In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 5 The Conflictual Politics of Consensus Building I: Korea, Rearmament, and the End of the Fair Deal [The rearmament program] would probably involve.... [r]eduction of federal expenditures for purposes other than defense and foreign assistance , if necessary by the deferment of certain desirable programs. -NSC68 [Interviewer Jerry N.] HESS: What's your opinion of Truman's legislative program? [Truman White House Special Counsel Charles] MURPHY: Well, in the foreign policy field I think it was phenomenally successful, and in the domestic field, only moderately. The statistical evidence presented in chapter 4 links divergent foreign policy preferences to the international interests of different domestic economic sectors. The evidence presented in chapters 2 and 3 indicates that the president's decision to increase the military budget was closely tied to political changes in his administration and his need to maintain the support of the internationalists who dominated the Democratic party. The next three chapters will present historical evidence that the administration 's need to secure Republican acquiescence to its ambitious foreign policy eventually produced a tacit political bargain that linked this foreign policy to important parts of the Republicans' domestic agenda. Cold War foreign policy became politically viable because it was linked to the demise ofthe administration's social welfare proposals and to a campaign against domestic radicals in the labor movement, government, and other areas of American life. It is tempting to explain the linkage between Cold War foreign policy and the domestic red scare in terms of a single, anticommunist ideological impulse. However, most of the major actors in the process sought either rearmament or an antiradical campaign and opposed the other. A bargaining process between the administration and Congress, rather than 103 104 Building the Cold War Consensus some substantive relationship between the policies, linked them together. While the administration sought to use the crisis created by the Korean War to secure congressional support for rearmament, its Republican opponents sought to link the crisis to their anticommunist domestic agenda. By linking the two policies together, both sides were able to secure their top policy priority. The relative priority the administration and its Republican opponents accorded their domestic and foreign policy agendas set the stage for the trade-off across these two issue areas. Both the administration and its opponents made concessions on less salient issues in order to make gains in areas they believed were more important. The Truman administration placed a greater priority on achieving its goals in foreign policy than in domestic policy. While the advocates of a more ambitious national security policy strengthened their position in the administration in late 1949 and early 1950, the left wing of the party was increasingly excluded from the circle of decision makers surrounding President Truman. Truman's commitment to some elements of the Fair Deal, especially repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, appears to have been largely rhetorical. On the other hand, the dominant faction of the Republican party in the Senate had little use for the expensive national security program sought by the State Department. The foreign policy goals they expressed publicly and privately amounted to finding some way to reduce the distraction caused by international events. They had little stake in an open international trading system-indeed, most favored relatively high tariffs (Eden 1985, 185-99). When they demonstrated concern about the Soviet threat, they argued for the use ofmore economical means than those advocated by the administration. In terms of domestic labor and social welfare policy, however, they had much clearer objectives, revolving around their opposition to most of the social programs of the New Deal and their concern about the power of the labor movement. The bargaining process began with policy proposals from both the administration and the Republican congressional leadership after U.S. intervention in Korea. The administration requested a $10.5 billion supplement to the fiscal 1951 defense budget on July 19. Five days later the president asked for an additional $4 billion in military aid funds. These requests, which would nearly double the defense budget and triple the size of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program, signaled that the administration 's plans for the national security program were far beyond the scope of what had been proposed since the end of World War II. NSC 68 made it clear that relatively modest programs of the sort that had passed the Congress during the preceding five years would no longer suffice. At the same time, the Republican congressional leadership, which was dominated...

Share