Cold War

Cold War became a defining name for the postwar struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, but the book treats its beginnings not as a single decisive announcement but as a gradual, disputed shift in policy and understanding. Harry S. Truman seldom used the expression, preferring to call the conflict “the war of nerves.” His changing response took shape over years of uncertainty, private counsel, diplomatic reversals, and mounting military pressure; even as he worked to contain Soviet power, he argued that the conflict’s aims must remain limited and that nuclear war was unthinkable.

Naming an Unsettled Conflict

In the summer of 1947, George F. Kennan published an article in Foreign Affairs under the signature “X.” Kennan recommended “containment” of Soviet power through firm counteraction wherever Soviet influence encroached, continuing until the Soviet Union either changed or collapsed. The proposal gave a name and strategic shape to an approach already circulating in the State Department. Within months, Walter Lippmann challenged the idea in a book called The Cold War. The expression, which Bernard Baruch had used earlier in a speech, entered the postwar vocabulary alongside the Iron Curtain. Its emergence therefore registered a political argument as well as a new way of describing the international situation: containment was a proposed response, while Cold War became a broad label for the struggle itself.

The book resists assigning that struggle a single starting point. It notes that later observers debated whether it began with the Truman Doctrine Address, with Truman’s first confrontation with Vyacheslav Molotov, or with congressional approval of the Marshall Plan. Charles E. Bohlen, who had witnessed the first meeting between Molotov and Truman in the Oval Office, the meetings at Potsdam, and George C. Marshall’s session with Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin, traced the conflict much further back, to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The distance between these accounts matters: the term could describe a decades-long ideological opposition or the sharper postwar rupture in American policy. The narrative identifies Marshall’s return from Moscow on April 26, 1947, as the clearest dividing point between the policy pursued since the war and the course that followed.

The label never entirely captured Truman’s own language. He seldom used Cold War and preferred “the war of nerves,” a phrase that stressed sustained pressure and uncertainty rather than an inevitable clash of absolute moral opposites. In a December 1949 address to military officers, he rejected the claim that two systems so different could not inhabit the same world. He urged the search for limited ends, respect for opponents, and recognition that the Soviet leadership would continue to hold its beliefs for a long time. The expression thus sits in tension with the president’s own effort to describe the conflict as enduring but not necessarily destined to end in direct war.

From Doubt to a Policy

The movement toward a more definite policy was neither immediate nor effortless. In the period surrounding Churchill’s Fulton speech, Truman’s public position appeared uncertain. He was disavowing Churchill’s warning while telling Averell Harriman that the Soviet refusal to withdraw from Iran might lead to war. Harriman, William D. Leahy, James Forrestal, and Dean Acheson favored a stronger presidential endorsement of Churchill’s position and regarded James F. Byrnes as too willing to compromise with the Soviets. Their disagreements exposed a government without a settled public line, even as officials increasingly saw Soviet conduct as a danger.

Kennan’s long message from the Moscow Embassy offered a forceful interpretation of that danger. He described the Soviet leadership as shaped by insecurity and committed to weakening American society and influence; in his analysis, the Kremlin responded to “the logic of force” and would often retreat when confronted with strength. The State Department received the message in February, two weeks before Churchill’s speech. Harriman sent it to Forrestal, who had it mimeographed and circulated throughout the administration to officials concerned with foreign and military affairs. Truman read it too. Yet the book cautions against treating the document as an immediate revelation that suddenly transformed his thinking: Kennan’s argument did not appear to have a profound or immediate effect on him, in part because Harriman had already made a similar case in their earlier conversations.

Truman had also commissioned a broader review before the public debate over containment had fully taken shape. In July 1946 he asked Clark Clifford to prepare a comprehensive analysis of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The resulting report, American Relations with the Soviet Union, called the problem the gravest facing the United States and judged that Soviet leaders appeared to be pursuing eventual world domination. It argued that the United States needed enough military strength to confine Soviet influence and be prepared for atomic and biological warfare; preparedness, it said, might deter aggression and preserve peace. The report showed that a harder strategic analysis was developing within the administration, though it did not by itself mean that Truman had adopted every recommendation as policy.

The president’s eventual turn took time. He had written to Eleanor Roosevelt less than a month after assuming office that patience should be the watchword if world peace was to be maintained. The book emphasizes that it took two years to arrive at a policy toward the Soviets, with close counsel from the same circle of advisers Franklin D. Roosevelt had relied upon, especially George C. Marshall. On April 26, 1947, Marshall returned from Moscow and reported that diplomacy would not work as Truman had hoped: the Soviet leadership wanted drift and chaos and the collapse of Europe. The report confirmed Truman’s private conclusion and marked a decisive change in the policy direction, though it did not erase the uncertainty and debate that had preceded it.

Containment, Crisis, and Commitment

By March 1948, Truman judged that the Marshall Plan alone could not meet the Soviet threat and that American military strength had to be restored quickly. He described the situation to Eleanor Roosevelt as the most serious the country had faced since 1939 and said he would face it with everything he had. In a message explaining the crisis, he pointed to the destruction of independence and democratic government in a series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe and warned of a design to extend that course to the remaining free nations in Europe. The language marks a change from the earlier posture of hesitation: the United States, he argued, had reached the point where its position needed to be unmistakable and action wiser than delay.

The Berlin crisis tested that commitment in real time. The Berlin Airlift was still an uncertain undertaking; no one knew how events would turn out, and it seemed unrealistic to expect a major city to be supplied entirely by air for more than a limited period. George C. Marshall thought Truman too vague while the United States was face to face with massive Soviet military power. At the same time, campaign advisers recognized that a crisis could bring citizens to support the president. The narrative, however, finds no sign that Truman was using Berlin for political advantage. He regarded the campaign’s demands as a distraction at a moment of grave responsibility, and in a July letter to Winston Churchill he described his own political trial while hoping that the new conflict with communism could be resolved without the blood and tears associated with the earlier wars against Nazism and Fascism.

The Berlin Airlift ultimately became one of the major achievements of the postwar era and one of Truman’s proudest decisions, strengthening morale in Western, non-Communist Europe and affecting the course of the Cold War. The importance of the outcome was not apparent while the crisis was unfolding. That contrast gives the episode particular weight in the book’s account of the term: containment was not simply a doctrine stated in advance, but a course tested by events whose risks and consequences remained unclear. The North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington on April 4, 1949, further formalized the American commitment. The United States, Canada, and ten Western European countries agreed that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on all. For the United States this was a sharp departure from tradition, the first peacetime military alliance since the signing of the Constitution. Truman regarded it, together with the Marshall Plan, as among the proudest achievements of his presidency; although Dean Acheson and Ernest Bevin did much of the negotiating, the book emphasizes Truman’s decisive commitment to the pact.

In 1949, the end of the American atomic monopoly intensified the conflict’s dangers. An Air Force weather reconnaissance plane flying from Japan to Alaska detected intense radioactivity over the North Pacific; further reports found levels as much as twenty times normal, and the radioactive cloud was tracked across the Pacific toward the British Isles. The Soviet development of the bomb came three to five years earlier than most predictions. The news ended the United States’ four-year monopoly and greatly heightened Cold War fears and tensions. Within months, reports of China’s defeat, the Soviet bomb, the indictment of Alger Hiss, and the treason of Klaus Fuchs compounded public uncertainty. Acheson argued that Truman’s existing defense-spending limit was no longer realistic. Truman’s decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb prompted a comprehensive review of military policy, while the pressure sharpened conflict between Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson.

Limits, Memory, and Significance

The military review produced NSC-68, a secret report prepared primarily by Paul H. Nitze under Acheson’s direction, with Defense Department participation. Delivered to Truman on April 7, 1950, and discussed with him at a White House meeting of the National Security Council on April 25, it was designed to shock the government into confronting the country’s military position. Its arrival belongs to the same broad pattern as the earlier Clifford report: officials sought to make the dangers of Soviet power legible through strategic analysis, but the policy response emerged through successive assessments rather than one document alone.

Truman’s public explanation of the conflict continued to stress patience and limits. On a two-week train tour in May 1950, ostensibly to dedicate Grand Coulee Dam, he made more than fifty speeches in fifteen states without mentioning Joseph McCarthy or calling for a campaign against him. He told audiences that the Cold War would last a long time, that there was no quick or easy way to end it, and that in the long run its problems could be solved. The tour’s tone differed from the alarming assessments then circulating inside the government. Rather than promise a simple or imminent victory, Truman presented endurance and confidence as necessary conditions of policy.

Looking back on his presidency, Truman said the years in office would be remembered as the time when the Cold War began to overshadow people’s lives. He described the struggle as a constant presence in his presidency, with the atomic bomb always in the background, and maintained that his administration had set a course capable of winning it. He called the decision to enter the Korean War the most important of his presidency and a turning point: this time, he said, free nations had met the test of aggression. But he also stressed that the horrific potential of modern war had not been allowed to escape control. He said his purpose in Korea had been to prevent a third world war, adding, “Starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable….”

That retrospective brings the term’s two central pressures together. Truman regarded resistance to expansion as necessary, but not as permission to pursue unlimited aims or let a regional conflict become a nuclear one. He expected the free world to grow stronger and more united, blocking easy Soviet expansion; over time, he believed, change would come within the Soviet world, though no one could predict when or how. In his account, patience and courage were compatible with firmness. Cold War therefore names both the prolonged contest that shaped his presidency and the restraint he considered essential to keeping that contest from becoming a general war.