Truman: Cold War Hero or "Parochial Nationalist"?

Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953, by Arnold Offner. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 626 pp. $28.

Few postwar presidents are as highly regarded today as Harry Truman. The defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist Japan, the founding of NATO, and the enactment of the Marshall Plan are all credited in whole or in part to Truman and his advisors. The Pax Americana begins with Truman at Potsdam. It begins with the new security architecture and institutions of the postwar era. For Democrats, Truman provides the model for an activist foreign policy untainted by Vietnam and McGovernism. For Republicans, Truman was the progenitor of containment and a pioneer of robust defense spending. Scholars are less effusive but hardly uncomplimentary. No matter that Truman was manifestly unpopular among his contemporaries; the consensus judgment on his legacy in world affairs is unmistakably positive.

This troubles diplomatic historian Arnold Offner, whose new study, Another Such Victory, takes wide aim at the Truman consensus. According to Offner, Truman was a "parochial nationalist," whose presidency "created a rigid framework in which the United States waged long-term, extremely costly global Cold War." ¹ His tenure "narrowed Americans' perception of the world political environment." It "intensified Soviet-American conflict, hastened division of Europe, and brought tragic intervention in Asian civil wars and a generation of Sino-American enmity." ² The Cold War, Offner would have us believe, was a hollow, ephemeral victory that recalls the words of King Pyrrhus himself: "another such victory, and we are undone." A classic is thus invoked to characterize contemporary world politics after the Cold War's end.

The argument is deeply contrarian, but hardly innovative. Left-leaning Cold War historians advanced it decades ago; pre-war isolationists on the right pioneered it before them. It sometimes appears as a species of realism: that is, based not upon normative reasoning but on allegedly positive grounds, upon cost-benefit analysis, or upon the proposition that the United States has over-committed itself and will be subject to the requisite blowback. Such arguments have their place in healthy public discourse. But the incarnation this study offers fails to reveal much that Melvyn Leffler's A Preponderance of Power ³ did not already reveal years ago, in spite of drawing amply upon Truman's papers and those of his advisors. It misses opportunities by omitting use of new foreign sources and archival evidence that would cast greater light upon the many contentious claims the book advances about the nature of Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean intentions and diplomacy. In many respects the book is ten years too late, speaking to questions of the "post-Cold War era" that seem well trodden a full thirteen years after the Cold War's end.

The book's key failing lies in unfair criticisms of Truman's intelligence and competence in the executive, particularly the claim that Truman was a "parochial nationalist," which is the reigning theme of Offner's study. This is too slippery and too subjective a contention—not to mention wrong—to serve as a serious organizing principle. The several reasons advanced to support such a conclusion are simply not convincing.

First is Truman's alleged "uncritical belief in the superiority of American values and political-economic interests." ⁴ Why his beliefs were "uncritical" is never shown, and is a dubious proposition. Truman shunned intellectualism, but was no dupe. His tendencies toward plain speech and platitude are well documented, but the logical leap to equate elocution with intellect is the same mistake many contemporary commentators make with respect to George W. Bush. These days, even New York Times editorialists concede that Bush is a shrewd politician and strategist who uses reigning perceptions and misperceptions to advance his administration's objectives. No doubt Truman was given to generalizations about the United States and the world that irritate the sensibilities of establishment historians like Offner. But historians themselves use a...