Table Of ContentPOLITICS AND POLICIES
OF THE
TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION
Politics and
Policies o f
the Truman
Administration
Edited with an Introduction
by
BARTON J. BERNSTEIN
CHICAGO
QUADRANGLE BOOKS
1970
POLITICS AND POLICIES OF THE TRUMAN AD
MINISTRATION. Copyright © 1970 by Quadrangle
Books, Inc. All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
For information, address the publishers at 12 East Dela
ware Place, Chicago 60611. Manufactured in the United
States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada
by Burns and MacEachern Ltd., Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-78302
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 3
American Foreign Policy and the Origins of the Cold War
BY BARTON J. BERNSTEIN ................................................................................
The Quest for Peace and Prosperity: International Trade,
Communism, and the Marshall Plan
BY THOMAS G. PATERSON ....................................................................................... 78
America and the German “Problem” 1945-1949
BY LLOYD C. GARDNER ............................................................................................r.113-
The Cold War Comes to Latin America
BY DAVID GREEN .......................................................................................................tJAfr
The Rhetoric of Politics: Foreign Policy, Internal Security,
and Domestic Politics in the Truman Era, 1945-1950
BY ATHAN THEOHARIS ...............................................................................................196
The Escalation of the Loyalty Program
BY ATHAN THEOHARIS ...............................................................................................242
The Ambiguous Legacy: The Truman Administration and
Civil Rights (
BY BARTON J. BERNSTEIN ............................................................................\ v)v269’
315
INDEX
POLITICS AND POLICIES
OF THE
TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION
Introduction
As th e m em ories of deep freezes, Russian spies, and foreign
wars have faded, Americans have come to express grudging
respect for Harry S. Truman and the accomplishments of his
administration. Many scholars have ranked him as a “near great”
President, and a few have placed him among the “great.” Judg
ing him in part by his expansion of presidential power and his
extension of the nation’s influence abroad, they have found much
to applaud in his administration. As admirers of the liberal tra
dition, they praise him for continuing the New Deal program
and seeking to expand its benefits through his own Fair Deal.
Sharing the consensus on Soviet responsibility for the Cold War,
they endorse his foreign policy, seeing his resistance to the Soviet
“threat” as visionary and courageous. For these historians, Tru
man’s postwar administration cast off the shackles of American
innocence and moved to a wise and necessary foreign policy.
His intervention in Korea, his determined efforts to halt com
munism elsewhere, and his containment policy in Europe—the
Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and n ato —all command
their respect.
In the late forties and early fifties, politicians and scholars
sometimes challenged this emerging interpretation. Most dis-
3
4 Introduction
senters questioned the administrations will or its ability to resist
communism, and criticized the government for belated and timid
responses to the Soviet “menace.” Others, like Walter Lippmann
and George Kennan, lamented the excessive moralism and legal
ism of American policy-makers, their loss of faith in traditional
diplomacy, their unwillingness to seek a relaxation of Cold War
antagonisms, and their inability to define and act upon the na
tional interest. A few scholars, most notably William Appleman
Williams, questioned the emerging consensus from a different
and surprising perspective. Moving beyond the naive criticisms
of American Cold War policies by Henry Wallace and Wilsonian
internationalists, Williams explained the Cold War not by Soviet
malevolence but by American ideology, which he traced back to
the nineteenth century. Not the innocence of American policy
makers but their conception of the national interest produced
the Cold War. The national interest, for these policy-makers,
depended upon an expanding domestic economy which required
equal access to international markets and the relaxation of trade
barriers (the Open Door). By their analysis, economies which
moved to bilateral trading, or revolutions which overturned cap
italism, were a menace to the international order, upon which
American prosperity, as well as domestic liberties, seemed to
depend.
Initially, in American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 (1952),
and then more fully in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
(1959, rev. ed., 1962), Williams emphasized that American pol
icy-makers had sought to impose upon the postwar world their
own design for peace and prosperity. America’s Open Door pol
icy, he argued, had directly threatened Russian security, pro
voking her fears of a renewed cordon sanitaire. The American
struggle to roll back Soviet influence, he stressed, was not a
response to feared aggression but part of the larger strategy of
trying to create a world in which the American political economy
could survive. Williams denied that Russia was a military threat
to the United States or Western Europe, pointing out that the
United States, not Russia, was the dominant military power in
the postwar years.
Often ignored or rejected at first, the Tragedy has won great
