The idea of revising what is known of the past constitutes an essential procedure in historical scholarship, but revisionists are often hasty and argumentative in their judgments. Such, argues Robert ...H. Ferrell, has been the case with assessments of the presidency of Harry S. Truman, who was targeted by historians and political scientists in the 1960s and '70s for numerous failings in both domestic and foreign policy, including launching the cold war—perceptions that persist to the present day. Widely acknowledged as today's foremost Truman scholar, Ferrell turns the tables on the revisionists in this collection of classic essays. He goes below the surface appearances of history to examine how situations actually developed and how Truman performed sensibly—even courageously—in the face of unforeseen crises. While some revisionists see Truman as consumed by a blind hatred of the Soviet Union and adopting an unrestrainedly militant stance, Ferrell convincingly shows that Truman wished to get along with the Soviets and was often bewildered by their actions. He interprets policies such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and support for NATO as prudent responses to perceived threats and credits the Truman administration for the ways in which it dealt with unprecedented problems. What emerges most vividly from Ferrell's essays is a sense of how weak a hand the United States held from 1945 to1950, with its conventional forces depleted by the return of veterans to civil pursuits after the war and with its capacity for delivery of nuclear weapons in a sorry state. He shows that Truman regarded the atomic bomb as a weapon of last resort, not an instrument of policy, and that he took America into a war in Korea for the good of the United States and its allies. Although Truman has been vindicated on many of these issues, there still remains a lingering controversy over the use of atomic weapons in Japan—a decision that Ferrell argues is understandable in light of what Truman faced at the start of his presidency. Ferrell argues that the revisionists who attacked Truman understood neither the times nor the man—one of the most clearheaded, farsighted presidents ever to occupy the Oval Office. Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists shows us that Truman's was indeed a remarkable presidency, as it cautions historians against too quickly appraising the very recent past.
In 1955, the United States Information Agency published a lavishly illustrated booklet calledMy America. Assembled ostensibly to document "the basic elements of a free dynamic society," the booklet ...emphasized cultural diversity, political freedom, and social mobility and made no mention of McCarthyism or the Cold War. Though hyperbolic,My Americawas, as Laura A. Belmonte shows, merely one of hundreds of pamphlets from this era written and distributed in an organized attempt to forge a collective defense of the "American way of life."Selling the American Wayexamines the context, content, and reception of U.S. propaganda during the early Cold War. Determined to protect democratic capitalism and undercut communism, U.S. information experts defined the national interest not only in geopolitical, economic, and military terms. Through radio shows, films, and publications, they also propagated a carefully constructed cultural narrative of freedom, progress, and abundance as a means of protecting national security. Not simply a one-way look at propaganda as it is produced, the book is a subtle investigation of how U.S. propaganda was received abroad and at home and how criticism of it by Congress and successive presidential administrations contributed to its modification.
NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War re-examines the origins and implementation of NSC 68, the massive rearmament program that the United States embarked upon beginning in the ...summer of 1950. Curt Cardwell reinterprets the origins of NSC 68 to demonstrate that the aim of the program was less about containing communism than ensuring the survival of the nascent postwar global economy, upon which rested postwar US prosperity. The book challenges most studies on NSC 68 as a document of geostrategy and argues instead that it is more correctly understood as a document rooted in concerns for the US domestic political economy.
Roosevelts lost alliances Costigliola, Frank
2012., 20111227, 2011, 2012, 2012-01-01, 20120101
eBook
In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory in Europe was approaching, the shape of the postwar world hinged on the personal politics and flawed personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. ...Roosevelt's Lost Alliances captures this moment and shows how FDR crafted a winning coalition by overcoming the different habits, upbringings, sympathies, and past experiences of the three leaders. In particular, Roosevelt trained his famous charm on Stalin, lavishing respect on him, salving his insecurities, and rendering him more amenable to compromise on some matters.
Balancing Risks Taliaferro, Jeffrey W
2004, 2004-01-01
eBook
Great powers often initiate risky military and diplomatic inventions in far-off, peripheral regions that pose no direct threat to them, risking direct confrontation with rivals in strategically ...inconsequential places. Why do powerful countries behave.
The United States emerged from World War II with generally good relations with the countries of Latin America and with the traditional Good Neighbor policy still largely intact. But it wasn’t too ...long before various overarching strategic and ideological priorities began to undermine those good relations as the Cold War came to exert its grip on U.S. policy formation and implementation. In The Truman Administration and Bolivia, Glenn Dorn tells the story of how the Truman administration allowed its strategic concerns for cheap and ready access to a crucial mineral resource, tin, to take precedence over further developing a positive relationship with Bolivia. This ultimately led to the economic conflict that provided a major impetus for the resistance that culminated in the Revolution of 1952—the most important revolutionary event in Latin America since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The emergence of another revolutionary movement in Bolivia early in the millennium under Evo Morales makes this study of its Cold War predecessor an illuminating and timely exploration of the recurrent tensions between U.S. efforts to establish and dominate a liberal capitalist world order and the counterefforts of Latin American countries like Bolivia to forge their own destinies in the shadow of the “colossus of the north.”
With contributions from the most accomplished scholars in the field, this fascinating companion to one of America's pivotal presidents assesses Harry S. Truman as a historical figure, politician, ...president and strategist. Assembles many of the top historians in their fields who assess critical aspects of the Truman presidencyProvides new approaches to the historiography of Truman and his policiesFeatures a variety of historiographic methodologies
In 1950, the U.S. military budget more than tripled while plans for a national health care system and other new social welfare programs disappeared from the agenda. At the same time, the official ...campaign against the influence of radicals in American life reached new heights. Benjamin Fordham suggests that these domestic and foreign policy outcomes are closely related. The Truman administration's efforts to fund its ambitious and expensive foreign policy required it to sacrifice much of its domestic agenda and acquiesce to conservative demands for a campaign against radicals in the labor movement and elsewhere.
Using a statistical analysis of the economic sources of support and opposition to the Truman Administration's foreign policy, and a historical account of the crucial period between the summer of 1949 and the winter of 1951, Fordham integrates the political struggle over NSC 68, the decision to intervene in the Korean War, and congressional debates over the Fair Deal, McCarthyism and military spending. The Truman Administration's policy was politically successful not only because it appealed to internationally oriented sectors of the U.S. economy, but also because it was linked to domestic policies favored by domestically oriented, labor-sensitive sectors that would otherwise have opposed it.
This interpretation of Cold War foreign policy will interest political scientists and historians concerned with the origins of the Cold War, American social welfare policy, McCarthyism, and the Korean War, and the theoretical argument it advances will be of interest broadly to scholars of U.S. foreign policy, American politics, and international relations theory.
Benjamin O. Fordham is Assistant Professor of Political Science, State University of New York at Albany.
Irene L. Gendzier presents incontrovertible evidence that oil politics played a significant role in the founding of Israel, the policy then adopted by the United States toward Palestinians, and ...subsequent U.S. involvement in the region. Consulting declassified U.S. government sources, as well as papers in the H.S. Truman Library, she uncovers little-known features of U.S. involvement in the region, including significant exchanges in the winter and spring of 1948 between the director of the Oil and Gas Division of the Interior Department and the representative of the Jewish Agency in the United States, months before Israel's independence and recognition by President Truman.
Gendzier also shows that U.S. consuls and representatives abroad informed State Department officials, including the Secretary of State and the President, of the deleterious consequences of partition in Palestine. Yet the attempt to reconsider partition and replace it with a UN trusteeship for Palestine failed, jettisoned by Israel's declaration of independence. The results altered the regional balance of power and Washington's calculations of policy toward the new state. Prior to that, Gendzier reveals the U.S. endorsed the repatriation of Palestinian refugees in accord with UNGA Res 194 of Dec. 11, 1948, in addition to the resolution of territorial claims, the definition of boundaries, and the internationalization of Jerusalem. But U.S. interests in the Middle East, notably the protection of American oil interests, led U.S. officials to rethink Israel's military potential as a strategic ally. Washington then deferred to Israel with respect to the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, the question of boundaries, and the fate of Jerusalem--issues that U.S. officials have come to realize are central to the 1948 conflict and its aftermath.
Military, social and economic historians have long appreciated the significance of the conflict in Korea in shaping the post-war world. The policy of containment was formed, China was established as ...an important military power, and the US increased its military expenditure fourfold as a result of a conflict which killed over 33,000 Americans. What has been less appreciated is the role played by the United Nations and the British Commonwealth in influencing US strategy at this time of crisis: the Truman administration invested time and effort into gaining UN approval for the conflict in Korea, and the course of the war was adapted to keep UN allies, often holding crucial strategic positions in other Cold War theatres, in tow. Robert Barnes develops a fresh perspective on these fluctuating relationships, the tensions between Washington and its British Commonwealth allies and their impact on the direction of the conflict in order to challenge the common view that the United States was able to use its dominant position within the UN to pursue its Cold War ambitions with impunity. This important new interpretation is supported by evidence from a wealth of sources, from official government records to private papers and memoirs written by the most important American and Commonwealth personalities directly involved in shaping the UN's response to the conflict. This study presents a thorough deconstruction of the decision-making process behind US handling of the Korean War from the outbreak of conflict in 1950 to the Geneva Conference of 1954. This will be essential reading for students of International Relations, Cold War Studies and modern History.
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