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

Arnold A. Offner's Another Such Victory is a meticulously documented reassessment of Harry Truman's impact on U.S. foreign policy at the genesis of the Cold War. This isn't a book written to confirm the current view of the plainspoken man from Missouri as a near-great president and the best of the Cold War lot. Offner cuts Truman back down to size, arguing that he was a "parochial nationalist" (470) who exacerbated the U.S.-Soviet rivalry because he lacked vision and leadership qualities necessary to facilitate détente and avoid needless conflict. His insecurity, bluster, and simplistic view of world affairs, Offner concludes, established an ideology of confrontation that guided subsequent administrations throughout the Cold War era. Yet the haunting, unspoken reality of Offner's otherwise compelling account is that the disturbing legacy of Truman's myopia survived the demise of the Soviet Union and now persists in a post-Cold War permutation of moralistic unilateralism and preemptive warfare. The parallel is too alarming to ignore, even as the lesson seems so difficult to learn.

So what can this important and timely reassessment of Truman's belligerency and "get tough" attitude reveal about present habits of mind in a period of unchecked American power and hubris? Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is that, by perpetuating a crude discourse of demonizing America's adversaries and insisting on a corresponding ethic of righteous coercion, the nation's leadership diminishes the ethos of democracy and undermines any hope of coping constructively with the complexities of the human divide. Thus the story of Truman's Cold War presidency is a cautionary tale of deploying primitive analogies, black-and-white categories, unqualified differentiations between friends and enemies, and inflated assessments of U.S. supremacy to mismanage the complications of international relations and conflicts. In short, Truman's urge to act decisively teaches us how to make a bad situation even worse.

While Offner, who is Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, does not himself link Truman's modus operandi to that of the present administration, Mr. Bush's fondness for the rhetoric of evil, persistent admonitions against appeasement, and general predilection to frame his post-9/11 crusade against terrorists and tyrants in World War II terminology is fraught with Trumanesque parochialism. Although thoroughly researched, Offner's book doesn't add much new information to the body of knowledge about the Truman presidency nor even alter substantially the critique of his administration advanced in Melvyn P. Leffler's A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford University Press, 1992), except to make the criticism harsher, stronger, and all the more urgent—or so it seems because of the increased saliency of such xenophobia and the clarity of Offner's analysis.

Truman wasn't handed an easily managed set of circumstances when he inherited the presidency upon Franklin Roosevelt's death, nor did Truman cause the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged from the war as the earth's strongest powers, confronting one another with antithetical economic and political systems and wishing to shape the world order consistent with their own interests and security. Each was wary of the other's intentions even while they remained allied against the Axis powers. Even Truman's advisors were split between some who warned against the Russian barbarians overrunning Europe and others who counseled the need of enhancing Soviet-American cooperation. Caught in these crosscurrents, Truman guided an historically isolationist country toward meeting its postwar global responsibilities by supporting the creation of the United Nations, securing substantial funds for foreign aid and reconstruction, and preserving presidential control over nuclear weapons even under sustained pressure to relinquish operational authority to the military.

Yet Soviet-American tensions developed into a full-blown Cold War and U.S. foreign policy became fully militarized during Truman's...