by Ron Radosh

Two years ago, TNR's Peter Beinart argued in his book The Good Fight, that a vibrant liberal tradition advocating a tough but realistic foreign policy was the heart of a mainstream liberal foreign policy. As reviewer James A. Lindsay explained in The Washington Post Book World, "In the years following World War II, it was Democrat Harry S. Truman who developed a coherent and compelling vision of national greatness in the dangerous world. The Cold War liberalism--a term Beinart takes as a compliment, not a slur--of Truman's Democratic Party unified the nation and provided a blueprint for promoting U.S. security and prosperity that lasted nearly half a century." Now, a series of important documents and two new books provide more proof for Beinart's assertion. Alan Johnson, editor of an online magazine, Democraitya, has published recently released British Cabinet memos written by Labor's foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, in 1948. Bevin called for Europeans to take the lead in creating an anti-communist foreign policy that he argued had to be both progressive and reformist. As Johnson writes in his introduction to the documents, it was an attempt by Labor "to insert a social democratic component into the emerging cold war structures," which Johnson calls a "Third Force" path between totalitarianism and laissez-faire capitalism." The Bevin memos make fascinating reading in today's world, as we face a new totalitarian threat. Bevin understood, as did Truman, that world communism threatened "the whole fabric of Western civilization," and had to be opposed by support to democratic elements the world over. In conjunction with the United States, Benin argued, the policy could eventually lead, as it did, to victory. In the realm of Truman scholarship, a major book of historical analysis has been published by Cambridge University Press. Written by Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C. of Notre Dame University, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War, the author shows how the Truman administration slowly but firmly moved away from the policies espoused by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had hoped that cooperation with the Soviets could continue in the postwar world. Miscamble, basing his argument on extensive and impressive research in scores of archives, shows how Harry S. Truman, the accidental president, developed a new conceptual role of America's international role. The new policy was based, as he writes, "on a desire to preserve the security of the noncommunist world from Soviet expansionism." In the process, Miscamble skewers and effectively demolishes the old arguments of the so-called "Cold War revisionists," who argued that the cold war was caused by American militarism and imperialism, and could have been avoided had the United State pursed an accomodationist foreign policy. Miscamble's book should be read in conjunction with an important reevaluation of Truman, Elizabeth Edwards Spalding's The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (The University Press of Kentucky). Spalding's contribution is to show how it was Truman himself who made the decisions and formulated the policy that led to containment. It was Truman, she reveals, who formulated the policy of developing a "strategic military component" as part of the Kennan containment policy, thereby broadening and moving away from George F. Kennan's own conception of how containment should be implemented. It was "freedom, justice, and order," Spalding argues, espoused by Truman, that became the basis upon which a durable peace could be attained. Like Bevin, Truman saw the conflict with the Soviets as a fight between liberal democracy and totalitarianism. Both books complement each other, and both authors show how we in today's world live in the shadow of the policies created and implemented by Harry S. Truman. For those who live in the Washington, D.C. area, both authors will appear, along with other scholars to discuss the new Truman scholarship at a forum on April 24, sponsored by the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. Those who want to attend should r.s.v.p. to the address here.