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H-DIPLO ROUNDTABLE Arnold Offner, _Another Such Victory: President Truman
and the Cold War, 1945-1953_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Roundtable Editor: Thomas Maddux

Reviewers: Mark Byrnes, Carolyn Eisenberg, Eduard Mark, Andrew Rotter,
William Stueck, Vladislav Zubok

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Commentary by Andrew Rotter, Colgate University

Arnold Offner's new biography of Harry S Truman as a foreign policy
president is a superb corrective to the misty-eyed nostalgia that has
lately suffused the field. David McCullough's 1992 book inspired among
Americans a wave of "give 'em hell Harryism"-the belief that the feisty
little man from Missouri, faced with menacing communists and surrounded by
spineless European allies and skittish advisers held over the from the
appeasement-inclined Roosevelt administration, acted with determination
and plain good sense to protect the free world from certain immolation. It
was no accident that this interpretation of Truman proved appealing during
the 1990s. McCullough's Truman had integrity, honesty, clarity of vision,
and a style of leadership that left no doubt where he stood. George H. W.
Bush and Bill Clinton seemed short on several of these qualities. What
Harry would have done to those quarrelsome Iraqis, Colombian drug lords,
Serbs and Rwandans and Islamic fundamentalists!

Offner is not convinced. To him, Truman was narrowly parochial in outlook,
an uncritical champion of "American values" as he understood them,
willfully ignorant of other peoples and cultures, especially outside of
Europe, and so unsure of his own fitness for the presidency that he almost
reflexively demonized those who disagreed with him. As a result, Offner
concludes, Truman's "foreign policy leadership intensified Soviet-American
conflict, hastened division of Europe, and brought tragic intervention in
Asian civil wars and a generation of Sino-American enmity" (p. xii).

A man of modest talents, Truman was plucked from obscurity by Tom
Pendergast, the notorious Kansas City Democratic kingmaker, and elected
country judge. He performed ably and for the most part dutifully and, in
1934, after four other possible candidates declined to run for senator
from Pendergast, Truman gained the machine's support for his own bid and
won the election. He became a moderate New Dealer, while nevertheless
harboring suspicions that Franklin Roosevelt himself was a patrician
"fakir," a word he never learned to spell. But he worked hard and played
ball with his Democratic colleagues, and he was rewarded with re-election
in 1940. Despite Roosevelt's expressed preference for others and his own
modest national profile, Truman was made FDR's running mate in 1944. When
the president died in April 1945, Truman, the failed haberdasher from
Jackson County, Missouri, suddenly became the holder of the most powerful
office in the world.

He was unprepared for the job, and he knew it: he confessed to a diplomat
that he was "the last man fitted to handle it" (p. 46). Certainly he faced
a sea of troubles. The Nazis were nearly beaten, but the end game was
proving tricky and there was full throated disagreement, within the
administration and among the allies, about how to reconstitute Germany
once it had surrendered. Japan fought on, without hope of victory but
still capable of inflicting great damage on U.S. forces then closing in on
the home islands. Truman had been president for nearly two weeks before
Henry Stimson and Leslie Groves told him about the atomic bomb; Groves
assured Truman that a bomb would be ready to use sometime during the
summer. Western Europe was exhausted by war, while Eastern Europe had been
liberated-ominously, thought Truman-by the Soviet Red Army. Haunted Jewish
survivors of the Holocaust cast their eyes toward Palestine, oil-rich Iran
was occupied by the rival powers, China had suffered eight years of war
and was rent by political division, and nationalism flared in South and
Southeast Asia. Overhanging all of these problems was the prospect of
conflict with the Soviet Union, battered by the war but still militarily
formidable, ideologically hostile to American values, and led by a
ruthless dictator who, in the view of many U.S. policymakers, was bent on
world conquest.

In his profound insecurity, Truman's impulse was to render snap judgments,
substituting the appearance of decisiveness for the measured deliberation
that might have introduced nuance into the policymaking process. Truman
gave the Cold War its shape. He assumed the worst of the Soviet Union. He
rejected Stalin's attempts to unite and weaken Germany, choosing instead
the division of the country and the strengthening of its western sector.
When, in 1948, the Soviets closed West Berlin to surface traffic, Truman
authorized an airlift to keep its citizens supplied and out of communist
hands. The president turned essentially local disputes (as in Greece and
Korea) into international confrontations, exaggerated the Soviet threat in
every venue (including Turkey and Iran), and eschewed balanced policies in
favor of politically or ideologically driven initiatives (see
Palestine/Israel and China) that destroyed flexibility and left the United
States vulnerable to charges that it no longer believed in
democracy-charges that stuck among Asians, Africans, and African
Americans. Above all, Truman absorbed the lessons of his hardline
advisers, among them Averell Harriman, Bernard Baruch, and George Kennan,
and resolved that the Soviet Union could not be trusted. It must instead
be contained through a combination of political and economic isolation
(the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan), and military force-retention
of nuclear supremacy, the North Atlantic Alliance in Europe, and
intervention on the Korean peninsula in 1950.

Offner's interpretation of Truman's foreign policy is a good deal more
critical than that of the so-called "orthodox" Cold War historians,
particularly John Lewis Gaddis and those, like Kathryn Weathersby, who
make a fetish of each newly-translated document extracted from the Russian
archives. Offner uses the Russian material, but properly contextualizes it
within the larger body of evidence derived from American and British
sources. Offner's take on Truman is somewhat more critical than that of
Melvyn Leffler in _A Preponderance of Power_; to Offner, Truman exercised
precious little realism or prudence in his dealings with the Soviets.
(Offner follows closely, however, the critique of Gaddis in Leffler's 1999
_AHR_ essay "The Cold War: What Do 'We Now Know'?".) At the same time,
Offner does not criticize Truman as harshly as do the radical
revisionists, among them Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperovitz (on the
atomic bomb), and Bruce Cumings (on the Korean War). Offner argues that
Truman's policies lacked wisdom and subtlety and in these ways made the
world more dangerous, but he stops short of accusing Truman of
criminality, and he credits the president with several successes: the
Marshall Plan ("perhaps the most enduring and inspiring foreign policy
initiative of the Truman administration," p. 244), the Berlin Airlift,
balanced defense budgets, and the preservation of a non-communist South
Korea.

Offner fits most comfortably alongside the moderate Cold War revisionists:
William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, Lloyd Gardner, Barton J.
Bernstein, and Thomas Paterson. Accordingly, Stalin was a very bad man,
but his foreign policy was cautious and thus need not have prompted such a
militant and far-flung response. Truman practiced atomic diplomacy. (On
atomic matters generally, he was out of his depth.) Provincialism and
insecurity blinded him to splits within the Communist camp and differences
between national liberation movements and communist-sponsored revolutions.
He promoted American values, democracy and capitalism, as if they were
universal, and saw skeptics of this view as enemies. He was racially
insensitive, blunt to the point of rudeness, close minded and prickly if
criticized. He was a creature of the political culture that produced him
but also one of its agents, and as such bears considerable blame for
making the Cold War worse than it otherwise might have been.

My sympathies inclined me toward Offner's interpretation, and as I read
this impressively documented study these hardened into convictions.
Several of Offner's contentions will nevertheless inspire controversy even
among those who accept his overall argument. It seems rash, for instance,
to insist that Truman's private upbraiding of secretary of state James
Byrnes for losing his nerve at the Moscow Conference in December 1945
amounted to "a personal declaration of the Cold War" by the president (p.
124), weeks before Kennan, Stalin, and Winston Churchill weighed in with
declarations of their own. Offner distinguishes the incendiary rhetoric
and aggressive purpose of the Truman Doctrine from the more practical aims
of the Marshall Plan, but Truman regarded them as "two halves of the same
walnut," even if Offner prefers not to. Chen Jian's most recent book
(_Mao's China and the Cold War_) suggests, contrary to Offner's claims,
that the Truman administration did not lose a chance to establish good
relations with Mao Zedong and Chinese Communists in 1949. Stalin's attempt
to achieve a united Germany in March 1952 surely had more to do with
creating discord in the Allied camp than it was a sincere effort to reopen
talks on the issue; NATO was by then in place, and Stalin had to know that
the Americans would not now abandon their plans for West Germany's revival
and rearmament as an independent entity.

Beyond that lie several matters that I would express not as criticisms but
as suggestions for further thinking. _Another Such Victory_ is dense with
detail about Truman's Cold War crises. (This seems to me especially true
of Offner's account of German policy. I should add that I have always
found U.S. postwar policy toward Germany mind-numbing, rather like German
music. Maybe that's just me.) Regardless, the effect of all this detail
was to create in me a feeling of sympathy for Truman. Perhaps he was out
of his depth on nuclear and other issues because the waters in which he
struggled were both turbulent and deep. The president could have done
better: smarter choices were made available to him by some in his
administration. But he had a hard job.

Offner's analysis of Truman rests on the claim that the president was an
insecure man, His Accidency, thrust into a role for which he hadn't asked
and that was plainly too much for him. "They didn't tell me anything about
what was going on," he complained to Henry Wallace a month after taking
office (p. 23). Deeply anxious about his public performance, the status of
Western Europe, Russian probes or presences in the Near East and a host of
other things, Truman was "self-deprecating" but also belligerent, seeking
to mask his anxiety with rhetorical toughness and contrived decisiveness.
He aimed to leave no doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing.

There is a commonsensical logic to this argument, which reminds me
slightly of Richard Hofstadter's thesis that a national "psychic crisis"
propelled the United States into war with Spain in 1898. Still, I wonder
whether historians ought to making clinical judgments about their
subjects. We aren't trained to know how the insecure-or, for that matter,
the confident or depressed-will act under stress. It seems to me possible
that insecurity, like schizophrenia, encompasses a range of symptoms and
manifests in a variety of behaviors. Insecure people might be belligerent,
and might feign decisiveness, but they might also act uncertainly and
inconsistently-which description seems to me to fit Truman at least
through early 1946. Let us agree, at least, to explore more deeply the
psychological dimension of presidential decision making.

In a recent op-ed piece in the New York _Times_, Thomas E. Mann found
reason to compare George W. Bush to Truman. Both men, he noted, came to
the presidency "without a clear mandate from the electorate," both were
regarded as intellectual lightweights by critics, both spoke plainly
(Bush? So says Mann), and both faced serious threats to the nation's
security. Mann concludes with the hope that Bush will become even more
like Truman, rejecting unilateralism and pre-emptive military actions in
favor of alliance building and containment of enemies. The comparison
seems to me strained, because Bush has steadfastly ignored world opinion
in his quest to destroy evildoers and to pursue American interests, as he
defines them, by all conceivable means. What with all the irresponsible
saber rattling in Washington this season, I confess myself nostalgic for
containment. Give me some nation-building in the name of democracy, some
meaningful consultation with the allies, a military interventions against
an aggressor, not against some thinker of nasty thoughts (and then only as
a last resort), and I will be a happy man. Truman did not fully achieve
these desiderata, but he came closer to them than the current president
seems destined to do.

The richness of Offner's account, the fullness of his evidence, invite
speculation on some broadly cultural aspects of Truman's Cold War that
Offner hasn't the space or the inclination to explore. Take, for example,
the matter of race. Save for chapters on Truman's policy toward the Middle
East and China, Offner focuses on U.S. relations with Europe and the
Soviet Union. That reflects the priorities of the administration. Yet
Truman did have policies toward Asia, Africa, and Latin America, areas in
which rising nationalism inevitably brought the United States into
confrontation with issues of race. As Mary Dudziak and Thomas Borstelmann
have recently demonstrated, the absence of civil rights for blacks in the
American south embarrassed the Truman administration in its efforts to win
the sympathies of people of color who sought liberation throughout the
Third World. Truman's racial prejudices, suppressed but not eradicated,
reinforced American Eurocentrism and prevented the president from taking
seriously liberation movements in Indochina and South Africa, to name just
two.

An analysis of Truman's policies from the standpoint of gender might also
be enlightening. Men who value toughness, and say so as often as Truman
did, may have something to hide. Truman would "stand up" to the Soviets,
and he refused to "baby" them-no man would do that. French misbehavior in
the Middle East following the war prompted Truman to wish them "castrated"
(p. 51). There was no military rationale to build a hydrogen "Super" bomb
beginning in 1950, but Truman authorized it anyway: ours had to be bigger
than the Soviets' if we weren't to get pushed around. Writing in his diary
during the summer of 1948, David Lilienthal praised Truman as "a real man"
(p. 457). No description could have made the president happier.

The claim that gender had influence on Truman's decision making presumes
that language matters-that it is meaningful, as Frank Costigliola has
argued, when people use certain words instead of certain other words.
Truman had a fascinating relationship with words. He was blunt. When he
lectured the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov on April 23, 1945,
he did so in "words of one syllable" (p. 31). Yet, Truman valued words, or
said he did. When, in late 1950, British prime minister Clement Attlee
asked the president to put in writing a promise to "consult" before using
atomic weapons, Truman demurred, claiming that "if a man's word wasn't any
good it wasn't made any better by writing it down" (p. 400)-a statement
that either gave Attlee faith in what Truman said or destroyed Attlee's
faith in documents Truman had previously signed. Truman called the Soviets
"barbarians," suggesting that there was no point in reasoning with them.
Most often, Truman compared diplomacy to poker; the atomic bomb, for
example, was his "master card" or his "ace in the hole." The analogy both
domesticates and dramatizes international relations. Poker is a man's
game, played for high stakes though rarely life and death. Those who play
it honor its rules, but they're encouraged to bluff with a straight
(poker) face. Doubtless the president used poker analogies unthinkingly,
while nevertheless expressing through them a wish to be reassured that,
win or lose the hand, in the end he would push back from the table alive
and well.

The tart language of which Truman was fond had a function: it allowed him
to let off steam without hurting anything except feelings. Molotov was
taken aback when Truman addressed him in words of one syllable, and the
Soviet foreign minister no doubt reported to Stalin that the new man would
be hard to deal with, but thereafter the president calmed down and dealt
more patiently with the Russians, for awhile. Truman told Attlee in
December 1950 that the only possible response to Communism was to
"eliminate it" (p. 421). Into his diary in early 1952 went the president's
harshest invective: the Russians honored no agreements, made slaves of
their POWs, "raped" (Offner's characterization) the Baltic states and
occupied Eastern Europe, and supported fellow traveling "thugs,"
presumably the North Koreans. "This is the final chance for the Soviet
Government to decide whether it desires to survive or not," Truman wrote
(pp. 409-10). Yet, having made these threats, Truman refrained from
carrying them out. Sometimes it takes saying or writing something to make
one realize how foolish or impractical it sounds.

I noted earlier that Truman's relative disinterest in the world outside
the West allows Offner to limit his treatment of U.S. policy toward the
periphery. Perhaps because of this, Offner somewhat underestimates the
contributions of smaller powers, West and East, to the development of the
Cold War. American power was preponderant, not all encompassing, and
recent scholarship has shown that both postwar superpowers could be
manipulated by their supposed clients. The British often instructed the
Americans on colonial and postcolonial questions, particularly in South
and Southeast Asia. It was a British and French initiative, the Dunkirk
Pact of 1947, that became the nucleus of NATO. (Ernest Bevin called
Dunkirk "a sprat to catch the American mackerel," and it worked.) The
French guided the process of German reintegration with the Schuman and
Monnet Plans, the Germans themselves had much to do with shaping the
Berlin Blockade crisis and its resolution, and the Japanese, despite
obvious constraints, managed their American occupiers in ways that served
their own purposes. The North and South Koreans took turns tormenting
their powerful sponsors. Offner's focus on Truman is a focus on the United
States, which is appropriate. But let us remember that the Cold War was a
multivalent thing, with sources, influences, and outcomes that were
sometimes beyond the grasp of even its most powerful participants.

One final point, on the matter of the use of atomic bombs against Japan
and the message they were intended to send to the Russians-"atomic
diplomacy." Offner's position is that anti-Soviet politics were integral
to the decision to use nuclear weapons by preventing "serious
thought...about not using atomic bombs" (p. 99). To Offner, warning the
Soviets about American power by using it was more than a diplomatic
"bonus" attached to defeating Japan more quickly: it was a significant
objective in its own right. In this way, Offner is more amenable to the
"atomic diplomacy" argument that is, say, Barton J. Bernstein, who first
described it as a "bonus."

Certainly Truman, Stimson, and other U.S. officials hoped that using the
bomb would frighten the Soviets into more agreeable behavior. Where this
hope ranked among the reasons for the Hiroshima bombing is hard to say.
What if the Soviets were not in August 1945 threatening to liberate
Manchuria and northern China from the Japanese and likely to demand a
share of the occupation authority in Japan itself? Would the United States
have used the bomb anyway, just to end the war more quickly? Of course.
Would the bombing have been morally cleaner had the Soviet Union not been
its implied secondary target? That seems doubtful. Once the war was over,
"atomic diplomacy" became a tautology: no U.S. policy, toward the Soviet
Union or anyone else, could take place in the absence of the bomb. There
would always be an implicit threat of an atomic attack by the United
States at least until its nuclear monopoly ended in the summer of 1949.
Thereafter, as more and more nations made nuclear weapons, atomic
diplomacy would become increasingly universal.

That these issues seem so fresh, so fraught, so debatable, testifies to
the extraordinary tensions of the early Cold War. No one gets the last
word on a period like this, or on a man like Harry Truman. But if Arnold
Offner hasn't solved Truman in all ways and for all time, he has done more
than anyone else to make us understand the foreign policy of this mulish
man from Missouri. "Give 'em hell, Harry"? No thanks.

Andrew Rotter
Colgate University

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