Editorial reaction was overwhelmingly supportive. The New York Times compared the speech to the Monroe Doctrine. To the editors of Time and Life it was a great clearing of the air at long last. “Like a bolt of lightning,” said Life, “the speech cut through the confused international atmosphere.” The President, said Collier’s, had “hit the popularity jackpot.” But support was often expressed with troubling reservations—“Are we to shoulder the mantle of nineteenth century British imperialism?” asked the San Francisco Examiner—and some of the liberal press was outraged. PM charged Truman with scrapping Roosevelt’s whole policy on Russia.
Most important was the objection of Walter Lippmann, who, though favoring aid to Greece, disapproved of the President’s tone. “A vague global policy which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits,” Lippmann warned. “It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot be predicted.”
That the speech was of immense importance, signaling a turning point, no one seems to have doubted. “If words could shape the future of nations,” wrote Newsweek, “these unquestionably would. They had clearly put America into power politics to stay.”
On Capitol Hill Senator Vandenberg was quick to stress that he did not consider Greek-Turkish aid as a “universal pattern,” but something only “to fit a given circumstance.” Acheson, too, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the bill was not intended to establish a pattern for the future. The United States, he stressed, would “of course” act “according to the circumstances of each specific case.”
Objections in Congress came from liberals and conservatives alike. Senator Pepper was sure such a policy would destroy all hope of reconciliation with Russia. Senators Byrd and McKellar were opposed chiefly because of cost. “I guess the do-gooders won’t feel right until they have us all broke,” said Republican Representative Harold Knutson of Minnesota.
Truman, within minutes after delivering the speech, had been on his way to the airport and another flight to Florida. The President, explained Wallace Graham, had been “going pretty hard lately” and needed a rest. In plain truth, the President was exhausted. Writing to Margaret from Key West, he said no one had any idea how “worn to a frazzle” he was by “this terrible decision.” But the police state of communism was no different from the police state of the Nazis, he told her. He had known that since Potsdam.
In the time between Truman’s dramatic appearance before Congress and the final vote on aid to Greece and Turkey, the fight in the Senate over the Lilienthal nomination grew intense and abusive. The opposition was nearly all Republican. Senator John Bricker of Ohio, who had been Dewey’s running mate in 1944, warned that it might be the last chance ever to get the Atomic Energy Commission out of the hands of leftists. Capehart of Indiana said that especially now, in view of the situation in Greece and Turkey, control of atomic energy ought to be returned to the Army, an idea that appealed also to Senator Taft. Brewster of Maine, who had once served on the Truman Committee, claimed Lilienthal’s indifference to communism made him no less a threat than if he were an outright party member.
“If Mr. L. is a communist so am I,” Truman wrote privately. He would carry the fight to the end, Truman vowed. “It is a matter of principle and we cannot let the peanut politicians ruin a good man….” Taft, Truman thought, was succeeding only in making himself look like a fool.
A few Republicans—Knowland of California, Saltonstall of Massachusetts, Aiken of Vermont—declared support for the nominee. But the decisive moment came when Vandenberg spoke to a tense session on the afternoon of April 3, giving what many thought was his finest speech ever.
David Lilienthal, Vandenberg said, was “no part of a communist by any stretch of the imagination.” When Vandenberg called for Lilienthal’s confirmation, the galleries roared with applause.
There was a test vote on an amendment. Lilienthal was with Truman at the White House when Charlie Ross put his head in at the door to report the result. They had won by a margin of 14 votes, more than anyone had thought possible. Truman and Lilienthal shook hands. Atomic energy was “the most important thing there is,” Truman remarked, looking subdued and thoughtful. “You must make a blessing of it, or,” he said, pointing to a large globe in the corner, “we’ll blow that all to smithereens.”
The final, formal vote in the Senate came on April 9, when a total of twenty Republicans defied Taft to support Lilienthal. Of the southern Democrats, only four besides McKellar voted against him. The nomination was confirmed by 50 to 31. It was Truman’s first test of strength with the new Congress and a sweet victory.
Yet the issue of loyalty—the issue of who was or who was not, in Taft’s phrase, soft on communism—was by no means ended. The Republican leadership, having made communism a theme with such success in the fall elections, would keep up the demand for investigations, and Truman, to head off such attacks from conservatives in both parties, had by this time accepted the view of a special commission—and of Attorney General Clark and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover—that a program of loyalty reviews was necessary. The whole concept troubled him. In notes he made of a conversation with the President in May 1947, Clark Clifford wrote: “[He is] very strongly anti-FBI…. Wants to be sure to hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo.’ ”
Further, much too much was being made of “the Communist bugaboo,” Truman thought, and said so in a letter to a former Pennsylvania governor named George Earle. The country was “perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned—we have far too many sane people.”
The political pressures bore heavily, however. Attorney General Clark, conceding that the number of disloyal employees in the government was probably small, argued that even one such person posed a serious threat. J. Edgar Hoover wanted authority to remove anyone from public service whose views were politically suspect. Such people, Hoover warned, might well influence foreign policy in a way that could “favor the foreign country of their ideological choice.” Like many Republicans on Capitol Hill, Hoover saw the State Department as the core of the problem. In his first speech as the new Speaker of the House, Joe Martin had declared there was “no room in the government of the United States for any who prefer the Communistic system.” Accusations that the New Deal had been riddled with Communists were made repeatedly and widely believed, however unfounded. “The long tenure of the Democratic Party had poisoned the air we Republicans breathed,” remembered Martin much later. “Fear of Communist penetration of the government was an ugly new phenomenon. Suspicion of the State Department was rife. We were disturbed and bewildered by the new power of the Soviet Union.”
Truman worried particularly about the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the extremes it might go to under its vile-tempered, and to Truman contemptible, Republican chairman, Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. By acting first on the loyalty issue, Truman hoped to head Thomas off. Also, importantly, he wanted no accusations of administration softness on communism at home just as he was calling for a new hard approach to communism abroad.
On Friday, March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to Congress, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing an elaborate Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. And he did so with misgivings.
Roosevelt, in 1942, had empowered the Civil Service to disqualify anyone from government employment where there was a “reasonable doubt of loyalty,” and by executive order Roosevelt later assigned the Justice Department and FBI to check on the loyalty of government workers. But that had been during the war. Until now, no such step had ever been taken in peacetime.
His purpose, Truman later wrote, was twofold: to guard against disloyal employees in the government work force, and to protect innocent government workers from unfounded accusations. To show that he had no intention of playing politics with the program, he put a conservative Republican, a prominent Washington lawyer named Seth Richardson, in charge of its Review Board.
All federal employees were to be subje
ct to loyalty investigations, whatever their jobs. FBI files and the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee would be called into use. Anyone found to be disloyal could no longer hold a government job. Dismissal could be based merely on “reasonable grounds for belief that the person is disloyal,” yet the term “disloyal” was never defined. Moreover, those accused would be unable to confront those making charges against them, or even to know who they were or what exactly the charges were. In addition, the Attorney General was authorized to draw up a list of subversive organizations.
To David Lilienthal, who well knew the torment that self-proclaimed Communist-hunters could bring down on a loyal government employee, the whole program looked ominous. Anyone serving in the government could be at the mercy of almost any malevolent accuser. “In practical effect,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “the usual rule that men are presumed innocent until proved guilty is in reverse.” Yet Lilienthal, too, conceded that something of the sort probably had to be initiated, and so staunch an upholder of liberal principle as the New York Post called the program a logical answer to subversion. At his next press conference, Truman was asked little or nothing about it. Of more interest was his letter to the former Pennsylvania governor. Was he truly so unconcerned about “the Communist bugaboo”?
“I am not worried about the Communist Party taking over the government of the United States,” Truman replied, “but I am against a person, whose loyalty is not to the government of the United States, holding a government job.” At the time it seemed all the answer anyone could ask for.
In another few months the FBI would begin running “name checks” on every one of the 2 million people on the federal payrolls, a monstrous, costly task. Over four years, by 1951, 3 million employees would be investigated and cleared by the Civil Service Commission, and another 14,000 by the FBI. Several thousand would resign, but only 212 would be dismissed as being of questionable loyalty. None would be indicted and no evidence of espionage would be found.
Clark Clifford would say sadly years later that the whole program had been “a response to the temper of the times,” and that he did not see how Truman could have done otherwise.
But in an interview with the journalist Carl Bernstein, Clifford was considerably more blunt:
It was a political problem. [Clifford told Bernstein] Truman was going to run in ‘48, and that was it….
My own feeling was there was not a serious problem. I felt the whole thing was being manufactured. We never had a serious discussion about a real loyalty problem…. the President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such that he had to recognize it….
There was no substantive problem…. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured….
(To Bernstein, this was a particularly chilling revelation, since his own parents had been among victims of the Loyalty Program.)
And politically the effect of Executive Order No. 9835 was indeed pronounced, for the moment at least, as Time’s Capitol Hill correspondent, Frank McNaughton, described in a confidential report to his editors:
The Republicans are now taking Truman seriously…[his] order to root out subversives from government employment hit a solid note with Congress, and further pulled the rug from under his political detractors. The charge of “Communists in government” and nothing being done about it, a favorite theme of the reactionaries, simply will not stick any longer…. The Republicans are beginning to realize Truman is no pushover.
That Truman’s concern over J. Edgar Hoover continued to trouble him there is no question. “If I can prevent [it], there’ll be no NKVD [Soviet Secret Police] or Gestapo in this country,” he wrote privately to Bess. “Edgar Hoover’s organization would make a good start toward a citizen spy system. Not for me….”
Writing in his memoirs years later, well after the pernicious influence of the Loyalty Program had become all too clear, Truman could say only in lame defense that it had started out to be as fair as possible “under the climate of opinion that then existed.” In private conversation with friends, however, he would concede it had been a bad mistake. “Yes, it was terrible,” he said.
On April 22, 1947, the Senate overwhelmingly approved aid to Greece and Turkey by a vote of 67 to 23. On May 9, the House, like the Senate, passed the bill by a margin of nearly three to one, 287 to 107. On May 22, while visiting his mother in Grandview, Truman sat at the Mission oak table in her small parlor and signed the $400 million aid package. The Truman Doctrine had been sanctioned.
Though it seemed so at the time, and would often be so presented in later accounts, the Truman Doctrine was not an abrupt, dramatic turn in American policy, but a declaration of principle. It was a continuation of a policy that had been evolving since Potsdam, its essence to be found in Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and in the more emphatic Clifford-Elsey Report. It could even be said that it began with Averell Harriman’s first meeting with Truman before Potsdam.
But, be that as it may, the Truman Doctrine would guide the foreign policy of the United States for another generation and more, for better or worse, despite any of the assurances by Acheson and Vandenberg that this was not the intent.
III
It could not have been a more exciting or important time, Clark Clifford would say, recalling events of 1947 and ‘48. “I think it’s one of the proudest moments in American history. What happened during that period was that Harry Truman and the United States saved the free world.”
Others felt the same. A young economic adviser at the State Department, Paul Nitze, would reflect after a long, eventful career in public service that nothing had given him such satisfaction as the work accomplished then. Dean Acheson, Speaking for all of them, would write that they had been “present at the creation.”
Their exhilaration derived in part from the tremendous urgency of the moment. Events moved rapidly. “There was much to be done and little time to do it,” Truman would remember. Plans had to be conceived and clarified with minimum delay, imagination applied, decisions reached, and always with the realities and imponderables of politics weighed in the balance. The pressure was unrelenting. “You don’t sit down and take time to think through and debate ad nauseam all the points,” George Elsey would say, in response to latter-day critics. “You don’t have time. Later somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting and quite irrelevant.”
With the stress of deadlines and long hours, emotions often ran high. The struggle to draw up a preliminary report for what would become the Marshall Plan was for George Kennan “an intellectual agony” greater than any he had known. So intense did a debate with his associates become one harried night at the State Department that Kennan had to leave the room and go outside, where he walked, weeping, around the entire building.
What they were attempting was, besides, different from what had gone before. They were pioneering, the state of the world being, as Acheson said, “wholly novel within the experience of those who had to deal with it.”
Of great importance also to everyone’s morale in the spring of 1947 was the changed outlook of the President, a subject which by now had drawn much attention. Dozens of articles appeared describing the “new” Truman, and for the reason that the change was truly striking. He was in “top spirits,” reported The New York Times; the whole “political picture has changed in Washington.” The President was “very different” now, “calm and forceful,” wrote Alden Hatch in Liberty magazine. “The recent change in Harry Truman has been variously ascribed to new advisers, a difference of political climate, or a change in his nature. The fact is that it is not change, but growth.” His voice, his whole manner had a “new authority,” said Collier’s. He was no longer Roosevelt’s “stand in.” Noting that Truman’s public approval rating was up sharply, to 60 percent, Time lauded his �
��new sense of the dignity of his office.” The President, said Time, had acquired “a new confidence and a new formula: be natural.”
On an afternoon in mid-April, speaking extemporaneously to several hundred members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors who crowded into his office, Truman was as impressive as he had ever been before such a group-relaxed, sure of himself, convincing in a way that seemed to take many of them by surprise. The Truman Doctrine, he said, was no “sudden” turn in policy, and he traced the history of relations with Russia from the time of his first meeting with Molotov there in the same room two years before. He was sure a solution to the problems with the Soviets would be found and that a long era of peace was in store. “I believe that as sincerely as I am standing here.” It was essential “to stand for what we believe is right,” hard as the Russians were to negotiate with. “They deal from day to day, and what’s done yesterday has no bearing on what’s done today or tomorrow. We have to make up our mind what our policy is.”
He had just been talking with a pilot who had flown around the world in sixty-eight hours, he told them. “We must catch up morally and internationally with the machine age. We must catch up with it…in such a way as to create peace in the world, or it will destroy us and everybody else. And that we don’t dare contemplate.”
To his staff it was an inspiring performance, a long way from the fumbling press conferences of the previous year.
The morale of the staff had never been higher. Truman spoke of them proudly and affectionately as his “team.” They were devoted to him, and increasingly as time went on, the better they knew him, quite as much as those who had served with him in the Army. They liked him as a man, greatly respected him as a leader, admiring his courage, decisiveness, and fundamental honesty. The President they worked for, the Harry Truman they saw day to day, bore almost no resemblance to the stereotype Harry Truman, the cocky, profane, “feisty little guy.” Rather it was a quiet-spoken, even-tempered and uncommonly kind-hearted person, whose respect for the office he held enlarged their appreciation not only of him but of their own responsibilities.
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