Truman Administration Research Articles

U.S. Limited War in the Early Ear of the Cold War: The Truman Administration's Korean War Policy and Its Implication on the Eisenhower Administration's Limited War Policy

이 연구는 미국이 6·25전쟁을 제한전쟁으로 수행한 과정 가운데 나타난 정치-군사 관계를 조명하였다. 제한전쟁은 전면전쟁보다는 제한된 목적을 추구하기 때문에 군사 분야가 정치 분야에 엄격하게 복속할 것을 요구한다. 연구의 결과 미국은 전쟁 초기에 현지 사령관의 지상군 투입 요구를 면밀하게 검토하지 않았으며 이후 현지에 대한 충원 요구를 범 정부적인 차원에서 논의하지 않았다. 또한, 정치 지도자들은 맥아더가 중국군과의 대규모 교전을 겪었음에도 아무런 조치 없이 11월 들어 재차 공세를 추진하였을 때 이를 방치하였다. 전쟁을 승계한 아이젠하워 행정부는 한국에서 학습한 6·25전쟁의 교훈들을 충실히 안보정책에 반영하였다. 새 행정부는 주변 지역의 분쟁에 개입하지 않기 위하여 지역별 방위체계를 형성하였으며 핵무기에 의한 중심부에 대한 억제를 전략을 개발하였다. 아이젠하워는 국가안보회의의 제도를 개선하였으며, 무엇보다도 한국에서의 경험을 바탕으로 디엔 비엔 푸에서 프랑스의 군사적 참패를 목격하면서도 미국의 개입을 거부하였다.

Gaitan: The Fate of the Columbian Liberal

The article is devoted to the political views, circumstances and consequences of the tragic death of Jorge Elicer Gaitn (1903-1948) - the most prominent political figure of Colombia in the XX century. The aim of the publication is to analyze on the basis of new sources and materials the ideology and policy of gaitanismo, the international and regional context of the events of 1948, the beginning of the Cold war in the Western hemisphere, connected with the decisions of the IX Panamerican conference in Bogot, the attitude of the US authorities towards Gaitan, the investigation of the murder of the prominent Colombian politician. The author comes to the conclusion that in the situation of the Cold war the USA was the main interested party in the Gaitns elimination. Truman's administration was determined to suppress not only the Socialist and Communist parties in Latin America, but also the liberalism, focused on national and social goals.

Unconditional Surrender and the American Case Against the Modification of a Controversial Policy (1943–1945)

The decision to employ nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 is arguably one of the most thoroughly investigated subjects in American history. Notably revisionist historians have repeatedly faulted the Truman administration for too easily discarding alternative options, arguing that a simple guarantee to retain the Japanese Emperor would have sufficed to make the Japanese government lay down arms almost immediately. In contrast to that position, the present article, however, maintains that American authorities did indeed have legitimate grounds not to expect that such concessions would in any way lead to a swift conclusion of the Pacific War, particularly since regardless of the Emperor issue there still remained the question of the appropriate moment and manner in which to exact a full surrender from the Imperial Army itself by decisively breaking its considerable military and political clout.

The United Nations and the Soviet Union: Diplomacy and Propaganda in the Twilight of the Cold War

Referring to the preparation of Soviet diplomacy for the 3rd session of the UN General Assembly, this article examines the process behind the development of the political line of the Soviet delegation, as well as the principles of covering the “UN” theme by the press, informing the population and shaping public opinion on major international problems. On the basis of specific material, the author demonstrates the principles of Soviet diplomats’ work on the preparation of analytical materials, the development of recommendations, and the implementation of propaganda measures at the UN in response to the changing international situation. Archival materials allow us to understand the attitude of the Soviet political elite to multilateral diplomacy and reconstruct the USSR’s assessment of the effectiveness of the organisation’s activities both in the field of maintaining international security and in the non-political sphere. Referring to the analysis of materials from the Russian Foreign Policy Archive (AVP RF) and the Russian State Social and Political Archive (RGASPI), the author reconstructs the rationale behind the propaganda campaign in the Soviet press against Trygve Lie, the first UN Secretary-General, in connection with the publication of the annual report on the organisation’s work between 1947 and 1948. Coordinated criticism of the world’s highest-ranking diplomat became an integral part of the political game in connection with the settlement of the Berlin crisis, as well as an important element in the strategy of a massive propaganda offensive against the United States, aimed at portraying the Truman administration as the culprit of the imminent split in Europe and Germany.

Asia, 1945-1954: Three Wars in One.

The conflicts waged in Asia between 1945 and 1954 are examined here as part of the anti-colonial struggle and national independence, giving rise to free and original Asian practices. The background is the emergence and consolidation of the bipolar powers of the superpowers involved in the cold war. The decolonization of the region was part of the Western Allies' ideals. However, the Cold Conflict's political conveniences lead the Truman Administration to tolerate and support the colonial presence. American policy on Asia-Pacific feared that independence would jeopardize regional stability. This desideratum frustrated the aspirations of the local populations and elites and the communists. After 1949 starting its huge task of national reconstruction, the People's Republic of China recovered imperial diplomatic practices. In addition to expanding his agricultural and industrial production bases, he supported the communist side in the war between the two Koreas and Vietminh, in Indochina. Exercising dominance over its allies the Maoist China, it consolidated its regional projection, suggesting to several important actors on the western side that the three conflicts were part of a single war against communism that they believed to be expanding.

Projecting Poseidon’s Trident: America’s East Asia and the shifting contours of 1950s post-war naval policy

ABSTRACT While the US obtained control of the seas in maritime East Asia after the dissolution of the Japanese empire in 1945, the Truman administration did not link its international security with maritime space in the immediate post-war period. The outbreak of the Korean War and the First Taiwan Strait Crisis drove the US to rethink the significance of international waters and gradually adopt a sea-oriented strategic command. This development altered the defence structure in Cold War East Asia and such perimeters of maritime defence remained in place until the US ended official relations with Taiwan in 1979.

America’s trade embargo against China and the East in the Cold War Years

This article traces the evolution of the American policy from 1947 of persuading the Western nations to embargo the export to the Soviet Union, and after 1949 to the PRC, of all technology or machinery used in the production of military weapons. The recent war demonstrated that technology would win the future wars and the communist countries must be stopped from stealing the West’s technology. The Truman administration drew up long lists of items to be banned, and the President Eisenhower continued the process with US embassy officials policing the operation. The Kennedy administration lessened the intensity of its ban that slightly favoured China although President Johnson reimposed the prohibitions and it was left to President Nixon along with Dr. Kissinger to lessen the East–West trade embargo and soften the relationships.

Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy. by Alessandro Brogi, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 533 pp. $55.00.

<i>Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy</i>. by Alessandro Brogi, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 533 pp. $55.00.

Nicolas Rasmussen, Fat in the Fifties: America’s First Obesity Crisis

Nicolas Rasmussen, in Fat in the Fifties: America’s First Obesity Crisis, crafts a compelling narrative exploring a forgotten moment in USA history—the increased medical and public concern with body weight in the 1950s. Rasmussen suggests that while scholars have usefully investigated the more recent 1990s ‘obesity epidemic’, his book focuses on the 1950s fatness panic and walks readers through the social, political and cultural forces that led to the crisis. This book is well-written, impressively detailed in its historical source material, and logically organised such that each piece of the unfolding story—from the 1930s to the 1970s—is visible along the way. In Chapter One, the author explains that the field of public health grew during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, tackling issues involving sanitation, sewage, housing and bacteria in the water supply. Due to these successes, infectious diseases like tuberculosis and pneumonia that had been the leading cause of...

Another Progressive Era?

Another Progressive Era? Daniel T. Rodgers (bio) Isser Woloch, The Postwar Moment: Progressive Forces in Britain, France, and the United States after World War II. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xxii + 515 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $40.00. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a burst of reform aspirations arose across the globe. Pent-up progressive ambitions of the interwar years erupted into the postwar era, fueled by experiences of war mobilization and wartime hardship. A human rights agenda began to crystalize around the war’s atrocities. Communism’s promise of a revolutionary break with capitalism had never seemed brighter. The end of empires, the hollow promise that World War I’s victors had raised in 1919, now seemed finally within reach. Whatever frame it took, conviction that the world should not be allowed to slide back into its earlier structures of power and politics shaped the idea of the “postwar.” In his most recent book, the Columbia University historian Isser Woloch turns his attention from the era of the French Revolution, on which most of his career has been focused, to a much later moment of disruption. The Postwar Moment does not survey the entire postwar terrain, as Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) did for Europe more than a decade ago.1 It undertakes, more modestly, to track the achievements and aspirations of the non-Marxist Left in the United States, France, and Britain during the Second World War and the war’s immediate aftermath. In France, Woloch pays closest attention to the mouvement républicain populaire (MRP), a social-Catholic political movement that emerged out of the anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy Resistance into brief but powerful political influence after 1945. In Britain, Woloch focuses on the agenda and achievements of the Labour governments of 1945–51. In the United States, his focus is on the Democratic Party and the CIO. In each of these three cases, the window of progressive possibility differed. The postwar progressive moment was shortest in France. In the parliamentary elections held in the first flush of liberation in the fall of 1945, a tripartite coalition of MRP progressives, non-Marxist socialists, and communists won an overwhelming majority, promising to set France on a new social-economic footing for the future. That alliance framed the Fourth Republic’s constitution and launched an ambitious program of economic and [End Page 105] social reforms, but then fell apart in a cascade of workers’ strikes in the fall of 1947. The postwar “moment” lasted longer in Britain, from the Labour Party’s stunning electoral victory in 1945 through the Conservatives’ return to power in 1951. Set within this context, the Truman administration from 1945 to 1952 should be not be seen simply as the final unraveling of FDR’s New Deal, Woloch urges, but as part of a transnational moment of progressive promise worth understanding on its own. The lasting achievements of the postwar progressive coalitions varied across the three nations. They were weakest in France. Nationalization of coal, electricity, and gas production; the airlines; and the largest insurance companies and banks had already been undertaken by De Gaulle’s provisional government under pressure from the Left before the tripartite government came into office. Women’s suffrage was the result of De Gaulle’s decree. During the tripartite government’s two years in power, however, it finalized a major extension and coordination of France’s late-1920s social insurance provisions. The first steps in an ambitious program of housing construction were undertaken. Institutions for national economic planning were inaugurated. But popular unrest over wages and price inflation, the wildfire spread of strikes, and communist opposition to the terms of U.S. economic assistance broke the alliance apart before more could be accomplished. Progressives’ most dramatic leap forward took place in Britain. The Labour Party had been on the margins of British politics before World War II. Its two brief periods in office in the 1920s had accomplished little. But now in the wake of the war, Labour majorities seized the mandate of their overwhelming electoral victory in 1945 to radically remake British economic and social policy. They...

Mendez v. Westminster: Domestic and International Forces Underlying the Fight for School Desegregation

Abstract This article examines how the desire for ideological and military dominance by the United States facilitated civil rights for Mexican Americans during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. The article relies on Mendez v. Westminster, the case that led to the end of legal segregation in California, as a lens to view the connection between domestic and foreign policy. Mendez came to trial when shifting geopolitical realities increased pressure on the United States to project an image of inclusive democracy, prompting an externally oriented elite to recognize the ideological gap between the country’s ideals and its practice. Although the case’s success provided activists and liberal members of the Truman administration with a measure of political authority to propel rights legislation forward, the rise of de facto segregation points to the limits of democratic activism when it confronts endemic racism without support from larger institutions.

The Historical Presidency: A Strategy of Strength: The Truman Presidency and the Rhetorical Linkage of Warfare and Welfare

This article examines the dynamic between the wartime presidency and domestic policy advocacy. The Truman administration developed a strategy to rhetorically link themes and programs of social welfare and national defense, particularly as concerns about the latter emerged on the national agenda. I find that this practice of rhetorical linkage often involved framing Fair Deal objectives as critical to America's national strength. My conclusion is supported by archival evidence from the Truman Library. Rather than merely a rhetorical posture, it is evident that many Fair Deal advocates maintained the idea that a broad social welfare agenda was necessary to uphold American national security objectives.

Strategic surprise, nuclear proliferation and US foreign policy

What are the effects of strategic surprise on foreign policy? We apply mechanisms from cognitive psychology and foreign policy analysis — the hindsight bias and policy engagement — to theorize about how political leaders attribute blame for strategic surprises and the consequences for their foreign policies. We argue that leaders who are hardly engaged with policy matters related to a surprise will tend to believe that it should have been foreseen, attribute blame to domestic culprits and favour significant changes in foreign policy. Conversely, those more involved with policy planning will blame an adversary’s deception and resist policy change. We illustrate these hypotheses empirically by examining the cases of the Truman administration’s reaction to the 1949 Soviet nuclear test and the Johnson administration’s reaction to the 1967 Chinese thermonuclear explosion. Despite their similar international and domestic political environments, the two presidents reacted quite differently to the two surprises. Truman, who was weakly engaged with nuclear matters prior to 1949, authorized major policy changes and reorganized the Central Intelligence Agency. Conversely, Johnson’s deeper involvement in nuclear matters led him to attribute blame for the surprise to Chinese deception. He sought to use the 1967 test to advance his ongoing efforts to secure the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The findings suggest that the variables of policy engagement and the hindsight bias can predict how leaders’ foreign policies will respond to surprises regarding nuclear weapons proliferation and potentially other shifts in the balance of power.

U.S. Perceptions of the Communist Threat in Iran during the Mossadegh Era

Most studies of the coup d’état in Iran in August 1953—a coup backed by U.S. and British intelligence agencies—attribute it at least partly to U.S. concerns about the threat of a Communist takeover in Iran. This article examines the evidence available to U.S. officials about the nature of the Communist threat in Iran prior to the coup, in the form of reports, analyses, and policy papers written on this subject at the time by U.S. officials. The documentation reveals that U.S. policymakers did not have compelling evidence that the threat of a Communist takeover was increasing substantially in the months before the coup. Rather, the Eisenhower administration interpreted the available evidence in a more alarming manner than the Truman administration had. The coup the administration undertook in response was therefore premature, at best.

The Fair Deal Universal Health Care Proposals: Historians’ Perspectives from 1970 to 2003

Throughout the Truman administration’s Fair Deal era, ideas for a national system of publicly financed universal health care were developed, debated, and even proposed in Congress. In spite of public support for health care reform, each legislative proposal that embodied these ideas failed, and the dream of truly universal health coverage has never been resurrected. Historians who have examined the failure of the Fair Deal proposals have generally agreed that opposition from within Truman’s own party and from congressional Republicans, combined with opposition from organized medicine, contributed to the ultimate failure of the proposals. But an examination of historical accounts of the Fair Deal health proposal failures written during a period beginning shortly after Medicare and Medicaid were enacted and ending amid President George W. Bush’s calls to privatize Medicare and Social Security shows that over time, historians’ interpretations of the failures shifted in two major ways. First, historians’ answers to the question of why the proposals failed changed. Over time, the roles played by politicians opposed to the programs and by organized medicine were viewed as less central to those failures. And second, historians began to ask a broader set of questions than simply “why did the proposals fail?” Later historians in this period asked about the ways in which the “universal” programs, had they been enacted, would have neglected many marginalized groups, and about the larger impacts of the proposals’ failures. This paper begins in Part I with a brief history of the Fair Deal proposals for a public, compulsory, universal system of health care coverage. In Part II, the accounts of five historians, written over a period of 34 years, are examined, with a focus on the factors to which each attributed the proposals’ failures, and on the broader implications — if any — that each historian addressed. And in Part III, I posit that two developments during the period in which these historians worked — the ascendency of a new conservative movement and the failure of the Clinton health care plan — partially account for the changes in their interpretations of the Fair Deal health proposals.

‘A Joint Controlling System’: Commonwealth Bases and the Special Relationship, 1945–1947

Britain’s position in 1945 was precarious but London was not prepared to relinquish global power status. Most famously, Winston Churchill in March 1946 argued this goal could be achieved by nurturing an Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. Yet Britain also sought to utilise the British Commonwealth of Nations to prop up its position and facilitate closer bonds with the United States. Significantly, Churchill had also claimed that the joint use of military bases could provide the mechanism to bind this ‘English-speaking’ alliance. This vision was, crucially, shared by the Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who described the US-Commonwealth military partnership as ‘a joint controlling system’. Nevertheless, between 1945 and 1947, the Truman administration’s attempts to gain base rights in the Southwest Pacific, India and on Ascension Island proved one of the most controversial issues between Washington and the Commonwealth capitals during the immediate post-war period. This article demonstrates that the Commonwealth members remained unwilling to sacrifice their partnership in favour of closer ties with the United States. At the same time, Washington sought to negotiate separate agreements with each of its wartime allies and refused to enter into binding reciprocal regional defence arrangements with the Commonwealth.

An American Voice on the Air: Mediated US Public Diplomacy in Danish State Broadcasting, 1945–1953

For US policymakers, the ideological war for ‘hearts and minds’ after World War II transcended the scope of traditional diplomacy. The American strategy sought to exert as much control as possible over the framing of US policy in foreign media, particularly through radio broadcasts. The present article focuses on the Truman administrations’ mediated public diplomacy efforts in Denmark, as implemented through the United States Information Service (USIS) in Copenhagen. Through an examination of archival material from the US State Department and digitized versions of preserved Danish radio broadcasts, this study shows how the United States tried to promote favourable framings of its policies in Denmark. Because the ideological battles of the Cold War were fought through the media, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation was deemed of special importance to US interests. However, from the outset, the political and executive heads of Danish State Radio were still traumatized by the coercion they had experienced under Nazi occupation in 1940–45; they therefore adhered strictly to principles of autonomy and rejection of unmitigated propaganda. With surprising operational flexibility, the Copenhagen branch of USIS thus adjusted their procedures to fit the local environment; USIS delivered source material and offered assistance, but left decisions about editing and approach angles to Danish journalists. Occasionally, therefore, sensitive themes such as race relations and McCarthyism in the United States received a critical framing in Danish media. However, regarding USIS’s core issues such as the nature and intentions of the Soviet regime and Danish citizens’ faith in NATO, USIS, via Danish State Radio, played an important role in framing US policy and reversing neutralist attitudes.

Sovereign Soldiers: How the U.S. Military Transformed the Global Economy after World War II

Sovereign Soldiers by Grant Madsen provides readers with an intriguing account of the links between the lessons learned from U.S. military occupations after World War II and the formation of Republican economic policy during the Eisenhower administration. The book argues that the postwar travails of Germany and Japan taught luminaries such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, and Bureau of the Budget director Joseph Dodge that the most appropriate economic policy was the reestablishment of nonregulated markets backed by conservative fiscal and monetary policies. Madsen argues that this classical policy, rather than that advocated by the academically ascendant liberal Keynesians, jump-started the “golden age of capitalism.” Thus, Madsen claims in his subtitle that Republican-oriented U.S. military leaders transformed the global economy. While there is much to like in Madsen's careful scholarship, his formulation overstates the role of his selected military officials in economic policy formation. Madsen neglects the ways the Roosevelt and Truman administrations laid the basis for a stable transition to a peacetime economy by providing resources to allies through the Lend-Lease Act (1941) and the Marshall Plan (1948) without creating destabilizing debt. One unfortunate omission in this volume is any consideration of George Marshall's contribution to the rejuvenation of the postwar economy.

ЗАРОДЖЕННЯ АМЕРИКАНСЬКОГО ПРОПАГАНДИСТСЬКОГО АПАРАТУ НА ПОЧАТКУ «ХОЛОДНОЇ ВІЙНИ» (1945–1948 рр.)

The main focus of this study was to identify the main stages of the American propaganda apparatus formation and development at the beginning of the Cold War. In this case, the historiographic works of contemporary American scholars had been analyzed and compared, concerning the activities of the President H. Truman administration on the transformation of existing and the creation of state propaganda new bodies. On the basis of the CIA 's open archival materials, was made an attempt to highlight the main steps taken by the US government to form a legal framework for confronting Soviet information and psychological activities outside the United States.

Presidential War Powers, the Take Care Clause, and Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter

In directing the use of military force without prior congressional authorization, Presidents invoke their authority as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. Examples of such uses of force include the missile strikes directed by President Trump against the Syrian government in 2017 and 2018. Yet Article II of the Constitution is not only a source of presidential war powers, it also imposes constraints on those same powers. Article II, Section 3 requires that the President “Take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The “Laws” encompass treaties, including the U.N. Charter, which sharply restricts the use of force by States. This Article argues that by virtue of the Take Care Clause, Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter binds the President as a matter of domestic law. In substantiating this proposition, this Article relies primarily upon the arguments of the Executive Branch itself in three superficially distinct, though interrelated domains. I demonstrate that the U.S. officials and experts involved in the drafting of the U.N. Charter as well as the senators who provided their advice and consent to the treaty shared an understanding that the Charter would be a “Law” within the meaning of the Take Care Clause. I then show how the President’s duty to execute the Charter was a key element of the Truman Administration’s constitutional justification for directing the Korean “police action” in the absence of prior congressional authorization. By synthesizing Executive Branch views on war powers, the Take Care Clause, and Article 2(4), this Article shows how Presidential arguments advancing claims of authority also delineate the scope of the corresponding constitutional duties. The Article also rebuts a 1989 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum by now-Attorney General William Barr which concluded that the President may unilaterally “override” Article 2(4) because the treaty provision is non-self-executing and because the use of force is a “political question.” I explain that though the doctrines of non-self-execution and political question may be relevant to the justiciability of Article 2(4) in the courts, neither has any bearing upon the status of Article 2(4) as a “Law” which the President is obligated to faithfully execute. The conclusion that Article 2(4) is a “Law” has significant implications for the allocation of war powers. Contrary to Barr’s 1989 memo, by virtue of the later-in-time rule, it is Congress, not the President that possesses the authority to “override” this treaty provision.