A New Kind of War: America's Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece (review)

Abstract

Reviews 167 Any attempt at national reconciliation at the time was doomed to fail. The stakes were too high on both sides. Procopis Papastratis Panteion University of Political and Social Sciences, Athens Howard Jones, A New Kind of War: America's Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece. New York: Oxford University Press. 1989. pp. xi + 327. $34.50. The book under review offers a painstaking, pedestrian record of what American officials had to say about their effort to contain Communism in Greece between 1947 and 1949. Jones has read widely in recently declassified documents. He took careful notes, with the result that his chapters offer a pastiche of quotes from reports written by the principal American representatives in Greece, supplemented with other quotes from high Washington-based officials and remarks by congressmen, newspaper correspondents and other shapers of opinion. He seldom offers opinions of his own: even his title is borrowed from a despatch by Anne O'Hare McCormick. Yet Jones' general tone is up-beat, endorsing the moral and practical worth of official U.S. actions, as his summation makes clear in the very last sentence of the book: "America's strategy in Greece exemplified the wisdom of pursuing a flexible and restrained policy in meeting challenges posed by a new kind of war" (p. 236). In view of the criticism of American intervention that has recently prevailed, especially in Greece itself, it is perhaps appropriate to have a book that restates and reaffirms the initial intentions, hopes and fears that pervaded American officialdom at the time. Certainly, MacVeagh, Griswold, Rankin, Nuveen, Van Fleet and the rest do not seem particularly wicked when allowed to speak for themselves, as Jones' way of writing history permits them to do. Jones also offers scattered information about the frictions and personal antipathies that racked the official American community in Athens from the start. But because he relies almost exclusively upon official documents, his account is broken and fragmented. What the quarreling Americans chose to write down, usually in reports to superiors whom they were trying to win over to their view, is what gets into Jones' pages. As anyone who has ever written a self-justifying report will agree, this means that only part of the human reality was recorded; and since Jones made little effort to supplement official documentation, his book offers only fractionated insight into the individual personalities and group dynamics behind the quarrels. 168 Reviews The same must be said for Jones' account of the war itself. The dynamics of the time, both within Greece and the United States and in the world at large, are scarcely hinted at. Jones does, repeatedly, suggest that the American belief that Stalin and the Russians controlled Communist policy in Greece and the Balkans was (he cautiously says "probably") mistaken, but he does not explore the social and intellectual traditions and circumstances that did control that policy. He explains the awkwardness Americans felt in supporting a reactionary Greek Right; but does not say anything about how that segment of Greek society had come into being. And the internal dynamic of American opinion that developed around the venture into Greece remains completely outside Jones' purview. One may hazard the guess that what inspired this book was the different way American interventions turned out in Greece and Viet Nam. That, I suspect, is why Jones pays special attention to recurrent official debates over sending U.S. troops to Greece. The upshot was repeated refusal to commit U.S. combat units to the field; and this constitute, in Jones' view, the keystone arch of the "flexible and restrained policy in meeting the challenges posed by this new kind of war." But by the time the struggle in Viet Nam heated up, this sort of flexible restraint was missing, and success turned to failure. Connections between U.S. military policy in Greece and Viet Nam are real and would be worth careful exploration, for as Jones remarks: "Indeed, some Greek veterans of the guerrilla war took their expertise to Viet Nam" (p. 235). The fact is that the American military representatives in Greece, General Van Fleet first and foremost, entirely misunderstood how victory had been...