At the end of the presentation, Vandenberg—head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and at times a fierce Truman critic—said solemnly, “Mr. President, if you will say that to the Congress and the country, I will support you and I believe that most of its members will do the same.”
Which is exactly what Truman planned to do—address the hostile Eightieth Congress in person. He began work on what many would consider the most important speech of his life thus far. An administration official named Joseph M. Jones was tasked with writing the first drafts. “All . . . were aware,” Jones recalled, “that a major turning point in American history was taking place. The convergence of massive historical trends upon that moment was so real as to be almost tangible.”
The speech would not only attempt to win over an opposition Congress, it would also be a direct signal to Joseph Stalin that Truman was going to support nations in an effort to resist Soviet bullying. Truman worked over the final drafts himself. As his special counsel Clark Clifford put it at the time, the speech would be “the opening gun in a campaign to bring people up to [the] realization that the war isn’t over by any means.”
On March 12 Truman climbed to the rostrum in the Capitol before a phalanx of microphones. Behind him sat Vandenberg and Joe Martin, both of them Republicans. In front of Truman was the entire federal legislature. Millions more were listening over radio. The president began, laying out a philosophy that would come to be known as the Truman Doctrine.
“The gravity of the situation which confronts the world today necessitates my appearance before a joint session of the Congress,” Truman began. “The foreign policy and the national security of this country are involved.” Nowhere in this speech was the Soviet Union mentioned. Truman continued:
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe 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.
For most Americans, Truman’s address came across as just another presidential message. The gravity of the situation in Europe, and the demands of meeting that challenge, were not immediately appreciated by a populace wearied by war.
There was little time for interpretation or deliberation, however. Even before the president delivered his Truman Doctrine speech, Secretary of State Marshall took off for Moscow in hopes of negotiating directly with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on the postwar future. The continent was emerging from a brutal winter, and what Marshall saw in Europe unnerved him. Entire national infrastructures were still in shambles. Mass starvation was imminent.
In the Kremlin, the secretary of state found Stalin unwilling to compromise on much of anything. Marshall would remember watching Stalin doodle pictures of wolves on paper and respond with shocking indifference to the human misery that was rampant in countries like Czechoslovakia, Italy, Germany, and France. Stalin was in no hurry to help.
“We may agree the next time, or if not, the time after,” Stalin told Marshall.
It was clear to Marshall that the Soviets were content to see Europe starve. Weak nations were nations incapable of attacking the Soviet Union. As Marshall’s official translator Charles Bohlen later described this situation, “Europe was recovering slowly from the war. Little had been done to rebuild damaged highways, railroads, and canals . . . Unemployment was widespread. Millions of people were short on rations. There was a danger of epidemics. This was the kind of crisis that Communism thrived on. All the way back to Washington, Marshall talked of the importance of finding some initiative to prevent the complete breakdown of Western Europe.”
While Marshall was abroad, on April 16, 1947, the famous financier Bernard Baruch gave a speech in the United States in which he used the term Cold War to describe US-Soviet relations, and from that time forward, the term worked its way into the American lexicon.
On April 28 Marshall arrived back in the United States. The next day, he told a nationwide radio audience: “Disintegrating forces are becoming evident. The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate.” Marshall gathered the top analysts in the State Department and ordered them to begin thinking of a plan to save the continent, and to report to him “without delay.”
“Avoid trivia,” he told them.
On May 9, 1947, the day after Truman’s sixty-third birthday, the House of Representatives voted to appropriate $400 million (roughly $4.6 billion in today’s numbers) for aid to Greece and Turkey. The Truman Doctrine was so controversial, during the vote, dissidents in the House shouted that it was “a declaration of war on Russia.” One week later, Truman took off in his presidential airplane, nicknamed the Sacred Cow, bound for Missouri, where his ninety-four-year-old mother lay dying. On May 22, in the presidential suite at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, he signed the Greek-Turkish aid bill into law.
Less than a month later, on June 5, George Marshall delivered an eleven-minute commencement speech at Harvard University. In the address, he voiced the ideas that became known as the Marshall Plan. “The entire fabric of European economy” had been destroyed by war, Marshall explained. The continent had no resources with which to recover.
“The truth of the matter,” Marshall said, “is that Europe’s requirements for
