Truman

McCullough uses the title of chapter 16, “Commander in Chief,” to highlight the dispute between the President and General MacArthur over Korean policy. Truman perceived MacArthur’s actions as insubordination even though they did not meet the military definition thereof. However, his actions did challenge the official political trajectory of the US and undermined Truman’s decision-making. As a result, Truman fired MacArthur because only the President could be the true Commander-in-Chief, and political decisions superseded their military counterparts. McCullough writes, “In high policy as in war there is no room for a divided command” (970).

Domestically, McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt raged. McCullough writes, “[N]othing Truman or anyone else said seemed to diminish McCarthy or the fear he spread in government and the nation” (890). The author shows a country gripped by hysteria and how such suspicions complicated the working of the government. For example, the University of California fired 157 employees, McCullough says, “for refusing to sign an anti-Communist oath” (894). The so-called Red Scare was the domestic mirror of the Truman Doctrine which made the challenge of communism global and raised the fears thereof.

During this period Truman announced the Four Point Program (1949-1953) for the so-called developing world. The program was based on the Marshall Plan, which became a blueprint for US foreign policy. Ideologically, the goal of this program was to deter decolonizing nations from cooperating with the Soviet Union. Truman claimed that “[t]he old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—had no place in the plan” (851). However, some critics argue that this type of economic assistance involved neo-imperialist methods without direct occupation.

McCullough spends little time examining the repercussions of forming NATO. Similarly, Chapter 11 only briefly touches upon Truman’s establishment of the Central Intelligence Group, later the CIA. Both organizations turned into key instruments of American foreign policy, but McCullough does not examine these developments. In the framework of the Cold War, the Americans perceived the 1949 Chinese Revolution as evidence of a global communist takeover and an additional threat to freedom and human rights abroad as well as to the security interests of the US. On the other hand, the US government actively backed Chiang Kai-shek because he championed its foreign policy goals. Acheson blamed Chiang’s failure on the “internal decay” of his regime and on “its rampant corruption” (864). Overall, the American engagement with China and the early stages of the Korean War demonstrate the consequences of the Truman Doctrine—the expansion of anti-communist efforts into more geographic regions. Truman perceived the Korean crisis as a matter of “Russo-Communist aggression” and “the Greece of the Far East” in reference to his initial backing of Greece in 1947 to prevent communist oppression (943, 907). This section also displays McCullough’s theme of War and Character.

This expansion also translated into an arms race. The Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons in response to the US. As a result, the US sought to develop a more powerful hydrogen bomb and increase its defense budget. These developments spurred the growth of the American military-industrial complex and the cooperation between the federal government and private weapons manufacturers.