The Start of the Cold War: 1947–1952
Events
1938 House
Un-American Activities Committee created
1947 Doctrine of
containment emerges Truman articulates Truman Doctrine Congress passes National
Security Act
1948 Alger Hiss
accused of being a Soviet operative Truman is reelected
1949 NATO is formed
China falls to Communist forces
1950 Congress passes
McCarran Internal Security Bill
1951 Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg convicted of espionage
1952 United States
develops first hydrogen bomb
Key People
Harry S Truman - 33rd U.S.
president; announced Truman Doctrine in 1947, which shaped U.S. foreign policy for four decades
Thomas E. Dewey - New York
governor who ran unsuccessfully on the Republican Party ticket against Truman
in 1948
George F. Kennan - State
Department analyst who developed containment doctrine in 1947, arguing that
Communism and the USSR could not be allowed to spread; this doctrine became the
basis of U.S. foreign policy strategy during the Cold War
Richard M. Nixon -
Republican congressman and prominent member of HUAC in the late 1940s;
successfully prosecuted Alger Hiss for being a Communist
Alger Hiss - Former federal employee
prosecuted by HUAC in 1948–1950 for
being a Communist and Soviet spy
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg - Married
couple convicted of espionage in 1951 after being wrongfully convicted of
selling nuclear secrets to the USSR; executed in 1953
Chiang Kai-shek - Leader
of China’s Nationalist government when Communist forces drove it out of
mainland China in 1949
Mao Zedong - Leader
of Communist revolutionaries who brought down China’s Nationalist government in 1949; became ruler
of People’s Republic of China as leader of Chinese Communist Party
Containment
In 1947, State Department analyst George F.
Kennan penned a highly influential essay on the Soviet Union that
transformed fear of the USSR into a cohesive foreign policy. Arguing that
insecure Russians had always had the desire to expand and acquire territory,
Kennan wrote that the Soviet Union would take every opportunity to spread
Communism into every possible “nook and cranny” around the globe, either by
conquering neighboring countries or by subtly supporting Communist
revolutionaries in politically unstable countries. Kennan also wrote, however,
that the United States could prevent the global domination of Communism with a
strategy of “containment.” He suggested maintaining the
status quo by thwarting Communist aggression abroad.
Kennan’s containment doctrine rapidly became
the root of the dominant U.S. strategy for fighting Communism throughout the
Cold War. Different presidents interpreted the doctrine differently and/or
employed different tactics to accomplish their goals, but the overall strategy
for keeping Communism in check remained the same until the Cold War ended in
the early 1990s.
The Truman Doctrine
Truman quickly latched onto the doctrine of
containment and modified it with his own Truman Doctrine. In a
special address to Congress in March 1947, Truman announced that the United States
would support foreign governments resisting “armed minorities” or “outside
pressures”—that is, Communist revolutionaries or the Soviet Union. He then convinced
Congress to appropriate $400 million to prevent the fall of Greece and Turkey to
Communist insurgents.
Critics, both at the time and looking back in
retrospect, have charged that Truman’s adoption of the containment doctrine,
coupled with his own Truman Doctrine, accelerated the Cold War by polarizing
the United States and the USSR unnecessarily. Many have claimed that the United
States might have avoided fifty years of competition and mutual distrust had
Truman sought a diplomatic solution instead.
Defendants of Truman’s policy, however, have
claimed that the Soviet Union had already begun the Cold War by thwarting
Allied attempts to reunite and stabilize Germany. Truman, they have argued,
merely met the existing Soviet challenge. Other supporters believed that Truman
used polarizing language in order to prevent U.S. isolationists from abandoning
the cause in Europe. Whatever his motivations, Truman’s adoption of the
containment doctrine and his characterization of the Communist threat shaped
American foreign policy for the subsequent four decades.
The National Security
Act
The possibility of a war with the Soviet Union
prompted Congress, Truman, and the military leadership to drastically
reorganize the intelligence-gathering services and armed forces. In 1947, Congress
passed the landmark National Security Act, which placed the
military under the new cabinet-level secretary of defense.
Civilians would be chosen to serve in the post of secretary of defense and as
the secretaries of the individual military branches, while the highest-ranking
officers in the armed forces would form the new Joint Chiefs of Staff to
coordinate military efforts. The National Security Act also created the
civilian position of national security advisorto advise the
president and direct the new National Security Council. The newCentral
Intelligence Agency became the primary espionage and
intelligence-gathering service.
The Election of 1948
Even though he had
initially complained about his new responsibilities as president after
Roosevelt’s death in 1945,
Truman decided to run for reelection as the prospect of another world war
loomed. Party leaders nominated him only halfheartedly after World War II hero
Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to run on the Democratic ticket. Conservative southern
Democrats in particular disliked Truman’s New Deal–esque commitment to labor,
civil rights, reform, and social welfare spending. When Truman received the
formal party nomination, southern Democrats split from the party and nominated
their own candidate, GovernorStrom Thurmond of South Carolina. Progressive
Democrats also nominated former vice president Henry Wallace on a pro-peace platform.
The Republicans, meanwhile, nominated New York governorThomas E. Dewey.
Most Democrats and even Truman himself believed victory to be impossible. On
election night, the Chicago
Tribune printed an
early version of the election returns, proclaiming a Dewey win with the
infamous headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” As it turned out, however, Truman
received more than two million more popular votes than his nearest challenger,
Dewey, and 303 electoral votes. He owed his victory
in part to his adoption of the policy of containment but mostly to his
commitment to expand Social Security and provide increased social welfare
spending as part of his proposed Fair
Deal program. Continued
Republican and southern Democrat opposition in Congress, though, blocked the
majority of Fair Deal legislation during Truman’s second term.
NATO and the Warsaw
Pact
With the mandate from
the election, Truman pushed ahead with his programs to defend Western Europe
from possible attack. In 1949,
the United States joined Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands,
Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Portugal in forming a
military alliance called theNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The NATO charter
pledged that an attack on one of the member nations constituted an attack on
all of the members. Greece and Turkey signed the treaty in 1952,
followed by West Germany in 1955.
Perhaps the greatest
significance of NATO was the fact that it committed the United States to
Western Europe and prevented U.S. conservatives in the future from isolating
the United States from the world as they had after World War I. Outraged and
threatened, the USSR and the Soviet bloc countries it dominated in Eastern Europe
made similar pledges of mutual defense.
The Fall of China
Meanwhile, events
unfolding in China had enormous repercussions on the
United States and ultimately on the Cold War itself. For decades, the
Nationalist government of Chiang
Kai-shek (sometimes written
as Jiang Jieshi) had been fighting a long civil war against Communist rebels
led by Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-tung). The U.S. government
under Roosevelt and Truman had backed the Nationalists with money and small
arms shipments but overall had little influence on the war. Mao’s
revolutionaries, however, finally managed to defeat government forces in 1949 and took control of mainland China.
While Chiang and his
supporters fled to the island of Taiwan, Communist Party chairman Mao became
the head of the new People’s
Republic of China (PRC).
The so-called fall of China was a crushing blow for the United
States, primarily because it suddenly put more than a quarter of the world’s
population under Communist control. Moreover, previous U.S. support for Chiang
Kai-shek also meant that the PRC would not look favorably upon the United
States.
The Arms Race
Also in 1949,
Truman announced that the Soviet Union had successfully tested its first atomic bomb, sooner than
American scientists had predicted. Even though it would have been difficult for
the USSR to actually drop a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil—nuclear missiles would
not be invented for another decade—the Soviets’ discovery cost Truman the
diplomatic upper hand. Whereas the United States had lorded its nuclear
superiority over the Soviets’ heads in the past, it could no longer do so.
To regain the upper hand, Truman poured federal dollars into the 1952 development of the hydrogen bomb, an even more
devastating weapon than the original atomic bomb. Its developers feared this
weapon would become a tool for genocide. The Soviet Union responded in kind
with its own H-bomb the following year, ratcheting the stakes even higher. The
United States and the USSR continued competing against each other with the
development of greater and more destructive weapons in an arms race that lasted until the end of the Cold
War.
The Second Red Scare
The fall of China, the Soviets’ development of nuclear weapons,
and the crises in Europe all contributed to Americans’ growing fear of
Communism at home. Remembering the Bolshevik revolutionaries’ cry for the
global destruction of capitalism, frightened Americans began hunting for
Communist revolutionaries within the United States and elsewhere. President
Truman had already created theLoyalty Review Board in 1947 to investigate all federal
departments, and the State Department in particular, to uncover any hidden
Soviet agents working to overthrow the government. The board went into
overdrive at the end of the decade, and thousands of innocent individuals were
wrongfully accused and persecuted as a result.
Red Hunts
As a member of the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC),
Congressman Richard M. Nixon of California helped spearhead the
search for Communists in the government. In 1948,
he prosecuted former federal employee and accused Communist Alger Hiss in one of the most dramatic cases of
the decade. Hiss’s trial dragged on for two more years and ended with a
five-year prison sentence for perjury. Prosecutors also charged husband and
wife Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg with having given
American nuclear secrets to Soviet agents—an allegation that, though debated
for decades after the trial, was corroborated by Soviet intelligence documents
released in the 1990s.
The Rosenbergs were convicted in 1951 and sent to the electric chair in 1953,
becoming the first American civilians ever executed for espionage.
Although the Red hunts resulted in the capture of legitimate
spies such as the Rosenbergs, Truman began to realize by the end of his
presidency that the fear of Communism had caused widespread and undue panic. He
tried to tame the Red-hunters in 1950 when he vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Bill,
which he believed would give the U.S. president too much power to subvert civil
liberties. Republicans in Congress, however, overrode Truman’s veto and passed
the bill into law later that year.
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