These books and archival records are a sampling of materials consulted by the author, and are recommended to those who wish to learn more about this critical period of American postwar history.
Biographies of Truman
The best-known and most readable biography of the thirty-third president is the Pulitzer Prize–winning Truman by David McCullough (1992). It paints an admiring and lavishly detailed portrait of its subject and won the man from Missouri a whole new legion of admirers. A less literary but more scholarly and balanced study is Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman by Alonzo Hamby (1995). The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World by A. J. Baime is a gripping account of Truman’s first steps onto the presidential stage, although the narrative necessarily ends long before the debut of the doctrine.
The Administration
The life and presidency of Harry S. Truman have been the subject of countless books and articles, but the Truman Doctrine has received relatively little attention from scholars. So crowded is the canvas of the immediate postwar years, with massive military demobilization, the Berlin Blockade and Airlift, the Marshall Plan, and countless other crises, that the doctrine sometimes gets lost in the background. However, those scholars who have examined the topic have done so thoughtfully and well, and readers wishing to learn more should explore the works mentioned below.
Perhaps the best and most exhaustive scholarly study of the doctrine is “A New Kind of War”: America’s Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece by Howard Jones (1989). Jones, a diplomatic historian of note, effectively illuminates the conflict in both Washington and the Balkans over confronting communist aggression.
For a detailed study of the crafting of Truman’s speech, see Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine: The Cold War Call to Arms, by Denise M. Bostdorff (2008).
A number of the participants in this historical drama left compelling memoirs that were valuable sources in the crafting of this narrative. The most immediate and compelling are those of State Department official Joseph M. Jones, a participant in the proceedings. His Fifteen Weeks: February 21–June 5, 1947 (1955) vividly conveys the determination of Dean Acheson and his team to act swiftly in response to the crisis and provides important detail and chronology. Acheson’s own memoir, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969) is like the man himself: mordant, witty, and admiring of Truman. The book is a wonderful portrait of a lost age of American diplomacy. (For a more objective look at Acheson, consult Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War by Robert L. Beisner [2006].) Finally, Truman’s own account of his time in office, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman, Volume 2: Years of Trial and Hope is a useful, sometimes pungent record of his thoughts and actions during those fateful weeks in 1947.
The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), the official history of American diplomacy published by the Office of the Historian at the Department of State, is an astonishing compendium of documents begun in 1861. Freely available online, it allows the researcher superb insights into the thinking and actions of policy makers.
Various newspaper archives, especially that of the New York Times, provide contemporary and often colorful observations. Thankfully, the days of scrolling through illegible microfilm are mostly over, and the online Times archive, available by subscription, is compendious and easily searchable.
Congress
For the legislative history of the Truman Doctrine, some of the sources above are helpful, but most valuable of all is the Congressional Record, which first appeared in 1873. A detailed record of deliberations on the House and Senate floors, and in committees, it is a priceless resource. Unfortunately, the years covered in this book are not freely available online and must be accessed either through subscription or at research libraries. The author has also relied upon his own experience as a member of the House of Representatives for an insight into the congressional debates on the doctrine.
The sometimes troubled collaboration between Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg is thoughtfully explored by Lawrence J. Haas in his Harry & Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World (2016). For more about Senator Robert A. Taft and his worldview, consult Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (1972).
The Greek Civil War
The classic English-language account of the Greek Civil War is The Struggle for Greece: 1941–1949 by C. M. Woodhouse (1976). A veteran of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), Woodhouse helped organize Greek resistance forces during the German occupation, and later served as a Conservative member of Parliament and a member of the House of Lords. His experience on the ground gave him a unique insight into the complexity of the bitter Greek conflict. Greece, the Decade of War: Occupation, Resistance and Civil War by David Brewer (2016) is a more recent, scholarly study based on new evidence. Another important work is An International Civil War: Greece, 1943–1949 by the late André Gerolymatos (2016), who was a native of Greece and professor of history at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
Crete: The Battle and the Resistance by Antony Beevor (1991) includes a vivid and detailed narrative of the German invasion of Greece. For Churchill’s Christmas visit to Athens in 1944, see Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts (2018), and Winston Churchill: Road to Victory: 1941–1945 (1986), volume 7 of the official biography by Sir Martin Gilbert.