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Before going into battle, Roman generals would donate a goat to their favorite god and ask their neighborhood temple priest to interpret a pile of pigeon poop to predict if they would take down the Greeks over on the next island. Americans in the nineteenth century had fortune tellers read their hands read and phrenologists check out the bumps on their heads. Statistics came along by the late 1800s, then “scientific polls” which did something similar.

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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.

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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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 Obama’s leadership. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Presidents struggle to take charge when crises befall the nation. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, whether it be the terrorist attacks of September 11, Katrina, or a massive oil spill, Presidents Bush and Obama alike have been accused of being slow to take charge. Despite the conventional narrative that crises unite the country and cause us to rally round the flag, the truth is that the American presidency is not an institution to which we quickly rally around because we have unrealistic expectations of what presidents can and should do.

While it has become a presidential cliché to declare, Harry Truman believed, that the “buck stops here,” it never does. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the oil spill disaster in the Gulf. The reason why the cliché doesn’t work is that even if the president may have the will to take charge, he cannot be responsible for someone else’s mistake, and even he is, he and the federal government lacks the technological resources to clean up BP’s spill. Incidentally, the first branch, Congress, ought to have some responsibility too.

Like the press and the American people, the White House clearly has not worked out the ethical boundaries of culpability versus responsibility, which it why it has floundered in articulating, exercising, and then defending the proper role of government in handling the present crisis. All this is compounded by the fact that the American media demands and expects a semblance of control even as nature and a complex reality stacks up against one.

While everyone is asking for it, no one knows what leadership means in this situation. If asked, talking heads would each have a different answer. The fact remains that the White House does not have plenary control over corporations and regulatory agencies, nor should it. The President can entreat other oil companies to chip in, but he does not have the authority to command them to do so. The President can pressure BP to be transparent about its operations, but he cannot seize BP’s assets or command a corporation to deploy its assets whichever way the White House directs.

And so the President has made repeated trips to the Gulf to show that whether or not he is in charge, he is at least in the loop and emotionally invested. Empathy, apparently, is a virtue in presidents if not in judges. We desire “activist” presidents, but events do not always permit them.  If we insist on turning leadership into messiahship, we should hardly be surprised at the president’s showmanship.

Given the contested and myriad models of leadership being purveyed on the Left and Right, it behooves the President, at the very least, to decide exactly and then defend what his leadership amounts to. If Obama believes that the buck really stops at the White House, then, as the Left desires, the regulatory power of the federal government must be considerably increased. If he does not want bigger government, then he needs to educate the American people and the Right that the buck really doesn’t stop with government, but at civil society or somewhere else. Right now Obama hasn’t made up his mind, but in this vacillation he is trying to have his cake and eat i

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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.”

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For some months now I have been talking to author and illustrator Cheryl Harness via email. She a wonderfully warm, funny, and clever lady. To try to give you sense of what she is like I am going to be having several 'conversations' with her over the next few weeks.

Cheryl have illustrated numerous books that were written by other people, and she has both written and illustrated many titles as well. Her National Geographic biographies are both fascinating to read and a joy to look at. Her books include such titles as The Remarkable Benjamin Franklin, Franklin and and Eleanor, and The Remarkable, Rough-Riding Life of Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of Empire America

Here is my first talk with Cheryl:

Marya: Good morning Cheryl. It is a pleasure to have you here on the TTLG
blog with me. I hope you are having a terrific 2009 so far.

Cheryl: I am indeed; so far so good. The December snow & ice has melted, so for today, at least, there's sure footing and the sky is blue.

Marya: We had a sort of white Christmas, but snow has been almost non-existent since then. This is a little disappointing for me because I love to ski.
Recently you told me that you got to look at the cover of the new book
that you are working on. This book is about Harry Truman. I was
wondering what got you interested in writing about this particular
president.

Cheryl: Well, as you and your readers may or may not know, Independence,
Missouri, is my home town. This is true, too, of our 33rd President. Neither of us were born here - he was born south a ways from here in Lamar, MO, 125 years ago; I in Maywood, CA, when he was the president, in 1951.
I actually saw him only once, in person even though we lived in the same neighborhood. I wasn't curious enough, youth being wasted on the young. I was more interested in drawing pictures and reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Anyway, I've been asked more than once, "When are you going to do a book about Harry?" Turned out that the answer was "these past few months."

Marya: When will this book be in bookstores?

Cheryl: The book will be available mid-February, in time for Presidents' Day, but I wouldn't expect to see The Harry Book (The Life of President Truman in Words & Pictures) in bookstores any time soon. I'm self- publishing this. It's something I've never done before and I confess that I am a much better writer and illustrator than I am a businesswoman. I imagine that one who goes to my website will find how he or she can get a copy. Or lots of copies! And I reckon that I'll have a bundle of Harry Books with me when I travel about, school visiting. It's comic book - did I tell you that? NO, I didn't! It's 48 pages' worth of pen & ink detailed pictures & lettering about this truly remarkable fellow. I learned so much about my long-gone neighbor. I wish I hadn't been such a doofus and had met him when I was young and had the chance... ah well.

Marya: You have written about several presidents so far including Teddy
Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Which president interested you the most and why?

Cheryl: Indeed, I should say Mr. Lincoln, this year being the 200th anniversary of the year in which he entered the world - same day, by the way, as Charles Darwin, the naturalist. And truly, I loved learning, writing, and illustrating his inspiring life, but of all the presidents - of all the Americans I've studied Teddy Roosevelt is the most interesting. Not saying I agree with all of his politics, but that TR was a fabulous individual. I love stories of overcoming and considering Abe's poverty- stricken background, FDR's polio, Geo. Washington's steadfastness in the face of truly aweful obstacles, TR's early illness - golly, I could go on and on. These individuals overcame so much. And too, each president represents to me a different chapter in the history of our nation.

Marya: I am also fascinated by Teddy Roosevelt's story. He was smart, funny, very active, and full of energy. And, like FDR, he had to overcome a severe illness. In TR's case it was asthma. In general I love reading biographies and books about history. What is it about history that excites you so much?

Cheryl: It's EVERYTHING! All we've done and hoped and dared. All humankind's accomplishments, our cruel, ridiculous, short-sighted mistakes; our explorations and our digging out of the holes we've dug.
And it's positively thick with role models. Me being such a sissypants, I'm ever drawn to courageous examples down the years. Harriet Quimby totally interests me these days. the first woman to fly across the English Channel, in 1912. Hugely brave & skillful PLUS she was totally beautiful, not that it matters, and she died far too young. a real pioneer. Plus, historical, real-life stories go well with my sort of illustration.

Marya: For those of you who don't know, Cheryl's artwork is full of detail and action, and she is a wizz when it comes to maps. Do you have any plans to branch out into fiction?

Cheryl: I did do that a few years ago in my novel for young readers, Just For You to Know [HarperCollins, 2006] It was set here in Independence, MO, 1963. Harry Truman had a brief, cameo appearance in it. That book was my heart's darling. I've got another book in the works - several really - and one of them might well involve another President. Stay tuned!

Marya: That's right! I remember the book because I reviewed - and loved - it. Here is my review. I look forward to seeing more works of both fiction and non-fiction with your name on them. Thank you for the chat Cheryl.

Cheryl: You are welcome.

I will be talking to Cheryl some more about her life and her work in the weeks to come. In the meantime do please visit Cheryl's website to find out more about this wonderful lady.

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