So much of the blame by
revisionist historians on Truman almost certainly has to do with the Vietnam
War. After the war’s disastrous conclusion in 1975 academics and students from
that era were justified in blaming both Nixon and LBJ for fighting a war that
killed thousands of American lives and destroyed much of Southeast Asia on lies
based on false intelligence. But not content with that many academics were
determined to find a root cause for why everything went wrong and began going
back to where they thought our problems began. Because Harry Truman was the
first President to send troops to what was then French Indochina historians
chose to hold him accountable. And in the method of deconstructionism, they
decided to ‘prove’ that the reason he had for doing so was based in a false
narrative. In that argument both he and
his administration ‘overreacted’ to what was happening in Eastern Europe ‘forcing’
Stalin to make ‘perfectly reasonable actions in Europe’ and therefore America
was the aggressor.
They then proceed to
list all of the horrible actions that America committed during the twenty years
leading to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and then basically argue every action
America took from that point on was done not to deal with international threats
but to build it’s own American empire to argue for the military industrial
complex rather than help the people in the United States. This policy of ‘Western
Imperialism’ continues to this day where America acts not for the greater good
of the world but only its own self-interest and to keep its economy moving. This
is the argument of the Zinn’s and Chomsky and by extension the Michael Moore’s
and Oliver Stone of this world and in their minds the twentieth century’s
horrors can be laid at the feet of Harry Truman who completely blundered FDR’s
vision for a post-war world.
It is true that Harry
Truman sent troops to French Indochina to deal with what was perceived to be a
Communist threat and that a fair amount
of the attempts at ‘containment’ in Asia were disasters for America. It can’t
also be denied that the threat of Communism abroad was used as a shield for
truly horrible behaviors at home, most horribly by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s
as well as so many morally questionable decisions in foreign policy involving
both the CIA and foreign governments that multiple presidents of both parties were
willing to sign off on. But the reductive thinking of the left ignores both
context or the possible of two things being true at the same time. This is
particularly true when it comes to the Cold War.
Yes America did
horrible things in the name of preserving democracy in the second half of the
twentieth century, most disastrously in the Vietnam War but in countless other
countries in Asia and South America. But that doesn’t mean that the Soviet
Union was an innocent bystander in everything that happened. And so much of
that narrow-minded thinking applies to Stalin in particular.
It is bizarre – but understandable
– that while Stalin was alive that there were many intelligent people in our
government who thought he was trustworthy and reliable even as he continued to lower
the Iron Curtain on so many nations of Eastern Europe during the period immediately
after V-E Day. But it is incredible that to this day so many people are willing
to either give him the benefit of the doubt, either by calling America the
aggressors or by ignoring every action he – and his successors – were willing
to take to maintain their dictatorial control over not only Russia but all of Eastern
Europe from the beginning of World War II until the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991.
Why so many people – especially
on the left - are willing to overlook
the policies of Stalin or the Soviet Union, particularly when one considers the
genuine horrors he inflicted on not only his entire population but most of
Eastern Europe as a result says far more about their thinking what Americans
were. Much of this comes to the thinking of the alliance between FDR and Stalin
during World War II and that Truman blundered it by being unpleasant to the
Soviets.
But FDR’s ‘grand plan’,
as has been illustrated in this essay, seems to have been based entirely on the fact
that he understood Joseph Stalin and that Stalin was a reasonable person. He
built this grand delusion by listening to people who told him what he wanted to
hear and ignoring people in his own state department as well as the warnings of
Winston Churchill and based only on the idea that ‘if we give Stalin everything
he asks for, he’ll be grateful in the aftermath’. This delusion basically went
against what was actually happening in Europe during the last year of his administration
and his decision to use people he trusted rather than the state department. It
was also based on little more than the fact that he believed he alone was capable
of solving the problems of the world and not trusting anyone else to do it.
This was delusional thinking by any President; the fact that he chose to do so
while he was mortally ill in his final year in office - and made no effort to share his grand design
with anyone, including his new vice president – is tantamount of treason.
Yet despite all of this too many historians refuse to acknowledge this because
it would mean taking the shine of the halo of one of the greatest Presidents in
history.
That Harry Truman
ascended to the White House at what may have been the most critical time in
American history since Andrew Johnson did after Lincoln’s assassination and
with no knowledge of his predecessors plans for a post-war world plays no role
in the thinking of revisionist historians. And the fact is he spent much of his
first year doing everything in his power to try and follow the plans of FDR’s accommodation
of Stalin despite all of his very real actions in Poland, Romania and the rest
of Eastern Europe as well as the obstinance of the Soviet diplomatic core to
give any substantial accommodations on his part. Over and over Stalin broke his
word and Truman and his State department were more than willing to overlook.
Only when he finally overreached beyond the scope of Eastern Europe did Truman
and his administration finally acknowledge that they had to meet force with force
– or risk a Soviet domination of Europe the way the Nazis had just a few years earlier.
None of this enters the
left’s way of thinking when it comes to Truman and its telling that they don’t
see the parallels in their own work. In Oliver Stone’s JFK there is a long sequence when Jim Garrison talks
with an informant played by Donald Sutherland based on the conspiracy theorist
Fletcher Prouty. Prouty argues that Kennedy was assassinated because he was
going to end American involvement in Vietnam.
(This is fundamentally false.) But in Prouty’s version the war in Vietnam was
not part of the fight againsa communism but an example of the America oligarchy
industrialists, weapon manufacturers and the powerful trying to line their
pockets. In his mind the American government has created the Cold War in order for
some to maintain their domination of American interests abroad, is engaged in
lies and deception to cover up their own wrong doing for the American people
and will destroy anyone who stands in their way.
This is, with just some
variations, almost exactly what Joseph Stalin and the Communist government was
doing to both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during this period. But Stone
never points out these similarities in Untold History of the United States and
if he recognizes it, he and his fellow historians choose to ignore it.
Because the fact
remains during the era from the end of World War II until the Berlin Wall came
down both Stalin and his successors went out of their way to clamp down on any
threats to their power in Eastern Europe. It would be seen in Czechoslovakia
and East Germany in 1948, events in Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Wall going up in the summer of 1961,
Brezhnev’s destroying the Prague Spring
in the summer of 1968 and on and on. And countless mini-despots emerged in
every Eastern European government with their own secret police and their own
loyalty to Moscow. The Soviet Union did damage to Eastern Europe that when it
collapsed in 1991 the damage was such that the countries are still recovering
from it – and there’s a question whether in some cases, they ever truly will.
Historians argued that ‘all
attempts to imagine alternative courses of postwar international relations run
up against Stalin himself.” Roosevelt spent too much time cooperating with
Russia not realizing that concessions and weakness only encouraged him to
spread his tyranny. If Truman deserves criticism it is not for reversing FDR’s
policies but by trying to hew too closely to them. If they had tried a policy
of containment earlier perhaps Stalin might have withdrawn. Both he and Byrnes
were essentially willing to ‘concede’ Eastern Europe to him in order to satisfy
his needs for security. Fortunately they stopped there.
The idea that Henry
Wallace, who at the very best can be considered delusional in his regard for
the Soviet Union, could have averted the Cold War is ludicrous. Indeed in the
leadup to his Progressive Party campaign in 1948 he seemed more than willing to
echo the Moscow party line, opposing the Marshal Plan when Moscow turned
against it and offering the most ridiculous excuses for the Czechoslovakian coup
even going so far as to suggest the President who had been pushed out a window
had committed suicide. Furthermore those who might argue for an isolationist
policy – most famously advocated by Robert Taft of Ohio – should be grateful
that he never managed to come close to the Republican nomination for President
and that Eisenhower entered the race because he opposed Taft’s principle of
reversing Truman’s strategy.
I have always thought
immensely highly of Harry Truman, not only because of the circumstances of his
ascent to power but because he did so after one of the greatest Presidents in
history and rose to the challenge masterfully, despite the way so many people
including loyalists to FDR thought he would fail. As of this writing he ranks
as the sixth greatest President of all time, behind only Lincoln, Washington,
FDR, Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson. This has always struck me as a
fair assessment of his skills and his willingness to make the hard decision and
go against what the public opinion might think. Those who argue that he was a
disastrous president, particularly former Wallace-ites like George McGovern,
are naïve in how the world was in the aftermath of World War II, particularly
in regard to outside actors in the Soviet Union. And those who argue the
choices he made were immoral – such as the dropping of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki – have decided to ignore the very real context of Japan at the
time as well as again arguing that only America is supposed to be a moral
nation first.
Truman understood that
in order to act as a world stage one must build coalitions. Men like himself,
George Marshall and Dean Acheson, all centrists, worked with men of the left
such as Clement Atlee and Ernest Bevin to preserve Europe from the threat that Stalin represented not just to Europe
but to the entire world in the aftermath of World War II. To argue that such a
threat did not exist ignores the reality of the Soviet Union, something that
was clear at the time and infinitely more so now. There will always be those
who are willing to argue America and the West are the villains of history and
in doing so they will ignore the actions of outside actors. There are, to be
sure, some who will still defend communism using that euphemism a ‘failed
experiment’. This covers the deaths of tens of millions of Russians, many of
them at the hands of their own government, as well as those were subjugated by
the Russian satellite governments during the next half century. Those who argue
against American policy have that great advantage of hindsight. Truman was
there, did what he thought was right and famously took responsibility for it.
For that, the world owes him a debt it can never repay.
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