Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953 (review)

How does one judge a statesman? At least three approaches may be employed, and have been, with respect to American leaders in the Cold War. Presidents can be judged by their ideologies, in which facts may safely be ignored; by their mistakes and lost opportunities, based, at least in part, on an estimate of foreign reactions to different courses of action; by their various approaches relative to one another; or by their failures to heed potentially fruitful recommendations from subordinates. Offner, who has been wrestling with Cold War questions for several decades, is too careful a historian to apply the first criterion, relying mainly upon the second in his broadly negative review of President Truman's foreign policies. He is, however, also too careful a historian to make a convincing case. His copious documentation shows Truman to have been in many ways unsophisticated, frequently emotional, and generally ready to assume the worst about America's Communist adversaries, but he rarely can present compelling evidence either that other courses of action would have worked better or that any other contemporary American statesman would have been likely to have acted differently.

Truman, Offner argues, was wrong on many points—wrong to pursue "atomic diplomacy" at Potsdam, wrong to buttress undemocratic regimes in Iran and Greece, wrong to paint the world in black and white, and wrong, above all, to build up West Germany as a political, economic, and military ally of the United States rather than to try to create a neutral and disarmed German state. On the other side of the globe, Offner suggests that Truman missed an opportunity to establish relations with Communist China in 1949/50 and overreacted to the Korean War (which Offner does not criticize in principle, except with respect to Truman's failure to secure a Congressional resolution of approval.) Offner's case is documented in great detail, although his general focus on the highest level of the American government sometimes misses the bureaucratic genesis of important events. But when one looks carefully even at his own evidence, it sometimes fails to add up to his conclusions.

Thus, the case for Truman's "atomic diplomacy" rests largely upon a few bellicose remarks about aces at the Potsdam conference, and its fruits, according to Offner, were limited to a refusal to provide the Soviets with reparations from the West German zone, or to let them occupy part of Japan. The bombs, of course, had not yet been dropped when the Soviets agreed to this plan, and Offner concedes that the Potsdam agreements basically reflected each ally's supremacy in its own sphere. Nor is there any proof that Joseph Stalin's various German initiatives—culminating in his reunification proposal in 1952—were actually designed to do anything more than to upset the American plans for Western European integration, just as Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson suspected at the time. Now that the Cold War is over and Germany is reunited, haven't those who criticized the creation of West Germany assumed a much bigger burden of proof in arguing against the policies that were adopted? Even if communism was not monolithic, weren't reasonably limited interventions, such as those in Greece and in Korea (at least to protect South Korea), justified to contain its spread? In short, is it merely "triumphalism" to suggest that events have vindicated many of Truman's policies?

Offner has some strong arguments as well. Truman's conduct of the Korean War after the Inchon landing—when he deserves at least as much of the blame for crossing the 38th parallel as MacArthur—and his handling of the pow issue in the Korean Truce talks, are open to question, precisely because they diverged from the policy of containment. But what is striking in most of this book is the lack of...