How Harry Truman Sold the Truman Doctrine and Changed American Foreign Policy

President Harry Truman with the help of key members of his administration transformed America’s foreign policy through superb salesmanship laden with emotional appeals to the nation’s sense of moral responsibility and collective ego. His speech to Congress in 1947 urging aid to Greece and Turkey subtly marked the most sweeping pronouncement ever of an American foreign policy shift. It turned America into an interventionist power and solidified the Cold War status that had quickly developed after World War II. 

By painting the global scene as a struggle between good and evil—liberty and tyranny—and appealing to American traditions and governing principles, Truman’s administration and its allies in the media convinced the Republican Congress and the majority of the public that if the United States did not counter tyranny abroad it would have to eventually fight it at home. While the voices of opposition were loud and many, the interventionists carried the day and succeeded in changing the way the U.S. was perceived throughout the world and the way Americans viewed their own role in global affairs.

The wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the U.S. had always been fragile because of the different economic systems that drove an ideological wedge between the two. The Soviets were convinced that capitalist countries were inherently imperialistic and, therefore, mistrusted the United States and the Western allies.[1]

The event that convinced many in the U.S. government that the Soviets were intent on conquering the nations of Eastern Europe occurred on July 31, 1944, when the Red Army stood by on the outskirts of Warsaw while the German occupiers in the city massacred the Polish resistance.[2]  This was interpreted as a convenient way for the Soviets to avoid having to deal with a powerful non-communist faction once Poland was liberated. 

This and other actions on the part of the Red Army and the Soviet government convinced the American Ambassador to the USSR, Averill Harriman, that if the U.S. did not stand up to the Soviets, they would become a world bully.[3] After the war ended, diplomatic relations with the Soviets deteriorated, as the USSR suppressed non-communist factions in Eastern Europe.

Churchill feared that if American troops left Western Europe, a “steel curtain” would fall over it just as was happening in Eastern Europe. Stalin would replace Hitler, and the Soviet NKVD would replace the Gestapo.[4] 

But to the consternation of both Churchill and his successor Prime Minister Clement Atlee, Americans as of yet did not share their concerns and still viewed the Soviet Union as an ally. Influenced by the pro-Soviet American media, the American people, according to a Princeton poll taken in May 1945, believed the U.S. should continue close cooperation with both the U.K. and the U.S.S.R. after the war.[5] 

This desire to cooperate, however, did not extend to sharing America’s newfound weapon with her allies. Two polls, one in August and another in November of 1945, showed that 70 percent of the American people opposed turning over nuclear weapons to the United Nations.[6] 

Ignoring the advice of atomic scientists, who informed him that Russia could build a bomb within five years, Truman listened to his advisors, who predicted U.S. atomic monopoly could last two decades, and that the U.S.S.R. had no uranium with which to build a bomb. Truman, therefore, announced on October 8, 1945, that the U.S. would maintain its atomic monopoly.[7]

Churchill also argued against turning atomic energy over to the UN, but only because he believed that the English-speaking nations of the world should retain control of it. Many in the British government also began to see the U.S. as its lifeline to maintain its empire and world dominance. 

At a speech in Fulton, Missouri, with Truman sitting on the podium behind him, Churchill dropped what was at the time a rhetorical bombshell in claiming “an iron curtain” had descended across Europe with the Soviets’ domination of Eastern Europe. He believed that only an Anglo alliance could halt the march of Soviet aggression.[8] Stalin responded by calling Churchill a warmonger and saying he was no better than Hitler.[9]

Most Americans, however, were leery of an alliance with an imperial power, regardless of whether the people of that empire spoke English. Despite Churchill’s wartime popularity, the reaction in the U.S. was mostly negative. On March 17, Irish-descended Secretary of State James Byrnes of South Carolina told the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick that he rejected any notion of a special relationship with Great Britain.[10]

Despite the initial public grumbling, Churchill’s speech had its intended effect. A poll taken two weeks after the speech showed that 60 percent of Americans felt that the U.S. was “too soft in its policy toward Russia.”[11]

Meanwhile, fear that the U.S.S.R. would become a bully began to materialize with the Soviets’ treatment of Iran and Turkey. The Iranians accused the Russians at the UN of instigating an independence revolt in Azerbaijan. When the Russians sought to indict the British for their continued military presence in Greece, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin pointed out that there is a great deal of difference in stationing troops in a country against its will—as in Iran—as opposed to stationing them there with the government’s consent—as in Greece.[12] 

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, meanwhile, had been using the Soviet-Turkish Pact of Friendship, which was due for renewal, to blackmail Ankara into allowing Russia joint-control of the Black Sea Straits. U.S. ambassador Edwin C. Wilson warned that Turkey’s collapse would lead to continued Soviet encroachments. The Soviets ceased their campaign of intimidation against Turkey only when the U.S. Navy sent a task force to Istanbul.[13]

Fear of Soviet domination of the Middle East intensified when on February 21, 1947, the British embassy informed the U.S. State Department that it would no longer be able to provide financial assistance to the governments of Greece and Turkey.[14] In Greece, like China, there had been two factions opposing the occupying armies, during the war. 

Once the war ended, the capitalist forces gained control of the country with British support while the communists began a guerrilla war, exasperating the already weakened Greek economy. The Greek army numbered 115,000 regulars and 35,000 gendarmes while the Communist army, led by Markos Vafiadis, could not have had more than 13,000. Despite this numerical superiority, the Greek army was poorly trained, poorly equipped, and unfamiliar with guerrilla tactics. The morale of the Greek people was largely held intact by the presence of a few thousand British troops in the belief that if things got out of hand, more Brits would come.[15]

A special economic mission, commissioned by Truman, reported that the Greek economy was a disaster, inflation was abysmal, and corruption was rampant. The Greek government, it reported, was “completely reactionary … incredibly weak, stupid and venal.”[16]  Even Truman’s interventionist Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson described Greek premier Constantine Tsaldaris as a “weak, pleasant, but silly man,” who led an expansionist and spendthrift government.

Nevertheless, Americans continued shipping military supplies to Turkey, Greece, and Iran in line with British desires with the implicit understanding that U.S. troops would intervene in any of those countries if necessary. 

Secretary of the Navy James Forestal had the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt sent to Athens’ port of Piraeus, and, on September 30, announced the establishment of a permanent U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean. U.S. ambassador in Athens, Lincoln McVeigh pushed for a public declaration against “foreign encroachment” threatening Greece’s “independence and integrity.” By December, Secretary of State Byrnes was already referring to Greece and Turkey as U.S. “outposts.”[17]

In the spring of 1947, Truman was up against a Republican Congress that before the war had supported non-intervention in foreign affairs. It also wanted to slash taxes by a fifth and his budget by a sixth. The Republicans were also not eager to help Britain maintain its empire, and the Democrats were not much friendlier to that idea. 

The administration believed that such aid would require an ideological shift, not only in Congress but in the American people as a whole. Acheson viewed the world from a power politics perspective that would define U.S. foreign policy during most of the Cold War and told journalist Louis Fischer, during a Metropolitan Club lunch, on February 24, 1947, that “only two powers” remained. “The British are finished,” he flatly stated. “They are through.”[18]

Stalin’s retreat under U.S. pressure in Iran and Turkey emboldened the administration to believe that force worked with the Soviets.[19] Truman convened a meeting with key members of the Senate and House of Representatives with the hope of convincing them of the need to offer substantial financial and military aid to Greece and Turkey. 

However, Truman’s presentation fell flat, prompting a Senator to ask why the U.S. should be in the business of pulling British chestnuts out of the fire. Newly-confirmed Secretary of State George Marshall tried his hand but also failed to draw the desired response from the tight-fisted Congressmen. [20] 

It fell to Acheson to save the day for the administration and persuade those present that Greece was of vital strategic importance. Using his understanding of their fear and hatred of communism, he painted the divide between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. as that between Rome and Carthage. He reinforced the already well-known evils of communism to the Congressmen and explained that the loss of Greece and Turkey could open up all of the Middle East to the Soviet Union. This would cause an “infection” that would spread “to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe.” Winning one toss of the dice would be a terrific victory for communism and only the U.S. was in a position to break up the play. If the Soviets succeeded in winning Greece and Turkey, U.S. security and “freedom itself” would be threatened.

After a long silence, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—who before the war had been a strong non-interventionist—told Truman, “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.”[21]

Vandenberg’s main concern with the executive branch was the seeming lack of a clear strategy from the Democratic executive. Acheson had relieved all such worries with his clear explanation of the challenge and the needed response.

Acheson assured interventionist Canadian ambassador Hume Wrong that “bold action” would overcome isolationist tendencies, and the U.S. would “execute her full responsibilities as the strongest Power in the world.” Foreign policy would now change “from top to bottom.” The people would rise like a “trout to a fly” to “pursue a vigorous 100 percent American foreign policy, which would combat on a world scale the spread of Communism.”[22] 

Acheson and the other chief architects of his foreign policy knew from the experience of getting the British loan passed that the way to get what they wanted from Republicans was by using anti-communist arguments rather than “nuanced economic appeals.”[23]

The problem, however, was that the Greeks and Turks had not yet requested aid. The State Department solved this by sending those nations’ embassies drafts for the requests they should make. Both governments made the expected requests, with the Greeks emphasizing war damage and humanitarian needs rather than any contest with communism. 

Acheson had won Congressional leaders over with his anti-communist appeal and privately opined that Truman’s speech to Congress, urging the aid, would signify that “we were entering an adversary relationship” with Moscow. 

But, the president had no intention of issuing any condemnation of the USSR or of communism in front of Congress and the American people. It would be much better to maintain the high ground and sound altruistic with no intention of dividing the wartime alliance. 

Acheson told the assistants in his office, who were responsible for framing Truman’s speech to Congress, that the president should speak of waging a “global struggle between freedom and totalitarianism” and emphasize the protection of “individual liberty” and “democracy everywhere in the world.” He added, “If F.D.R. were alive I think I know what he’d do. He would make a statement of global policy but confine his request for money right now to Greece and Turkey.”[24] It was to be understood that helping Greece and Turkey was not mere “vague do-goodism”, but was vital to protecting Americans’ way of life. It was agreed upon not to mention the Soviet Union in the speech.[25]

In his message to Congress, Truman warned that “confusion and disorder might spread throughout the entire Middle East.” No democratic country, including the United States, could be safe in a world dominated by dictatorships. He framed the aid as an investment to ensure the investment of World War II would not be in vain and concluded that the national interest demanded that the policy of the U.S. should be to protect free peoples around the world in the resistance of attempted subjugation by armed minority factions or outside forces.[26][27] 

This promised commitment that became known as the Truman Doctrine and marked the first time that the United States became involved with the internal affairs of a European nation during peacetime.

The pervading belief among the administration that Stalin was funding the Greek guerillas was unfounded and at odds with logical strategy. Stalin was loathe to provide any support to the Greek communists for fear of arousing American intervention in the region. Charles Woodhouse, a British observer in Greece and author of several books on the subject, insisted that Stalin never seriously considered aiding the communist guerrillas. Rather, it had been Yugoslavia’s rogue communist leader Josep Tito who had been supplying the rebels with arms, hoping to expand his influence in the region.[28] In fact, when it became obvious that the communists would not win after the U.S. began pouring in aid, Stalin instructed Tito to stop his support for the rebels, a wish that the independent-minded Tito ignored.[29] 

But Truman’s speech covered all his bases. Even if it had been proven beyond a doubt that the USSR had nothing to do with the communist insurgents in Greece, the “armed minorities” plank of the Truman Doctrine took care of that nicely. Even if it was a domestic insurgency, the U.S. still had a license to intervene because of the global war against spreading dictatorships.

The New York Times declared Truman’s speech as the end of the “epoch of isolation” and welcomed “an epoch of American responsibility.” Time and Newsweek also praised the president’s pledge to defend freedom throughout the world. 

Nevertheless, despite the administration’s intense public relations campaign, the Doctrine faced fierce criticism from both the left and right, and the administration had to defend itself against both sides, using their opposition’s talking points.[30] On the left, The Nation and the New Republic joined Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace in criticizing the president for a policy that could lead to war with the Soviet Union. On the right, Walter Lippmann supported assistance measures to Greece but believed it should have gone through the UN.[31] 

Most Americans took this conservative position regarding the aid. Fifty-six percent of the American people polled on the issue, in 1947, held Lippmann’s view, as opposed to only 25 percent who supported unilateral intervention in Greece.[32] The bill’s authors no doubt kept this in mind when they included the pro-UN statement in the bill: “Whereas the furnishing of such assistance to Greece and Turkey by the United States will contribute to the freedom and independence of all members of the United Nations in conformity with the principles and purposes of the Charter…”[33]

To achieve passage, the administration and its Congressional supporters lobbied journalists, commentators and public figures to support the aid package. Acheson voiced his support for intervention in Greece based on its ancient democratic history, thereby creating an emotional link between the small Mediterranean nation and 20th century Americans. But Greece was ruled by a corrupt monarchy, causing many senators to hesitate at the notion of giving aid to such a country in the name of democracy. Many of them insisted that any U.S. aid be limited to humanitarianism.[34]

Still, Acheson was not sowing in infertile ground, and the ideological appeal was by far the most successful tactic employed by the Truman administration, because it appealed to the American people’s ego. This was after all the time of “America Triumphant.”[35]  America’s sons had just come back from defeating fascism abroad, her economy was booming, and she was the sole possessor of the atomic bomb. She was the world’s undisputed superpower and had essentially taken the place of Great Britain in world dominance and enforcer of international order and stability through global hegemony. The Truman Doctrine was a strong appeal to that feeling of paternalism.

But the agreement to present the package in sharp ideological terms, appealing to the American people’s love of individual liberty and democracy, was by no means unanimous. Republican Congressman Francis H. Case, who had supported the bill, wrote to the president warning that no country is “wise or rich enough to run the rest of the world.”[36] 

Diplomat George Kennan, known for his influential “Long Telegram,” in which he argued for containment of the Soviet Union, strongly opposed pitching the aid package in moralistic terms. He believed the U.S. should take a tough stand against Soviet expansion and even favored economic aid to Greece. But in a speech to the National War College in Washington, he called the president’s speech “grandiose” and bulging with commitments that the nation could not and should not honor.[37] 

Kennan was not comfortable with applying universalist rhetoric to a particular situation with clearly defined goals in order to win over the simple and the ideologues. He did believe it was the government’s responsibility to educate the masses, many of whom suffered from a lack of mental development. But there was a difference between education and exaggerated distortion, and he felt that Truman’s speech to Congress had crossed that line. He simply did not believe it was possible “to describe in a few pages a program designed to achieve U.S. objectives with respect to the USSR”[38]

The failure of the policy’s opponents to produce a solid, consistent, and eloquent opposition was one of the main reasons for which the Truman Doctrine went smoothly into effect. Republican Senator Robert Taft was the leading anti-interventionist voice in Congress. He believed that even if all of Europe were to fall to communism America would not be threatened and that only through over-extending the nation’s resources could America be destroyed. However, he never succeeded in transforming his beliefs into a coherent foreign policy, which hurt not only his position but his chances of becoming president.[39]

The most peculiar and, by far, most radical aspect of the Truman Doctrine was that it did not limit the possibility of U.S. intervention to instances of communist aggression. While the case in point dealt with internal communist insurrection, and it was widely understood to be an anti-communist doctrine, Truman spoke more broadly about opposing totalitarianism in general and did not even specify the prerequisite that the beleaguered nation ask for U.S. assistance.[40] 

This posed the possibility that the U.S. could—and would—intervene militarily in another country, even if it meant moving in against the will of that country’s people or its government in order to put down an external or internal development that Washington perceived to threaten said country. This stretched America’s foreign policy beyond the bounds of containment of the Soviet Union and put the American government—and not the UN—in the place of judge, jury, and executioner of tyrants around the world. It also meant that American taxpayers would now bear the brunt of this crusade while their sons, brothers, and fathers died for it.

In hindsight, it is clear that the Doctrine’s authors did not intend it to be a foreign policy doctrine but a political means to gain support for the immediate ends of providing military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. Nevertheless, the tactics to which Truman and Acheson resorted to sell the policy to Congress and the American people cemented the Doctrine as the major step in transforming the U.S. from an isolationist to an interventionist power—or in the minds’ of Wilsonian interventionists: a worldwide defender of freedom and democracy. 

Under Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Truman Doctrine was significantly mellowed. Future presidents, despite loose adherence to the principles behind the Doctrine, would always have to be selective in its application for lack of unlimited funds and manpower. But the Truman vision remained alive and well through subsequent administrations and loosely governs the bipartisan consensus on American foreign policy today.[41] 

Truman and Acheson correctly understood that in order to sell a product to a skeptical buyer, a salesman must appeal to ego, fear, and passions. Their salesmanship garnered enough public support to fundamentally change American foreign policy. As the slim numbers of the communist guerrillas in Greece show, the Greek government, with ample economic aid, could have handled the situation on its own without the U.S. government’s turning it into the start of an international crusade against tyranny. But an economic aid package would have been harder to sell to the American public. 

Notes

[1] “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism A Popular Outline,” Marxists.org, accessed 12/03/2014, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/, chapter 3.

 [2] Randall B. Woods and Howard Jones, Dawning of the Cold War: The United States’ Quest for Order, (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1991), 23-24.

[3] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 23-24.

 [4] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 54.

 [5] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 53, 74.

 [6] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 53, 74.

 [7] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 71.

 [8] “The Sinews of Peace,” The Churchill Center, accessed 12/03/2014, http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/biography/in-opposition/qiron-curtainq-fulton-missouri-1946/120-the-sinews-of-peace.

 [9] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 114-115.

 [10] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 116.

 [11] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 117.

 [12] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 101-102.

 [13] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 135-136.

 [14] Dennis Merril, “The Truman Doctrine: Containing Communism and Modernity,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36:1, 2006, 27.

 [16] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 140.

 [17] Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: a Life in the Cold War, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 53.

 [18] Beisner, Dean Acheson, 57.

[19] Beisner, Dean Acheson, 52.

[20] Beisner, Dean Acheson, 32.

 [21] Beisner, Dean Acheson, 57.

[22] Beisner, Dean Acheson, 57

[23]Beisner, Dean Acheson, 52.

[24] Beisner, Dean Acheson, 57-59.

[25] Beisner, Dean Acheson, 57-59

,” YouTube video, 19:11, posted by “Thule,” Oct. 23, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btCLnh5gCPU.

[27] Berril, 33.

 [28] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 152.

 [29] Carl C. Hodge and Cathal J. Nolan, U.S. Presidents Foreign Policy: From 1789 to the Present, (Santa Barbara, CA, ABC-CLIO, 2007), 269.

 [30] Merril, “The Truman Doctrine,” 34.

 [31] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 146.

 [32] Lawrence S. Kaplan, “The Monroe Doctrine and the Truman Doctrine: The Case of Greece,” Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 13:1 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993),  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124186?seq=1, 5-6.

 [34] Kaplan, “The Monroe Doctrine,” 5.

 [36] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 150.

 [37] Woods and Jones, Dawning of the Cold War, 147.

 [38] John Lewis Gaddis and Robert A. Lovett, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 49-52.

 [39] John Moser, “Principles Without Program.”

 [40] Doris A. Graber, “The Truman and Eisenhower Doctrines in the Light of the Doctrine of Non- Intervention,” Political Science Quarterly, 73:3 (The Academy of Political Science, 1958), http://www.jstor.org/stable/2145842, 321-334.

 [41] Graber, “The Truman and Eisenhower Doctrines.”

Bibliography

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