THE PORTRAITS OF HARRY Truman and Ronald Reagan hung in my congressional office throughout the time I served in Congress. The image of Reagan surprised few, since most viewed me as a fire-breathing Republican whose small-government crusades on the House floor and in GOP caucus meetings seemed extreme even to Republican peers. Besides, Ronald Reagan was a unifying figure who left office with high approval ratings and an abundance of goodwill. But Truman’s portrait, the same that graces the cover of this book, surprised visitors. In his time, Harry Truman was not a beloved figure even among Democrats. Unlike the Gipper, Truman departed the White House with historically low levels of support. Still, I considered myself a conservative more than a Republican, and in the Scarborough household, being conservative was defined primarily by one’s status as a Cold War hawk. Truman fit that bill and was, in fact, the first Cold Warrior in the White House.
When I came to Washington in 1994, the United States was still basking in the glow of its victory over Soviet totalitarianism. The Iron Curtain’s collapse was nothing less than an epochal achievement made possible by the cooperation between nine American presidents and congressional leaders from both parties. A continuity of policy and purpose was woven seamlessly through every presidency from Harry Truman’s to George H. W. Bush’s. That singular focus occassionally led to disastrous outcomes: the tragic legacy of Vietnam is shared by John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. But Cold War diplomats like George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft served both Republican and Democratic presidents alike, and their central focus across five decades—a commitment to toppling an “evil empire” responsible for the deaths of millions of its own citizens—ultimately proved to be a moral campaign that required great skill and endless fortitude.
Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush may have expedited and managed the Cold War’s end, but it was Harry Truman whom history called upon to engage the Soviet Union in a struggle for world supremacy during a time when most Americans were war-weary and exhausted by their role in resolving the endless tragedies of twentieth-century Europe. Truman knew ignoring Stalin’s expansion across Central Europe was as unwise as the appeasing of Hitler’s advances across that same continent a decade earlier; and yet, like his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt in the lead-up to World War II, Truman faced resistance from Republicans in Congress and progressives in his own party. Worse yet, many of Truman’s own allies considered the new president ill equipped to confront Soviet expansionism and lead America through the postwar crises it would soon confront.
The journalist and historian Herbert Agar called Truman a “strange little man,” and others shared that harsh assessment when the former Missouri senator assumed the presidency after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. Just twenty years earlier, the failed businessman had been defeated in his bid for reelection as county judge back home in Independence. The machine backing Truman thought so little of him that party bosses only allowed him to campaign for the United States Senate in 1934 after their first four choices refused to run. Even after his surprising win, the New York Times dismissed the incoming senator as a “rube.” Truman would spend the next six years absorbing a steady stream of abuse while championing FDR’s New Deal agenda, but his unremitting loyalty was not returned by the Democratic president, who refused to campaign for Truman’s reelection bid or even endorse him. The St. Louis Dispatch dismissed Truman as a “dead cock in the pit” in that reelection battle against a popular Missouri governor. But Harry Truman would run and win as an underdog again, and once more shock Washington insiders who shared the Dispatch’s grim take on his chances. That would be far from the last time the five-foot-nine-inch commoner with an explosive temper and poor eyesight exceeded all the low expectations placed upon his narrow shoulders.
Four years after refusing to endorse Truman’s reelection bid, a dying Roosevelt glumly selected the unrefined senator as his vice presidential pick in 1944. An FDR aide later admitted, “We chose Truman because all of us were tired.” Roosevelt’s own chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, brusquely asked his boss during those deliberations, “Who the hell is Harry Truman?” The media’s reaction was no less caustic. Time magazine responded to Truman’s nomination by describing him as “the mousy little man from Missouri.” Others mocked FDR’s VP choice as “the Second Missouri Compromise.”
Even after Harry S. Truman’s elevation to the White House, the slights continued. “To err is Truman” was a jab Republican and Democrats alike used to target a politician who, at times, seemed hopelessly overmatched by the challenges confronting his presidency. My own family, who suffered through the darkest days of the Great Depression in rural Georgia, survived those desperate times because of Roosevelt’s New Deal; a picture of FDR hung on my grandmother’s wall until she died at the age of ninety-three, a half a century after Roosevelt’s own death. And yet my mom remembered with a laugh her poor, rural family mocking the lack of abilities exhibited by fellow Baptist and Democrat Harry S. Truman. Like Washington elites and press barons in New York City, the Clarks of Dalton, Georgia, saw Truman as a country bumpkin unfit to lead the country, much less carry through on Roosevelt’s legacy.
When President Truman sought reelection in 1948, some Democrats even ridiculed their eventual nominee with signs declaring “I’m Just Mild About Harry.” But soon Truman would turn those mocking sneers into the fevered cries of “Give ’em Hell, Harry!” That bruising reelection campaign ended with the Chicago Tribune’s infamous headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” being printed as election-night experts declared the president a beaten man. Truman brushed aside those predictions and, instead of worrying about his political fate, went to bed. He would awaken the next morning to learn that once again, the failed haberdasher had proven his critics wrong, but this time in the most remarkable of ways; Harry S. Truman had somehow managed to pull off the greatest upset in the history of American politics. This modest man from Missouri had once again accomplished what he had done before as vice president, United States senator, and county judge: wildly exceeding the grim expectations laid upon him.
All too predictably, Truman’s reelection victory would soon be followed by four more years of bruising attacks from both the left and right. And after eight grueling years in the Oval Office, Harry Truman left Washington with the lowest approval ratings ever recorded for a president. Though few of his contemporaries appreciated Truman’s long list of history-bending achievements, the man who spent his life haunted by business failures, personal debt, and withering political criticism would return home to Independence, Missouri, as the most consequential foreign policy president of the past seventy-five years. Only his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, compares with Truman as commander in chief for shaping world events over the twentieth century.
The twelve presidents who followed the man from Independence inherited an international stage shaped by Truman’s policies. Joseph Stalin’s plans for expansion into Western Europe were undermined by containment, the Marshall Plan, the formation of NATO, the Berlin Airlift, and yes, the Truman Doctrine. The thirty-third president’s decision to draft the disgraced former president Herbert Hoover to lead America’s response to the European refugee crisis following World War II led to the two presidents saving more lives “than any two players on the world stage.” As Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy wrote in The Presidents Club, Truman and Hoover’s heroic work in feeding millions left starving across Europe after the war carried with it both a humanitarian and a strategic purpose. “Bare subsistence meant hunger, and hunger meant communism,” Hoover told Truman. The Democratic president agreed and used the powers of his office to bring an end to that epic suffering that was crippling Europe. Taken together, the words, actions, policies, and legislation of Truman saved millions of lives across Europe and assured that millions liberated from Hitler by Allied forces would remain free in the postwar world. Even the lands enslaved by Soviet communism after the war would eventually be liberated because alliances and international structures left in place by Truman, in time, would lead to the Berlin Wall’s collapse in 1989 and the Soviet Union’s demise.
Winston Churchill declared of Truman that he, “more than any other man . . . saved civilization.” And the legendary secretary of state Dean Acheson rightly praised this not-so-common man from Missouri for bringing about a “complete revolution in foreign policy.” He had confronted almost two centuries of Americans’ deep suspicion over US involvement in the affairs of other nations and had somehow forged a path that made it possible for America and its NATO allies to save Europe from the scourge of Stalinism. But America’s isolationist instinct had held sway from the Republic’s first days, and is again leading to America’s retreat across the globe.
In its time, it was the “Truman Doctrine” that finally brought one hundred and fifty years of American isolationism to an end.
Despite the sickening human and economic losses it suffered, the British Empire had still grown in the wake of the First World War. But while the United Kingdom held the future of Western civilization on its shoulders during the Battle of Britain in 1940 and 1941, its empire began to rapidly disintegrate after that war’s end. The heroic and lonely stand taken by the British under Winston Churchill against Hitler’s war machine wreathed that nation in everlasting glory, but exhausted its resources and its people. Their “finest hour” was followed by a dizzying decline, and their defense of freedom had broken Britain’s back to such an extent that it could no longer play the role of a history-shaping world power. Its sprawling possessions, on which the sun had famously never set, were now unaffordable indulgences. Instead, the United States would bear the burden formerly borne by Great Britain as a guarantor of world peace. Pax Britannica would now become Pax Americana, and those countries not formally a part of the empire, but still under British protection, would also be left to their own devices.
Greece was an example of the latter. An ancient land dotted by the landmarks of classical civilization and surrounded by the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean, Greece was of prime strategic importance in the great power struggles of the nineteenth century. For centuries a part of the Ottoman Empire, Greece won its independence with British help in 1832. Its proximity to the Black Sea made its control key to Russian access to the Mediterranean; the British both maintained a military presence and provided economic support.
Greece would remain a battleground in the standoff between the West and Soviet communism. The Germans invaded during World War II, and even before V-E Day in 1945, the country was ravaged by a civil war between government forces and communist insurgents.
Under the banner of the Truman Doctrine, the United States pledged to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This was a profound transformation of America’s conception of itself and its role in the world. Under the precepts of Washington’s Farewell Address, the United States would stand apart from international intrigue as an example for other nations to follow. But the principles of the Truman Doctrine transformed the US into an active participant in the political affairs of other endangered nations. A principle and worldview to which America had largely adhered since the presidency of George Washington was giving way to the realities of a shrinking world. The consequences for the United States and that world were vast.
America’s increased engagement with foreign crises and global challenges was anything but inevitable. It came about only because of the skill and determined leadership of a group of statesmen led by Truman, who believed history required them to create a new and more just world in America’s image.
But it was on Capitol Hill that the fate of Truman’s postwar vision rested. Members of the House and Senate, and especially the latter, would ultimately determine whether America would finally assume leadership of the free world. The Senate, long a bastion of isolationism, in which Washington’s Farewell Address has been read from the dais every year since 1862, was still alive with the spirit of Henry Cabot Lodge and those who had dashed President Woodrow Wilson’s dreams of a League of Nations following the First World War. But Truman was determined things would be different following World War II. This would happen, in large part, because a formerly dedicated isolationist would undergo one of the most far-reaching and consequential political conversions in American political history. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, would respond to Truman’s call and set about convincing his reluctant colleagues that America could no longer concern itself merely with its own affairs.
Then, as now, the government of the United States was restrained by Madisonian checks and balances meant to frustrate ambitious would-be autocrats while producing measured legislation. The separation of powers, carefully designed by the Founders to foster deliberation and avoid precipitate action, made it impossible to produce sweeping policy shifts without coordination and compromise between the executive and legislative branches. The legislative process has long been complex and arcane, with most bills destined for oblivion; the Senate has been especially notorious for its ponderousness. Each member has looked in the mirror to see a future president looking back, and this self-regard convinces too many that their every lengthy oration is necessary for the enlightenment of the republic. One senator can still hold up the process indefinitely until their particular concerns are addressed. The House could in theory act more swiftly, but its larger size means that even more personalities are involved. The reconciliation of differences between House and Senate bills add yet another step to this constitutioinally measured but politically tortuous process.
An added obstacle—one that was deplored by the Founders but that emerged practically before the ink of the Constitution was dry—is the scourge of partisan conflict. Just as Washington’s cabinet—and the Congress with which he contended—were divided between partisans of Great Britain and revolutionary France, twentieth-century Democrats and Republicans held profoundly different views about the role of government and the conduct of world affairs. The Republicans had evolved from their more pro-government origins into a party that believed in limiting the growth of the state. At least for the first half of the twentieth century, the party was also the natural home of isolationism. Suspicious of overseas engagements while begrudging their costs, most Republicans wished to restrain the international ambitions of Democratic presidents from Wilson to Roosevelt to Truman. In addition, Republicans were frustrated by the exceptionally long period of Democratic rule in Washington, resulting from Roosevelt’s unprecedented four election victories. Fortunately for Harry Truman, there were those who understood that the then traditional Republican approach to foreign policy was ill suited for an age when Stalin and the Soviets looked to expand their empire into Western Europe. Still, partisanship remained an enduring element of American politics, and the constant struggle for electoral advantage would influence—if not determine—the intense debate that followed.
The conditions that compelled the president to announce the Truman Doctrine were acute, and the roiling international scene would not afford Truman and his cabinet the luxury of time. Could the government, subject as it was to the desires of a traditionally isolationist population of one hundred million, respond quickly enough to face down the onrushing events that threatened to overtake America and its European allies? Would the United States move away from the Farewell Address, written by its most revered statesman when the country was still young, to a hastily conceived doctrine proclaimed by a man who not long before had been a failed haberdasher? How American government answered these questions during Harry Truman’s presidency would determine the future of Western civilization.