U.S.–Soviet Cold War
TrumanThe U.S.–Soviet Cold War was the prolonged struggle that came to dominate Harry S. Truman’s presidency, reshaping American foreign and military policy while placing the danger of nuclear war in the background of public life. The book presents no single, uncontested beginning. Instead, it traces a slow change in judgment: Truman initially urged patience, then concluded that diplomacy with the Soviet Union could not secure a stable peace. His answer was not simply confrontation. It was to resist expansion, strengthen the free world, and keep military conflict from becoming a new world war.
Origins and the Turn in Policy
The origins of the Cold War remain disputed in the account. George C. Marshall’s return from Moscow on April 26, 1947, marks the clearest dividing point in American policy. Marshall reported to Truman what the President had already privately concluded: diplomacy was not working, the Soviet Union could not be dealt with, and its leaders appeared to welcome drift and disorder in Europe. The significance of the moment lies in this convergence. Truman’s view was not presented as a sudden reaction to a single encounter; it had taken shape over time and was now reinforced by the report of a trusted adviser.
Other witnesses placed the conflict’s beginnings further back. Charles Bohlen, who had observed meetings with Vyacheslav Molotov and the negotiations at Potsdam, traced the Cold War to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The competing accounts make its beginning a question of interpretation: whether it should be dated to a particular American policy or understood as the much longer consequence of Soviet political origins. Truman himself seldom used the label Cold War. He preferred to call it the war of nerves, a phrase that emphasized the contest’s persistent psychological pressure rather than a formal declaration of war.
George F. Kennan’s 1947 article in Foreign Affairs gave the emerging policy a name and a strategic argument. Published under the signature X, it recommended firm containment of Soviet expansion, with counterpressure wherever the Soviet Union appeared to encroach, until its political system changed or collapsed. Kennan’s identity soon became known. Walter Lippmann then mounted a strong rebuttal in a book called The Cold War, helping make that expression part of the postwar vocabulary. The debate over terminology accompanied a deeper dispute about how the United States should respond: containment could mean a sustained effort to block expansion, but its critics questioned what strength and commitments that effort required.
The change was not as impulsive as later accusations suggested. Less than a month after taking office, Truman had written to Eleanor Roosevelt that patience should guide the pursuit of world peace. The account emphasizes that it took two years to arrive at a policy toward the Soviet Union. During that period Truman relied closely on many of the same advisers Franklin D. Roosevelt had trusted, particularly Marshall. The continuity was visible in the Oval Office on April 23, when the group assembled for a landmark meeting consisted of Roosevelt’s people, not Truman’s former Senate staff, a new foreign-policy adviser of his own choosing, or a Missouri circle. That inherited counsel formed part of the setting in which Truman’s policy developed.
Civilian Authority and the Atomic Shadow
The struggle over policy was also a struggle over who would direct the nation’s power. In 1942, as war contracts rapidly expanded—by the first six months of that year, military contracts had added $400 billion to the economy—Truman worried that ambitious generals and admirals were gaining influence over industry and agriculture. In a broadcast for The March of Time that fall, he described civilian control as the foremost issue of the day and warned that the balance of authority could shape the country’s postwar political and economic structure. His principle was that military leaders should identify what they needed to fight, while elected civilian officials retained responsibility for the larger decisions.
The atomic bomb made that responsibility more consequential and more difficult. When the bomb’s use against Japan was considered, the possibility of a technical demonstration away from a city had been examined and rejected by the committee and its scientific panel. General George C. Marshall had earlier considered a military installation and, if necessary, manufacturing centers preceded by warnings; the scientists, however, could propose no demonstration likely to create the required shock. The committee’s role was advisory. Henry L. Stimson stressed that the recommendation to the President was Truman’s responsibility alone, and that he understood how much depended on his judgment.
Truman later recalled a consensus among James F. Byrnes, Stimson, William D. Leahy, Marshall, and General Arnold in favor of using the bomb. Marshall emphasized the lives that might be saved by avoiding an invasion, and Truman recalled his estimate that an invasion of the Tokyo plain and other parts of Japan would cause at least a quarter of a million American casualties. Truman described reaching his own conclusion only after long and careful thought and made clear that he disliked the weapon. In his written account of the decision, he also expressed regret at the prospect of wiping out whole populations and concern for Japanese women and children. He said he would not do so unless it was absolutely necessary, and believed Japan might soon surrender after the Soviet Union entered the war. These doubts and calculations help explain why the atomic question remained, in his later account, an ever-present part of the Cold War rather than a problem settled by the end of the Second World War.
Nuclear Rivalry and the Crisis of Confidence
The end of the American atomic monopoly transformed the stakes. The Soviet Union’s development of an atomic bomb came three to five years earlier than most predictions. The news produced an immense shock; the four-year American monopoly was over, and fears and tensions associated with the Cold War intensified. The account describes this as a change in the world, not simply a new item in the military balance.
The shock arrived amid a succession of alarming news. In less than six months, the country confronted what was described as the loss of China, the Russian bomb, Alger Hiss, and the treason of Klaus Fuchs. Together, these developments produced profound uncertainty. Within the administration, Dean Acheson had already argued for months that Truman’s $13 billion limit on defense spending was no longer realistic. Truman’s decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb authorized a complete review of military policy. Work began on a sweeping new report at both the State Department and the Pentagon, while relations between Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson grew more contentious. At a March meeting, Johnson angrily objected, striking his chair down, shouting, and pounding the table; Acheson concluded that Johnson, like James Forrestal, had buckled under the strain.
The resulting strategic argument appeared in stark form in the report. It opened with an apocalyptic warning that the United States, despite its strength, stood in deep peril. The report judged that the country lacked sufficient military power and that Kennan’s containment policy amounted to a bluff without superior conventional forces behind it. Nuclear weapons alone were not enough; the Soviet Union was likely to reach nuclear equality by 1954. The analysis exposed a tension within containment: a policy intended to resist Soviet expansion could not, in the report’s view, rest on diplomatic resolve or nuclear weapons alone. It required a broader military capacity, with consequences for national spending and the conduct of the Cold War.
Korea as the Test of Resistance and Restraint
Truman later identified the decision to enter the Korean conflict as the most important of his time in office and Korea as the turning point of the Cold War. He argued that allowing Communist forces to enter the Republic of Korea without opposition would encourage further aggression and leave smaller nations without the courage to resist more powerful neighbors. In his view, the failure to respond risked repeating the pattern by which earlier acts of aggression had helped bring about the Second World War. Korea therefore became a test of whether the free world would resist coercion, not merely a local military emergency.
The decision also tested the limits of resistance. Truman later stressed that the horrific potential of modern warfare had not been allowed to get out of hand. The point was not that the conflict was unimportant, but that the defense of a principle had to be pursued without letting war escalate beyond control. In his retrospective account, the test had been met while the wider issue remained world peace in the nuclear age. That balance—opposition to aggression coupled with restraint over the scale of war—became central to his understanding of the conflict.
The boundary between civilian policy and military command became an open confrontation with Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur issued a foreign-policy statement on his own responsibility despite directives against such declarations. Truman regarded the act as defiance of his orders as President and Commander in Chief, as well as a challenge to constitutional authority and United Nations policy. He concluded that he could no longer tolerate the insubordination and removed MacArthur from command. The episode made civilian control concrete: military expertise and battlefield authority did not give a commander the right to set national foreign policy independently.
The dispute had a political route into public view. In February, Joseph Martin had criticized the administration’s policy in Korea, called for the use of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, and accused the administration of a defeatist course. Martin sent MacArthur a copy of his speech and requested his views. MacArthur replied on March 20; Martin chose to make the letter public because it carried no statement of confidentiality. The publication brought the commander’s position into the political argument and sharpened the conflict Truman faced between military leadership, congressional criticism, and presidential authority. Truman also resisted appealing to Congress at a moment of emergency, telling Averell Harriman that doing so could make it harder for future presidents to deal with emergencies.
Public Endurance and Truman’s Retrospect
Truman repeatedly sought contact with the public while the Cold War continued. In May, he travelled by train on a two-week tour ostensibly to dedicate Grand Coulee Dam. Across fifteen states and more than fifty speeches, he did not mention Joseph McCarthy or call for a general mobilization of feeling. Instead, he spoke with patience and optimism, arguing that the Cold War would last a long time, that there was no quick or easy way to end it, and that its problems could nonetheless be solved. The tour presented endurance as a political resource: the conflict was prolonged, but it need not be treated as hopeless.
In later recollections, Truman named aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, NATO, Point Four, and the Berlin Airlift among the accomplishments of which he was proud. He included Korea as the supreme test and maintained that American military power had been restored and national prestige strengthened. His account therefore linked containment not only to military force but also to aid, alliances, and a wider effort to make the free world stronger and more appealing to people on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
His final assessment joined confidence to uncertainty. He accepted that history might remember his years in office as the period when the Cold War began to overshadow ordinary life, and recalled that the atomic bomb had always remained in the background. Yet he believed the policies established during those years had set a course capable of winning the contest. He expected change in the Soviet world, but did not claim to know when or how it would come—through revolution, unrest in satellite states, or change within the Kremlin. What he affirmed instead was faith in free people and the need for patience and courage. In this telling, the Cold War was both a strategic contest and a test of political discipline: resist expansion, preserve civilian authority, and prevent the nuclear danger from dictating the world’s future.
