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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 Mark S. Byrnes, Wofford College

The strength of Arnold A. Offner's Another Such Victory lies in its
judicious treatment of the particulars of Harry Truman's foreign policy.
Offner has given us a thorough examination of the origins of the Cold War,
one that deserves the considered attention of all cold war scholars. While
he is predominantly critical of American foreign policy during the Truman
years, he is consistently fair in his evaluation of it. The problem with
this well-researched work is that ultimately its overarching argument is
not persuasive.

Offner argues that his treatment of Truman differs from past accounts in
its focus on the influence of what he calls Truman's "parochial and
nationalist heritage." (xii) By this, Offner means that the man from
Independence never truly broadened his views beyond the limited horizons
of the small American town from which he came. Throughout his life and
presidency, Truman held an "uncritical belief in the superiority of
American values and political-economic interests." From this flawed
foundation came "his conviction that the Soviet Union and Communism were
the root cause of all international strife, and his inability to
comprehend Asian politics and nationalism." (xii) The result, according to
Offner, is a more intense Cold War than was necessary, and far worse
American relations with the communist states in Asia, punctuated by
terrible wars in Korea and later in Vietnam.

Offner is far too careful a scholar to argue that Truman caused the cold
war. He wisely denies the idea explicitly: "No one leader or nation caused
the Cold War." (456) Instead, he asserts that Truman's leadership (or lack
thereof) "intensified Soviet-American conflict, hastened division of
Europe and brought tragic intervention in Asian civil wars and a
generation of Sino-American enmity." (xii) Offner's choice of verbs here
shows that he sees differing degrees of responsibility-he lays the most
blame at Truman's feet in the case of the Chinese and Korean conflicts.
Only with regard to Asia does Offner suggest that the course of the cold
war could have been meaningfully altered had another man occupied the Oval
Office. But in Asian policy, Truman "brought" about problems, rather than
merely "intensified" a conflict that would have happened regardless.

The argument that Truman's parochial nationalism is the key to
understanding why the Cold War developed the way it did falls short on
several counts. Offner simply attributes too much to Truman as an
individual. It is no doubt true that presidents are quite important in
making foreign policy. But Truman was arguably less important than his
immediate predecessor Franklin Roosevelt and some of his successors, such
as John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Offner notes in his biographical first
chapter (at twenty-one pages, it seems somewhat brief, given that the
argument rests on Truman's heritage) that Truman "would defer greatly to
strong leaders" and specifically notes the influence of both George
Marshall and Dean Acheson. Offner goes on to assert that Truman also
"would denounce leaders whose styles or ways of thinking were
unfamiliar."(3) Offner places greater importance on the latter observation
and sees it as explaining Truman's later failure to deal well with Stalin
and Mao. In the context of his overall argument, however, what is striking
is Offner's concession that Truman deferred to his Secretaries of State,
Marshall (1947-1949) and Acheson (1949-1953). If one includes Acheson's
service as Undersecretary of State under James F. Byrnes (1945-1947),
these two men guided the State Department through almost all of Truman's
presidency. If Truman generally deferred to Marshall and Acheson when
making foreign policy, how important was Truman's parochial nationalism?
Perhaps his acceptance of their proposals owed something to Truman's
underlying attitudes, but those policies were not the product of Truman's
personal heritage. Unless one is inclined to label both Marshall and
Acheson parochial nationalists too, it is difficult to see the importance
of the concept to the formation of the administration's foreign policy.

Ironically, one of Offner's more positive appraisals of Truman's diplomacy
concerns the recognition of Israel, an episode that is perhaps the most
striking example of Truman actually putting his personal stamp on policy
and refusing to defer to the strongly held view of a key adviser. In his
memoirs, Dean Acheson delicately observes that Truman had "deep-seated
convictions on many subjects," and that his support for Jewish immigration
to Israel was one of them. It is one of the few cases in which Acheson
says he "did not share the President's views," but he defends Truman
against the charge of being politically motivated by a desire to secure
the Jewish vote in the 1948 election. (Dean Acheson, Present at the
Creation: My Years in the State Department, New York: Norton, 1969, p.
169.) Offner agrees that Truman made policy toward Israel based on
"political realities, not campaign concerns," and he states that Truman
"sought a principled position." (298, 299) There was no one alive for whom
Truman had more respect than George Marshall, yet he defied his secretary
of state, even in the face of Marshall's warning that he would not vote
for the president in the upcoming election if he recognized Israel. In
this case, it seems, Truman's personal inclinations served him well.

While generally approving of the substance of policy, Offner observes that
Truman's "inability to grasp the nuances of diplomacy caused him great
difficulty." (299) But as Offner's narrative makes clear, the persistent
attempts of the State Department to undermine his position also caused Truman
serious problems. His difficulties were by no means all of his own making. As
if sensing that the positive assessment that his scholarly judgment leads him
to offer might undermine his case, Offner shifts his emphasis more to Truman's
style than the substance of his policy. Truman may have wanted to do the right
thing on occasion, Offner suggests, but his lack of sophistication impeded the
effort.

While style can matter in diplomacy, Offner does not convincingly
demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between Truman's parochial
nationalism and the substantive policies of Truman's administration. Far
too often, Offner's focus on style becomes a tendency to quote Truman at
his most down-to-earth, as if that is proof enough of his limited vision.
Offner rarely misses a chance to quote Truman calling someone a "son of a
bitch" (24, 51, 91, 115, 304) or telling someone to "go to hell" (32, 105,
162), and he seems to revel in Truman's errors. For example, in the
chapter on recognition of Israel, Offner quotes Truman (not once, but
twice) saying that his "soul [sic] interest" was to stop bloodshed in the
region (275, 295). Quoting (and then repeating) Truman's slip seemingly
serves no purpose other than making him appear to be someone of less than
stellar intellect. Offner does the same thing with another Truman error:
rendering the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek's name as "Chiang
K.C." Offner quotes this mistake on three separate occasions (318, 344,
464). Surely once was sufficient. No doubt, Truman was sometimes
unsophisticated in his language-in particular when angry or frustrated.
This fact does not constitute evidence that Truman's policies were
determined or even shaped by parochial nationalism.

Despite his evident distaste for what he sees as Truman's simplistic world
view, Offner's work consists of judicious treatment of particular
subjects. For example, Offner criticizes Truman for precipitating the
Berlin blockade of 1948-1949 due to the West's determination to create an
independent West Germany allied to the United States and its allies in
western Europe. (246) Nonetheless, he seems to admire Truman's handling of
the crisis: "Truman did manage to make a virtue of some of his
predispositions. He demonstrated his determination to sustain the U.S.
commitment to Europe and to Allied unity, to avert war, to retain control
over the military (especially atomic weapons), and to avoid taking
partisan advantage of a foreign policy crisis." (271-272) If this is
parochial nationalism at work, perhaps it is not all bad. To balance this
positive assessment of Truman's actions, however, Offner does insist that
Truman's "perspective was shaped by a relatively simplistic definition of
the situation" and says that Truman's "exaggerated sense of 'contract'"
prevented him from seeing the German situation from Stalin's perspective.
(271) Overall, however, Offner gives credit to Truman when the evidence
leads in that direction.

This same chapter, however, raises a troubling characteristic of Offner's
critique of Truman. He insists that Truman's flawed mindset led him to
fail to understand other leaders and nations and thus led to poor policy
choices that intensified the cold war, but he does not apply the same
standard to Truman's diplomatic counterparts. Offner criticizes Truman for
failing to see "the Soviet view of the current German problem" before the
Berlin blockade, but quickly dismisses Stalin's bullying as an
"ill-conceived coercive action." (271) Would it not be fair to say that
Stalin failed to see the American view of the German problem, too? Did not
his attempt at blackmail, holding the people of West Berlin hostage,
seriously intensify the cold war?

Perhaps Offner's strongest indictment of Truman's diplomacy concerns the
president's disastrous decision to take the Korean War north of the 38th
parallel and seek rollback rather than mere containment of the North
Korean regime. It is hard indeed to argue with Offner's conclusion:
"Truman's political myopia, and that of his advisers, precluded their
grasping the PRC leaders' determination to define and defend their
revolution." (420) What is lacking in Offner's account, however, is a
similar critique of the "political myopia" of Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il
Sung. Offner downplays Stalin's decision to allow Kim to invade the south,
explaining that Stalin's goals were "tsarist" rather than "global."
Perhaps so, but why did he and Mao fail to grasp that their "sponsorship"
of Kim's attack would run afoul of the American leaders' determination to
defend their South Korean ally? (370) Whatever Stalin's goals, tsarist or
global, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that in this case the
Soviet leader unnecessarily intensified the cold war, in a far more
provocative fashion than Truman ever did. It was Stalin's decision to
unleash Kim that led Truman to adopt the apocalyptic conclusions of NSC-68
and "set the nation on an aggressive course." (348) (Offner gives
surprisingly little attention to that seminal document, perhaps because it
was so unquestionably the product of Truman's advisers and contrary to the
president's personal inclination to restrain military spending.)

Lastly, Offner fails to pay enough attention to the influence of public
and Congressional opinion and its limiting effect on the practice of
diplomacy. Can one truly understand the Truman administration's policy
toward the Chinese Communists without considering the role played by the
China Lobby? The Truman administration's non-recognition policy (no matter
how unfortunate) was not made in a vacuum, but Offner devotes only one
paragraph to domestic pressures. (340) One can agree with Offner's
assessment of the decision to go north in Korea and still wonder whether
it would have been politically possible for Truman to order General
Douglas MacArthur to cease military operations when he had the enemy on
the run. Even after the massive intervention of the Chinese in the fall of
1950, MacArthur's enthusiasm for a wider war held considerable appeal to
some in Congress and among the public at large. What would their reaction
have been if, before Mao's involvement raised the stakes, Truman had
stopped a military advance in its tracks and left an aggressor to survive
and menace the south in the future? Congressional and public opinion may
not have determined Truman's policies, but as the leader of a democratic
state he had to remain mindful of it. Every president has to balance an
understanding of the conditions and perspectives of other nations with the
demands of his own people. Too often, the latter factor is missing in
Offner's analysis.

It sometimes seems as if Offner wishes that Truman had been a
disinterested cosmopolitan internationalist, immune from any hint of
anything as crass and distasteful as political concerns or national
self-interest, who might have been able to lead the world to the promised
land of international peace and cooperation. In short, Truman should have
been Henry Wallace. Offner describes Wallace as an "advanced" man, "a
plant geneticist and agronomist who also understood atomic science," while
Truman was "a country farmer given to homespun." (174) However much Offner
may regret FDR's decision to drop Wallace from the ticket in 1944, the
reality is that Wallace was not the vice-presidential candidate because he
was seen as a political liability by FDR (who certainly was no parochial
nationalist).

The kind of cooperation Wallace envisioned was never, as Offner admits, in the
cards: "The Second World War generated inevitable Soviet-American conflict."
(456) Truman just made that conflict worse than it needed to be, Offner tells
us. Maybe so. But he may also have kept it from being much worse. There can be
no doubt that at numerous points in his presidency, Truman faced domestic
pressures for a far more confrontational policy toward the Soviet Union and its
allies than the one he pursued. The true political alternative to Harry Truman
was not Henry Wallace, but Thomas Dewey or Robert Taft.

If Truman's policies assumed, as Offner argues, the superiority of
American aims and interests, that may be in no small part because the
nation he led assumed it too. Truman may have represented his nation too
well. Both had considerable strengths and weaknesses. Offner certainly has
a point that Truman had an unfortunate tendency to reach for the easy
analogy, that he sometimes simplified the complex situations he faced. But
he also often had the wisdom to see the merit in the advice he received,
and to reject some proposals that were not consistent with his views. The
end of World War II left the United States feeling much like the stunned
vice-president had felt on April 12, 1945: "like the moon, the stars, and
all the planets had fallen" on it. A nation that had spent most of its
history in willful ignorance of the world and its complexities was now
thrust into the middle of virtually every issue and conflict in the world,
from the Middle East to Eastern Europe to East Asia, places previously of
limited importance to a primarily hemispheric power. Like Truman himself,
it may well have doubted its ability to take up the mantle of leadership.
Like him, it could exhibit both the considerable confidence (even
arrogance) and innate insecurity that come with sudden power. Its people
and its leaders, even the more cosmopolitan among them, were hardly immune
from the traits Offner ascribes to Truman. Perhaps the dignified military
man George Marshall and the suave diplomat Dean Acheson expressed their
views without the sometimes salty and earthy language used by their chief,
but their perspective was not so different from his. The mistakes of the
Truman administration were bigger than one man or group, and so were its
successes.

Mark S. Byrnes
Wofford College

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