This week (March 12) in 1947, President Harry Truman addressed Congress and outlined a foreign policy course of action that would become known as “The Truman Doctrine.”
In his speech Truman called for financial assistance for Greece and Turkey to help them battle insurgencies by Soviet-assisted Communist forces. But this “doctrine” would quickly expand into a policy of “containment,” in which the United States would expend billions in economic, financial and military resources to check Soviet expansion around the globe. The Truman Doctrine would become the chief foreign policy objective of every subsequent U.S. president until, some 42 years later, the Soviet Union finally “collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions,” in Soviet expert George Kennan’s famous phrase.
Today, having been victorious in the Cold War that Truman’s doctrine midwifed, most would agree that this policy was — for all the blood and treasure spent on its behalf — the proper one. But back then it was controversial, both because the country was war-weary and sick of foreign commitments, and because Greece and Turkey — two Balkan countries with no U.S. national security implications — hardly seemed worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
What’s more, before becoming president Harry Truman was a little-known politician whose career had depended on the corrupt boss of a Kansas City political machine, Tom Pendergast, and whose elevation to the presidency had only come because of FDR’s sudden death. Thus he had little political capital to spend on such a controversial course of action.
But Truman didn’t earn history’s imprimatur of greatness for nothing. Fed up with Soviet expansionism, he decided to take a stand. Using all his presidential powers — including deliberately overstating the crisis in Greece and Turkey — Truman finally got Congress to approve his plan to supply the Greeks and Turks with money, military equipment and American advisors. As a result, not only did the Soviets back off, but also, in Greece, the aid so revitalized the country that it became known as “the Greek economic miracle.” Equally important, this success helped ensure the public’s approval of another economic recovery plan for all of Europe, which Truman’s secretary of state, George Marshall, proposed a year later.
The Marshall Plan, of course, helped revitalize a war-ravaged Europe, as did the creation of NATO in 1949 — the most successful multi-national military alliance in history — and even today Truman’s foreign policy is generally considered a high point in American foreign affairs in the 20th Century. Not bad for a small-time Missouri politician who never went to college, who was looked down upon by the establishment, and who, before he entered politics, was mostly known for having failed at his only other career — part ownership of a haberdashery store.
