Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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AMERICAN STORIES
198
To the Surrender of Japan
On the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel
Paul Tibbets, a former medical student, arrived in the air space over the Japa-
n
ese city Hiroshima. The plane, the Enola Gay (named after Tibbets’s mother),
flew unobstructed, but its crew was not without apprehension. They carried
a small, unlit uranium sun in the belly of the silver fuselage. Down below on
the streets of Hiroshima, air raid sirens were silent. Another American plane
had been in the air earlier, gauging the weather and visibility, relaying its data
to Tibbets. Once it flew off, everyone in Hiroshima could relax and enjoy the
day. People returned to work. Soldiers went back to drilling. Children scurried
to school. Pedestrians and bicyclists jammed the old streets and walkways.
J
apanese air defenses were all but nonexistent after months of pounding by
U.S. bombers, and B-29s like the Enola Gay could fly above 30,000 feet, too
high for fighters or antiaircraft bursts. The high-altitude temperatures would have
frozen the crews of other planes, but B-29s were the first pressurized combat
airplanes, so its flyers had relative warmth and comfort. As the clock neared
8:15 am, a crewmember scribbled mission notes in a diary. His hand paused as
word went through the plane that it was time to release the “gadget.”
The Japanese empire was in dire straits. Tokyo was half ruined, well more
than 100,000 of its citizens having perished in fire bombings, 83,000 in one
night alone. Another sixty Japanese cities had recently undergone a similar fate
as the USAAF tried to subdue the Japanese will to go on through the direct
use of terror. Gelatinized gasoline dropped from low-altitude bombers stuck
to the skin, burning and incinerating civilians. Throughout the South Pacific
at places like Tinian and Iwo Jima, ferocious hill-to-hill battles had raged as
the forces of General MacArthur closed in on Japan’s mainland islands. In
February and March 1945 on Iwo Jima (site of the famous flag raising above
Mount Suribachi immortalized in a photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal and
recently re-created in Clint Eastwood’s 2006 film Flags of Our Fathers), 90
percent of the 22,000 Japanese defenders died.
Ever
since the decisive battle at Midway atoll in June 1942, U.S. and Japa-
nese
forces had fought a seemingly never-ending series of struggles for bits
and pieces of land scattered south and west of Japan. Marines would storm
ashore and get cut down in frightful numbers while taking heavily fortified
positions, just as Allied troops had at Omaha Beach. The farther inland they
went, the more combat became a nightmare of jungle rot, skin ulcers, and
diarrhea. During the battle for Saipan island in the summer of 1944, not only
were there 14,000 U.S. casualties, but two-thirds of the approximately 12,000
Japanese women and children on the island committed suicide, some out of a
sense of obliged honor, others because they had heard rumors that Americans
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would torture them if found alive. Many families had plunged ritualistically
off a cliff. To the GIs faced by such prospects and to leaders in Washington
responsible for plotting the next move, the fatal devotion of Japanese citizens
and soldiers did not seem noble; it seemed scary.
From April through June 1945 at Okinawa, U.S. Marines took the island
one hot inch at a time from unyielding Japanese defenders. Fully one-third
of Okinawa’s civilians, about 150,000, died during the fighting. This was
home turf for them and part of the sacred domain of Emperor Hirohito.
Japanese resistance to the U.S. invasion had been particularly tough because
from Okinawa U.S. bombers could have close, fighter-escorted access to
Yokohama, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and other major cities. Japanese suicide
attacks by 1,400 specially trained kamikaze pilots had shaken GIs’ nerves
and further convinced American war planners that an invasion of the Japanese
home islands would take untold lives, estimates ranging as high as one-half
million—extrapolated from the casualty rate on Okinawa. After all, 2 mil-
lion
Japanese soldiers waited along with thousands more kamikaze planes on
Honshu, Kyushu, Hokkaido, and Shikoku, where resistance would be more
intense. Civilians had been exhorted to fight, and they seemed likely to do so,
in part because of Roosevelt’s 1943 demand that the Axis powers surrender
unconditionally, which meant the Americans could remove the emperor, an
unacceptable loss for many Japanese.
C
onsequently, in an effort to try alternatives to a full-scale invasion, the Al-
lies
mined Japanese ports in an honestly titled mission, Operation Starvation.
Between the mines and U.S. submarine patrols, Japan’s supplies of imported
food and gas plummeted. One official U.S. estimate suggested that within
six months the Japanese would have to surrender. U.S. bombers continued to
demolish military and civilian targets, but as had been the case throughout
Europe, the Japanese people showed an unfathomable willingness to suffer.
In July 1945, President Harry S. Truman waited to meet one final time with
Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Potsdam, near Berlin. Truman had a
secret he wanted to share with Stalin. Stalin had a secret of his own.
H
overing above all this uncertainty and with just enough fuel to return to the
airstrip at tiny Tinian, the Enola Gay carried only one weapon, “Little Boy,”
an atomic bomb. A ten-foot-long metal tube wrapped itself around a uranium
bullet poised to unleash an eight-mile-high mushroom cloud superheated at
its core to 100 million degrees Fahrenheit—what would have been an incred-
ible
science fiction story had it not been for an international assortment of
physicists—J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller,
Hans Bethe—and roughly 120,000 other men and women who had labored
for four years at numerous locations across the United States to unravel the
mysteries of atomic fission.
AMERICAN STORIES
200
Hungarian émigré scientists like Szilard and Teller knew as far back as the
mid-1930s that Adolf Hitler had capable physicists figuring out how to exploit the
power of the atom, which if properly split could trigger an explosive chain reac-
t
ion. Some scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer, feared that such a reaction,
if done by fusion rather than fission, might ignite Earth’s atmosphere and turn
the planet into an uninhabitable cinder. When war broke out in Europe in 1939,
Leo Szilard enlisted Albert Einstein to sign a letter requesting that Roosevelt use
government funding to promote American development of atomic weaponry.
Government funding for science had dwindled to a nub after the close of World
War I, but Einstein’s celebrity ensured that the letter reached Roosevelt, who
authorized an exploratory committee. For two years, a few brilliant theoreticians
like Enrico Fermi made very little progress in the States. Only a few thousand
dollars had been committed, and the United States was not yet at war, so an in-
s
titutional sense of urgency was lacking. In late 1941, at the urging of Fermi and
a few colleagues, Roosevelt agreed to accelerate the process. A new committee,
the Top Policy Group, met the day before Pearl Harbor got bombed, the spark
that lit so many fuses. Whereas in the past scientists had chased an elusive money
trail, competing for thin crumbs of research funding, the Manhattan Project—as
the overall development effort got titled—invested $2 billion over four years to
create a weapon capable of turning people into vapor.
Pudgy, ambitious, and never far from a secret stash of chocolate, Colonel
Leslie Groves was chosen to play ringleader and boss of bosses to uncom-
mon
geniuses like Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe, the men who would
actually create the bomb. Groves made an unlikely selection when he picked
Oppenheimer, a former Communist Party member with distaste for fat men,
to lead the research team. When military intelligence officers waffled over
giving Oppenheimer clearance, General Groves (enjoying his new promotion)
ordered them to approve his choice. As a mere colonel, Groves had overseen
construction of the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Cajoling building contrac-
tors
to keep to a construction schedule had taken skill, but it would take more
than a head for logistics and timetables to keep Oppenheimer’s team working
in strict secrecy and abject isolation from the rest of the world. These were
open-minded nuclear physicists used to sharing every scrap of formula-
doodled paper they produced. Groves soon ordered them to keep their ideas
to themselves on a need-to-know basis, a command not surprisingly avoided
by men like the project’s originator, Leo Szilard, who had never had much
interest in taking orders. (Another Manhattan Project scientist, Klaus Fuchs,
also bypassed Groves’s efforts at maintaining a total security lockdown. Twice
a month, Fuchs passed top-secret documents to his Soviet contact in a park
in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This was Stalin’s secret: he knew about the bomb
before President Truman did.)
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The professorial brainiacs of the Manhattan Project also enjoyed good
drinks, conversation, and romance. Partway into the project, Groves fumed
to Oppenheimer that the scientists were too busy making babies to get any-
t
hing essential accomplished. Oppenheimer told Groves it was not a scientific
director’s job to police trysts. Figuring out how to imitate the sun was not
going to happen without some rest and relaxation along the way, playing a
round of cards, stretching the muscles. So Groves was forced to allow more
goofing off than he liked at the research facilities in Los Alamos, New Mexico,
where Oppenheimer and crew lived for nearly two straight years, not allowed
to travel far for fear of their dread secrets escaping with them. Gruff General
Groves would have to add patience and tact to his list of skills. He managed
well enough; Oppenheimer and Groves—the reader-of-books leftie and the
by-the-book conservative—even developed an unexpected kind of friendship,
each respecting the other’s capacities, each doing his part to set up the first
test of the nuclear age.
A
t 5:30 am on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and Groves stood in a stretch of
southwestern desert known appropriately as the Journey of Death, the Jornada
del Muerte. Together with hundreds of other military men, engineers, and
scientists spread out over neighboring hills and inside shacks, they witnessed
“Trinity,” the effective fissioning of atoms in a cascading nuclear chain reac-
tion
that lit the sky with a blinding white light, shattered windows in cities
farther than 100 miles from ground zero, and heated the air at the epicenter
of the blast to temperatures exceeding the sun’s surface. Watching in subdued
awe, Oppenheimer (as he later remembered events) murmured a line from
the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text that he read in the original Sanskrit:
“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
1
Two days later, on July 18, at the Potsdam Conference, President Truman
hinted to Stalin that the United States now had a powerful weapon of “ex-
traordinary
destructive power.” Stalin took the news effortlessly, saying that
he hoped the weapon would be put to good use, hamming up the moment by
saying “What a bit of luck!” before walking away from the president. Stalin
did not act surprised because he was not surprised. His scientists were working
on their own atomic bomb, thanks in part to the information they received from
spies like Klaus Fuchs. In certain ways, this exchange between Truman and
Stalin was the start of the Cold War. With Germany defeated and the prospects
for a Japanese surrender looking much better thanks to Trinity, Truman was
worried about what the Soviet Union might do next. At Yalta only months
before, in his withered and mortal state, Roosevelt had acquiesced to a robust
Soviet presence throughout Eastern Europe. When Truman learned about the
Yalta accords, he assumed that Stalin, with his pumped-up army already in
Berlin, might choose to push even farther west. For his part, Stalin realized
AMERICAN STORIES
202
that neither Churchill nor Truman bore him much, if any, goodwill or trust.
Churchill complained to Stalin at Potsdam on July 24 that his diplomats in
Bucharest, Romania, were facing “an iron fence [that] has come down around
them,” a metaphorical fence of ill will and interference “built” by the Soviet
occupiers. Stalin’s tart retort was simply, “Fairy tales!”
2
Truman let Stalin
know about the bomb not because Truman was in the mood to politely share
top-secret information with a friend, but instead because he wanted to shock
Stalin into fear and submission. Stalin knew this, so he did not act afraid. In
fact, Stalin believed Truman might indeed turn on him. If this was not the start
of the Cold War, it was at least a lowering of the temperature.
Barely three weeks later, on August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay’s bombardier,
Theodore “Dutch” van Kirk, released the bomb doors. Tibbets spun the plane
around and pitched into a nosedive designed to pick up enough speed that the
shock from Little Boy would not toss the Enola Gay earthward like an old
tin can. Seconds later, Little Boy’s hurtling drop toward earth was arrested
in its own explosion at 1,850 feet. Within only seconds, more than 70,000
people in Hiroshima were killed. Of those who escaped instant death, many
wandered toward remaining medical facilities, their skin hanging from them
in bloody sheets and strings, the center of their town nothing but rubble and
ruin. Salt water was used to clean and sterilize what remained of living vic-
tims’
flesh. Of those who died on the spot, many simply vanished into the
absorbing heat; others remained only as shadows burnt into fragmented walls
of concrete, charred silhouette ghosts. A final death count cannot be made
with certainty. Hiroshima’s residents continued to die in the ensuing days
and years, radiation sickness and cancer putting another 70,000 to 100,000
people into their graves.
While
Tibbets and his crew were feted with liquor and beer back on base
at Tinian, the Japanese government tried to assess what had just happened.
Some people were initially unbelieving, the stories seeming like mad rumor.
Disbelief melted in the heat of a second attack. Only three days later, on
August 9, Fat Man—a plutonium rather than uranium bomb—landed on the
outskirts of Nagasaki and killed another 70,000 people. Whole families and
whole futures ceased to exist. Whatever shards of innocence may have been
left in America surely drifted away. Horror had been stopped with horror.
Finally enough people had died. Emperor Hirohito pushed his government to
surrender. World War II was finished, and the world had been transformed.
The United States had been awakened from its long isolationist slumber,
but it had been awakened with kicks and stabs, with Pearl Harbor, with
D-day, with the sight of the undead at Dachau and Treblinka, with Okinawa
and Saipan. The Russian people had undergone two German invasions in
twenty years—99 times more Russians than Americans died during World
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FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR
War II—and they responded by making Eastern Europe into a “sphere of
influence.” The American people in turn felt fear, anger, and insecurity. Now
Americans and Russians would visit their collective fears and demons on each
other and on the rest of the planet for the next forty years in a hodgepodge of
bluffs, covert wars, conservative domestic politics, nuclear brinksmanship,
and influence peddling.
After the War: “Give ’em hell, Harry!”
Harry S. Truman liked to play the piano. One night not long after the close
of World War II, the president invited a junior staff member, Ken Hechler,
to have dinner. At one point during the evening, President Truman played
the piano for a little while, making the young man feel as though he were
“soaring” with the notes. The presidential fingers slowed down, the music
stopped, and in the hushed moment—to the surprise and delight of Hechler,
Truman said that if he had not got caught up in the mess of politics he would
have made a “helluva good piano player in a whorehouse.”
3
Truman was a
mild-mannered former clothing salesman from Independence, Missouri, who
spoke a workman’s dialect and had only a high school education, but when
the time came to be serious, Harry Truman could “give ’em hell.”
Harry S. Truman had been president for only a few months when he issued
the order to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. This was quite a turnaround from
the understated role of vice president—a job about which one of Roosevelt’s
earlier vice presidents, John Garner, had said, “The vice presidency isn’t
worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
4
The war had been won, and it remained to be
seen if victory would work. Troops were coming home by the hundreds of
thousands. Women were being asked to leave their factory jobs and hand over
the rivet guns and welding torches to returning veterans. Economic recession
seemed imminent, a slowdown in the economy being normal after the mas-
sive
wartime expenditures slowed to a trickle. There was a housing shortage,
and there was a baby boom to make the few rooms available feel even more
cramped. The nation was delirious with victory but starting to stumble other-
w
ise. The federal government had instituted price controls during the war, but
now industry was demanding a free hand with its own business affairs. And
big corporations had only grown bigger and more powerful during the war,
posing a more formidable front to unions. Coca-Cola Company, for example,
had been awarded the contract to provide 95 percent of all soft drinks to the
overseas PX stores, boosting its already near-monopoly of the cola market
and ensuring that veterans would harbor a lifelong soft spot for Coke. The
deal with the military had been smoothed by Coca-Cola Company’s president
giving generously to the Roosevelt campaign when his industry competitors
AMERICAN STORIES
204
had fizzed their money into the campaign coffers of the Republican challenger
in 1940, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York State.
During 1946, more than 1 million American workers went on strike. They
had sacrificed enough for four long years, and now they wanted enough money
to buy a transistor radio, a dishwasher, and a new car (or two). Wages were
terrible, prices were rising (as much as 6 percent a month), and workers did
not want to return to the depressing wages or circumstances of the 1930s.
As strike lines snaked from one factory to the next, railroad workers nation-
wide
also went on strike in May 1946, essentially stalling the entire country
and preventing most goods from getting anywhere. Some 17,000 passenger
trains stopped in their tracks. President Truman was exasperated. Having
already verbally committed himself to continuing with Roosevelt’s New
Deal programs, Truman was in theory a supporter of collective bargaining,
which could naturally lead to collectively marching off the job. In practice,
however, Truman did not think the strikes were coming at a good time. A few
weeks into the railroad strike, this former World War I artillery captain with a
quiet voice and a good poker bluff addressed a joint session of Congress and
presented one of the most brash and—to the men and women on the picket
lines—offensive presidential requests in more than 150 years. Truman wanted
the legislators to “draft into the armed forces of the United States all workers
who are on strike against their government.”
5
This was a blunder of the first
order, the kind of draconian threat least likely to win Truman the electoral
support of the Democrats’ staunchest constituents: workaday Americans, many
of whom he was threatening to toss into a military uniform.
Moments
after the words smoked out of Truman’s mouth, an aide handed
him a note that Truman promptly read to Congress: management and workers
had just agreed to end the railroad strike. The applause of congressmen was
not repeated by unions, and in the midterm elections of 1946, Republicans
took the Senate and the House of Representatives. Now Truman, the unknown
and unpopular heir to the lauded and loved Roosevelt, would have no chance
for congressional cooperation on legislation he would propose during the next
two years, including a raise in the national minimum wage and civil rights
action. Although history has given credit to later presidents John Kennedy
and Lyndon Johnson for promoting civil rights, Truman was the first to do
so on his own accord without prompting or prodding. In June 1945, Truman
confided to his diary a simple belief in all people’s capabilities: “It is my
studied opinion that any race, creed or color can be God’s favorites if they
act the part—and very few of ’em do that.”
6
Theodore Roosevelt, on his own initiative, had invited Booker T. Wash-
ington to dinner at the White House. Franklin Roosevelt had created the
Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) in 1941, which attempted
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FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR
to ensure that black people would receive equal pay in all government and
government-contracted jobs. But the FEPC had been squeezed out of Roos-
e
velt by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, a union with an all-black membership. Randolph had threatened
a march on Washington in 1942 if Roosevelt did not address employment
inequality, and the timing of a civil rights march could not have been more
embarrassing or emblematic of hypocrisy, given that Roosevelt was preparing
to lead the nation into a crusade against Nazi racism. Furthermore, typical
of the hesitant, half-hidden, halfhearted support that presidents had given
African-Americans, neither of these progressive Roosevelt presidents, nor
any other, had ever addressed the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP). Unassuming Harry Truman broke through that
color barrier on June 29, 1947, under the shadow of the towering Washington
Monument, an obelisk pointing skyward like an exclamation mark at the
end of the Bill of Rights. The gathered members of the NAACP and affili-
a
ted friends listened to Truman issue promises of federal protection for “all
Americans.” He said, “We must not tolerate . . . limitations on the freedom
of any of our people and on their enjoyment of basic rights which every
citizen in a truly democratic society must possess.”
7
Half a year later, in
February 1948, Truman asked Congress to draft a civil rights bill intended,
among other goals, to protect voting rights and to stop discrimination in
interstate transportation facilities. Consequently, Truman deepened the at-
t
achment between the Democratic Party and African-American voters while
simultaneously alienating a majority of white southern Democrats. Congress
would not enact any of his legislative requests, and it seemed certain that
he had handed the upcoming presidential election to Thomas E. Dewey, the
slick Republican with a pencil-thin mustache who had proved popular even
against Roosevelt in the 1944 election.
At the same time that Truman seemed to be shoveling out a political grave
for himself by offending unions and supporting civil rights, his stance toward
overseas events seemed strong and sure. Truman’s genuine love for the United
States did not initially sour him to Joseph Stalin or the Russian people. Only
a few months into his time as president in 1945, Truman jotted into his diary
a warmhearted appraisal: “I’m not afraid of Russia. They’ve always been our
friends and I can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t always be.” Recognizing
that Soviet-style communism was actually a one-party, one-man rule, Truman
wrote, “The dictatorship of the proletariat is no different from the Czar or
Hitler. There’s no socialism in Russia. It’s the hotbed of special privilege.”
While Truman preferred American democracy and capitalism to the “dictator-
ship
of the proletariat,” he thought that American and Soviet foreign policy
were twin versions of the same thing. As he put it:
AMERICAN STORIES
206
They evidently like their government or they wouldn’t die for it. I like ours
so let’s get along. You know Americans are funny birds. They are always
sticking their noses into somebody’s business which isn’t any of theirs. We
send missionaries and political propagandists to China, Turkey, India and
everywhere to tell those people how to live. Most of ’em know as much
or more than we do. Russia won’t let ’em in. But when Russia puts out
propaganda to help our parlor pinks [domestic communists]—well, that’s
bad—so we think. There is not any difference between the two approaches
except one is ‘my’ approach and the other is ‘yours.’
However, Truman’s desire for a lasting peace did not induce him to share
atomic secrets with Stalin, only atomic threats. “I have some dynamite . . .
which I’m not exploding now,” Truman had coyly written to himself after
his first talk with Stalin at Potsdam, two nights after the Trinity test in July
1945.
F
ascist militarism lay ruined and dead by September 1945, but large swaths
of Asia and Europe also lay in ruins. Wars always harm soldiers, but World
War II had wrecked civilians, cities, towns, and fields more than any human
conflagration had since the horse-blood-drinking Mongols of Genghis Khan
had galloped over the Asian steppes 800 years earlier. (Mongol horsemen
sometimes slit open small veins in their horses’ necks and sipped the salty
sauce when time was precious and they could not stop for a less liquid snack.)
Firebombing had obliterated entire cities: Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo. Almost
every Jew in Europe was dead. Bacterial diseases festered in municipal water
supplies and in refugee camps. Peace would be no good if everyone starved
to death. And although fascism had gone down with its leaders, other political
ideologies competed worldwide.
Shattered
civilizations breed more than flies and cholera. They also breed
discontent, fear, and openness to new perspectives. The minute Japanese guns
stopped shooting in China, the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek went back
to fighting the communists under Mao Zedong. Mao was a former librarian
who had embraced Marxist-Leninist theories in 1920 when China was having
a very difficult time transitioning from monarchy to democracy. With Soviet
guidance, the Chinese Communist Party mounted an armed struggle for control
of the nation. Forced deep into the Chinese interior in the mid-1930s, Mao
took communist theory in a radical direction by arguing that peasants were
just as capable of communist revolution as their urban proletariat counterparts.
Fashioning himself after the cult of personality shamelessly used by Stalin
(statues and posters in every town square, the homey nickname “Uncle Joe”),
Mao presented himself to the masses as the vanguard of the revolution. His
revolutionary Red Army was large and capable in 1945, and Chiang Kai-shek’s
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FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR
army was weary after its four-year drama against the Japanese. The ensuing
civil war in China was no less fierce than had been the Japanese invasion.
Perched only a hangnail away and ripe with equal volatility, the Korean
peninsula got divided in 1945 at the thirty-eighth parallel after the Japanese
occupiers were forced to evacuate: North Korea dominated by Kim Il-sung,
a zealous communist beholden to Stalin; South Korea dominated by the
pretend-democrat Syngman Rhee, who owed his power and hopes to the
United States. Their armies peered perilously over the thin dividing line. Far
away, civil wars raged in Greece and Turkey as well. Instability threatened
whatever hopes leaders like Truman had for a better world.
By 1945, Joseph Stalin was sick and old, but still a force. His support for
Mao in China was virtually nonexistent, Stalin thinking in genuinely Marxist
terms that Mao’s rural peasants were not ready for the communist engines
of history. Stalin did, however, prop up Kim Il-sung in North Korea and fun-
neled
aid to the communists in Greece while stirring up trouble in Turkey by
demanding some of its territory. The Soviet Union controlled Poland, Bulgaria,
Romania, and Hungary. Marshal Broz Tito, a strict communist, had control
of Yugoslavia, independent from Stalin as it turned out. It seemed to Truman
that World War II would have been fought in vain if all of Europe and most
of Asia gave up on democracy and capitalism. So despite his diary notes in
1945 concerning what he saw as America’s habit of sticking its nose into
other people’s business, Truman went before Congress on March 12, 1947,
and asked for precisely $400 million in direct aid for Turkey and Greece.
Isolationism had died in World War II.
Arguing that the “national security” of the United States was at stake,
Truman said that a “militant minority” of communists was undermining
the impoverished Greek government by using “terrorist” tactics. Like any
president before him seeking to involve war-weary, generally isolationist
Americans in an overseas muddle, Truman cast the scenario in idealistic
yet frightening terms. “I believe,” he said, “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.”
8
This was his challenge to the
Republican majority in Congress: either go with me and go with freedom,
or do nothing and help the tyrants. Truman had taken the initiative. Ten days
later, he signed the bill authorizing the requested $400 million, and with his
signature the United States embraced the Truman Doctrine, the commitment
to put men and money into places in the world where freedom—as defined
by a president—was being threatened. Truman had also clearly labeled com-
m
unists as the opponents of freedom. Lines were being drawn on global maps
separating the United States and the Soviet Union into two separate camps.
Between
March 1947 and the presidential election of November 1948,