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  • Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine: The Cold War Call to Arms
  • Timothy Barney
Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine: The Cold War Call to Arms. By Denise M. Bostdorff. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998; pp x + 198. $17.95 paper.

At a meeting late in February of 1947, one week after the State Department received notes from the Atlee Government that a collapsing British economy would no longer provide aid to Greece and Turkey, Director of European Affairs Jack Hickerson remarked to his colleagues that Greece "was certainly the most important thing that had happened since Pearl Harbor" (73). The force of such a hyperbolic comment is blunted after [End Page 151] decades of other "Pearl Harbors" in U.S. foreign policy, and the corrupted, confused political situation of 1947-era Greece seems a strange rallying cry today. Yet it is a testament to Denise M. Bostdorff's excellent Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine that the reference seems almost fitting, given her revealing perspective of the urgent sensibility of the fast-evolving cold warriors being shaped in the Executive Branch during such heady days.

Bostdorff's meticulous research contextualizes the evolution of an interpretive framework for practicing Cold War in the tumultuous wake of World War II, culminating in Truman's message to Congress that "the free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms" (7). Key to Bostdorff's argument is that the bipolar syntax and the dramatic certainty of the Truman Doctrine never arrived fully formed, but took important twists, turns, fits, and starts in the Doctrine's discursive development before the president opened his black book to speak on March 12, 1947. Furthermore, she asserts that the implications of this "turning point in U.S. foreign policy" (12) were perhaps never fully thought through, as the speech's call to crisis would chain out in what Bostdorff considers "both the best of the United States—the Marshall Plan—and its worst—the arms race and repeated military intervention abroad" (12). Bostdorff deftly balances this ambivalent narrative of Cold War evolution on the generative and strategic functions of the Truman Doctrine address itself, situating the speech as the focus of a "concerted crisis campaign that set the stage for routine episodes of presidential foreign crisis promotion and management in the decades that followed" (13)—an assurance, perhaps, that there would be more Pearl Harbors to endure.

And if anyone knows "crisis" in contemporary rhetorical studies, it is Denise Bostdorff, as Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine adds another nuanced case study to the project begun with her book The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis (University of South Carolina Press, 1994). By now, Bostdorff's rendering of the frame of crisis is a fully developed one, as it organizes the languages of urgency and dis-ease that she ably charts from their formative stages in State Department office chats, in tense decisions around maintaining the precariously special relationship with Britain, even in Truman's struggle with nerve-wracked health problems amidst the uncertainties of his new role. She wisely dilutes the theoretical trappings of Burke and Edelman from her earlier book, and lets her own context-thick critical voice and marvelous eye for the archive drive the study from the case up. Of course, her main assumptions—especially that Cold War rhetoric and reality are not opposed [End Page 152] and that public leaders construct crises—don't leave those two titans' ideas far behind, and this may disappoint those looking for new theoretical ground to be broken. Rather, Bostdorff constructs a more traditional public address study that intensifies the contextual forces at play in the textual moment and uses these potential limitations to sharpen her focus.

In terms of the book's layout, Bostdorff works chronologically up to the charged moment of Truman's delivery: the early chapters prelude the crisis campaign, taking her readers through the various "turning points" of 1945–1947, then into the deliberate campaign by the administration to court Congress and media outlets, building to the rhetorical situation of "opportunity and threat" that, Bostdorff argues, met Truman and his crew. Finally, this culminates in an analysis of the...

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