—there was virtually no chance that either Greece or Turkey would turn down millions in foreign aid. Regarding the second point, the United Nations was not consulted because the administration knew it lacked the resources to act, a situation that was unlikely to change in the near future. Finally, the third clause gave the president the authority to determine whether the objective of the aid had been achieved, a decision Truman would be in no hurry to make. It was a clever bit of legislative legerdemain that helped to defuse what might otherwise have been a pressing problem for all invested in the bill’s passage.
The committee adopted both amendments by voice vote—with no objections. It is fascinating to reflect, seven decades later, how large the United Nations loomed in the minds and imaginations of American legislators. The Senate, which had rejected the League of Nations in 1919, overwhelmingly approved the UN Charter in 1945 by a vote of 89 to 2. In the spring of 1947, the glow of its recent founding gave it a cachet that the international body would never enjoy again. It is impossible to imagine today Congress taking swift bipartisan action only after both parties were satisfied that the UN had been given its due respect and recognition.
Of the voices that were raised in opposition to Greece’s rescue, perhaps the most influential was that of Henry A. Wallace, who had been Roosevelt’s vice president from 1941 to 1945. Tall, urbane, and wealthy, Wallace was a passionate man of the left. Driven to distraction by his politics and eccentric persona, conservatives in the party pushed Wallace off the ticket at the 1944 Democratic National Convention. After winning a fourth term, Roosevelt appointed Wallace secretary of commerce.
Wallace remained at Commerce after Roosevelt’s death, as Truman wished to steady the public’s nerves by maintaining stability in the cabinet. But as tensions with the Soviets rose, Wallace’s outspoken criticism of American policy became too much for Truman. In September 1946 he publicly declared, “We have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs in Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States.” Such geopolitical declarations were for the commander in chief to pronounce, not the secretary of commerce, and Truman wisely sacked him.
Even out of power, Wallace retained influence. As editor of the prestigious liberal opinion journal New Republic, and a tireless campaigner, FDR’s former vice president remained in the public eye, championing left-wing causes.
He wasted no time in attacking the Truman Doctrine, taking to the airwaves on the day after the president’s speech, saying, “President Truman calls for action to combat a crisis. What is this crisis that necessitates Truman going to Capitol Hill as though a Pearl Harbor has suddenly hit us? How many more of these Pearl Harbors will there be? How can they be foreseen? What will they cost?”
Even Churchill did not escape his wrath: “One year ago at Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill called for a diplomatic offensive against Soviet Russia. By sanctioning that speech, Truman committed us to a policy of combating Russia with British sources. That policy proved to be so bankrupt that Britain can no longer maintain it. Now President Truman proposes we take over Britain’s hopeless task. . . . I say that this policy is utterly futile.”
Fortunately for Truman, Wallace followed this broadside with an ill-considered lecture tour of the United Kingdom, during which he criticized the “ruthless imperialism” of the American government, declaring, “I shall go on speaking for peace, wherever men will listen to me, until the end of my days.” Attacking his own country on foreign soil did Wallace no favors with the American public or press, and made opposition to the Truman Doctrine a political position outside the mainstream of American political thought.
Truman ignored Wallace’s fulminations, but Churchill was rightly incandescent. In a speech at the Albert Hall in London for the Primrose League, an organization founded in memory of the great nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, he retorted:
We have had here lately a visitor from the United States who has foregathered with that happily small minority of crypto-Communists who are making a dead set at the foreign policy which Mr. Ernest Bevin, our Foreign Secretary, has patiently and steadfastly pursued with the support of nine-tenths of the House of Commons. The object of these demonstrations has been to separate Great Britain from the United States and weave her into the vast system of Communist intrigue which radiates from Moscow. Now I travel about a certain amount myself, and am received by much kindness by all classes, both in Europe and America. But when I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticise or attack the Government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home. But when I am abroad and speaking to foreigners I have even defended our present Socialist rulers, and always I have spoken with confidence of the future destiny of our country. Here at home we must do our duty, point out the dangers, and endeavour so to guide the nation as to avoid an overwhelming collapse. But I have no patience with Englishmen who use the hospitality of a friendly nation to decry their own. I think this is a very good principle, and one which deserved general attention. . . . This is particularly appropriate where foreign policy is concerned.
Those who doubt the importance of an individual dramatically impacting the course of world events should ponder this: Had Wallace not been pushed out at the 1944 Chicago convention, or had Truman refused the president’s invitation to join the ticket, then it might have been Wallace who succeeded Roosevelt upon the latter’s death. The United States would have entered the postwar world with a socialist in the White House, with incalculable consequences for decades to follow.
A FEROCIOUS SKEPTIC of big government, Ohio senator Robert Taft had been one of Roosevelt’s chief congressional antagonists, and he continued his opposition to the domestic ambitions of the Democrats after Truman arrived in the White House. Known as “Mr. Republican,” the Ohio senator stood for an uncompromising brand of small-government conservatism and used his mastery of parliamentary procedure to thwart Truman’s liberal domestic ambitions.
Taft’s father had served as President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war, and was Roosevelt’s handpicked successor when the Rough Rider decided not to run again for the presidency in 1908. The elder Taft had little interest in the White House; his fondest ambition was to become chief justice of the United States. But he acceded to Roosevelt’s wishes (and those of his wife) and duly won the election, helped by the popularity of his predecessor. President Taft found the job a miserable experience, and Roosevelt, his ambition unquenched, turned against his former protégé and resolved to run again in 1912. Failing to wrest the Republican nomination from Taft, TR ran instead as the candidate of the Progressive Party. The resulting split in the Republican vote gave the Democratic candidate, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, the White House. Taft was stung by his defeat, but later achieved his ultimate ambition when President Warren G. Harding appointed him chief justice in 1921.
The younger Taft, undeterred by his father’s past political travails, resolved from an early age to reach the White House himself. A brilliant student, he graduated at the top of his class from the preparatory school founded by his uncle, and performed similar academic feats at Yale and Harvard Law School. He established himself as a successful attorney and soon founded his own law firm. But all this was mere preparation for what he considered his ultimate calling. Following in the footsteps of his famous father, Taft entered politics and was elected to the Ohio legislature in 1920, serving for a decade and rising to become Speaker. In 1930 he was elected to the state senate, and although defeated for reelection two years later, he still burned with ambition.
He won a seat in the United States Senate in 1938, and soon Senator Taft established himself as a leader of the conservative opposition to the New Deal. As the clouds of war gathered over Europe at the outset of his time in the Senate, the Ohio conservative was outspoken in his opposition to Roosevelt’s pro-Allied policies, warning against American involvement in what was sure to be a devastating conflict. In 1940 he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, but with war seemingly imminent, his rock-ribbed isolationism was then out of favor even with Republicans and he lost the GOP nomination to political neophyte and internationalist Wendell Willkie.
Taft’s commitment to isolationism was far from being the outgrowth of a sheltered existence. As a boy, he lived in Manila for four years while his father served as governor of the Philippines, an American colonial acquisition following the Spanish-American War. Later he would serve in the US Food Administration in the First World War, and was posted to Paris as a legal adviser to the American Relief Administration in the wake of the 1919 armistice. Taft was responsible for the coordination and distribution of humanitarian aid, and saw firsthand the devastation that four years of war had wreaked upon Europe. The experience impacted the future senator greatly and made him resolve to keep the United States far removed from the affairs of that troubled continent.
Those insights shaped his political identity, and therefore it surprised few that he responded coldly to Truman’s appeal, telling reporters, “I do not want war with Russia. Whether our intervention in Greece tends to make such a war more probable or less probable depends upon many circumstances regarding which I am not yet fully advised and, therefore, I do not care to make a decision at the present time.”
The New York Times reported Taft’s view of the Truman Doctrine as an acceptance of “the policy of dividing the world into zones of political influence, Communist and anti-Communist,” and Taft worried that “if we assume a special position in Greece and Turkey, we can hardly longer reasonably object to the Russians continuing their domination in Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria.”
The Republican independence of mind and idiosyncratic approach to politics made it difficult to predict whether he would end up supporting the legislation, but his influence within the party and across America made winning him over an important goal for Truman.
The swift and dramatic transition from an internal administration process—one that, while discussed in exhaustive detail, had been almost entirely free of serious debate and discord—to a public debate open to endless scrutiny predictably raised concerns about the Truman Doctrine that had not been seriously vetted by its architects.
One such question involved the role of Turkey. The crisis in Greece had dominated that initial flurry of meetings and discussions in the State Department, and as Truman’s speech had gone through the drafting process both there and in the White House, Turkey had taken a back seat in deliberations. Now that the matter was open for public debate, it was reasonable for skeptics of an expansive US role in world affairs to ask whether the inclusion of Turkey in the bill was an overreach.
One witness before the House committee put the matter somewhat caustically when he declared, “Administration and congressional spokesmen have themselves volunteered only the briefest discussion of the Turkish problem or of proposed United States aid to Turkey. Now, I do not mean to be ribald, but I really cannot help saying this: It almost appears that when the new dish was being prepared for American consumption Turkey was slipped into the oven with Greece because that seemed to be the surest way to cook a tough bird.”
A tough bird Turkey may have been, but its rhetorical neglect in Truman’s message was not meant to imply that it was any less strategically important. The situation in Greece was simply more urgent; by all accounts, the country itself was on the cusp of collapse and communist guerrillas had been successful in destabilizing the nation while exhausting the will of Greece’s resistance. Turkey had shown itself more capable of fending off communist aggression and therefore found itself in a more stabile state of affairs.
There was yet another reason to keep the spotlight primarily on Greece. While the Soviets were prepared to exploit every opportunity that arose before them, their ability to directly impact military events on the ground in Greece was less so than in Turkey. And while both countries were important to the Soviet’s strategic designs, Turkey was more pivotal in the short term, due to the importance of the straits and its access to the Mediterranean. Thus the possibility of provoking a Soviet response was greater in the case of Turkey, which the administration, for all its grim resolve still hoped to avoid. The less said about this Soviet target, the better.
But the issue of Turkey now had to be forthrightly addressed, and the task would fall to Vandenberg, who performed his job ably in his usual orotund way. The formal Senate debate on S. 938 began on April 8, after many hearings in the Senate and in the House. As the bill’s sponsor and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Vandenberg was the first to speak, calling the proposal
a plan to forestall aggression which, once rolling, could snowball into global danger of vast design. It is a plan for peace. It is a plan to sterilize the seeds of war. We do not escape war by running away from it. No one ran away from war at Munich. We avoid war by facing facts. This plan faces facts. . . .
If the Greeks, in their extremity, are not successfully helped to help themselves to maintain their own healthy right to self-determination, another Communist dictatorship will rise at this key point in world geography. Then Turkey, long mobilized against a Communist war of nerves, faces neighboring jeopardy. The two situations are inseparable. Turkey confronts no such internal extremity as does Greece; but it requires assistance to bulwark its national security. The president says that the maintenance of its national integrity is essential to the preservation of order in the Middle East. If the Middle East falls within the orbit of aggressive Communist expansion, the repercussions will echo from the Dardanelles to the China Sea and westward to the rims of the Atlantic. Indeed, the Middle East, in this foreshortened world, is not far enough away for safety from our own New York or Detroit or Chicago or San Francisco.
By explicitly drawing the connection between Greece and Turkey, and then the Middle East, Vandenberg made explicit what the administration had chosen to make implicit. Senators traditionally have had wider latitude to make certain pronouncements than presidents. Vandenberg warned grimly that the defeat of the measure “would be the forfeiture of all hope to effectively influence the attitude of other nations in our peaceful pursuit of international righteousness from now on. It would stunt our moral authority and mute our voice. . . . It would invite provocative misunderstandings of the tenacity with which we are prepared to defend our fundamental ideals.”
Vandenberg’s speech was the first of seventeen in favor of S. 938, and set the tone for all those to follow. The other speakers in favor were divided equally between Democrats and Republicans, an encouraging sign for the administration.
IN A SURPRISING development, Senator Taft ultimately voted in favor of the aid bill. His statement of reluctant support may have seemed to be an exercise in wishful thinking, but it was an act of responsible statesmanship by the conservative icon:
I intend to vote for the Greek and Turkish loans for the reason that the President’s announcements have committed the United States to this policy in the eyes of the world, and to repudiate it now would destroy his prestige in the negotiations with the Russian Government, on the success of which ultimate peace depends. I do not regard this as a commitment to any similar policy in any other section of the world. . . .
I am in thorough accord with the Vandenberg amendments proposing that we withdraw whenever a Government representing a majority of the people requests us to do so, and whenever the United Nations find that action taken or assistance furnished by them makes the continuance of our assistance undesirable. I believe we should, in any event, withdraw as soon as normal economic conditions are restored.
Despite these stated reservations, Robert Taft surely knew that his dramatic decision to support the Truman Doctrine would help launch a worldwide crusade against communism.
AS THE SENATE was in the midst of its grave deliberations, President Truman delivered another speech in support of his doctrine, this one in more partisan political surroundings. His motorcade left the White House on the evening of April 5 and made the short drive up Connecticut Avenue to the Mayflower Hotel, a grand Washington institution that had opened two decades before. It had already been the scene of several notable events and presidential visits. Truman was here on this night to address the annual Jefferson Day Dinner, sponsored by the Democratic National Committee and held in honor of the third president—the party’s founder. His wife and daughter joined him on the dais, as did Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder and Congressman Sam Rayburn, who had lost his Speaker’s gavel after the 1946 midterm elections and now was stuck with the unaccustomed title of House Minority Leader.
Truman, gazing out at the party faithful gathered in the vast ballroom, opened his remarks by quoting a letter from Jefferson to President James Monroe: “Nor is the occasion to be slighted which this proposition offers of declaring our protest against the atrocious violations of the rights of nations by the interference of any one in the internal affairs of another.”
Monroe would later proclaim similar sentiments in the message to Congress that contained the doctrine that bears his name. Truman explicitly sought to ground his own recently proclaimed doctrine in the sentiments expressed by Monroe’s, declaring:
We . . . have witnessed atrocious violations of the rights of nations. . . .
We too have declared our protest.
We must make that protest effective by aiding those peoples whose freedoms are endangered by foreign pressures.
The thirty-third president continued, moving far beyond any sentiments ever contemplated by Jefferson or Monroe:
We must take a positive stand. It is no longer enough merely to say “we don’t want war.” 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.
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. We know how the fire spreads. And we know how it ends.
Let us not underestimate the task before us. The burden of our responsibility today is greater, even considering the size and resources of our expanded nation, than it was in the time of Jefferson and Monroe. For the peril to man’s freedom that existed then exists now on a much smaller earth—an earth whose broad oceans have shrunk and whose natural protections have been taken away by new weapons of destruction. . . .
We are a people who not only cherish freedom and defend it, if need be with our lives, but who also recognize the right of other men and other nations to share it.
Truman concluded with one of the most stirring declarations ever written by Thomas Jefferson, one that he composed on the eve of his election as president and is still engraved on his neoclassical memorial on the Tidal Basin in Washington:
I have sworn, upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
April 22 was the climactic day of the Truman Doctrine’s debate in the Senate. The legislative day began at eleven a.m. with a prayer by the chaplain, Peter Marshall, who concluded with a plea to the Almighty, “Reveal to us now Thy word for today.” Just as God was to reveal his word that day, so the United States Senate would reveal its judgment on S. 938.
This was the day chosen to close debate and vote on the five amendments proposed by Colorado senator Edwin C. Johnson before moving on to a final vote on the bill. Aware that his amendments would fail, and determined to make a last stand against the Truman Doctrine, Johnson withdrew them and introduced a substitute amendment that would eliminate all military aid from the package. Upon being recognized by the chair, he rose to speak and delivered a stinging attack on what he called a “pending war measure.” Senator Johnson continued, eyes blazing,
I have ever been an implacable foe of peacetime conscription. . . . I have fought this Prussian-inspired military system at every turn of the road. . . . But if Congress enacts this measure pending war I will support conscription and military training, and a renewal of selective service on a wartime scale, immediate mobilization of a huge army and navy, increased military appropriations and every other step necessary to defeat our enemies quickly. . . .
Violently opposed to conscription and militarism as I am, this is an especially hard reversal for me to make, but our military alliance with Turkey which we are about to implement . . . leaves me no honest alternative. . . . I do not believe we can fight communism successfully with arms, but if that be our decision we must fight it in Moscow, not in Greece, not Turkey, not France, not all over the globe.
“Russia,” he continued, “in her stupid, stubborn, exasperating policy of suspicious negation, and the United States, in her new dynamic policy of unilateral military intervention everywhere, are both dead wrong. . . . [The] UN must realize that time is running out and this is its last and best chance to avert World War III.”
With tempers running high, Vandenberg denounced Johnson’s statement as an “invitation to alien misunderstanding which otherwise would have no possible basis whatever.”
As tempers cooled, the Senate began moving toward the vote. Senators began voting at four p.m., and Johnson’s amendment was defeated easily, 68 to 22. A few desultory final amendments were then swatted away by the Senate leadership. Thousands of words had been spoken in support of and in opposition to S. 938 before the presiding officer finally called for a vote on the bill. The roll call began, with the clerk slowly reading each senator’s name. When it was finished, the Truman Doctrine had taken a decisive step toward becoming a reality. S. 938 passed by an impressive margin of 67 to 23, with 35 Republicans and 32 Democrats in support, 16 Republicans and 7 Democrats against. The outcome was a triumph in bipartisanship.
Upon hearing the news, the Greek prime minister, Demetrios Maximos, told his parliament: “We assure President Truman that every dollar allotted to Greece will be appreciated as a symbol of the supreme industriousness of the American people and will be used exclusively for the purposes for which it was intended.”
The passage of the Senate bill was not only a step toward ultimate congressional approval, but also a step toward the increased involvement of the United States in the political affairs of a foreign country, one with a painful past and a troubled present.
THE NEW YORK TIMES reported the dramatic Senate vote and listed the yeas and nays. In a front-page column, the famed foreign correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick also acknowledged at length the weaknesses of the Greek government: “It apparently has no program but anti-communism and no capacity either to improve the lot of the people or to unite them by a generous gesture of reconciliation.” Despite those failings, the legendary Times correspondent acknowledged that the political scene “is more like democracy than anything in the neighborhood.”
McCormick then raised the critical question: Would the United States aggressively intervene in Greek politics if the House decided that America’s new role in the world was to shield that country from “outside pressures”? Unfolding events in the region and across the globe would soon teach Harry Truman and his cabinet that there were few simple answers available to them in the troubled postwar world they had inherited from FDR.