Truman Administration Research Articles

Maximalist: America in the world from Truman to Obama

Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama by Stephen Sestanovich New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014 416 pages $28.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The recent spate of writing decrying the decline of American power and influence centers on issues of domestic decay and turmoil, with the view that the United States has somehow lost its way in the world. Some authors argue these domestic political, economic, and social challenges have hamstrung the current administration in pursuing the kind of aggressive, engaged foreign policy needed in this volatile time. Stephan Sestanovich, author of Maximalist, shows the current challenges of the Obama administration are not new, but part of a cycle that can be traced back to the post-World War II Truman administration. Sestanovich is a former US diplomat, who served under both Presidents Reagan and Clinton. He is currently a professor of international relations at Columbia, as well as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Sestanovich has written a highly-readable and thorough history of US foreign policy since 1947. The book does not offer much in the way of new research or detail. However, the author succeeded in repackaging previous works and incorporating a great many anecdotes to retell this story with a slightly new twist. It is a worthy addition to US foreign policy scholarship, and should be read by any serious student of diplomatic history, or for anyone in a position to advise on or craft future foreign policy. The book expands on the author's earlier thesis, regarding the tradition in US foreign policy, one advanced in a Spring 2005 article in The National Interest. Sestanovich, describes foreign policy and diplomacy in a continuum cycling between periods of maximalism and retrenchment. One criticism of the book is the author never defines these two terms, which are so central to his argument. The reader quickly summarizes that maximalism equals overreach, with retrenchment the do less corollary that follows when America must pick up the pieces. The author details the approach administrations have taken cycling between these two extremes: the maximalist Truman followed by a retrenching Eisenhower; who is then followed by maximalist Kennedy/Johnson administrations; then by a long period of retrenchment under presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter; the maximalism of Reagan; a pause in the cycle under presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton; the maximalism of George W. Bush; and finally this current period of retrenchment under President Obama. A few unanswered questions linger below the surface of a linear story long on narrative but short on analysis. My central criticism is the cycle is described as far too simplistic. Can any administration be categorized as purely maximalist or retrenching? …

Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order. By Eric Helleiner (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2014), 304 pp. $39.95

The Bretton Woods negotiations are typically described as an intellectual contest between Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes and their rival plans for postwar monetary order. This framing directs attention to the national priorities that the two statesmen sought to advance—an open trading system based on pegged exchange rates and free capital markets in the case of the United States and a full-employment-friendly international system of adjustable exchange rates and inconvertible currencies in the case of Great Britain. The story reaches a climax with the compromise of pegged but adjustable exchange rates and currencies convertible on current but not capital account. Richard Gardner’s Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective: The Origins and Prospects of Our International Economic Order (New York, 1956) is an influential case in point; Benn Steil’s Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton, 2013) is another.While acknowledging that thirty-two of the forty-four delegations at Bretton Woods were from what we would now call emerging markets, this narrative dismisses their participation as marginal. As a result, their agenda of finance for development was diminished. The International Monetary Fund, not the World Bank, became the dominant Bretton Woods institution, and the Fund focused on the advanced countries.Drawing on the ample secondary literature but also on such primary sources as the recently rediscovered transcripts of the Bretton Woods conference, Helleiner challenges this conventional view. Developing countries, far from passive, actively sought to advance their interests. The United States and the United Kingdom embraced their arguments for state-led development and official finance. The New Deal rendered American officials sympathetic to arguments in favor of an expanded role for the state. Already, in the second half of the 1930s, these officials had sought a financial partnership with Latin America under the umbrella of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. U.S. “money doctors” like White, as well as Robert Triffin of the Federal Reserve Board, had headed technical-assistance missions with a strong developmental component to Cuba and Paraguay. Helleiner rejects Gardner’s argument that the developmental agenda, as symbolized by the Point Four Program of technical assistance announced by PresidentTruman in his 1949 inaugural address, if not also the very concept of international development, were products of the Cold War.Helleiner makes a compelling case, although he exaggerates the influence of developing countries at Bretton Woods. They attended, to be sure. They offered ideas. But their mere presence does not mean that they significantly influenced the negotiations or the outcome. There was an asymmetry of power, since the United States held the purse strings. Moreover, as Helleiner recounts, disagreements prevented the developing-country delegations from forming a united front.Nonetheless, development was undoubtedly an important issue at Bretton Woods, and the experience of the preceding decade created fertile soil in which to plant the concept. But this situation raises the question of why earlier historians drew the wrong conclusions. The Cold War, Helleiner suggests, redirected the attention of the United States—and its chroniclers—away from Latin America and toward monetary and economic stability in Europe (he might also have pointed to the Communist takeover of China as further diminishing the salience of the Bretton Woods developmental agenda). Financial interests hostile to the World Bank received a warmer reception from the new Truman administration. Accusations that White was a Soviet fellow traveler diminished the stature of the institutions of which he was an architect. These are intriguing arguments, although at some level they are not entirely satisfactory resolutions of the paradox.Forgotten Foundations is classic interdisciplinary history, drawing on literatures from political science and economics as well as primary sources. Even if he overstates his case, Helleiner has made an important contribution that will permanently re-frame how scholars conceptualize Bretton Woods.

American Foreign Policy and Postwar Reconstruction: Comparing Japan and Iraq

<i>American Foreign Policy and Postwar Reconstruction: Comparing Japan and Iraq</i>

A Preponderance of Politics: The Auténtico Governments and US–Cuban Economic Relations, 1945–1951

AbstractThis article analyses the bilateral economic negotiations between Washington and Havana during the era of the Cuban PRCA (Auténtico) governments led by Ramón Grau San Martín and Carlos Prío Socarrás (1944–52). This work shows that, initially, the PRCA governments took advantage of the economic bargaining capacity that Cuba had developed with Washington during the Good Neighbor era, but after 1947 this declined as the Truman administration's Cold War foreign policy agenda assigned only a marginal position to Latin America and Cuba. Havana's inability to obtain further economic support from the United States had a powerful destabilising effect, complicating Cuba's economic governance and delegitimising the PRCA politically. The study of this episode enhances our comprehension of a period largely overlooked by the historiography on Cuba and our understanding of the demise of the Auténtico project, the last attempt to transform Cuba's social structures in a progressive and democratic manner.

German Question and First Berlin Crisis: Focused on the German Policy between the United States and Soviet Union and the Currency Reform

The Berlin Blockade is the important incident that symbolize the fierce conflict between United States and Soviet Union in the cold war period. Stalin blockaded the roads to Berlin but western Allies responded strongly against Stalin’s action. Truman administration had launched Berlin airlift.BR The tension and conflict between United States and Soviet Union in Berlin Blocakde period showed that Both camps had the will and the firm resolution that never concede each other. The reason why we take notice of the Berlin Blockade is this affair was not unilateral crisis to the West but the crisis to both bloc.BR The fact that United Stats did not make any concession, when Stlain blockaded Berlin shows that United States did not have any intention that solve the German Question and did not deny that the division of Germany was a fait accompli. Stalin created crisis through Berlin Blockade but similarly, United States also created crisis through Berlin airlift. Berlin airlift means the strong intention that United States would establish single governement in western occupied zone.BR Marschall Plan and Currency Reform was the plan that strengthen a market economy and prevent the spread of socialim. so, Stalin felt strong threats for this policies of United States. The Berlin Blockade resulted in Berlin airlift, Berlin airlift created another crisis and showed the strong will for the currency reform and Marshall plan. so, Berlin Blockade was not the crisis that only Stalin created, but the crisis that both bloc created. We can see the essence of the Cold War through researching first Berlin Crisis.

Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South by Kari Frederickson (review)

Reviewed by: Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South by Kari Frederickson Andrew H. Myers (bio) Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South. By Kari Frederickson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 226. $69.95 cloth; $24.95 paper) From 1953 until 1988, the Savannah River Plant (SRP) manufactured thirty-six metric tons of plutonium for America’s nuclear arsenal. It also produced tritium for hydrogen bombs. The SRP consisted of five reactors and related facilities for refinement and waste disposal. Thousands of people worked there. The site remains under the control of the federal government but has since been diverted to other uses. It spreads over 310 square miles bordering on Georgia and covering parts of three South Carolina counties. As Kari Frederickson makes clear through her admirably researched and gracefully written book, the SRP encompasses a similarly broad swath of historiographical themes. Other sites like Hanford and Los Alamos have received attention in studies about national defense. Although scholars of the South acknowledge the importance of defense spending and have examined military installations, they have overlooked places such as the SRP and Oak Ridge. Frederickson positions her study within the framework of this literature. In addition, she demonstrates how the SRP shaped the labor movement, the growth of the middle class, the evolution of corporate culture, the increased authority of scientific experts, the rise of the consumer economy, the decline of the Democratic Party in the South, and the end of Jim Crow segregation. Frederickson organizes her book chronologically with each chapter addressing a larger theme. She starts with the 1949 detonation of a fission bomb by the Soviets, which spurred the Truman administration to pursue thermonuclear technology and led to a November 1950 announcement that the DuPont Corporation would build the SRP. She also discusses how the Korean War lent urgency to the effort and how politicians such as James Byrnes, Strom Thurmond, and Mendel Rivers worked to locate the plant in South Carolina. She provides an overview of the area the SRP would affect while [End Page 541] making the case that Aiken County could serve as a lens for examining the entire South. Cotton cultivation dominated the economy. The town of Hamburg was an important railroad terminus during the nineteenth century. Nearby, the textile factory at Graniteville had been a pioneer in mill village paternalism. These also made Aiken County a target during the Civil War and the site of an 1865 battle. Some of the worst racial violence of Reconstruction took place in Hamburg and Ellenton. Despite such incidents, the county served as a tourist destination for affluent “winter colonists.” Other newcomers included Strom Thurmond, who practiced law in Aiken after stepping down as governor. The book’s most poetic chapter is about the removal of eight-thousand people who lived on the site and the destruction of entire towns, including Ellenton. Frederickson writes a compelling analysis of the differing ways in which inhabitants and appraisers conceptualized the value of land. She emphasizes how both viewed their actions in terms of patriotism. She tells how some residents uprooted tombstones to prevent exhumation of their loved ones. She reminds readers that many of the dispossessed were sharecroppers who received no compensation for losing their homes. Construction of the primary SRP facilities occurred between 1951 and 1956, which coincided with campaigns to eliminate racial segregation and give workers the right to organize unions. Although the federal government was ostensibly committed to these twin goals, Frederickson demonstrates that they were overshadowed by Cold War imperatives, DuPont’s corporate culture, local resistance, and the technical requirements of jobs. Unlike Hanford or Oak Ridge, the SRP did not provide employee housing. That experience raised concerns about the governmental control that came with such amenities, so nuclear workers in South Carolina relied upon existing communities. Frederickson explains how this free-market solution overwhelmed the infrastructure and the ability of local officials to manage growth. Subsequently, she describes how the SRP fostered greater social mobility and increased participation by residents of Aiken County in the consumer economy. Part [End Page 542] of this change came through DuPont’s efforts to downplay its role...

A United States of Europe? Amerykańscy ojcowie zjednoczonej Europy u progu zimnej wojny (1945-1957)

It was George Washington who many authors claim first expressed the wish, often reported by Americans, that „one day, on the model of the United States of America a United States of Europe will come into being”. In fact, the idea seems to have been launched by 19th century European federalists, yet it could not materialize until the dawn of the Cold War. Not only did the Truman administration’s reappraisal of US global security interests and its role in the world lead to their support, but to their relentless promotion of Europe’s economic, political and military integration. Out of their mixed idealistic and pragmatic motivation, the Washington establishment argued that, if united along the American model, a federal Europe would overcome its traditional problems (national rivalries and wasting its economic potential) while, on the other hand, it would also reduce US responsibility for the well-being of the Western world. However, as post-war normalization set in, the leaders of Western Europe grew increasingly skeptical of American federalist visions, while Washington responded with ever more resolute threats of withdrawing its forces from Europe. It was not until the ultimate failure of the EDC/EPC project that the Eisenhower administration modified its European policy, coming to terms with the end of federalism and the triumph of functionalism.

A Fair Deal for Immigrants? The Truman Administration and Immigration Policy Reform

This article offers a critique of President Harry Truman's contribution to twentieth-century immigration reform. It challenges the view that he presided over an era of groundbreaking and progressive changes in immigration policy, arguing instead that the liberal positions taken on key immigration and naturalisation matters by the Truman administration were mostly inherited from his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. Moreover, by examining the important issues of anti-Asian and anti-Mexican discrimination, this study reveals the limitations of Truman's liberalism in the areas of immigration and naturalisation policy. Mirroring recent interpretations of his contribution to the African-American struggle for racial equality, this article concludes that Truman's immigration initiatives largely originated in either Cold War expediency or maneuvering for political advantage, rather than a heartfelt commitment to reform.

‘Your Vigilance is the Price of Your Freedom! Volunteer for Civil Defense Now!’: Shaping U.S. Public Opinion Using Television as a Propaganda Tool

‘Your Vigilance is the Price of Your Freedom! Volunteer for Civil Defense Now!’: Shaping U.S. Public Opinion Using Television as a Propaganda Tool By Manivone Sayasone T he conclusive year of World War II showcased a terrifying reality that the people of the United States were forced to confront. Once they entered the Cold War in 1947, Americans faced an era where oceanic barriers could no longer prevent “potential aggressors” from devastating the United States with “long-range bombers, aircraft carriers, and atomic weapons.” 1 The majority of Americans perceived the Soviet Union as a major aggressor because the incompatibilities of their political and economic ideologies could have led the Soviet Union to attack the United States with nuclear weapons. Since the Soviet Union also felt the need to defend against the United States’ nuclear weapons, the two global powers compete to establish a national security state by creating alliances through foreign intervention and by increasing the quantity and quality of their weapons. The ability to establish a national security state was dependent on the utilization of a nation’s domestic resources including raw materials and the labor of its “citizen soldiers in farms and factories.” 2 Therefore, the U.S. government augmented its efforts to generate public support for the development of a national security state by using various forms of propaganda. One of the effective forms of propaganda the government used to shape public opinion about the Cold War in the 1950s was televised, informational films with themes that emphasized the United States’ vulnerability to communist threats, the importance of civic duty, and the preconceived undertones of capitalist and communist societies. National Security Ideologies of the Truman Administration Many of the informational propaganda films released during the early years of the Cold War featured themes based on ideologies that are found in political documents including George Kennan’s 1946 long telegram, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct;” Clark Clifford’s and George Elsey’s 1946 Clifford-Elsey Report, and President Harry Truman’s 1947 speech, the “Truman Doctrine.” 3 As modern viewers would notice in U.S. televised propaganda, each document had an ideology that depicted the Soviet Union and its communist regime as terrifying and tremendous threats that must be contained by the United States before they “encroach upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world.” 4 If the U.S. failed to contain communism globally, Harry Truman stressed in the Truman Doctrine that the U.S. risks endangering the “welfare of [its] own nation” as well. 5 Many propaganda films also depicted the Soviet Union and Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945- 1954 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. Ibid., 12. Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945- 1954 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10-12. George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, (New York, Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.:July 1947), n.p. Harry Truman, “Address Before Join Session of Congress (Truman Doctrine Speech)” (Washington, D.C., U.S. Congress: March 12, 1947), n.p.

Bomb power: The modern presidency and the national security state, by Gary Wills

Gary Wills Bomb power: The modern presidency and the national security state New York: Penguin Books, 2010. 278pp $22.05 (paper) ISBN 978-1-594-20240-7The United States should render thanks to heaven for having placed it up to now that they have need of neither standing armies, nor public force, nor skillful and sustained foreign policy. If any one of these necessities presents itself, one can predict, without being a prophet, that they will lose their liberty or concentrate power further. It took two global wars and the better part of a century for Alexis de Tocqueville's prescient prophecy to come to fruition. Journalist and historian Gary Wills' latest book provides a surgical dissection of the costs and corruptions associated with the ascent of such an empire for the members of the American body politic. It is Wills' central contention that the Manhattan Project (the American-led effort to build the atomic bomb) provided the defining intellectual template for subsequent postwar national conduct. He argues that the project's addiction to official deceit, its wartime requirement of executive branch unaccountability, its tendency toward institutionalized strategic-threat inflation, and its technological fetishism became the distinguishing if disfiguring characteristics of the impoverished postwar US global posture. Cumulatively, Wills argues, the democratically and diplomatically pernicious effect of such practices led to a foreign policy defined by strategic overextension abroad (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq) and discrediting cover-up practices at home (Watergate, Iran-Contra, post-9 11 human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, etc.)Wills presents a strong, spirited, if occasionally simplistic, prosecutorial brief against the reigning shibboleths of postwar American statecraft. His presentation of how early US Cold War foreign policy was conducted is relatively brief (57 102), overly top down in design, with undue emphasis on institutional factors. In over 35 years, it appears that Wills has not moved much beyond his dated, polemic portraiture of American Cold War society provided as an extensive forward to Lillian Heilman's contentious memoir, Scoundrel Time (1976). From his current analysis, one gains little strategic sense of what the Cold War was fundamentally about or how the proconsuls of the newly minted American empire were able to sustain such a high degree of democratic legitimacy and support at home and abroad for approximately 20 years (1946 1966), except through crude and repetitive means of manipulating and deceiving public opinion. Those looking for a more nuanced and substantive analysis of state society dynamics, which better captures how the bomb shaped the contours of American postwar consciousness, would do well to consult a broader range of Cold War scholarship dealing with issues such as how the Truman administration's strategic outlook vis-a-vis the Soviet Union was shaped and defined by the larger, globalized structural constraints of the postwar bipolar system. …

Securing justice? The Australian campaign to save the Rosenbergs

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs”, recalled Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. Others recalled this event differently: as legal murder and a flagrant miscarriage of justice. The electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in June 1953, on a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage, was unprecedented in the history of the United States and aroused international outrage. Although there are scattered studies of the worldwide protest movement, none has examined the Australian dimension. This paper, therefore, fills a historiographical gap by exploring the genesis, development, and activities of the Australian campaign to pressure the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to grant clemency to the Rosenbergs. That campaign faced several obstacles: one was the liaison and intelligence sharing between the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and US Consular and Embassy officials in Sydney and Canberra and another was the infiltration of its leadership by an important ASIO operative. Drawing on the extensive papers of the New York-based Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, the article will illuminate the close transnational connection between the Australian and American campaigns and challenge the customary characterisation of the Rosenberg clemency committees as “fronts” for the Communist Party or products of Moscow's machinations.

‘History Has Begun a New Chapter’: US Political-Opinion Journals and the Outbreak of the Korean War

In the pages of the United States’ leading political-opinion journals, different ideological camps had very different answers to the issues raised by the outbreak of war in Korea in the summer of 1950. Left liberals placed a great deal of blame for the outbreak of war on South Korean President Syngman Rhee, while conservatives and hawkish liberals used the occasion to lambast President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson. Hawkish liberals welcomed the possibility of a global showdown with Communism, while conservatives disapproved of US intervention in Korea for reasons both political and constitutional. In sum, the debate that dominated the pages of US opinion journals in the first weeks and months of the Korean War was both heated and robust, and exposes the ideological fault lines of the early cold war. To wit, hawkish liberals held positions that anticipated the birth of neoconservatism some two decades later. And conservative voices utilised their newfound platforms in The Freeman and The American Mercury to attack the Truman administration on a whole host of foreign-policy issues, revealing in greater detail than has previously been shown the role that international affairs played in the birth of the New American Right.

Anglo-American Relations and the Labour Government's ‘Scuttle’ from Abadan: a ‘Declaration of Dependence’?

The 1956 Suez Crisis has attracted enormous attention and been widely seen as marking a sea change in Britain's position in the Middle East and within the Anglo-American special relationship. Yet in September 1951 the Attlee government had already signalled waning British power in pulling back from major unilateral military action to defend Britain's single most important overseas asset: the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and its huge operations in Iran. What this crisis revealed of British aspirations in the Middle East and within the special relationship has not received the attention it deserves. This article examines the Attlee government's decision to ‘scuttle’ from Abadan in September 1951. It first places the decision in the context of Anglo-American relations and great cumulative pressure in favour of British military action. It then weighs various considerations claimed in the extant literature to explain the British decision. In doing so it disagrees with suggestions that British military intervention was precluded by an understanding between Truman and Attlee that such action was acceptable only in a narrow range of circumstances for fear of retaliatory Soviet intervention in Iran. It also argues that accounts that correctly emphasise US opposition to the use of force as the key restraint on the Attlee government could and should have gone further. Specifically, it needs to be better appreciated just how the Truman administration actively undermined potential British recourse to military intervention, infused other potential constraints with extra weight and helped delay a Cabinet decision until a point when armed intervention was least likely to achieve British ends.

The Rise and Fall of the United States Trusteeship Plan for Korea as a Peace-maintenance Scheme

During the Second World War, the American State Department prepared a Korean trusteeship plan with a view to mitigate Great Power rivalry over Korea after Japanese defeat. To achieve this goal, the Department recommended that American leaders consult with Russian leaders to manage the joint trusteeship whilst maintaining the administrative unity of Korea. However, amid a sharp rise of threat perception over Soviet expansion and the expectation of the development of an atomic bomb, the Truman Administration delayed diplomatic consultations with the Russians after April 1945. Furthermore, due to a lack of proper co-ordination in Washington's bureaucracy, a valuable opportunity for diplomatic compromise on Korean trusteeship was missed when Harry Hopkins visited Moscow in late May 1945. Although the Potsdam Conference offered the final opportunity for compromise, James Byrnes chose to pursue a unilateralist policy to secure a separate zone of occupation below the 38th parallel with Truman's full support. This article examines American decision-making and diplomacy whilst taking into account its leaders' threat perception as well as their confidence derived from the atomic monopoly.

The Truman Administration and Bolivia: Making the World Safe for Liberal Constitutional Oligarchy. Glenn J.Dorn. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011.

The Truman Administration and Bolivia: Making the World Safe for Liberal Constitutional Oligarchy. Glenn J. Dorn. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011.Bolivia is frequently compared to a beggar on a golden chair, an impoverished state possessing tremendous mineral resources. The silver mines of Potosi' once drew the Spanish to the heart of South America, but by the mid-twentieth century its tin resources were of far greater interest to the US, which was the world's largest consumer of this metal for cans, solders and alloys. Tin is central to Glenn Dorn's analysis of the relationship between the US and Bolivia during the sexenio, the six-year period between the lynching of military strongman Villarroel and the National Revolution of 1952, a seminal event that still reverberates through Bolivian politics.The book is structured as a series of chapters detailing the interactions between the Truman Administration and a rapid succession of Bolivian governments, all of which attempted to steer a middle course between reform and violent repression to protect the oligarchic order. Dependence on tin, which Augusto Ce'spedes named El Metal del Diablo, had stunted the growth of the economy as well as the civil society in this landlocked state. As long as the proverbial Bolivian beggar relied on his tin cup for foreign exchange, the fate of the nation lay in the hands of a small landowning elite, the rosea, dominated by the tin barons Aramayo, Hochschild and Patino. This feudal social structure, along with the humiliating defeat in the Chaco war, made fertile ground for opposition movements such as Paz Estenssoro's Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, and for a rich crop of workers' associations and secret military lodges. The sexenio was the last stand of the rosea, but the attempt to stem the revolution would be futile without the support of the norteamericanos.The Truman Administration stepped clumsily into the seething cauldron of Bolivian politics. Its ability to understand the country was impaired by overblown fears of fascism, Peronism and communism, but also by the fact that the Americans kept a tin ear to the ground. Despite its ideological affinity for trade, the Truman Administration engineered a tin buyers' cartel with the British to supplant the producers' cartel of the interwar years. The US, represented by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), thereby circumscribed the Bolivian government's ability to mollify the mining camps with decreed bonuses and pay hikes. While speculating that a liberal constitutional oligarchy should have been near ideal as an ally and provider of tin, Dorn shows how Washington failed to develop a coherent policy, leaving the RFC to push the tin prices down regardless of the consequences. …

The Circuitous Nature of Operation Ajax

In seeking to protect its economic interests and its control of oil resources in Iran, Britain planned to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Dr Mohammad Mossadegh in a military coup d’état following his decision to nationalize the Iranian oil industry in 1951. However, the British initially faced strong opposition to this plan from the US under the Truman administration, which preferred a more diplomatic approach to the crisis and did not see British interests as being in line with its own. Facing this opposition and after unsuccessful attempts to oust the Iranian leader through economic pressure and propaganda campaigns, the British skillfully leveraged American fear of Communism to secure Washington, under the Eisenhower Administration, as a partner to lead a joint US-UK mission to overthrow Mossadegh. This paper explores the reasons behind the shift in American policy regarding this issue, exploring whether it was the Brit's successful use of covert, circuitous tactics to achieve their intended outcomes or solely a result of ideological differences between the two US administrations

Lengzhan yu "minzu guojia jian'gou:" Han'guo zhengzhi jingji fazhan zhongde Meiguo yinsu (1945-1987) (The Cold War and nation-building: America's role in South Korean political and economic development, 1945-1987) by Liang Zhi

Reviewed by: Lengzhan yu "minzu guojia jian'gou:" Han'guo zhengzhi jingji fazhan zhongde Meiguo yinsu (1945-1987) (The Cold War and nation-building: America's role in South Korean political and economic development, 1945-1987) by Liang Zhi Wang Guangyi Lengzhan yu "minzu guojia jian'gou:" Han'guo zhengzhi jingji fazhan zhongde Meiguo yinsu (1945-1987) (The Cold War and nation-building: America's role in South Korean political and economic development, 1945-1987) by Liang Zhi. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2011. 579pp. In The Cold War and nation-building: America's role in South Korean political and economic development, 1945-1987, Liang uses the perspective of the "Cold War and development," taking the 1945-1987 period of South Korea's economic "take-off" and its process of political democratization as his focus. Liang puts this into context against the grand backdrop of U.S. Cold War strategy towards the Third World, and over the course of six chapters, comprehensively examines the role the U.S. played in South Korea's nation-building process. The first chapter, "America's Cold War strategy in the Third World: politics and economics," discusses American economic and political strategies during the Cold War. Politically, combating communism was the core of America's policy in the Third World within which the U.S. therefore attached great importance to preserving political stability and promoting democracy. Economically, from the Truman to Johnson administrations, America's economic Cold War strategy changed from the indiscriminate promotion of Western-style capitalist economic growth to the pragmatic but all-out support of economic development in the Third World. In this process, the goal of containing communist "economic expansion" did not change. The method with which to contain it, however, did. Chapter two, "Anti-communism and financial aid: America and the division of the Korean peninsula (1945-1948)," discusses American policy towards the southern half of the Korean peninsula from 1945 to 1948. In doing so, one aspect the author discusses is the U.S. repression of the revolutionary passion of ordinary South Koreans, and United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) efforts to support the right-wing, attack the left, and how this— objectively speaking—created the polarization of the South Korean political structure, strengthened the nation, weakened society, and both propagated and implemented American-style democratic thinking. Another aspect was that, in order to combat the spread of disease and famine, the USAMGIK supplied locals with "Government and Relief in Occupied Areas" and, furthermore, implemented land and educational reforms. Further, American and Soviet superpowers did not just use ideological warfare as a way of dividing the Korean peninsula. Instead, in the international context of a Cold War spanning both East and West, the Korean peninsula became a petri dish of sorts for experimentation on capitalist and communist systems. [End Page 226] Chapter three, "From limited containment to absolute containment: America's strategic choices on the Korean peninsula (1948-1953)," discusses American policy towards South Korea from 1948 to 1953. Following the establishment of the Republic of Korea, the U.S. continued to provide it with political, economic, technological and military assistance yet, during the same period, in a move that would prove disastrous, withdrew its troops from the Korean peninsula. In June 1950, war broke out, and America immediately intervened militarily. Throughout the war, the Truman administration's priority was to develop South Korean military strength and win the conflict. As a result, Syngman Rhee took the opportunity to strengthen his dictatorial regime, and American economic support reverted back to the level of emergency relief and aid. Chapter four, "Prioritizing military strength: The extension of U.S. policy after the Korean War (1953-1957)," discusses American policy in South Korea from 1953 to 1957. Following the official launch of U.S. containment policy towards China and the plan to slowly [re]arm Japan, in 1954 the U.S. formulated its National Security Council report no. 5514, formally establishing the fundamental doctrine in its policy towards South Korea of "prioritizing military strength and development." Hereafter, economic development and maintaining a strong South Korean military was, for a time, America's chief objective— followed closely by the promotion of...

Tom Clark under Fire: The Consequences of Congressional Investigations of Supreme Court Justices

Tom Clark under Fire: The Consequences of Congressional Investigations of Supreme Court Justices CRAIG ALAN SMITH Introduction President Harry Truman’s nomination of Attorney General Tom Clark to the United States Supreme Court on August 2, 1949, following the unexpected death of Justice Frank Murphy, was regarded as a political appointment, one bom offriendship or loyalty rather than ability or stature. Though not a complete surprise—the Attorney General’s office was then regarded as a stepping-stone to the Court—news commentators expected Truman to choose a Catholic to replace the only Catholic Justice.1 When the United States Senate confirmed Clark’s nomination (73 to 8), Republicans cast all the “nay” votes. Opposition leader Homer Ferguson drew attention to numerous suspect instances while Clark served as Attorney General, but the most compelling reason for some Senators to vote against Clark was his failure to testify at his own confirmation hearing. Calling the nomination “transparently political,” Fergu­ son made no effort to hide his displeasure that Clark was not called for questioning, and when the Judiciary Committee approved Clark’s nomination (9 to 2) without inviting Clark to testify, the two “nay” votes princi­ pally protested his absence at the hearings. From the floor of the Senate, Robert Taft called Clark’s nomination “outrageous” because the Committee reported it favorably without Clark’s testimony.2 By the time of Clark’s nomination, a nominee’s personal appearance before the Judiciary Committee was not a wellestablished practice, but neither was it unprecedented. In 1925, Harlan Stone became the first Court nominee to testify, but the next five nominees were not invited. Not long after 140 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed Court “packing” plan, the Committee heard from five successive nominees, including Attor­ neys General Frank Murphy and Robert H. Jackson. Clark’s nomination, on the other hand, followed five successive nominees who were not invited, thereby blunting Taft’s charges.3 The first and only nominee (to date) to refuse to testify was Appeals Court Judge Sherman Minton, who Truman nomi­ nated shortly after Clark following the unexpected death of Justice Wiley Rutledge. As a Senator, Minton had defended Roose­ velt’s Court “packing” plan, but, as a nominee, Minton refused to testify based upon the separation ofpowers,4 a view Clark later adopted when Congress sought testimo­ ny about his work as Attorney General. Whether Clark should testify or whether he could refuse once he was on the Court became increasingly contentious for the next four years. Clark’s absence at his confirmation hearings did not halt further inquiry into his Justices Felix Frankfurter and Stanley F. Reed appeared as character witnesses at the first perjury trial of Alger Hiss (above), a former State Department employee suspected of spying for the Soviets and accused of lying in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Frankfurter and Reed were subpoenaed to testify, but some news accounts reported that their trial appearances were voluntary, leading to congressional proposals prohibiting Supreme Court Justices from serving as character witnesses. Justice Department service. He was subjected to incessant probing by congressional com­ mittees investigating old Justice Department cases. It is doubtful any sitting Justice faced such protracted investigations oftheir off-thebench record until the failed 1968 nomination of Abe Fortas for Chief Justice and his subsequent resignation eight months later. Tom Clark endured threats ofimpeachment or requests for his resignation, demands for his testimony, and intense public scrutiny of his conduct as Attorney General. This essay examines congressional efforts to compel Clark to testify and whether his refusal based on the separation ofpowers was convincing. It highlights news coverage of these investiga­ tions and compares it to secondary historical scholarship, much of which overlooked Clark’s part in Truman administration scan­ dals or their implications for future congres­ sional inquiries of sitting Justices. On several occasions congressional committees consid­ ered or expected Clark’s testimony on matters unrelated to his judicial duties, and each time Clark avoided appearing before lawmakers. Historical circumstances made it possible for Clark to maintain the separation of powers, but questions over whether Congress could compel a Justice’s testimony or whether a...

MATTHEW C. EHRLICH. Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest.

American radio emerged in 1945 as an acclaimed medium that had brought a sense of immediacy to a war fought in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Between 1945 and 1951, radio news and documentary faced the difficult tasks of adjusting to the reality of the Cold War and to the presence of a nascent television industry, promoted by the radio networks, that challenged radio for its audience and influence. In this book, Matthew C. Ehrlich analyzes what he calls “postwar audio documentary” during this critical and, at least for the radio business, understudied era. The major broadcast networks felt obliged to present balanced and informed commentary on current events as part of their obligation to act in the public interest. Hence NBC, ABC, CBS, and the Mutual Networks all ran documentaries on such subjects as mental health, the state of education, the deterioration of city centers, the menace of venereal disease, and the distribution of medical care. Each of these subjects became the object of partisan political debate in the second Truman administration; the news divisions of the radio networks, staffed by educated, left-leaning reporters and writers, produced programs that tried to increase the public's interest in these issues.

Do Presidents Control Bureaucracy? The Federal Housing Administration During the Truman-Eisenhower Era

Charles M. Lamb and Adam W. Nye show how the Federal Housing Administration continued to permit racial segregation in its mortgage insurance program for years after the Truman administration indicated that it must alter that policy. They argue that this case study once again illustrates that presidential control has its limits as bureaucracy successfully defied presidential preferences and continued on a policy trajectory opposed by the president.