ON MONDAY, ACHESON returned to work and waited for further direction from the president and secretary of state. Both Truman and Marshall knew that whatever plan they devised could only check Stalin’s advances into Greece and Turkey if it first gained support from Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The task would be diffficult. Over lunch at the Metropolitan Club, he fretted to a journalist: “The trouble is that this hits us too soon before we are ready for it. We are having a lot of trouble getting money out of Congress.” Among his many other tasks at State had been congressional relations. Acheson had taken the measure of members of the House and Senate, and the Groton and Yale man found them wanting. He saw the politicians there as beholden to narrow and parochial interests, incapable of understanding seismic changes buffering world affairs any more than they could grasp the need for the United States to adopt an increasingly expansive role. The undersecretary’s toughness and determination would help in the legislative struggle to come, but his patrician manners and unconcealed sense of superiority would predictably alienate many on the Hill.
During his recent trip to Princeton, Marshall had laid some of the rhetorical groundwork for the policy changes to come. On Saturday, February 22, as his subordinates scrambled to prepare the department’s draft response to the British “blue papers,” the secretary of state delivered a speech at the university’s Alumni Day festivities in which he sounded the themes of world engagement:
Now that an immediate peril is not plainly visible, there is a natural tendency to relax and return to business as usual, pleasure as usual. . . . It is natural and necessary that there should be a relaxation of wartime tensions. But I feel that we are seriously failing in our attitude toward the international problems whose solution will largely determine our future. The public appears generally in the role of a spectator—interested, yes, but whose serious thinking is directed to local immediate matters. Spectators of life are not those who will retain their liberties nor are they likely to contribute to their country’s security.
Marshall returned to the State Department on Monday the twenty-fourth and received a briefing from Acheson, as well as his memorandum on the crisis. Given the theme of his Princeton address, it is not surprising that Marshall proved to be a receptive audience when the British ambassador formally presented the messages the State Department had received on Friday. The secretary gravely responded that he would seek an answer from the president as soon as possible, and prepared to cross West Executive Avenue for a cabinet meeting with Truman.
Marshall arrived early, and asked to see the president alone in the Oval Office. He told Truman about what had transpired since the British notes were delivered on Friday, and assured him that a coordinated response was being prepared and would soon be ready for his review. Marshall also passed along a memo from Acheson in which the latter expressed his belief that the British were “wholly sincere in this matter and that the situation is as critical as they state. This puts up the most major decision with which we have been faced since the war.”
Acheson led further discussions on the crisis with the secretary of the navy, James Forrestal; Secretary of War Robert Patterson; and members of the top brass of both services. They quickly determined that immediate action regarding Greece and Turkey was in the national security interests of the United States, and that the president should seek congressional support at once.
Having secured unanimity within the upper reaches of the State Department and the White House, Acheson on February 25 assembled a wider group of department officials to sound out their views. A few aired reservations, especially about a possible Soviet response—but most of those assembled supported the proposed policy and were determined to see it come to fruition.
Hours later, Acheson and his team put the final touches on a document entitled “Position and Recommendations of the Department of State Regarding Immediate Aid to Greece and Turkey.” In bureaucratic prose that nonetheless crackled given the vast consequences of the policies proposed, the document warned that if the United States did not fill the void created by the British, then the recent victory over Nazi tyranny would be squandered, with grave consequences for the democratic West.
Now that State’s position was finalized, Acheson needed to win the final approval of secretaries Forrestal and Patterson. Momentum would be lost if the administration was divided, and Acheson needed to go to the president with a plan backed by all the relevant players on his team. During their meeting on February 26, the two military chiefs expressed their support for the plan, but raised concerns. Forrestal and Patterson were rightly focused on several other hot spots around the world, and warned that Greece and Turkey were not the only countries in need of American aid. Korea and China were both in a precarious state, and other nations were sure to come hat in hand. But as Joseph M. Jones relates in his history of the period, the urgent situation in Greece made it necessary for other vulnerable countries to take a back seat for the moment. With luck, success in Greece and Turkey might increase the possibility of coming to the aid of other beleaguered countries in the future. The military leaders concurred.
Following their fruitful meeting with the secretaries of War and the Navy, Marshall and Acheson formally presented the recommendations to the president that afternoon. Truman was now ready to move.
Having his administration united and speaking with one voice on the question of aid to Greece and Turkey, it was time for the president to gain the support of Congress. This would require a speech—perhaps even a joint session—but first there was groundwork to be laid.
The challenge facing Harry Truman was made greater by the disastrous results of the 1946 midterm elections a few months before. Republicans had won resoundingly, gaining 57 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate, seizing control of both chambers for the first time since 1932, the dawn of FDR’s Democratic coalition. Republicans had been elected on a familiar platform of tax cuts and small government, and were in no mood to pass new and expensive initiatives proposed by the Democratic president, especially if the money was being spent on foreign countries. Had the American people not sacrificed enough over four bloody years of war? Had the US Treasury not been squeezed to a breaking point throughout World War II? Was it not time for a return to normalcy when America’s own needs could finally be put first?
Congressional Republicans certainly thought so. The president’s first federal budget request after the election landed with a thud on Capitol Hill. Truman’s proposed $37.5 billion budget was less than he had originally planned, but more than congressional Republicans were prepared to accept. The only question among his opponents was precisely how much to slash. (The spending cuts were not merely for the sake of reducing federal expenditures, but also to make possible a substantial tax cut. In those quaint times, American politicians still believed that revenues and expenditures should remain roughly equivalent.)
Despite howls of protest from the military and civilian leaders of the armed forces, the budgets of both the army and navy were to be reduced. Eager to realize a peace dividend, Republicans discounted the importance of feeding the vanquished Germans and Japanese, and of rebuilding their shattered economies. Not all GOP leaders supported such a self-defeating approach to the foreign aid budget; Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., grandson of the man who had doomed Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, compared his party colleagues to “a man wielding a meat ax in a dark room.” But the vast hemorrhage of government money since prewar rearmament began had worried fiscally prudent Republicans, who remained focused on shrinking the size of the federal government. Persuading conservatives to provide money for Greece and Turkey in such an environment would not be easy.
One of Truman’s aides later recalled that in his dealings with the newly elected Republicans in Congress, “The president liked . . . face to face exchange. It personally meant a great deal to him. That kind of firsthand obtaining of the feelings, the attitudes, reactions, the dos and the don’ts from the congressional leadership coming straight to him, were, at least for him, by far the most effective way to do business.”
So it was that on Thursday, February 27, in the Oval Office, Republican and Democratic leaders gathered in response to the president’s summons. With Truman were Marshall and Acheson, with the former general taking the lead in laying out the crises now facing Greece and Turkey. The delegation included Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the Democratic ranking member, Senator Tom Connally; Speaker Joseph Martin; House minority leader Sam Rayburn; and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Charles A. Eaton. Top appropriators were also present. Missing was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, son of former president and chief justice William Howard Taft, and a man who by ideology and temperament would be unlikely to support the president’s proposal. In a glaring oversight, the White House had failed to invite him, a serious mistake given his influence in the party and especially clumsy considering his well-known isolationist views. Even without Taft present (and his absence was noted by Vandenberg), Acheson felt “we were met at Armageddon.”
It made sense to give the secretary of state the starring role on that critical day. No less a figure than Winston Churchill had lauded General George Marshall, who had been chief of staff of the army in World War II, as “the organizer of victory.” He was a lifelong servant of the state, drawn out of retirement by Truman to be the nation’s chief diplomat. Austere and forbidding, he was held in awe by his subordinates, and his clout on the Hill was far greater than that of the president. The jocular Franklin Roosevelt had once ended an Oval Office meeting by turning to Marshall and asking, “Don’t you agree, George?” Marshall had icily replied, “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with that at all.” Roosevelt was a man not used to being challenged, and never referred to the general by his first name again. But when the time came to appoint a chief of staff, FDR elevated Marshall over more senior colleagues, knowing that he would always get the truth from him.
For whatever reason, Marshall’s quiet magnetism failed him on that momentous afternoon. After the president asked him to speak, the general read from his notes in a rote and uninspiring manner: “A crisis of the utmost importance and urgency has arisen in Greece and to some extent in Turkey. This crisis has a direct and intimate relation to the security of the United States.” Marshall agreed with the recommendations of his staff, and stuck to the prepared script, but obviously was not yet inspired by Acheson’s plan. His listeners grew restless; one asked, “Isn’t this pulling British chestnuts out of the fire?” Old frustrations and antagonisms ran deep and resurfaced in that Oval Office meeting; a more forceful response would be required to overcome congressional skepticism.
Sensing that they were losing the leadership of Congress, and trusting in the wisdom and humility of his chief, Acheson quietly asked Marshall if he might take over the presentation. “This was my crisis,” he later remembered. “For a week I had nurtured it.” Acheson then launched into a passionate soliloquy, shrewdly but sincerely playing on the anticommunism bent of his audience. “Soviet pressure on the straits, on Iran, and northern Greece,” he warned, “had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration.” Prefiguring later talk of nations falling like dominoes, he said, “Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east.” And the infection would keep spreading. “Freedom itself” was at stake. There was no time to lose, for the Greek government was badly weakened.
A silence fell. Finally Senator Vandenberg said, “Mr. President, if you will say that to the Congress and the country, I will support you and I believe that most of its members will do the same.” Such sentiments being openly expressed by an avowed isolationist like Vandenburg was an unexpected turn of events. Sensing a shift in momentum, other congressional leaders voiced their assent, at least in principle. So far, it seemed that “the nonpartisan oil of government lubricated the machinery of politics through the leadership,” as Acheson later put it. But Truman and his team would soon learn how far they still were from resetting 150 years of US foreign policy.