From “The Cold War’s Magnificent Seven,” a tribute to Churchill,
Truman, Adenauer, Meany, Chambers, John Paul II, and Reagan
published in Policy Review for Winter 1992, pp. 44 to 54
Containment’s Architect: HARRY S TRUMAN
by Frank Gregorsky (FrankGregorsky@aol.com)
President George McGovern? The peace-at-any-price senator lost 49 states in
1972, but his inspiration and forerunner Henry Wallace, vice-president during
World War II and Franklin Roosevelt’s third term, nearly made it to the White
House. A scant 11 weeks after Wallace turned over the vice-presidency to Harry
Truman, President Roosevelt died. Had an ailing and distracted FDR not allowed
the 1944 Democratic convention to replace Wallace with Truman, the Free World
would have lost the Cold War before it started.
From 1945 to 1949 Wallace crusaded against NATO and military aid to non-
democratic allies, and for world disarmament. In short, he fought the entire
“containment” strategy put together by the Truman administration. When
Truman crushed Wallace’s third-party drive against him in 1948, the peace-at-
any-price tendency within Democratic liberalism was discredited for 20 years.
Thus, for domestic political leadership, as well as innovation in building the
postwar institutions of the Free World, Harry S. Truman is a Cold War hero.
Isolationism’s Enemy
American conservatives had no affection for Truman at the time. They slammed
him for “losing” Mainland China to Mao’s gangsters, for the “no-win” refusal to
conquer North Korea, and for his press-conference defense of Alger Hiss.
Truman’s Republican congressional opponents were one day superhawkish, the
next day isolationist. Without his prodding, they never would have passed NATO
or the Marshall Plan.
But, after Dwight Eisenhower defeated their leader, Ohio Senator Robert Taft, for
the 1952 GOP nomination, anti-Soviet containment became bipartisan orthodoxy.
All of Truman’s successors in the presidency except Jimmy Carter followed the
containment strategy