II

He had been trying for days to find time to write to her, Truman told his sister in a letter in February.

He was more concerned than usual about staying in touch. Mamma had had a fall and fractured her hip. Truman had flown home to see her, but remained gravely worried—and concerned, too, about the burden of care on Mary Jane. “Now Mary, don’t you work too hard.” If she needed help, she was to get it.

“Things have been happening here in a hurry,” he told her. Foreign affairs were uppermost. Marshall was to leave for Moscow in little more than a week, for his first Foreign Ministers’ Conference. He himself would be flying to Mexico in three days, for the first visit to Mexico ever by a President of the United States. “I am spending every day with Marshall going over policy and hoping we can get a lasting peace. It looks not so good right now.”

The date was February 27, 1947. Six days earlier, on the 21st, a month to the day since Marshall took up his duties as Secretary of State, an urgent formal message, a so-called “blue paper,” from the British ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, had been delivered to the State Department. Marshall had been out of town, speaking at Princeton University’s bicentennial convocation. So it was Under Secretary Acheson who telephoned Truman that afternoon. Great Britain, its financial condition worsening, could no longer provide economic and military support for Greece and Turkey. The cost was too great. The Attlee government would withdraw forty thousand troops from Greece and all economic aid would halt as of March 31. The United States, it was hoped, would assume the responsibility.

The news was both momentous and not wholly unexpected. Britain was in desperate straits. All Europe had been hit by one of the worst winters on record. In France, the cold destroyed millions of acres of winter wheat. Snow fell in Paris for the first time in years. In Berlin, where temperatures hovered around zero, people were dying of the cold. Ice clogged the Kiel Canal from the Baltic to the North Sea. Food and fuel were scarce everywhere. In Prague, electric current was being shut off for three hours a day. But Britain was hit hardest, the whole country virtually snowbound. Factories and schools closed. Huge snowdrifts blocked highways and railroads, closed coal mines, and isolated hundreds of small towns. When a bus on a main coastal road ran into a ten-foot drift and a snowplow was brought to the rescue, reported The Times of London, the snowplow, too, was buried. “Weather Threatens Coal Supply,” read the headline in The Times on. February 6. To save power, London offices were being lit with candles. And the storms continued. On February 21, the day of Lord Inverchapel’s message, it snowed again over most of the country.

On January 20, meantime, the British government had issued an economic White Paper describing Britain’s position as “extremely serious.” That Britain would soon have to cut back on its armed forces and overseas commitments was self-evident. The situation, wrote Walter Lippmann, would “shake the world and make our position highly vulnerable and precariously isolated.”

Specific warnings had been crossing Truman’s desk for weeks. As early as February 3, the American ambassador in Athens, Lincoln MacVeigh, reported rumors that the British were pulling out of Greece, where, since 1945, their troops and money had helped maintain a royalist government in a raging civil war with Communist guerrillas. On February 12, another dispatch from MacVeigh urged immediate consideration of American aid to Greece. A few days later, Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a member of a United Nations investigating committee, cabled from Athens that Greece was a “ripe plum” ready to fall into Soviet hands.

Warnings about Turkey had come even sooner. Turkey had “little hope of independent survival unless it is assured of solid long-term American and British support,” cabled General Walter Bedell Smith, who had replaced Averell Harriman as the American ambassador in Moscow.

Truman himself, furthermore, had already made his concern for the future of Greece clear to the Greek government, if not, as yet, to the American people. In the fall of 1946, through Ambassador MacVeigh, Truman had acknowledged that Greece was of vital interest to the United States and promised substantial aid to maintain its independence, providing the Greek government could show that democracy survived there—a question of considerable importance, since the Greek government, as Truman knew and later wrote, “seemed to encourage irresponsible rightist groups.”

But while the crisis in Greece and Turkey came not without warning, the formal announcement of British withdrawal did come, as Truman said, “sooner than we expected,” and its very formality made it seem especially dramatic and unsettling.

February 21 was a Friday. Truman asked Acheson for a report by Monday, and Acheson, Bohlen, and others worked through the weekend at the old State Department, where packing boxes cluttered the halls in preparation for the move to Foggy Bottom. On Monday, Marshall and Acheson met with the President and urged “immediate action” to provide help for Greece, and, to a lesser degree, for Turkey as well. To Marshall the British announcement of withdrawal from Greece was tantamount to British withdrawal from the whole Middle East. He, too, saw the situation as extremely serious. The sum needed for Greece alone just for the remainder of 1947 was a quarter of a billion dollars.

Truman agreed. Greece would have to be helped, quickly and with substantial amounts.

But aid to Greece was only one aspect of the problem. It had been a year now since Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech at Fulton. Something more than a simple aid bill was called for. On this Truman, Marshall, Acheson, Clifford—virtually all who had a say in policy—were agreed. One ranking State Department official, Joseph M. Jones, urged that Secretary Marshall, not the President, go before Congress, to rouse the nation to the reality of the crisis, because, as Jones wrote in an internal memorandum, Marshall was “the only one in Government with the prestige to make a deep impression.”

Things were indeed “happening in a hurry,” as Truman told his sister. The morning of the 27th, he called the congressional leaders to his office for a crucial meeting. They listened first to Marshall, who, in measured tones, told them, “It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.” The choice was “acting with energy or losing by default.”

Acheson, who thought Marshall had failed to speak with appropriate force, asked to be heard. There was no time left for a measured appraisal, Acheson said. Greece was the rotten apple that would infect the whole barrel. “The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. It did not need to win all the possibilities.” When Acheson finished (according to his own later account), Vandenberg told the President in a sonorous manner that if he would say the same thing in the same way to Congress, then he, Vandenberg, would lend his support and so would a majority on Capitol Hill—his clear implication being that aid to Greece and Turkey could be had only if Truman shocked Congress into action. But in his memoirs, for all his regard for Acheson, Truman would make no mention of Acheson’s remarks or the Vandenberg response as described by Acheson. Truman said only that Marshall had made it “quite plain” that the choice was to act or lose by default—“and I expressed my emphatic agreement to this.”

The meeting ended at noon. Nothing was disclosed of what had been said.

The crowds in Mexico City were such as Truman had never experienced. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets to see and cheer an American President for the first time. The trip had been Truman’s idea and the acclaim was thrilling. He returned the “Vivas!” of the throngs (one woman shouted, “Viva Missouri!”), and several times broke away from his Mexican and Secret Service escorts to shake hands with people. “I have never had such a welcome in my life,” he told the Mexican legislature, to whom he pledged anew Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. To a crowd of American citizens later, he said he hoped they would remember that they, too, were ambassadors.

The next morning, he announced suddenly that he wished to make an unscheduled stop at Mexico City’s historic Chapultepec Castle, where, with one simple, unheralded gesture, he did more to improve Mexican—American relations than had any President in a century. Within hours, as the word spread, he had become a hero.

The long motorcade pulled into the shade of an ancient grove of trees. Truman stepped out of his black Lincoln and walked to a stone monument bearing the names of Los Niños Héroes, “the child heroes,” six teenage cadets who had died in the Mexican-American War in 1847, when American troops stormed the castle. According to legend, five of the cadets had stabbed themselves, and a sixth jumped to his death from a parapet rather than surrender. As Truman approached, a contingent of blue-uniformed Mexican cadets stood at attention. As he placed a floral wreath at the foot of the monument, several of the cadets wept silently.

After bowing his head for a few minutes, Truman returned to the line of cars, where the Mexican chauffeurs were already shaking hands with their American passengers.

The story created an immediate sensation in the city, filling the papers with eight-column, banner headlines. “Rendering Homage to the Heroes of ‘47, Truman Heals an Old National Wound Forever,” read one. “Friendship Began Today,” said another. A cab driver told an American reporter, “To think that the most powerful man in the world would come and apologize.” He wanted to cry himself, the driver said. A prominent Mexican engineer was quoted: “One hundred years of misunderstanding and bitterness wiped out by one man in one minute. This is the best neighbor policy.”

President Truman, declared Mexican President Miguel Alemán, was “the new champion of solidarity and understanding among the American republics.”

Asked by American reporters why he had gone to the monument, Truman said simply, “Brave men don’t belong to any one country. I respect bravery wherever I see it.”

The three-day whirlwind visit ended on March 6, when the presidential party departed on The Sacred Cow before dawn. Moonlight reflected on the plane’s wings as Truman looked out the window. Despite the hour and the chill morning air, a thousand people had come to see him off.

Less than a year before, in July 1946, as only a few were aware, Truman had asked Clark Clifford to prepare a comprehensive analysis of Soviet-American relations, the first of its kind.

The project began at once, and though Clifford remained in charge, and with his editing gave the finished effort much of its tone and emphasis, the real work—research and writing—was done by his assistant, George Elsey, who had suggested the project in the first place. He had felt, Elsey later explained, that Truman was judging Russia on “too narrow a basis,” his concerns limited too often to whether or not Russia was keeping its agreements.

By the time Elsey was finished in September 1946, the report ran to nearly 100,000 words. It was immensely detailed and clearly influenced by Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” but most of it had been drawn from interviews with or written reports from a dozen or more key people within the executive branch, including the State and War departments, and in all it was a far more alarming state paper than the “Long Telegram,” even though, as Elsey himself later said, most of the material had been previously called to Truman’s attention by Byrnes, Forrestal, Harriman, Leahy, even Harry Hopkins as early as April 1945.

Titled “American Relations with the Soviet Union,” it began by stating that such relations posed the gravest problem facing the United States and that Soviet leaders appeared to be “on a course of aggrandizement designed to lead to eventual world domination by the U.S.S.R.”

The Soviet Union was “consistently opposed” to British-American efforts to achieve world peace agreements, because the longer peace settlements were postponed, the longer Red Army troops could “legally” remain in “enemy” countries. Moreover, the Soviets were maintaining excessively large military forces in the satellite countries. The Soviets already dominated Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. In Austria only the presence of British, French, and American occupation troops prevented a Soviet takeover.

Communist parties were growing in France and Italy. In a weak and divided China, the USSR was “in a position to exert greater influence there than any other country.” The Soviets were supplying the Communist forces in China, while in Korea, the Soviets had shown that they would consent to the unification of the country only if assured of a “friendly” government.

Most ominous was Soviet military power:

Generalissimo Stalin and his associates…are supporting armed forces stronger than those of any potential combination of foreign powers and they are developing as rapidly as possible a powerful and self-sufficient economy. They are seizing every opportunity to expand the area, directly or indirectly, under Soviet control in order to provide additional protection for the vital areas of the Soviet Union.

The menace was gathering. Russia was rapidly developing “atomic weapons, guided missiles, materials for biological warfare, a strategic air force, submarines of great cruising range….” The Soviet Union, the grim report continued, was also actively directing espionage and subversive movements in the United States.

Since the “language of military power” was the only language the Russians understood, it was necessary that the United States maintain sufficient military strength to “confine” Soviet influence. Therefore, the United States, too, must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare. “The mere fact of preparedness may be the only powerful deterrent to Soviet aggressive action and in this sense the only sure guarantee of peace.”

In reviewing the situation in the Middle East, the report noted that the Soviets hoped for the withdrawal of troops from Greece to establish another of their “friendly” governments there. The Soviet desire for Turkey was a puppet state to serve as a springboard for the domination of the eastern Mediterranean.

Finally, the report concluded that in addition to maintaining its military strength, the United States “should support and assist all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R.”

George Kennan, when asked to look at a nearly completed draft, judged it “excellent.” Truman, who was up much of one night reading the final report, called Clifford at his home early the next morning to ask how many copies there were. Ten, Clifford said. Truman wanted the other nine put immediately “under lock and key.” The report was so “hot,” he told Clifford, that if it ever came out its effect on his efforts to resolve the East-West conflict peacefully would be “exceedingly unfortunate.”

How much effect it had on Truman is difficult to gauge. He never said. Clifford, when recounting the Truman years, would stress its great far-reaching influence, while Elsey would be far more modest. “The impact of having it all drawn together may have had some influence on the President,” Elsey would speculate. “Again, I don’t think one can—you never know and neither the President nor anyone else is ever able—to say exactly what all the influences are that help make up his mind.”

All the same, it was Clifford and Elsey who, after Truman’s return from Mexico, put the finishing touches to the historic speech Truman would make before Congress concerning the situation in Greece, and much that was in the speech came directly from the report.

At a Cabinet meeting on March 7, Truman’s first day back from Mexico, Acheson said the complete disintegration of Greece was only weeks away. “If we go in we cannot be certain of success in the Middle East and Mediterranean. If we do not go in there will be a collapse in these areas.” There was also, of course, the possibility of “military risk.”

Truman felt he faced a decision as difficult as any ever to confront a President. The money for Greece was only the beginning. “It means the United States is going into European politics….” The President’s staff viewed the speech as potentially the most important of his career.

A first draft had been prepared at the State Department, but Truman thought it too wordy and technical, more like an investment prospectus, as he later wrote. He also wanted the addition of a strong statement of American policy. Acheson made cuts and revisions, modified several passages, including a key sentence that essentially repeated what had been in the Clifford-Elsey report about helping countries in jeopardy from the Soviet Union, only here the Soviet Union was not to be mentioned by name.

“It is the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” the line read in its original state. Acheson changed it to, “I believe it must be the policy of the United States….”

To Clifford, it was time to take a stand against the Soviets, time for “the opening gun” in a campaign to awaken the American people. As he had urged the President to stand fast against John L. Lewis, so Clifford now urged a strong response to Stalin.

George Kennan, on the other hand, thought the speech went too far, and in Paris, Marshall looked it over with Chip Bohlen, who was accompanying him to Moscow, and both felt there was “too much rhetoric.”

When Bernard Baruch, who had no official position in the administration, let it be known that he too wished to have a say in the matter, Truman refused. “If you take his advice,” Truman said, “then you have him on your hands for hours and hours, and it is his policy. I’m just not going to do it. We have a decision to make and we’l l make it.”

(Hearing the story later from Clifford, David Lilienthal wrote in his diary that “the President’s comment interested me because it was so human: one of the few things a President can enjoy is to decide whom he will consult.”)

Truman had Clifford and Elsey finish up the final draft as suited him. He was no Woodrow Wilson, who could sit down at a typewriter the night before addressing Congress at an historic juncture and tap out his own speech. But he knew what he wanted. “I wanted no hedging…. It had to be clear and free of hesitation or double talk.”

In answer to Marshall’s concern about “rhetoric,” Marshall was told that in the opinion of the executive branch, including the President, the Senate would not approve the new policy without emphasis on the Communist threat. Probably that was correct.

“There is, you know, such a thing as being too intellectual in your approach to a problem,” Clark Clifford would say years later in an interview.

The man who insists on seeing all sides of it often can’t make up his mind where to take hold.

Without any disparagement, that was never a problem for Mr. Truman. He wanted all the facts he could get before he made up his mind. But if he could get only 80 percent of the facts in the time available, he didn’t let the missing 20 percent tie him up in indecision. He believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all. And when he made up his mind that was it….

We’d been through the greatest war in which the world had ever been involved…. This is 1947. The war ended in August of 1945. There was every reason for Harry Truman to say, “This is not for us.” And he kept worrying about it, thinking about it…. I remember thinking there was really nothing to impede the Soviet forces, if they chose to, from just marching straight west to the English Channel…. And yet he decided that it had to be done…. Harry Truman looks at this, and he just steps up to it….

The speech setting forth what became known as the Truman Doctrine was delivered in the House Chamber before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, March 12, 1947, beginning a few minutes past one o’c lock. It was a straightforward declarative statement lasting eighteen minutes. Greece was in desperate need, the situation was urgent. The existing Greek government was not perfect, and the government of the United States, no less than ever, condemned extremist measures of the right or left. Though Turkey, unlike Greece, had been spared the destruction and suffering of the war, Turkey also needed American support.

One of the primary objectives of American policy, Truman said, was “the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free of coercion.” This had been a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan, countries that had tried “to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other countries.”

Dressed in a dark suit and dark tie, he read from an open notebook slowly and with great force. His audience listened in silence. Hardly anyone moved. In the front row, John Snyder had his head bowed. Beside him the perfectly tailored Acheson sat as stiff and straight as if at a memorial service, hands folded in his lap. Further along in the same row, Senator Taft fiddled with his glasses, rubbed his face, then yawned. On the dais behind Truman, Speaker Martin and Senator Vandenberg were following the speech line by line in printed copies.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

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.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes….

Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East.

We must take immediate and resolute action….

To many who were listening there in the chamber and over the radio, it seemed an odd, ironic time for a crisis. The United States was the richest, strongest country in the world and prospering as few could have ever imagined. Production was up. Incomes were up. There were few strikes. There was no more waiting for new automobiles, no meat shortages any longer. White shirts, nylon stockings, fishing tackle, and golf balls were back on store shelves. Because of the GI Bill, more than 4 million veterans were attending college, as most never could have in other times. Yet the speech seemed disturbingly like a call to arms, “Well, I told my wife to dust off my uniform,” an ex-soldier enrolled at the University of Oklahoma remarked to a reporter.

The cost of winning the war had been $341 billion. Now $400 million was needed for Greece and Turkey. “This is a serious course upon which we embark,” Truman said at the finish, and the look on his face was serious indeed. “I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious…. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world, and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.”

The entire room rose in applause, but as Acheson later wrote, it was more as a tribute to a brave man than a unanimous acceptance of his policy. Truman, holding the closed notebook with the speech in front of his chest with both hands, nodded to the applause left and right, several times, but he never smiled.

Editorial reaction was overwhelmingly supportive. The New York Times compared the speech to the Monroe Doctrine. To the editors of Time and Life it was a great clearing of the air at long last. “Like a bolt of lightning,” said Life, “the speech cut through the confused international atmosphere.” The President, said Collier’s, had “hit the popularity jackpot.” But support was often expressed with troubling reservations—“Are we to shoulder the mantle of nineteenth century British imperialism?” asked the San Francisco Examiner—and some of the liberal press was outraged. PM charged Truman with scrapping Roosevelt’s whole policy on Russia.

Most important was the objection of Walter Lippmann, who, though favoring aid to Greece, disapproved of the President’s tone. “A vague global policy which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits,” Lippmann warned. “It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot be predicted.”

That the speech was of immense importance, signaling a turning point, no one seems to have doubted. “If words could shape the future of nations,” wrote Newsweek, “these unquestionably would. They had clearly put America into power politics to stay.”

On Capitol Hill Senator Vandenberg was quick to stress that he did not consider Greek-Turkish aid as a “universal pattern,” but something only “to fit a given circumstance.” Acheson, too, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the bill was not intended to establish a pattern for the future. The United States, he stressed, would “of course” act “according to the circumstances of each specific case.”

Objections in Congress came from liberals and conservatives alike. Senator Pepper was sure such a policy would destroy all hope of reconciliation with Russia. Senators Byrd and McKellar were opposed chiefly because of cost. “I guess the do-gooders won’t feel right until they have us all broke,” said Republican Representative Harold Knutson of Minnesota.

Truman, within minutes after delivering the speech, had been on his way to the airport and another flight to Florida. The President, explained Wallace Graham, had been “going pretty hard lately” and needed a rest. In plain truth, the President was exhausted. Writing to Margaret from Key West, he said no one had any idea how “worn to a frazzle” he was by “this terrible decision.” But the police state of communism was no different from the police state of the Nazis, he told her. He had known that since Potsdam.

In the time between Truman’s dramatic appearance before Congress and the final vote on aid to Greece and Turkey, the fight in the Senate over the Lilienthal nomination grew intense and abusive. The opposition was nearly all Republican. Senator John Bricker of Ohio, who had been Dewey’s running mate in 1944, warned that it might be the last chance ever to get the Atomic Energy Commission out of the hands of leftists. Capehart of Indiana said that especially now, in view of the situation in Greece and Turkey, control of atomic energy ought to be returned to the Army, an idea that appealed also to Senator Taft. Brewster of Maine, who had once served on the Truman Committee, claimed Lilienthal’s indifference to communism made him no less a threat than if he were an outright party member.

“If Mr. L. is a communist so am I,” Truman wrote privately. He would carry the fight to the end, Truman vowed. “It is a matter of principle and we cannot let the peanut politicians ruin a good man….” Taft, Truman thought, was succeeding only in making himself look like a fool.

A few Republicans—Knowland of California, Saltonstall of Massachusetts, Aiken of Vermont—declared support for the nominee. But the decisive moment came when Vandenberg spoke to a tense session on the afternoon of April 3, giving what many thought was his finest speech ever.

David Lilienthal, Vandenberg said, was “no part of a communist by any stretch of the imagination.” When Vandenberg called for Lilienthal’s confirmation, the galleries roared with applause.

There was a test vote on an amendment. Lilienthal was with Truman at the White House when Charlie Ross put his head in at the door to report the result. They had won by a margin of 14 votes, more than anyone had thought possible. Truman and Lilienthal shook hands. Atomic energy was “the most important thing there is,” Truman remarked, looking subdued and thoughtful. “You must make a blessing of it, or,” he said, pointing to a large globe in the corner, “we’ll blow that all to smithereens.”

The final, formal vote in the Senate came on April 9, when a total of twenty Republicans defied Taft to support Lilienthal. Of the southern Democrats, only four besides McKellar voted against him. The nomination was confirmed by 50 to 31. It was Truman’s first test of strength with the new Congress and a sweet victory.

Yet the issue of loyalty—the issue of who was or who was not, in Taft’s phrase, soft on communism—was by no means ended. The Republican leadership, having made communism a theme with such success in the fall elections, would keep up the demand for investigations, and Truman, to head off such attacks from conservatives in both parties, had by this time accepted the view of a special commission—and of Attorney General Clark and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover—that a program of loyalty reviews was necessary. The whole concept troubled him. In notes he made of a conversation with the President in May 1947, Clark Clifford wrote: “[He is] very strongly anti-FBI…. Wants to be sure to hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo.’ ”

Further, much too much was being made of “the Communist bugaboo,” Truman thought, and said so in a letter to a former Pennsylvania governor named George Earle. The country was “perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned—we have far too many sane people.”

The political pressures bore heavily, however. Attorney General Clark, conceding that the number of disloyal employees in the government was probably small, argued that even one such person posed a serious threat. J. Edgar Hoover wanted authority to remove anyone from public service whose views were politically suspect. Such people, Hoover warned, might well influence foreign policy in a way that could “favor the foreign country of their ideological choice.” Like many Republicans on Capitol Hill, Hoover saw the State Department as the core of the problem. In his first speech as the new Speaker of the House, Joe Martin had declared there was “no room in the government of the United States for any who prefer the Communistic system.” Accusations that the New Deal had been riddled with Communists were made repeatedly and widely believed, however unfounded. “The long tenure of the Democratic Party had poisoned the air we Republicans breathed,” remembered Martin much later. “Fear of Communist penetration of the government was an ugly new phenomenon. Suspicion of the State Department was rife. We were disturbed and bewildered by the new power of the Soviet Union.”

Truman worried particularly about the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the extremes it might go to under its vile-tempered, and to Truman contemptible, Republican chairman, Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. By acting first on the loyalty issue, Truman hoped to head Thomas off. Also, importantly, he wanted no accusations of administration softness on communism at home just as he was calling for a new hard approach to communism abroad.

On Friday, March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to Congress, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing an elaborate Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. And he did so with misgivings.

Roosevelt, in 1942, had empowered the Civil Service to disqualify anyone from government employment where there was a “reasonable doubt of loyalty,” and by executive order Roosevelt later assigned the Justice Department and FBI to check on the loyalty of government workers. But that had been during the war. Until now, no such step had ever been taken in peacetime.

His purpose, Truman later wrote, was twofold: to guard against disloyal employees in the government work force, and to protect innocent government workers from unfounded accusations. To show that he had no intention of playing politics with the program, he put a conservative Republican, a prominent Washington lawyer named Seth Richardson, in charge of its Review Board.

All federal employees were to be subject to loyalty investigations, whatever their jobs. FBI files and the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee would be called into use. Anyone found to be disloyal could no longer hold a government job. Dismissal could be based merely on “reasonable grounds for belief that the person is disloyal,” yet the term “disloyal” was never defined. Moreover, those accused would be unable to confront those making charges against them, or even to know who they were or what exactly the charges were. In addition, the Attorney General was authorized to draw up a list of subversive organizations.

To David Lilienthal, who well knew the torment that self-proclaimed Communist-hunters could bring down on a loyal government employee, the whole program looked ominous. Anyone serving in the government could be at the mercy of almost any malevolent accuser. “In practical effect,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “the usual rule that men are presumed innocent until proved guilty is in reverse.” Yet Lilienthal, too, conceded that something of the sort probably had to be initiated, and so staunch an upholder of liberal principle as the New York Post called the program a logical answer to subversion. At his next press conference, Truman was asked little or nothing about it. Of more interest was his letter to the former Pennsylvania governor. Was he truly so unconcerned about “the Communist bugaboo”?

“I am not worried about the Communist Party taking over the government of the United States,” Truman replied, “but I am against a person, whose loyalty is not to the government of the United States, holding a government job.” At the time it seemed all the answer anyone could ask for.

In another few months the FBI would begin running “name checks” on every one of the 2 million people on the federal payrolls, a monstrous, costly task. Over four years, by 1951, 3 million employees would be investigated and cleared by the Civil Service Commission, and another 14,000 by the FBI. Several thousand would resign, but only 212 would be dismissed as being of questionable loyalty. None would be indicted and no evidence of espionage would be found.

Clark Clifford would say sadly years later that the whole program had been “a response to the temper of the times,” and that he did not see how Truman could have done otherwise.

But in an interview with the journalist Carl Bernstein, Clifford was considerably more blunt:

It was a political problem. [Clifford told Bernstein] Truman was going to run in ‘48, and that was it….

My own feeling was there was not a serious problem. I felt the whole thing was being manufactured. We never had a serious discussion about a real loyalty problem…. the President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such that he had to recognize it….

There was no substantive problem…. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured….

(To Bernstein, this was a particularly chilling revelation, since his own parents had been among victims of the Loyalty Program.)

And politically the effect of Executive Order No. 9835 was indeed pronounced, for the moment at least, as Time’s Capitol Hill correspondent, Frank McNaughton, described in a confidential report to his editors:

The Republicans are now taking Truman seriously…[his] order to root out subversives from government employment hit a solid note with Congress, and further pulled the rug from under his political detractors. The charge of “Communists in government” and nothing being done about it, a favorite theme of the reactionaries, simply will not stick any longer…. The Republicans are beginning to realize Truman is no pushover.

That Truman’s concern over J. Edgar Hoover continued to trouble him there is no question. “If I can prevent [it], there’ll be no NKVD [Soviet Secret Police] or Gestapo in this country,” he wrote privately to Bess. “Edgar Hoover’s organization would make a good start toward a citizen spy system. Not for me….”

Writing in his memoirs years later, well after the pernicious influence of the Loyalty Program had become all too clear, Truman could say only in lame defense that it had started out to be as fair as possible “under the climate of opinion that then existed.” In private conversation with friends, however, he would concede it had been a bad mistake. “Yes, it was terrible,” he said.

On April 22, 1947, the Senate overwhelmingly approved aid to Greece and Turkey by a vote of 67 to 23. On May 9, the House, like the Senate, passed the bill by a margin of nearly three to one, 287 to 107. On May 22, while visiting his mother in Grandview, Truman sat at the Mission oak table in her small parlor and signed the $400 million aid package. The Truman Doctrine had been sanctioned.

Though it seemed so at the time, and would often be so presented in later accounts, the Truman Doctrine was not an abrupt, dramatic turn in American policy, but a declaration of principle. It was a continuation of a policy that had been evolving since Potsdam, its essence to be found in Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and in the more emphatic Clifford-Elsey Report. It could even be said that it began with Averell Harriman’s first meeting with Truman before Potsdam.

But, be that as it may, the Truman Doctrine would guide the foreign policy of the United States for another generation and more, for better or worse, despite any of the assurances by Acheson and Vandenberg that this was not the intent.