The Truman Administration and the Greek Crisis: the formulation of the Truman Doctrine

TRUMAN DOCTRINE

The Truman Doctrine

In his address to a joint session of Congress on March 12 , 1947 President Truman officially committed the United States to an ideological cold war . Newsweek magazine called it "America 's Date with Destiny " With unmistakable clarity Truman stated the principle that would guide U .S . global strategy for the next four decades "I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures (Burns Richard Dean , 1994 , 3 ) As

many recognized at the time , it represented a new foreign policy for the United States . The day after the speech , James Reston of the New York Times compared its significance to that of the Monroe Doctrine , and it quickly became known as the "Truman Doctrine

The speech led to a transformation of Harry Truman and a transformation of U .S . foreign policy . Those transformations had been more than a year in the making . From the end of 1945 when concern over Soviet maneuvers turned to alarm , the administration had begun narrowing its perceptions and its options . Now , in March 1947 it was time to announce publicly this policy transformation . Truman 's address built on the division Churchill had drawn at Fulton , placed ideological themes and arguments drawn from Churchill and from the Clifford -- Elsey report in an American policy context , and transformed that policy (that , for all practical purposes , had been in effect for a year ) into a doctrine , a doctrine that would form the basis for the anticommunist reality of subsequent decades . Truman described it as "this terrible decision " and Margaret Truman concluded that it was "the real beginning of the cold war (Cochran Bert , 1994 , 9 ) The president 's speech defined a new ideological reality that would dominate the American political arena in which foreign policy commitments (and many domestic policies , as well would be debated and either implemented or rejected

Truman 's historic proclamation , taken with the other rhetorical events of this period , resulted in a transformation of American society . The questions we pose now are : why did the Truman Doctrine become an ideological statement of universal policy and messianic mission for the United States ? In other words , why did Truman define the conflict with the Soviet Union in ideological terms instead of diplomatic or other political terms ? And what role did Truman 's speech play in the creation of the cold war consensus

BACKGROUND

The precipitating event that led to the Truman Doctrine was not an act by an adversary but an announcement by an ally . On the afternoon of February 21 , 1947 , the private secretary of Lord Inver chapel , the British ambassador to the United States , called the State Department to request an immediate meeting for the ambassador with the new secretary of state , George C . Marshall . The purpose was to deliver a "blue piece of " a code name for an important message from the British government . Since Marshall was away for...