Truman(39)

This accretion of strength came at a crucial time. In 1947 the defeated countries of Europe remained impoverished and demoralized. France and Italy in particular looked on the brink of revolution. Of the two victorious countries Britain, snowbound and fuelless, was forced to begin the long process of withdrawing from its world power illusions and responsibilities. Russia, moved by a mixture of truculence and fear, had become sullenly uncooperative, iron-handed in Eastern Europe and menacing beyond. There was no approach to a stable balance in the continent.

The third week of February was a climacteric in Britain’s adjustment to post-war reality. On February 20th Attlee announced in the House of Commons that power would be handed over in India no later than June 1948. On the 21st Bevin caused notes to be delivered to Marshall informing the United States Government that British aid to Greece and Turkey could not continue after the end of March 1947. For Britain the former was the more momentous decision. But it posed no problem for Washington. It did not immediately affect the East-West balance and gentle support for Indian nationalism had long been settled American policy. Such support had been one of the main sources of friction between Roosevelt and Churchill during the war. No action from Washington was called for.

The eastern Mediterranean decision was quite different. It was to be implemented with brutal speed and it was bound, in the view of London and Washington alike, to result in an important shift of power to the Soviet union   unless America would step in where Britain was forced to withdraw. Bevin indeed would probably not have assented to the decision had he not judged that the US Government was just about ready to accept the new commitment. Major issues were therefore at stake. Had America refused the new burden, not only would a dangerous flank have been opened to Russian influence, but Anglo-American relations would have been gravely impaired, and the United States, having once resisted a ‘bounce’, would have been the more difficult to move in the future. If the Greek-Turkish gamble had gone wrong the Marshall Plan would have been unlikely to take shape.

In fact, however, although playing for high stakes, Bevin was not doing so against long odds. It was overwhelmingly likely that Truman, advised by Marshall and Acheson, would want to pick up the check. The more open question was whether the new Republican Congress would allow him to do so. The key meeting for this was at the White House on February 27th. Truman, Marshall and Acheson met the leaders of both parties in both houses. Acheson’s account of what occurred, while somewhat vainglorious, is the most vivid and well-supported from other sources.

‘My distingushed chief [Marshall], most unusually and unhappily, flabbed [sic] his opening statement. In desperation I whispered to him a request to speak. This was my crisis. For a week I had nurtured it. These congressmen had no conception of what challenged them; it was my task to bring it home. Both my superiors, equally perturbed, gave me the floor. Never have I spoken under such a pressing sense that the issue was up to me alone. No time was left for measured appraisal. In the past eighteen months, I said, Soviet pressure on the Straits, on Iran, and on Northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest Communist parties in Western Europe. The Soviet union   was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. It did not need to win all the possibilities. Even one or two offered immense gains. We and we alone were in a position to break up the play. These were the stakes that British withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean offered to an eager and ruthless opponent.

A long silence followed. Then Arthur Vandenberg said solemnly, ‘Mr President, if you will say that to the Congress and the country, I will support you and I believe that most of its members will do the same.’ Without much further talk the meeting broke up … ‘4

The Truman Doctrine was effectively launched. The only trouble was that Acheson, determined rightly to get it into the water, had pushed it down the slipway with too much champagne. Well before Dulles the domino theory was promulgated, and the susceptibility of the majority of Congress to the rhetoric of the Cold War was established.

When, therefore, Truman laid before a joint session of Congress on March 12th his proposals to make available an immediate $250 million for Greece and $150 million for Turkey he was proposing something much more far-reaching than the spending of $400 million (although that sum was then a great deal more substantial than it is today) and he was deliberately doing so in ideologically provocative terms. In particular, he set no limit to the geographical framework within which support was to be given: ‘I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempts of subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.’ This somewhat flat sentence, when supported, as it was, by the Congress, can be regarded as one of the four or five most decisive in American history, even though Truman did not act uniformly upon it throughout the world. Viewed favourably, it proclaimed several decades of the Pax Americana. Viewed unfavourably, it set the country on the course to the débâcle of Vietnam. Viewed neutrally, it achieved its purpose. Both houses of the Republican Congress voted for the Truman Doctrine by approximately three to one.