The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism

Spalding, director of the Washington Program at Claremont McKenna College, claims the 33rd president ""conceived, enunciated, and directed the strategy of containment"" that fueled postwar US-Soviet relations in this flawed, dry political history. Truman inaugurated two major initiatives to stem what he saw as the march of communism across Europe: the Truman Doctrine, ""the primary building block of containment"" which proclaimed that the US would support ""free peoples"" resisting outside (read: Soviet) domination; and the Marshall Plan, which helped Western Europeans rebuild and ""permitted the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist."" Spalding argues that it was presidential advisor Clark Clifford, in a memo that integrated Truman's words and actions with administration policies from 1947 to 1949, that formed the basis of containment, and not usual suspect George Kennan in his article ""Sources of Soviet Conduct."" Among other elements, the memo emphasized that the Soviets were bent on ""a chief goal of domination,"" a thesis counter to Kennan's view of the Soviet Union as a ""nonimperialistic"" actor. But dislodging Kennan from his perch as the pre-eminent Cold War theoretician is a Herculean task. Arguably, one of the elephants in the room is leading Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, a proponent of Kennan-centered containment, whose work is only addressed in the final pages. An analysis of the moral underpinnings of Truman's containment is also left until the end, making the questions of morality and religion Spalding raises seem tangential at best.