THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE has shaped US foreign policy and America’s role in the world for the last seven decades. It remained the country’s strategic vision throughout the Cold War’s entirety, and made the defeat of Soviet communism US foreign policy makers’ primary goal. Although the Soviet Union was not mentioned by name in the president’s March 12, 1947 speech, every member of Congress in that joint session knew the source of the “outside pressures” that threatened free people everywhere.
John Lewis Gaddis, the Cold War’s leading scholar, has called the Truman Doctrine and the policies that flowed from it “an attempt, through political, economic, and, later, military means, to achieve a goal largely psychological in nature: the creation of a state of mind among Europeans conducive to the revival of faith in democratic procedures.”
The irony of the Truman Doctrine is that it was fashioned as a means of resistance against the spread of Soviet communism, but it was inspired by a communist insurgency in which Stalin quickly lost interest. Combined British and American support for Greece, even before the doctrine, made the Soviet tyrant wary of becoming ensnarled in a civil war erupting in the country. But the Truman administration had every reason to believe Stalin had designs on Greece, just as his omnivorous appetite for expansion targeted the Balkans and Europe. Few historians doubt that a defeated and demoralized Greece would have soon fallen into the Soviet orbit.
The passage of the Greece and Turkey aid packages proved to be a monumental legislative and diplomatic accomplishment. A nation committed since its founding to the principle of nonintervention in foreign affairs had long been disinclined to lead worldwide crusades for freedom. Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to do the same following World War I led to personal and political disaster for the Democratic president. But unlike Wilson, Harry Truman understood the political challenges confronting him. Wilson was an Ivy League president and governor before ascending to the White House while Truman was a creature of the Senate. Truman also was wise enough to surround himself with the tough but subtle diplomacy of Dean Acheson and the diplomatic genius of General George Marshall. Republican Arthur Vandenberg also played a vital role in moving the United States beyond its former “Fortress America” approach to foreign affairs. The spread of democracy would continue decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse. While the last several years have exposed autocratic impulses both here at home and across the world, the pandemic that ravaged economies and strained health care systems has proven again that countries led by politicians hostile to democratic norms, a free press, and full transparency soon find themselves overwhelmed by historic events.
Many breathtaking developments would follow America’s triumph in Greece. The Truman Doctrine soon inspired a series of initiatives on an even grander scale. One of the most far-reaching was the European Assistance Program, a vast network of aid for Europe that saved millions from starvation and set the continent on the road to economic recovery. Despite his support for the Truman Doctrine, and his unrivaled prestige and status, Secretary Marshall did not play a central role in its creation or promotion on Capitol Hill. But the general’s mission to Moscow had brought him face-to-face with the grim, unblinking determination of the Soviet leadership to sow chaos in Europe and across the globe. Marshall would return to Washington angered by Russian intransigence and convinced that only a massive program of aid could shield the shattered European continent from Stalin’s malignant designs.
Marshall unveiled the proposal in a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, just two weeks after Truman signed “An Act to Provide for Assistance to Greece and Turkey” into law. In his matter-of-fact style, Marshall declared:
The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character. . . . The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole.
Truman, having already given his name to the doctrine that shaped American foreign policy, wisely ceded the spotlight to Marshall in the campaign to win congressional support of the European Assistance Plan. Despite the president’s recent legislative victory, the former general’s standing was still unsurpassed in Washington, and thus the “Truman Doctrine” was followed by the “Marshall Plan.” The Soviets’ foolish decision to not participate in this histroic program proved a tremendous political boost for the bill in Congress, and Truman signed it into law on April 3, 1948. In the most far-reaching act of practical-minded generosity in history, the United States gave $17 billion in aid to the devastated countries of war-torn Europe.
More momentous events would quickly follow.
As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union continued to rise in 1948, Berlin became a flash point during the first years of the Cold War. The former German capital was well inside Soviet-controlled East Germany but divided between American-controlled West Berlin and the Soviet-dominated east. The Soviets soon revealed their expansionist designs across Eastern Europe and would eventually bring pressure to bear on West Berlin.
Truman and Vandenberg would use this crisis as an opportunity to join forces again. Western democracies would now have to unite in an armed alliance to resist the growing Soviet threat across Europe. The senator worked tirelessly to build support among his colleagues as Acheson—who had returned to the State Department as secretary after Marshall’s retirement—made the diplomatic rounds in Western Europe to forge a unified front against Soviet aggressions. Together America and Western Europe fashioned the North Atlantic Treaty, which bound the United States and eleven European nations in a pact of mutual defense against the USSR. The treaty declared, “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” The Senate, in yet another extraordinary display of bipartisanship, approved the treaty by a vote of 82–13 in the summer of 1949. Thus was born the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance of democracies that kept Soviet leaders in check and eventually brought the Cold War to a peaceful and victorious end.
THE ULTIMATE CLASH between communism and the free world that would unfold during the Truman administration was the Korean War, a conflict far removed from the European arena that had so occupied the architects of the Truman Doctrine. On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops poured over the border into South Korea, in a calculated act of aggression supported by Moscow. The “Doctrine” may not have originally been conceived as a worldwide umbrella of American protection, extending as far as Asia, but Truman still acted swiftly in response. This time, the United Nations was not only consulted, but the subsequent war was fought under its banner, albeit with an overwhelming preponderance of American soldiers, armaments, and money. For the United States, Korea proved to be an ugly war of attrition, fought without a congressional declaration and without a clear, overriding strategic aim. The war would outlast the Truman administration, ending in an armistice and stalemate in July 1953, ultimately costing nearly thirty-six thousand American lives.
Truman’s 1947 speech regarding Soviet aggression in Europe had strategically omitted mention of the USSR, but the doctrine it launched focused on countering the geopolitical ambitions of Moscow. The monolithic view of communism that was later to prevail until President Richard M. Nixon’s opening of China had not yet taken hold. Acheson and his team sought to differentiate between the great-power maneuverings of the Soviet Union and the workings of international communism; if a communist-led government demonstrated its independence of the Soviets, it was not necessarily to be considered an adversary. Harvard and Columbia Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski spent much of the 1950s and 1960s writing and teaching on the subject of comparative communism to a generation of students such as future Secretary of State Madeline Albright. The sweeping nature of Truman’s speech may have obscured those fine distinctions, but the mandarins in the State Department clung to those subtleties regardless.
A more nuanced view of comparitive communism did not survive the Korean War. The entry of the Chinese into the conflict put an end to any strategy of triangulation until Nixon’s opening of China in 1972 and Jimmy Carter’s normalization of relations that was launched in 1979 at Brzezinski’s farmhouse in McLean, Virginia. While the Soviet Union was not the sponsor of all communist movements across the world, it became American policy to regard communism itself as a fundamental threat to the United States wherever it manifested itself.
FROM ITS INCEPTION, the Truman Doctrine had prominent critics. George Kennan, who long feared that his writings on containment of Soviet influence were misunderstood by policy makers, considered the doctrine to be “a blank check to give economic and military aid to any area of the world where the Communists show signs of being successful.” He later considered Truman’s landmark achievement to be little more than an expression of America’s failing, a desire to seek “universal . . . doctrines in which to clothe or justify particular actions.”
But Kennan would eventually come around to endorse the soundness of Truman’s actions. Losing Europe to Soviet domination would be a devastating reversal to the cause of freedom. Echoing the concerns America’s founders had regarding human nature, Kennan darkly observed:
The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us. It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down at the usual helpless and invisible depth. If confidence and security were to disappear, don’t think that he would not be waiting to take their place.
The Truman Doctrine did produce darker consequences in the years ahead. What worked in the fields of Europe led to calamitous consequences in the jungles of Vietnam. The Far East would highlight the doctrine’s limits; US policy makers’ obsession over “falling dominoes” in Asia would soon enough lead to American humiliation. The communists of North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh proved themselves to be remarkable fighting warriors and a more fierce nationalist force than the guerrillas of Greece. Lyndon Johnson, living uncomfortably in the shadow of his glamorous predecessor, President Kennedy, was advised by the “best and the brightest” whom JFK had assembled. LBJ steadfastly refused to back down in the face of what he saw as communist aggression. His successor, Richard Nixon, was likewise held captive by his inflexible adoption of Truman’s doctrine and the high expectations Americans held regarding conflicts with communist rebels. Withdrawing from Vietnam was viewed as politically unsustainable for Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Two decades of tragic foreign policy miscalculations in Southeast Asia led to the deaths of nearly sixty thousand Americans and over two million Vietnamese.
The United States has likewise been drawn into lengthy conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, highlighting once again the limits of American power. President George W. Bush would declare: “I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom,” only to discover that many citizens in foreign countries yearned more for safety and security. Those who considered the Truman Doctrine to be too idealistic would have been aghast by the sentiments expressed in Bush’s Second Inaugural: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” This declaration followed the Truman Doctrine to its most extreme conclusion. It was a miscalculation that the forty-third president himself confronted and eventually rectified in the final two years of his presidency.
But the policies of one president cannot be judged by the actions of his successors. The Truman Doctrine, though bold, was a limited exercise in economic and military aid focused on restraining communism in two of the most strategically important countries of Europe following the Second World War. Had those dominoes fallen, other Western European governments would have likely collapsed as well.
The Truman Doctrine was not a declaration of war, but the recognition of a cold war with the Soviet Union that had already begun. It heralded a new era of American involvement in world affairs, but as Truman said in his joint address to Congress, it was also necessary to protect America’s colossal wartime investment in World War II. The carnage of that war that raged from 1939 to 1945 was on a scale never before witnessed in human history. Securing the peace that came from Hitler’s defeat was worth the price; now the Soviets had to be confronted.
Writing years later, Joseph M. Jones would recall with wonder “American democracy working at its finest, with the executive branch of the government operating far beyond the normal boundaries of timidity and politics, the Congress beyond usual partisanship, and the American people as a whole beyond selfishness and complacency.”
Truman, who owed his presidency to the late Franklin Roosevelt, was determined to win the White House in his own right. And the brief burst of cooperation in 1947 that had made the Truman Doctrine a geopolitical reality was soon forgotten in the scramble for the White House.
Despite his foreign policy successes, few gave Truman a chance of being reelected. The president went into his White House run deeply unpopular. He had acquired a reputation for clumsiness and incompetence in domestic affairs, and his preference for surrounding himself in the White House with old friends and political allies from his colorful political past struck many as being beneath the dignity of his office. By 1948, “to err is Truman” became a popular expression, and a Newsweek poll of fifty political pundits found that every one of them predicted his defeat.
His 1948 Republican opponent was the popular Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, who had been the party’s nominee against Roosevelt four years before. Both Vandenberg and Taft had wanted the nomination, but the former was too proud to campaign for it and the latter was too conservative and wooden to gain traction. Despite his lifelong ambitions, “Mr. Republican” would not follow his father into the White House.
Truman’s nemesis and predecessor as vice president, Henry Wallace, was the Progressive Party’s candidate, threatening to split the party’s left flank. Wallace renewed his opposition to the Truman Doctrine and derided his foreign policy programs as a dangerous and headlong rush to destruction.
If that were not challenging enough, Southern Democrats rebelled against the party’s limited support for civil rights. Under the “Dixiecrat” banner, they withdrew from the 1948 Democratic Convention and nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as their candidate. Now the incumbent president faced a party challenge from the right.
The situation seemed hopeless for Truman. Journalists became less concerned with the election than with the future policies of the Dewey administration. But Truman reached deep within himself, as he had during his seemingly hopeless Senate reelection campaign in 1940, and barnstormed across the country. He refused to back away from his belief that American leadership across the world was required, declaring, “We will get peace in the world if the people of the United States back up their bipartisan foreign policy.” In another campaign speech he echoed Vandenberg when he said, “We are now the world’s leader. . . . That is the reason it is necessary for our political fights to stop at the water’s edge.”
This ode to bipartisanship did not prevent him from attacking the remaining isolationist elements inside the Republican Party. In speeches near the close of the campaign, he angrily told voters:
The Communists want a Republican administration, because they believe its reactionary policies will lead to confusion and strife upon which Communism thrives. The Communists want us to get out of Europe and Asia. They want us to stop helping European countries. . . . They want us to withdraw and leave the field entirely to them. They know they can never get what they want so long as the Democratic Party remains in control of this Government. But the Communists have real reason to hope that Republican isolationism will exert its pressure within the Republican Party, and, in a period of time, they can take over nation after nation.
Truman’s campaigning became even more intense as the election neared. The Democratic president railed against the Republican “do-nothing” Congress, a cynical tactic given the historic degree of cooperation between the administration and Capitol Hill in the realm of foreign affairs. Still, the Republicans never flagged in their efforts to thwart Truman’s ambitious domestic plans. On issues related to labor, health care, and the welfare state, the partisan battle waged on endlessly.
Election Day brought one of the most astonishing political upsets in history: Truman won with 303 electoral votes; Dewey won 189 and Thurmond 39. The president prevailed in the popular vote by a margin of 4.5 percent over his Republican opponent. Truman’s tireless travels, ferocious rhetoric, and slashing attacks on his opponents bore political fruit. Dewey, by contrast, had pursued a cautious strategy, confident of victory and unwilling to take any chances.
To his eternal delight, the Chicago Daily Tribune printed its front page before the polls had closed, with the blazing headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. In one of the most famous photographs in American political history, a beaming Truman holds up the paper in triumph. He had reason to rejoice: Not only had he won a miraculous political victory, but the Democrats had retaken both houses of Congress. The Republican reign on Capitol Hill was over after two short years, and the Democrats reasserted their longstanding dominance in Washington.
On January 20, 1949, the winter sun glinted off the iron dome of the Capitol as Harry Truman raised his hand and took the inaugural oath. Unlike his first presidential oath nearly four years before, there was no mad scramble for the new president, no panic inside the White House, and no sense of impending doom. Instead, Truman felt a level of vindication enjoyed by few politicians before or since. Coatless and hatless in the chill wind, he delivered his inaugural address before a crowd of one hundred thousand gathered before the East Front of the Capitol. The spirit of the Truman Doctrine infused his every word, and unlike his address to Congress twenty-six months before, this one forthrightly named the “false philosophy” that aid to Greece and Turkey was designed to confront: communism. The newly re-elected president contrasted the blessings of democracy, “based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice,” with the communist belief that “man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong masters.”
Truman’s Inaugural Address made clear that the American “program for peace and freedom” would continue with support for the United Nations, the continuation of the Marshall Plan, and the further implementation of the Truman Doctrine, to “strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression.” And he looked forward to a day when “those countries which now oppose us will abandon their delusions and join with the free nations of the world in a just settlement of international differences.”
On April 18, 1951, Senator Arthur Vandenberg died. He had been suffering from lung cancer—the legacy of a lifetime of cigar smoking—but even as his body wasted away, the foreign policy giant labored in the Senate to maintain the bipartisan foreign policy that he and the president had worked together to promote. As his strength gave out, the senator returned to Grand Rapids to spend his final days. On his death, Truman issued a moving tribute, praising his Republican partner as:
A patriot who always subordinated partisan advantage and personal interest to the welfare of the Nation.
In his passing the Senate has lost a pillar of strength in whom integrity was implicit in every decision he made and in every vote he cast during a long tenure. . . .
He formed his opinions only after deliberate study of every aspect of every problem that came before him. His courage was fortified by a good conscience. So he had no fear of the consequences to his personal fortunes when the time came for him to differ from men of great power and influence within his own party on the paramount issue of foreign policy.
Of course we know that his independence cost him dearly in everything save honor. But to him his country’s welfare, the security of the Nation and a just and enduring peace in a world of free men were above and beyond all other considerations. . . .
But the death of Vandenberg did not end the era of bipartisan foreign policy. His stated belief that “politics stops at the water’s edge” was practiced, however imperfectly, throughout the remainder of the Cold War. Together Truman and Vandenberg built the foundations of an American national security policy that would remain in place for seventy years. When the Vietnam War threatened to tear that consensus asunder, as the disaster in Southeast Asia consumed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Party began questioning the costs of American global leadership. As the 1960s drew to a close, the Cold War became a source of domestic conflict for Democrats and Republicans rather than a unifying crusade.
Forty years were to pass between Truman’s inaugural address and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War he dared to wage proved to be a long and violent struggle, fought in the far corners of the earth while in the shadow of nuclear annihilation. But the eventual triumph of the West vindicated Harry Truman’s vision declared before Congress in 1947. In the decades between Truman’s speech and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, America had, in fact, become Reagan’s “city on a hill” and FDR’s “arsenal of democracy.”
The worldwide prestige enjoyed by Genereal George Marshall—and Truman’s unabashed reverence for him—made the secretary of state the ideal spokesman and advocate for the Marshall Plan. But during the dramatic months when the Truman Doctrine was conceived, it was Dean Acheson who proved to be the indispensable man. He could hardly have been more different from his president; the Yale man’s patrician manners and forbidding intellect were in sharp contrast to Truman’s simple tastes and homespun humor. But together they shaped US foreign policy as few partners in diplomacy ever have.
Americans have spent the past decade questioning their country’s role in the world. Their reservations sound much like those made by Republican isolationists and progressive leaders during Truman’s time. Decades of underwriting the defense of Western powers and US military misadventures in the Middle East have led Americans and their leaders to again look inward. Donald Trump’s foreign policy was framed by his hostility to Western democratic leaders and a bizarre attraction to former KGB agent and current Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump let pass no opportunity to undermine NATO, a bulwark against Russian aggression since its founding. Trump also, in effect, ceded Syria to Putin, giving Russia its first beachhead in the Middle East since 1973. And his constant attacks on America’s most faithful ally during the Cold War, Germany, led to the American president playing into Russia’s hands again by withdrawing troops from the country. While Trump’s “America First” theme initially struck a nerve with voters, his ignorance of history and lack of diplomatic skill prevented his administration from making progress on any significant foreign policy issue over four years. His open hostility toward democratically elected leaders and his open admiration for autocrats also caused grave damage to America’s reputation on the international stage.
The world has undergone profound change since the thirty-third president proclaimed the Truman Doctrine in 1947, and that change became even more vertiginous as we entered the twenty-first century. After four fitful decades, the twilight struggle of the Cold War ended in 1989 with joyful East Germans vaulting over the crumbling Berlin Wall. Soon after, the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, pushed to the brink by the powerful rhetoric and increased defense expenditures of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The heady days of the early 1990s were marked by stunning geopolitical milestones like German reunification and confident predictions of a “peace dividend.” Some political observers even suggested the Soviet collapse was “the end of history.”
But history races forward still, predictably mocking those of us who try to predict its next move. The national security structures so painstakingly assembled by Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and Arthur Vandenberg may well be due for reconsideration, but their durability and success across the decades should inform our leaders that it is best to proceed forward with great caution. It was, after all, Truman’s foreign policy vision that created the world order that saw the United States dominate all rivals economically, diplomatically, militarily, and culturally for over half a century.
Harry Truman was nothing if not decisive. Confronted in 1947 with a historic challenge—whether to extend massive amounts of aid to Greece and Turkey in peacetime, risking conflict with the Soviet Union—he listened to the advice of his gifted subordinates and quickly moved forward on their recommendations. He acted with similar decisiveness in 1945, when confronted with the terrifying choice of whether to end the Pacific War through a bloody invasion of Japan or the use of atomic bombs. On July 26, 1948, Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces:
It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.
Later that year, once it became evident that the aging and carelessly maintained White House was falling apart around him, he ordered the demolition of most of its interior, and the rebuilding of its historic rooms with concrete and steel. Truman left his successors a gleaming new executive mansion, and a presidency that was enhanced by a new national security construct that would guide the United States to victory in the Cold War.
In his irreverent but insightful biography of Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson (then mayor of London, now British prime minister) wrote of his subject: “He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. . . . One man can make all the difference.” As Johnson wrote of Churchill, so it was with Truman. Had the party bosses at the 1944 Democratic National Convention not intervened to halt the boom for Henry Wallace, and had Wallace become president upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt, there would have been no Truman Doctrine but instead an administration offering little resistance to Soviet designs on the war-ravaged European continent. Rather than a beacon of freedom for oppressed people across the globe, the United States would have likely turned inward again, with consequences impossible to contemplate. Harry S. Truman instead would lead America to a position of supremacy in the world unseen since the days of the Roman Empire, and put the West on a triumphant course in its long, turbulent struggle against Soviet tyranny.
The process that yielded the Truman Doctrine was a breathtaking achievement, and an example of thoughtful bipartisanship, government efficiency, diplomatic brilliance, presidential leadership, and informed public debate. Clark Clifford would call it “one of the proudest moments in American history. What happened during that period was that Harry Truman and the United States saved the free world.” Churchill’s declaration that Truman saved civilization itself is perhaps the greatest tribute to the thirty-third president, a historical giant dismissed in his time as a strange, little man.