Transcript: Chapter 22

NARRATOR: The president would resist Communist aggression abroad. He had issued a declaration of Cold War. But in Western Europe, there was more to fear from starvation and chaos than from the Red Army. It had been the worst winter in living memory. The war had been over for more than two years, and Western Europe seemed on the verge of collapse.

WALTER LAFEBER: If Western Europe was not helped and quickly, mass starvation would break out and there was the real danger that Western Europe would begin moving to the left very rapidly. The analysis made within the State Department at this point indicated that the way to deal with this was not militarily. The way to deal with this was economically, to pump in between eight and $17 billion so that the Europeans would have the money to buy food from the United States, food and other resources.

NARRATOR: Truman had already managed to persuade a reluctant Congress to give him $400 million for the Truman Doctrine. Now he convinced Congress to give him $13 billion more. No president had ever received so much money to aid people who weren't Americans. He called his economic aide program -- the Marshall Plan, after his secretary of state George Marshall, a man who commanded the respect of the entire country.

GEORGE ELSEY: Some of the White House staff suggested to President Truman they didn't much like this idea of General Marshall getting credit for it. Truman was very firm on that. "The Congress will do anything George Marshall wants. If my name is on it, it probably will become controversial. I don't want it to become controversial. I want it to succeed. It's the Marshall Plan. We'll have no more talk about changing the name."

WALTER LAFEBER: Truman would later say that the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were two halves of the same walnut. The Truman Doctrine was the military and political commitment. The Marshall Plan was the $13 billion finally in economic commitment to rebuild what Truman called the "free peoples of the world".

LUCIUS BATTLE: It became very popular, very quickly. No one expected that sort of altruism, that sort of sweeping thing coming out of us ... this was much bigger than anybody had realized.

ROBERT DONOVAN: A great appeal of the Marshall Plan was that these billions that were being appropriated were being spent in the United States to farmers and manufacturers. That money wasn't spent in Europe. It was spent here, and that was a great appeal to Congress.

VICTOR REUTHER: This was a terribly important decision, also it was a compassionate one, and understood as such. It was a real badge of honor for Harry Truman.

NARRATOR: While the president was rescuing Europe and mobilizing Americans to fight Communism overseas, Republicans charged that there were Communists here at home -- in Truman's own administration. In the 30s, Republicans had claimed that there were Communists in Roosevelt's New Deal. Now they were demanding that Truman take action.

CLARK CLIFFORD: There were lots of pressures developing about Communists infiltrating our whole system. And he felt obliged to do something. He did not believe there were disloyal employees. He did not believe that. He said on a number of occasions, "Our enemy is abroad. Our enemy is not here at home."

WALTER LAFEBER: Truman is in a terrible position here because, if he had not done anything, he would have been open to the accusation that he was tough on Communism abroad, but he was overlooking Communists within his own government, whatever few there were.

NARRATOR: On March 21, 1947, against his own better judgment, the president issued an extraordinary executive order: he established a loyalty program, making the political beliefs of every federal employee subject to investigation by the FBI.

ELLEN SCHRECKER, Historian: Truman, trying to mobilize public opinion for the Cold War, exaggerated the Communist menace. He presented, the Cold War as a kind of crusade against Communist totalitarianism. And you don't break up your crusade into "This is the European part. We'll focus on this. And let's not look at the American part. It was a total crusade.

NARRATOR: Harry Truman was leading America in a new kind of war. And he prepared the country as it had never been prepared before. He created the Department of Defense; he established the National Security Council, and the CIA -- the Central Intelligence Agency, putting the United States in the business of peacetime spying for the first time in its history. Soon there would be another first: NATO, America's first peacetime alliance -- a bulwark set in Western Europe against Communism. Truman was changing the way Americans looked at the world, and at themselves.

WALTER LAFEBER: I think Truman's great contribution to American politics was to figure out how to get Americans to commit themselves to a war which was cold rather than hot, a war which had not been declared, a war which is extremely complex, and yet which Truman defined as a rather "simple" war between the enslaved and the free peoples. This is how he got Americans to commit themselves to the Cold War, in which Russian and American soldiers were beginning to peer across boundaries at each other.

NARRATOR: The Cold War had begun, and it would last for the next half-century.

back to top