How Harry Truman Didn't Start The Cold War, Introduction

 

 

It is one of the coincidences of history that the two vice presidents who ascended to the White House at what were our nation’s most critical historical points did so almost eighty years to the day apart.

On April 14^th 1865 Andrew Johnson became President after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, just five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Two days shy of eighty years later Harry S Truman was drinking in the Senate cloakroom when he was called to the White House.

Eleanor Roosevelt greeted him with the news that FDR was dead. The first words out of Truman’s mouth were if there was anything he could for her. He never forgot her response: “Is there anything we can do for you, Harry?” she famously said. “For you are the one who is in trouble now.”

Harry Truman and Andrew Johnson, despite living in completely different centuries, had many things in common. Neither man had much of an education; Johnson had no real schooling; Truman had never attended college. Both men were Southern Democrats; Johnson was a native of Tennessee; Truman was from Missouri. Both men were essentially laborers; Johnson trained as a tailor before getting into politics; Truman had failed both as a farmer and as a small goods merchant. Both men had been in the Senate, though Johnson had left his seat to serve as War Governor of Tennessee. And both men had been controversial choices for the Vice President to replace popular incumbents in an election that took place during wartime. Neither man was thought highly of when they were named to the ticket; Truman was famously referred to as the second Missouri Compromise. And when both men ascended to the White House, the nation went into great mourning though in radically different circumstances.

In the case of Harry Truman FDR’s death had come as a shock to the nation even though it had been due to natural causes. The country had been kept unaware of the state of FDR’s health which by the spring of 1944 was so dire that the powers that be in the Democratic circle knew that Henry Wallace, a man so fundamentally strange as well as a man so enraptured by the Soviet Union that some murmured he was in bed with Stalin would be a threat to the post-war world if he ever became President. Against his will Truman accepted the nomination and not long after meeting with FDR he knew he was going to be President soon – “and it scared the hell out of me.”

Everyone in DC knew that FDR’s death was imminent but the rest of the country and indeed the world was unaware. When he died at Warm Springs on April 12, 1945, the nation went into mourning that was unparalleled since Lincoln’s death eighty years later. FDR had been President for twelve years to the point that he seemed more like a father than the leader of the nation. His voice over the radio had made him a presence to the nation during the Depression and the New Deal had brought the nation back from the brink of disaster. When World War II began in Europe his decision to run for a third term – one that violated the unspoken tradition that had been in place since Washington – was glossed over in the name of the national crisis.

Though it should be said Harry Truman was not one who immediately joined the national bandwagon. Announcing his run for reelection to the Senate, he made it very clear he opposed FDR’s run for a third term. That might have hurt him with the DNC but at the time few gave Truman a chance to win his primary in the Senate against the popular governor of Missouri. When Truman managed an incredible upset in the primary, it was forgotten in the fall election. Truman remained quiet about it from that point on, but it was a principle he held firm too and one that would affect his own decision making when he became President.

FDR had been the President during Pearl Harbor, had been meeting with Churchill, had named Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox to his cabinet as Secretaries of War and Navy respectively in the name of a bipartisan approach and had led a nation to build the biggest army in the world, one that was on the verge of defeating Hitler’s Germany within days of his passing. Everyone was terrified not just what his death meant to the war efforts but to a post-war world which he was bringing images to of a lasting peace. An apocryphal story told in Europe is told of a GI learning of FDR’s death. He asks who’s President now and is told its Harry Truman. “Who the hell is he?” he responds.

Both Johnson and Truman are harshly criticized by many for their behavior in their first months in office. But while most historians ranks Johnson among the bottom of all Presidents, Truman’s place among historians has always been among the greatest. In the most recent ranking by historians he is ranked sixth all-time, behind only Lincoln, Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Jefferson and of course his predecessor FDR. This is fundamentally unchanged over the last half-century and it is by far the right verdict of history.

Yet ever since Truman left office he has been the subject of excoriation by the left wing that has never ended. George McGovern, who worked for Henry Wallace’s magazine and was a delegate to Wallace’s Progressive Party convention in 1948, would forever lambast the commemoration of Truman by historians after his death. When promoting his movie W. Oliver Stone claimed that George W. Bush was by far the worst President who lived, and that was counting Richard Nixon and Harry Truman. In his documentary series The Untold History of the United States -  a series based off an infamous leftist political history – he spends an entire episode almost single-handedly blaming Truman for starting the Cold War and the birth of American Empire, something that every other President – save his sainted JFK – has only maintained ever since.

Most leftist versions of history are academic and lecture from the benefit of decades in the future with no context for the time and place. In both the case of Johnson and Truman, they were both Vice Presidents coming into power at the time at the end of conflict that had been part of the national consciousness for more than four years. Each man had been part of the administration for a very short time – Johnson little more than a month, Truman eighty-two days – and neither had been briefed by anyone in power of the policy the President had in place. In Johnson’s case it was how the world worked; in the case of Truman who never received any briefings about wartime policy or relations with the Soviets until hours after he was sworn in as President, this was tantamount to be thrown in the deep end with anvils tied to his legs. Truman essentially had to learn all about FDR’s foreign policy essentially on the job while a war in the Pacific was still going on and through people who were loyal to FDR and many of whom had widely differing agendas. Yet none of the human elements traditionally enters the reasoning when it comes to measuring either man’s actions in the aftermath of taking office. The academics have the benefit of seeing what went wrong decades after the fact and naturally assume that men such as Truman should have had the same clarity that is obvious to them.

And while it might be understandable to think a certain way in the aftermath of the Civil War about Johnson’s errors as President – though as I argued in my own essays about him earlier this year, similarly flawed in reasoning -  blaming Truman for starting the Cold War essentially comes down to the idea that Truman’s radically shifted his policy in a way that shocked Stalin’s sensibilities, giving him no choice but to begin his domination of Eastern Europe which was in the minds of these historians not only understandable but apparently forgivable. Stone basically says as much in his session on FDR when he says with a straight face after the Yalta Conference that “Stalin was a man of his word.”

This is, just to be clear, the view that many leftist both from political circles and indeed in FDR’s administration held at the time. It ignores the very reality of what Stalin had been doing to his own country for the decade before Germany invaded Russia as well as what we now know he was doing after the war within the power structure and in much of 1945. More than sixty years later, with all the information we now know about what was going on in Stalin’s Russia, much of it from Stalin and his inner circle himself, it would seem unthinkable for any rational person to believe that either Stalin was trustworthy or conversely, such a shrinking violet that a mere personal slight could have convinced him to start the Cold War. That Oliver Stone, a man who famously made clear in JFK and in almost all his work since then, about never trusting the official version, somehow believes this would seem to boggle the mind. And yet that is what an entire group of historians still fundamentally seem to believe despite whatever evidence comes out to the contrary.

And it’s somewhat telling that so many leftist tend to believe the version of FDR’s vision over Truman’s. By any reasonable measure Harry Truman was the kind of man the left claims to be a fundamental supporter of: a self-made man with no formal education who worked his way up in the world, who survived long odds to make his way to the corridors of power,  who loved his wife and was always faithful to her, and finally, reluctantly made it  to the White House itself. You would think they would prefer him to this man who was a child of privilege (literally, one of his cousins was President) who spent much of his childhood in the schools of Eton, who had a prep school education, who constantly cheated on his wife and who by the time of his Presidency was essentially living a separate life, who tootles about in yachts and railway cars well before he took public office. Yet they glorify the latter and excoriate the former. Now to be very fair FDR’s deserves much, if not most of their celebration and worship. But that doesn’t make him any less flawed in critical ways and there were several occasions – including his approach to the Soviets – that many historians refuse to acknowledge in comparison to Truman.

What these articles will do is take a look at FDR’s legacy when it comes to the Soviets and how his approach had flaws in it that far too many scholars do not look at when they choose to unfavorably compare it to Truman’s. We will look at the men in the diplomatic and state corps who worked between both administrations in the first months immediately after FDR’s death. And critically we will look at many of Truman’s most critical decisions to see that Truman tried as closely as possible to adhere to FDR’s policy with the Soviet Union and how so many other factors ended up intervening.

I should mention I am, like many historians a deep admirer of Harry Truman both as President and as a man. I also deeply admire and a great fan of FDR as President as well. But I also am aware of both men’s flaws and to judge one because of one’s predetermined beliefs is not the true picture of history. Just as  critics of the Vietnam War tend to beatify JFK because of their ironclad certainty that he would not have made the mistakes LBJ did, many believe FDR wouldn’t have made the decisions they consider wrong that Truman did in the first months of his President at critical points. As we shall see the reality is fundamentally different than the perception.