Transcript: Chapter 21

NARRATOR: As 1947 began, Harry Truman had been president for nearly two years. Humiliated in the mid-term elections, he had little hope of advancing the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal through the stubborn, Republican-controlled Congress. But in the two years to come, the president who had been rejected at home, would make decisions that would determine the fate of the world for the next half-century.

Europe was devastated. The war had left a continent in ruins. As poverty and starvation spread, chaos threatened to overwhelm the Western democracies. Some feared the election of Communist governments, others... Stalin, and the Red army. The Russian dictator remained an enigma ... his intentions, unclear.

Stalin did not yet have the atomic bomb, but the Soviet Union was a great military power, its armies spread across Eastern Europe, poised to enforce Stalin's will. At Potsdam, Truman had been impressed with Stalin, even liked the man. When the war ended, the president, like most Americans, had clung to the hope that Stalin would not impose Communism on Eastern Europe.

But Truman's optimism dwindled as he saw -- Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany -- fall behind a Communist iron curtain. Many Americans still argued that the Russians were not a threat to the United States. But in the beginning of 1946, Truman said he was growing tired babying the Soviets.

"I do not think we should play compromise any longer," he wrote his secretary of state. "Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist, another war is in the making."

One month later Stalin declared that Communism and capitalism were incompatible. He called war "inevitable." Russia and America were moving into two opposing camps. The turning point came in Greece and Turkey, where Truman feared further Communist expansion.

In a civil war in Greece, Greek Communists threatened to topple the monarchy. In Turkey, the Soviet Union was demanding control of the strategic Dardanelles straits. Two local conflicts would become the catalyst for a worldwide struggle against Communism.

WALTER LAFEBER: I think at this point Truman begins to see Stalin as an expansionist dictator. And at that point you can begin to see Truman change and believe that the only thing that the Soviets understand, as he says, is strength, not negotiations.

NARRATOR: Truman had changed his mind. Now, he would have to change the minds of still-ambivalent Americans. He would have to convince Congress that a crisis in two faraway countries threatened the security of the United States... that $400 million in military aid was needed to save Greece and Turkey.

WALTER LAFEBER: Truman had to go to this Republican Congress that had gotten into power in the elections of 1946 by promising to cut taxes and to cut aid overseas. Truman was now going to have to go to these penny-pinching Republicans and get $400 million. The question was, how did you do this?

NARRATOR: Under secretary of state Dean Acheson had the answer. Acheson would one day become secretary of state, and Truman would call him his "top brain man" in the cabinet.

In 1947, Acheson, Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall gathered together a bipartisan group of the most influential men in Congress, and Acheson laid out Truman's request for aid in the starkest terms.

MARSHALL SHULMAN: If you want the Congress to support the appropriations needed, there has to be a bit of a crisis atmosphere. And so Acheson made a very impassioned speech and he laid it on very heavily about how the Russians would sweep across Europe.

WALTER LAFEBER: What Acheson said was, if the Soviets could win in Greece and in Turkey, then they would be in a position where there would be Soviet pressure on Italy, on the Mediterranean. Once that pressure was established, there would be pressure on Western Europe and pretty soon the United States would be standing alone.

MARSHALL SHULMAN: Senator Vandenberg, who was a leader of the Republicans, said to Acheson and to Truman, "If you can get that kind of a view across to the American people, we'll support you."

WALTER LAFEBER: There was the story that Vandenberg said to Truman, "Mr. President, you're going to have to scare hell out of the American people." Whether or not Vandenberg said that, that's exactly what Harry Truman did.

NEWSREEL NARRATION: President Harry Truman comes before a joint session of Congress to make a momentous announcement. A tense atmosphere prevails, for the nation's lawmakers realize that this may be the curtain raiser for events that will shape the destiny of America and the world.

ARCHIVAL FILM: TRUMAN SOUND ON FILM: "The gravity of the situation which confronts the world today necessitates my appearance before a joint session of the Congress. ... I believe that 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.

GEORGE ELSEY: He was reminding Americans of what gradually had been sinking into the public consciousness that the aim of the Soviet Union was to expand its hegemony over as much of the world as it possibly could, and that was not to be permitted. We would help free peoples maintain their freedom.

ARCHIVAL NEWSREEL: TRUMAN SOUND ON FILM: If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world, and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.

WALTER LAFEBER: Truman, the Midwestern politician, understood exactly how you sell these kinds of things to the American people, because what he did was to give a definition to the world that Americans could understand and which they could become committed to, because what Truman said was, "The world is essentially now divided in two. On one side are totalitarian and the enslaved peoples. On the other side are the free peoples." He then looked at the Republicans and said, "Which side are you on? If you are on the side of the free peoples, give me the $400 million dollars." That put the Republicans in a terrible, terrible position, which is exactly, of course, what Acheson and Truman had in mind. And Truman got his $400 million within a matter of weeks.

NEWSREEL NARRATION: President Truman signs the bill for $400 million aid to Greece and Turkey.

NARRATOR: The president had committed Americans to a battle against Communism all across the world. The policy became known as the Truman Doctrine.

LUCIUS BATTLE, State Department: I was scared by it. I wondered how far reaching this was going to be. What does it really mean? This is a sweeping, sweeping decision. Asking for an open-ended faith in a policy of protecting the free people and bringing freedom where it didn't exist around the world. And that was the -- that has no limits, had no limits. And it was awfully hard to know exactly where those limits were.

MARSHALL SHULMAN: It led to a more absolute view of the conflict. And I once remonstrated with Acheson about this in my innocence -- I was very young then -- and (laughs) he made it clear to me that if you want to get things done, you have to get congressional support and you have to do what's necessary to get it. And this was essentially what came to be the language of the administration. It became more and more alarmist.

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