“I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the ‘cold war’ began to overshadow our lives,” Harry S. Truman speculated in his presidential farewell address of January 1953. “I have had hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle—this conflict between those who love freedom and those who would lead the world back into slavery and darkness. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb.”

From the moment he became president of the United States in April 1945, Truman made hard decisions under acutely...

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...

Harry Truman had much to learn about foreign policy when he became president of the United States, and he spent the second part of 1945 and early 1946 thinking about the new conditions of world politics. In 1946, with no appropriate institutional structure and some difficulties with top advisors—in particular, Secretary of State James Byrnes and Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace—Truman articulated the meaning of the Cold War and America’s role in the conflict. This was remarkably challenging, since Byrnes represented an opposing fusion of Wilson’s progressive internationalism and FDR’s liberal internationalism, which appealed to much of the...

Scholars have long debated to what extent communism animated Soviet behavior during the Cold War. While controversy continues, extensive materials have been released from former Eastern bloc archives supporting the conclusion that Communist ideology typically motivated the Kremlin.¹ Truman neither benefited from the academic debate nor was he privy to these materials. Instead, he drew on what he experienced and observed, and what information and analysis he received from his advisors. Some State Department officials interpreted the Soviet Union as a typical great power seeking hegemony, while others at State and within the armed service and intelligence sectors asserted the...

During World War II, Harry Truman had foreseen the need to rehabilitate a war-racked Europe, an opinion generally shared by the man who became his secretary of state, George Marshall. Attuned to domestic political difficulties, including the unprecedented commitment demanded by a large-scale program to rebuild Europe, the president delegated to Marshall—respected, nearly worshiped, by Congress and the American people—the announcement of the European Recovery Program (ERP) in June 1947. His use of Marshall, in this regard, reflected Truman’s understanding not only of the primacy of the president in foreign policymaking but also of political tactics about the...

It is no coincidence that scholars have written more about George F. Kennan—and his version of containment—than about any other advisor in the Truman administration. Adept in foreign languages, Kennan was respected for his intellect and prose throughout his career. A foreign service officer of the State Department who had postings in Geneva, Hamburg, Tallinin, Riga, Prague, Berlin, Lisbon, London, and Moscow, he worked his way up through the ranks from vice consul in 1927 (when he was twenty-three years old) to acting as charge d’affaires between two U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union in 1946. During those...

Some would say that the United States in 1947 and 1948 had done as much as (or more than) it should have in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, but Harry Truman did not think so. He believed that primarily political and economic aid were insufficient under the unprecedented circumstances of the Cold War; a strategic military component, he reasoned, was needed as part of containment. So Truman endorsed what he saw as an unprecedented yet proportionate response: the Atlantic Alliance, a collective defense arrangement that protected its member states from attack without the sacrifice of national sovereignty. This...

In the mid-1940s, the dominant method for gathering and interpreting data, as well as developing policy, was the age-old memorandum process, often based on months of research that culminated in one lengthy report. From a process angle, let alone that of national security, it was inadequate. Harry Truman knew that U.S. national security, a constant imperative, needed an institutional framework with built-in continuity and stability to address new Cold War circumstances. In 1947, Truman’s establishment of the National Security Council (NSC) marked the start of America’s national security arrangements after the Second World War. In subsequent years, the NSC corroborated...

On January 31, 1950, Harry Truman decided that the United States had to pursue the development of the hydrogen bomb. That same day, independent of the H-bomb decision, the president also requested a broad-based report on the continuing world crisis. Drafted in February and March 1950 by new director of the Policy Planning Staff Paul Nitze (who had replaced George Kennan) and a nine-member team of State and Defense Department officials, NSC 68 was submitted to the president in April. It cited and quoted NSC 20/4, not NSC 20/1, as its institutional touchstone. Long dismissed as a crude propaganda effort—...

At the beginning of the last year of his presidency, during the height of the Korean War, Truman summarized his abhorrence of human rights violations and compared dealing with Communist governments to “an honest man trying to deal with a numbers racket king or the head of a dope ring.” He indicted the Soviets for breaking every agreement made at the three main wartime conferences; castigated them for raping Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Baltic states; and chastised them for sending citizens who believed in self-government to slave labor camps. He also mourned the some three million prisoners of...

Harry Truman’s Cold War was a conflict between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny, between liberal democracy and totalitarianism, between capitalism and communism. In his liberal internationalism—which both was informed by and undergirded the strategy of containment—he was generically American, not specifically Wilsonian, as he aimed to articulate and project America’s basic principles of freedom and equality, assist those who also lived under such principles to maintain and defend them, and aid those under totalitarianism to realize them in the future.

Truman based his understanding of politics, and hence of liberal internationalism, on regime distinctions. In his...