Harry Truman as Parochial Nationalist

Arnold A. Offner. Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. xv + 626 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $37.95.

The reputation of Harry S Truman has undergone something of a resurgence among both scholars and the public at large. A president who left office with public approval ratings lower even than Richard Nixon's in the midst of the Watergate crisis is now widely considered to have been a tough-minded, decisive, and effective leader who ably guided the United States through the perilous waters of the early Cold War and whose policy of containment essentially laid the foundations for American "victory" in that prolonged conflict. For many, the down-to-earth Midwesterner now merits consideration as one of the greatest American presidents. Not surprisingly, presidential aspirants of the two major political parties have been quick to claim Truman as their own. On the scholarly front, several recent biographies of Truman, Robert Ferrell's Harry S. Truman (1994), Alonzo Hamby's Man of the People (1995), and especially David McCullough's Pulitzer prize-winning Truman (1992), have reinforced such sentiments by presenting a generally laudatory portrait of the thirty-third president. The last comprehensive overview of Truman's foreign policy, Melvyn Leffler's A Preponderance of Power (1992), cautiously praised the Truman administration's essential wisdom in handling a myriad of problems.

Arnold Offner will have none of this. His central thesis is that Truman was a "parochial nationalist" whose "uncritical belief in the superiority of American values and political-economic interests," conviction that "the Soviet Union and Communism were the root cause of international strife," and "inability to comprehend Asian politics and nationalism" intensified the postwar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, precipitated the division of Europe, and set Sino-American relations on a path of long-term animosity (p. xii). Rather than being a great statesman who carefully weighed various policy alternatives, Offner asserts that Truman's myopia "created a rigid framework in which the United States waged long-term, extremely costly global cold war" (p. xii). As his title suggests, the Cold War was at best a pyrrhic victory for the United States.

Curiously, for a book that places such importance on its protagonist's personality and worldview, Offner devotes only one short chapter to Truman's upbringing and political career before his elevation to the presidency. Nevertheless, Offner insists that these years "profoundly and significantly shaped [Truman's] approach to the presidency and foreign policy" (p. 2). He speculates that Truman's physical limitations and childhood ailments distanced him from his peers and also bred a degree of insecurity, which fostered "ambivalence toward powerful men" (p. 3). As a result, Truman would "defer greatly to strong leaders," such as his political mentor, Thomas Pendergast, and secretaries of state George Marshall and Dean Acheson, but he would also "denounce leaders whose styles or ways of thinking were unfamiliar," which militated against compromise and greatly circumscribed discussion of policy options (p. 3). From his early study of the Bible, Truman developed a moral code that punishment should always follow transgression, which he would later apply to aggressor nations. His voracious appetite for history books developed in him a sense that history was cyclical and that its "lessons" could provide a guide for current affairs. Truman also shared many of the ethnic and racial prejudices of his contemporary Missourians. His private comments occasionally included ethnic slurs, and as president he periodically questioned the loyalty of "Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans, Swedish-Americans or any other sort of hyphenate" (p. 23). Military service in the First World War apparently did little to modify such views, and the global conflagration only reinforced Truman's assumption of American moral superiority over the rest of the benighted world. During his time in the Senate Truman was a staunch supporter of military preparedness to rein in outlaw nations and, after the outbreak of war in...