The First Cold Warrior

Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism

Elizabeth Edwards Spalding

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780813138398
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

From the first days of his unexpected presidency in April 1945 through the landmark NSC 68 of 1950, Harry Truman was central to the formation of America's grand strategy during the Cold War and the subsequent remaking of U.S. foreign policy. Others are frequently associated with the terminology of and responses to the perceived global Communist threat after the Second World War: Walter Lippmann popularized the term "cold war, " and George F. Kennan first used the word "containment" in a strategic sense. Although Kennan, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall have been seen as the most influential architects of American Cold War foreign policy, The First Cold Warrior draws on archives and other primary sources to demonstrate that Harry Truman was the key decision maker in the critical period between 1945 and 1950. In a significant reassessment of the thirty-third president and his political beliefs, Elizabeth Edwards Spalding contends that it was Truman himself who defined and articulated the theoretical underpinnings of containment. His practical leadership style was characterized by policies and institutions such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Berlin airlift, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Council. Part of Truman's unique approach—shaped by his religious faith and dedication to anti-communism—was to emphasize the importance of free peoples, democratic institutions, and sovereign nations. With these values, he fashioned a new liberal internationalism, distinct from both Woodrow Wilson's progressive internationalism and Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberal pragmatism, which still shapes our politics. Truman deserves greater credit for understanding the challenges of his time and for being America's first cold warrior. This reconsideration of Truman's overlooked statesmanship provides a model for interpreting the international crises facing the United States in this new era of ideological conflict.

1

“I’m tired babying the Soviets”

The Beginnings of
Truman’s Internationalism

When Harry Truman became president in April 1945, liberal internationalism was little more than an intellectual concept and by no means a common expression. For the first part of the twentieth century, politicians spoke in terms of being nationalists or internationalists, but they tended not to add modifiers such as liberal, conservative, or progressive. As World War II came to a close, the two great presidential expositors of internationalism—Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt—were gone, but their presence still dominated American politics. Facing a global conflict with the Soviet Union, an ally during the Second World War, Truman could have taken up the mantle of either one of these leaders; he could have pursued a fusion of their approaches, much as Secretary of State James Byrnes advocated in 1945 and 1946. But Truman, while admiring his predecessors, chose neither Wilson nor FDR nor a combination of their international theories as his model. Instead, he fashioned a unique postwar liberal internationalism that applied broadly held domestic principles to the nation’s foreign policy. It was inclusive, bipartisan, and informed by the ideals of the United States rather than a particular philosophy of international relations or the agenda of a political party. Built on a foundation of strength and an understanding of freedom, this liberal internationalism first found voice in Truman’s policies and statements toward the Soviet Union on such topics as Trieste, Iran, and Berlin.

Making the World Safe for Democracy

When he was twenty-eight years old, Harry Truman followed with interest the 1912 Democratic Party convention, which took many days and ballots to determine a presidential nominee. Although initially for native Missourian and representative Champ Clark, Truman and his father came to favor New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson. It was renowned Populist William Jennings Bryan’s endorsement of Wilson that changed the Truman men’s minds.¹ In his early thirties, Truman answered President Wilson’s call to fight in World War I—finagling his way out of several eye exams in order to be accepted by the military—not only because of his patriotism but also to test himself under the rigors and deprivations of war. From the beginning and, eventually, through his command of a field artillery battery, he excelled at both his self-imposed trial of character and the combat-tested challenge of leadership. In addition to the discipline and habits of the military life, he learned how to direct people of different minds and diverse backgrounds, by both decision and example.² Captain Truman served as an officer in the army reserves for over thirty years, retiring in 1945 as a full colonel when he became the nation’s commander in chief. His men respected and admired him during the war and after, actively supporting him as captain, judge, senator, and president; for his part, Truman always remained close to his battery through correspondence and in person.

Truman carried away from the Great War and its immediate aftermath a deeper understanding of world politics. He liked to say that America owed it to the Marquis de Lafayette, who had crossed the Atlantic to serve under General George Washington in the Revolutionary War, to help the French fight the Germans. Although he perceived that European politics and wars derived from beliefs and customs other than those of the American experience, Truman held that the United States could not retreat from the world arena. In his estimation, World War I had been America’s initiation into world leadership. In explaining the First World War and the interwar period, he eschewed isolationism, which, he believed, contributed to the Second World War. During his senatorial and presidential years, he repeatedly exhorted the American people and the U.S. Congress to exercise the global leadership they had refused to assume in 1919.

Truman did not refer much to Wilson in his World War I letters to his future wife, Bess, noting in 1919 that he—and “every A.E.F. [American Expeditionary Force] man feels the same way”—wanted to come home after helping to beat the Germans and did not “give a whoop” about either the League of Nations or the situation in Russia.³ In time and with distance from his fighting days, he wrote in 1954 that he “became one of [Wilson’s] great admirers” after the 1912 nomination and was pleased with his reelection in 1916; in 1953, Truman placed Wilson in company with Buddha, Jesus, Cincinnatus, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln as makers of history; after seventy-five historians ranked American presidents in a 1962 poll in Time magazine, Truman reordered the first five from Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson to Washington, Jefferson, Wilson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.⁴ Despite such laudatory comparisons, Truman’s internationalism differed significantly from that of Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson’s worldview stressed the primacy of peace as the fulfillment of progressive history. In 1916, the same year that he campaigned for reelection on the theme that he kept the United States out of war, Wilson focused on the world after the Great War and urged that “we must move forward to the thought of the modern world, the thought of which peace is the very atmosphere.” After adding that “[o]ur interest is only in peace and its future guarantees,” he expressed “the confidence I feel that the world is even now upon the eve of a great consummation,” which would result not only in some sort of international security organization but also in coercion being put only “to the service of a common order, a common justice, and a common peace.” Wilson based these comments on the proposition that “[t]he interests of all nations are our own also.” In making all states’ interests interchangeable, he acknowledged the rights of individual peoples and nations and of small states, but emphasized that the world had an overarching right, specifically to be free from “every disturbance of its peace that has its origin in aggression and disregard of the rights of peoples and nations.”⁵

To secure the primacy of peace, Wilson called for “peace without victory” in 1917, several months before the United States entered World War I. To him, this memorable phrase meant that only a postwar “peace between equals” would “win the approval of mankind” and last. While arguing that the United States and the other peoples of the New World would have a special role in guaranteeing peace and justice, Wilson contended that the “organized major force of mankind,” seemingly in the form of a global policeman and an all-encompassing concert of power, was the key to an enduring peace. Rejecting the mechanisms of realpolitik, he proposed new procedures in another one of his most famous phrases: “There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” In fact, Wilson took the opportunity to repudiate the main elements of international relations before the Great War, such as entangling alliances and hegemony, and to advance instead self-determination, freedom of the seas, and military power used only as a tool to maintain order. Although he stressed that his new procedures and processes of peace were essential, he believed that “[t]he right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace.” Wilson knew that he was advocating a different way of engaging in world politics, but submitted its principles were both American and “forward looking,” “modern,” and “enlightened.”⁶

“We are at the beginning of an age,” Wilson said in presenting the declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, “in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.” Equating progress with his view of civilization (and arguing that civilization hung in the balance in the war), he planted the seeds for a League of Nations by emphasizing that a “steadfast concert for peace” could only be maintained by a partnership of democratic nations. “The world,” he proclaimed, “must be made safe for democracy.”⁷

In the Fourteen Points speech of January 1918, Wilson set forth the “processes of peace” by which all peoples and nations, Germany included, would take their place in “the new world in which we now live.” Once more, he spurned what he saw as old ways, such as conquest, aggrandizement, and secret covenants, and praised the acceptance of new methods “now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow now or at any other time the objects it has in view.”⁸ Following these themes in the presentation of the Covenant of the League of Nations in February 1919, Wilson termed the covenant a “belated document” and remarked that “the conscience of the world has long been prepared to express itself in some such way.” In the end, “the moral force of the public opinion of the world”—with armed force in the background as a last resort—would secure and sustain peace.⁹ Wilson viewed himself as specially equipped, if not chosen, to help others see that politics could now operate according to an open and democratic process and that the power politics of realism had given way to the inevitable forces of history.¹⁰

Woodrow Wilson pursued what many have termed liberal internationalism, but what should more accurately be termed progressive internationalism.¹¹ By the end of World War I, he viewed democracy and freedom ultimately as tools to obtain an organized peace through the vehicle of the League of Nations. Wilson’s progressive internationalism inhered in his Presbyterianism, the childhood impression the Civil War left on him, his belief in democracy, his conviction that the United States had a special role in world politics, and his aspirations to create a new world order. The last was inspired, in part, by Wilson’s correspondence and interaction with the progressive leaders of his day, who renounced militarism, imperialism, and balance of power politics. In foreign policy and international relations, Wilson wanted a community of power and nations.

Truman did not speak in such language, although he too rejected militarism, imperialism, and balance of power politics as unethical and outdated. In his political thought, free peoples and a community of free nations were the goals. In place of Wilson’s expectations for collective security through a single international organization, Truman placed his trust in collective defense, most notably in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an arrangement that would have been impossible and illegal in Wilson’s world under the League of Nations. He concluded that international organizations could achieve good global effects, but, unlike Wilson, he did not predict universal results. Truman’s liberal internationalism relied on the combined strength of the free nations of the world—led by the United States—to defend and further freedom, promote justice and order, and result in peace of a durable sort. Wilson’s progressive internationalism assumed that peace was inevitable and the world community of nations would practice moderation, seek peace and justice, and be able to thwart the actions of potential aggressor states through the strength of their moral power and, only as a last resort, their military power. Truman was attracted to Wilson’s affirmation of the need for the United States to be involved in world politics and his belief in international organization. Any other Wilsonian influence on Truman was deflected to a large extent by the realities of the Cold War.¹²

Where Truman might be the most indebted to Wilson is in the latter’s view of the executive power in foreign affairs, even though it is unclear whether Truman (like other modern presidents) fully grasped this legacy. In his 1911 Constitutional Government in the United States, Wilson argued for the president’s “control, which is very absolute, of the foreign relations of the nations,” and added that the “initiative in foreign affairs, which the President possesses without any restriction whatever, is virtually the power to control them absolutely.” And although Americans (including most earlier presidents) were only beginning to regard the presidency in this light, it would increasingly be the case that the office and its inhabitant would be viewed, for all intents and purposes, as absolute in foreign policy. Because “it has risen to the first rank in power and resources,” wrote Wilson, the United States “can never hide our President again as a mere domestic officer.”¹³ While also believing in a strong presidency and acting with dispatch and boldness in the Korean War, Truman never echoed Wilson’s general comments about the virtual absolute primacy of the president in international relations, and he chose as a matter of course to involve Congress in foreign policymaking such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO.

To the Presidency

Once he was elected in 1934 to represent Missouri in the U.S. Senate, Truman consistently articulated his belief that tyranny must be defeated in world politics and that a real peace required strength, freedom, and international commitment. As early as the latter part of 1937, he was dissatisfied with the policies of neutrality, and, in 1939, he wanted American legislation revised in order to permit arms and munitions aid to Great Britain; in 1941, he was one of the few Democrats who joined Republicans in an effort to repeal all neutrality provisions. In his September 1939 letters to Bess, Truman expressed his concern that, if not stopped, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would take over Europe, defeat France and England, and then “we’ll have a Nazi, or nasty, world.”¹⁴ He explained to a Missouri audience in October that the current neutrality policy penalized American allies because “we should not help the thugs among nations by refusing to sell arms to our friends.”¹⁵ While he hoped that the United States might be able to escape entry into the Second World War, he believed that the country could not sit by idly and permit a worldwide catastrophe.

Truman did not suffer tyrants gladly. In October 1939, he said that the “three dictators, Russian, German, and Italian,” had returned to “a code little short of cave-man savagery,” and that he saw their exploitation of “this magnificent machine age of ours” as an effort to destroy civilization. Without a moral reawakening, he thought another dark age was possible.¹⁶ His most controversial public remark on the subject of despotic aggression came after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them think anything of their pledged word.”¹⁷ Truman’s immediate criticism of the two powers stemmed from his understanding of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the nonaggression treaty between the USSR and Germany. While recognizing that the United States had to accept the Soviet Union as an ally against Hitler, Truman did not think that the Kremlin could be trusted as a friend.

In aiming to change matters and prepare the United States for war, Senator Truman was practical. Having been reelected in 1940 without FDR’s endorsement (and having supported favorite-son candidate Missouri Senator Bennett Clark for the Democratic presidential nomination), Truman returned to the Senate with a reputation as an anti-Roosevelt Democrat.¹⁸ In summer 1940, he had noticed that the American defense buildup was handicapped by wasteful expenditures and the failure ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “I’m tired babying the Soviets”
• 2. “The two giant marauders, war and tyranny”
• 3. “A growing feeling of certainty in the rightness of our step”
• 4. “A noble page in world annals”
• 5. “Bonds far greater than those of mere ideology”
• 6. “The great principles of human freedom and justice”
• 7. “Peace with freedom and justice cannot be bought cheaply”
• 8. “To assure the integrity and vitality of our free society”
• 9. “We must put on the armor of God”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index