The papers explained that the United Kingdom would no longer be able to deliver aid to Greece and Turkey, two nations that were on the brink of falling victim to Soviet-inspired Communist revolution. In a short period of time, all British economic aid to the countries would stop.
For some time, intelligence reports had warned that Soviet-backed Communist guerillas were gaining control of Greece and Turkey. British aid was all that was keeping the Kremlin from Sovietizing these nations, and if the Soviets could take Greece and Turkey, they would have an easy road into the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
On Monday, February 24, Acheson and his boss, the new secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, met with Truman in the White House. In Truman’s eyes, no man deserved more respect than Marshall, who had served as army chief of staff during World War II and whose very countenance inspired trust and reverence. Marshall made the case that the United States had to take over the burden of aid to Greece and Turkey, to stop the Soviets from advancing. A Truman assistant, John Steelman, was in the room and recorded that the president was “very convinced . . . that there was only one way to deal with the Communists and that was to let them know straight from the shoulder where he [Truman] stood.”
All the major players in Washington sensed that this was a crossroads. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in a letter to a friend during this week, “The next eighteen months look to me to be about the most critical that this country has ever faced.”
By this point Truman was well aware of the dark forces at hand. Months earlier, the State Department’s top Russia expert, George Kennan, had made an analysis of Soviet psychology in a paper that had come to be known as the “Long Telegram.” Kennan concluded that the Soviets believed their security could only result from a “patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power.”
More recently Truman had received a report written by two advisers, Clark Clifford and George Elsey, called “American Relations with the Soviet Union” (known as the Clifford-Elsey Report), which laid out in chilling terms what the Americans should understand about Stalinist power politics. The Soviets already controlled much of Eastern Europe. The Kremlin’s goal was to dominate every nation it could. Italy, France, Korea, China, Greece, Turkey, Iran—all had been ravaged by war and were now balanced on a razor’s edge, ready to fall to one side or the other. Economic hardship in these nations made them easy pickings for the Kremlin.
According to the Clifford-Elsey Report, “Development of atomic weapons, guided missiles, materials for biological warfare, a strategic air force, submarines of great cruising range, naval mines and minecraft . . . are extending the range of Soviet military power well into areas which the United States regards as vital to its security.” (Truman was so unnerved by this report, he told Clifford, “If it leaked it would blow the roof off the White House, it would blow the roof off the Kremlin”; he confiscated all copies Clifford had produced, and the report would not surface again until historians got ahold of it, twenty-two years later.)
Now the State Department’s two top officials—George Marshall and the dapper aristocrat Dean Acheson—were confronting Truman regarding aid to Greece and Turkey. It was time for decision. Marshall himself had just returned from a mission to save China from falling to Soviet-backed Communist leadership, a mission that had failed. China was on the brink. Would Western Europe and the Middle East be next?
Truman made a determination that was to define US foreign policy for decades to come. “This was, I believe, the turning point,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Wherever aggression, direct or indirect, threatened the peace, the security of the United States was involved.” The idea was to use money instead of soldiers to fight the Soviets. Economic aid was imperative if countries like Greece and Turkey were going to create stable democratic societies. Without financial aid, these nations had no chance.
The president knew support for Greece and Turkey would be highly controversial. It would require the Democratic administration to get the Republican-controlled Congress on board with an unprecedented program that would hand out hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to foreign governments, free of charge. This at a time when the Republicans were charging the Democrats and “High Tax Harry” with overspending, when Americans were anxious about their own volatile economy.
Truman explained the situation in a letter to Bess: If the United States did not commit to Greece and Turkey, “we prepare for war. It just must not happen. But here I am confronted with a violently opposition Congress whose committees with few exceptions are living in 1890; it is not representative of the country’s thinking at all. But I’ve a job and it must be done—win, lose, or draw.”
On February 27, 1947, Truman welcomed into the White House the nation’s most influential figures in foreign policy. Here were Dean Acheson and General Marshall from the State Department. Six congressmen arrived, including Republicans Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and Speaker of the House Joe Martin of Massachusetts. The president opened the discussion, then turned the floor over to the secretary of state. Marshall had a prepared statement with him. He spelled out in dire terms what would happen if the Soviets succeeded in sacking Greece and Turkey: “It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.”
Marshall made clear:
