By Christopher McKnight Nichols
On 22 May 1947, President Harry Truman signed the formal “Agreements on Aid to Greece and Turkey,” the central pillars of what became known as the “Truman Doctrine.” Though the principles of the policy were first articulated in a speech to a joint session of Congress on 12 March 1947, it took two months for Truman to line up the funding for Greece and Turkey and get the legislation passed through Congress.
Official portrait of Harry Truman by Greta Kempton
In his March address, Truman reminded his audience of the recent British announcement — a warning, really — that they could no longer provide the primary economic and military support to the Greek government in its fight against the Greek Communist Party, and could not prevent a spillover of the conflict into Turkey. Truman asserted that these developments represented a seismic shift in post-war international relations. The United States, he declared, had to step forward into a leadership role in Europe and around the world. Nations across the globe, as he put it, were confronted with an existential threat. They thus faced a fundamental choice about whether or not states “based upon the will of the majority” with government structures designed to provide “guarantees of individual liberty” would continue. If unsupported in the face of anti-democratic forces, a way of life “based upon the will of a minority [might be] forcibly imposed upon the majority”, a government orientation which he contended depended on “terror and oppression.”
Ultimately, the “foreign policy and the national security of this country,” Truman reasoned, were at stake in the global conflict over democratic governance and thus in the particular tenuous situations confronting Greece and Turkey.
The fates of the two states were intertwined. Both nations had received British aid, he said. If Turkey and Greece faltered, or “fell” to communists, then the stability of the Middle East would be at risk; thus US assistance also was “necessary for the maintenance of [Turkey’s] national integrity.”
The President therefore made the ambitious proposal that was elemental to his “doctrine”: thereafter “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Truman requested $400 million in assistance for the two nations, in a move that many at the time — and most subsequent scholarship — depicted as marking a sort of de facto onset of the Cold War.
While transformative, the precise significance of Truman’s speech is a subject of debate. As historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued, “despite their differences, critics and defenders of the Truman Doctrine tend to agree on two points: that the President’s statement marked a turning point of fundamental importance in the history of American foreign policy; and that US involvement in the Vietnam War grew logically, even inevitably, out of a policy Truman thus initiated.”
However, Truman’s speech and authorization of funding on which the principles depended was neither a subtle nor a decisive shift toward the strategy of containment as many later politicians and scholars have surmised. As Martin Folly observes in a superb piece on Harry Truman in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History: “It is easy to see the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery as following directly from the Truman Doctrine.” Folly goes on to note that this association is wrong. There is little evidence to support a claim that Truman or his powerful then-Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson conceived of the Doctrine as a first step toward, for instance, the measured but firm anti-Soviet resolution showed in the US response to the Berlin Crisis (in the form of the Berlin airlift) nor was the doctrine directly linked to the Marshall Plan as it developed in the year to come. However, as Folly suggests, the Doctrine “reflect[s] Truman’s own approach to foreign affairs as it had evolved, which was that the United States needed to act positively and decisively to defend its interests, and that those interests extended well beyond the Western Hemisphere.”
The major ideological shift represented by the Truman Doctrine and the aid to Greece and Turkey its its simultaneous rejection of the long-standing injunction to “steer clear of foreign entanglements” and an embrace of a heightened expansion of a sphere of influence logic. For the first time in US history, the nation’s peacetime vital interests were extended far outside of the Western Hemisphere to include Europe and, indeed, much of the world. According to Truman, it is “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
This new logic of pro-active aid and intervention to support “vital interests” (always hotly contested, continually open to interpretation) worldwide undergirds the ways in which the United States continues to debate the nation’s internationalist as well as unilateralist options abroad in Ukraine, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and elsewhere.
Wherever one stands on debates over the “proper” US role in the world and contemporary geopolitical challenges, the antecedents are clear. After 1947 American national security—and foreign relations more broadly — were no longer premised on a limited view of protecting the political and physical security of US territory and citizens. Instead, the aid agreement signed on 22 May 1947 clinched a formalized US commitment to (selectively) assist, preserve, intervene, and/or reshape the political integrity, structures, and stability of non-communist nations around the world. The consequences of this aid agreement were profound for the early Cold War and for the shape of international relations in the world today.
Christopher McKnight Nichols is a professor at Oregon State University and a Senior Editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History.
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Image: Official Presidential Portrait painted by Greta Kempton. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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Learned Hand was born on this day in 1872. In a letter dated 15 May 1951, Judge Learned Hand wrote President Harry S. Truman to declare his intention to retire from “regular active service.” President Truman responded to Hand’s news with a letter praising his service to the country. These letters are excerpted from Reason and Imagination: The Selected Letters of Learned Hand, edited by Constance Jordan.
To Judge Learned Hand
May 23, 1951
The White House, Washington, D.C.
Dear Judge Hand:
Your impending retirement fills me with regret, which I know is shared by the American people. It is hard to accept the fact that after forty-two years of most distinguished service to our Nation, your activities are now to be narrowed. It is always difficult for me to express a sentiment of deep regret; what makes my present task so overwhelming is the compulsion I feel to attempt, on behalf of the American people, to give in words some inkling of the place you have held and will always hold in the life and spirit of our country.
Your profession has long since recognized the magnitude of your contribution to the law. There has never been any question about your preeminent place among American jurists – indeed among the nations of the world. In your writings, in your day-to-day work for almost half a century, you have added purpose and hope to man’s quest for justice through the process of law. As judge and philosopher, you have expressed the spirit of America and the highest in civilization which man has achieved. America and the American people are the richer because of the vigor and fullness of your contribution to our way of life.
We are compensated in part by the fact that you are casting off only a part of the burdens which you have borne for us these many years, and by our knowledge that you will continue actively to influence our life and society for years to come. May you enjoy many happy years of retirement, secure in the knowledge that no man, whatever his walk of life, has ever been more deserving of the admiration and the gratitude of his country, and indeed of the entire free world.
Very sincerely yours, Harry S. Truman
Hand immediately responded to the President’s letter:
To President Harry S. Truman
May 24, 1951
Dear Mr. President:
Your letter about my retirement quite overwhelms me. I dare not believe that it is justified by anything which I have done, yet I cannot but be greatly moved that you should think that it is. The best reward that anyone can expect from official work is the approval of those competent to judge who become acquainted with it; your words of warm approval are much more than I could conceivably have hoped to receive. I can only tell you of my deep gratitude, and assure you that your letter will be a possession for all time for me and for those who come after me.
Respectfully yours, LEARNED HAND
The letters above were excerpted from Reason and Imagination: The Selected Letters of Learned Hand, edited by Constance Jordan, a retired professor of comparative literature and also Hand’s granddaughter. Learned Hand served on the United States District Court and is commonly thought to be the most influential justice never to serve on the Supreme Court. He corresponded with people in different walks of life, some who were among his friends and acquaintances, others who were strangers to him.
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Image credit: (1) Harry S Truman. US National Archives. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Judge Learned Hand circa 1910. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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Even today, Truman Capote remains one of most America’s most controversial authors. Following early literary success his flamboyant became well-documented at the many parties and restaurants he frequented. Always claiming to be researching his next book, Capote was a social celebrity and may have had just as many strong opinions about other people as they had about him.
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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and 
author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at General Stanley McChrystal. See his previous OUPblogs here.
Sarah Palin is not the only person going rogue these days. In a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London last Thursday, General Stanley McChrystal advocated for an increase in American troop levels in Afghanistan by 40,000, while rumors that the General would resign his command if his request was not honored remain unquashed. A week before, McChrystal appeared on CBS’s “60 minutes” to spread the word that help is needed in Afghanistan. And before that, he, or one of the supporters of his proposal, leaked a confidential report of his petition to the president to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, which published a redacted version of it. These are the political maneuverings of a General who understands that wars abroad must also be waged at home.
But, the General fails to understand that the political war at home is not his to fight, and his actions in recent weeks have been out of line. No new command has been issued yet about Afghanistan, but General McChrystal has taken it upon himself to let the British and American public know how he would prefer to be commanded. As it is a slippery and imperceptible slope from preemptive defiance to actual insubordination, as President Harry Truman quickly came to realize about General Douglas MacArthur, President Obama needs to assert and restore the chain of command swiftly and categorically.
As Commander of Special Operations in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2003 to 2008, McCrystal was given free reign to bypass the chain of command. This leeway allowed McCrystal’s team to capture, most illustriously, Saddam Hussein during the Iraq war. But it may have gotten into his head that the discretion Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney granted to him has carried over to his command in Afghanistan. No doubt, McCrystal has been emboldened by supporters of a troop increase in Afghanistan, who have recently chastized President Obama for not having had more meetings with McChrystal. Others, like Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) have on CNN accused the “people in the White House … (as) armchair generals.”
Those who assault the principle of civilian control of the military typically and disingenuously do so obliquely under the cover of generals and the flag, for they dare not confront the fact that the constitution unapologetically anoints an armchair general to lead the military. It is worth noting, further, that in the same sentence in which the President is designated “Commander-in-Chief,” the Constitution states, “he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments.” The President may require the opinion of any cabinet secretary should he so choose to do so, but he isn’t even constitutionally obligated to seek the opinion of the Secretary of Defense, to whom General McChrystal’s superior, General David Petraeus, reports via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General McChrystal has spoken out of turn even though his chain of command goes up quite a few more rings before it culminates in the person seated on an armchair in the Oval Office, and yet I doubt he would take kindly to a one-star general speechifying against his proposal for troop increases in Afghanistan.
Dwight Eisenhower, when he occupied the armchair in the Oval Office, wisely warned of the “Military Industrial Complex” because he understood that it was as much an organized interest as was the Liberal Welfare State, Wall Street, or what would become the Healthcare Industrial Complex. No “commander on the ground” will come to the President of the United States and not ask for more manpower and resources, and Eisenhower understood that the job of the armchair general was to keep that in mind.
Let us not rally around military generals and fail to rally around the Constitution. Inspiring as the Star Spangled Banner may appear flying over Fort McHenry, we will do better to stand firm on the principles etched on an older piece of parchment. As Truman wrote in his statement firing General Douglas MacArthur,
“Full and vigorous debate on matters of national policy is a vital element in the constitutional system of our free democracy. It is fundamental, however, that military commanders must be governed by the policies and directives issued to them in the manner provided by our laws and Constitution.”
