*Many of America’s greatest presidents have been accidents:  TR should never have been president, Lincoln owed his victory in part to the division of the Democratic Party, even in 1844, the Whigs asked, ‘Who is James Polk?’  Harry Truman, another accidental president, was nonetheless one of America’s best.  A WWI veteran and a Mason, he was a failure at farming and business (he was a haberdasher) before entering politics through one of America’s most corrupt organisations, the [Tom] Pendergast Machine of Missouri.  He stood out as perhaps the only honest man in the organisation, and was said to have been the only man to lose money while working for the machine.  Handpicked by Pendergast to fill one of Missouri’s US Senate seats in 1934, Truman first came to the attention of FDR when an investigation into government finances led him to an unexplained money sink called ‘Manhattan.’  He was told to quietly back away, and he did so.

*In 1944, he was chosen as FDR’s third Vice-President, and took over as President on 12 April 1945, much to his surprise and dismay, as he had been largely in the dark about the executive office’s internal workings.  Truman got off to an inauspicious start.  He called in many of his old friends to assist him; they were known as the ‘Missouri Gang,’ reminiscent of Harding’s ‘Ohio Gang,’ and they were not as scrupulously honest as their boss.  As Truman stumbled through his first weeks in office, the common explanation was ‘To err is Truman.’

*Unlike other presidents, Truman did not live in the White House for much of his period in office. Structural analysis of the building early in his term had shown the White House to be in immediate danger of collapse, partly due to problems with the walls and foundation that dated back to the burning of the building by the British in the early nineteenth century. The President was moved immediately to Blair House nearby, which became his White House, while the White House was systematically dismantled to the foundations and rebuilt, using concrete and steel, with the interior re-inserted over the new floors and walls. A new balcony was inserted on the curved portico, now known as the Truman Balcony.

*Truman had the misfortune to preside over the opening years of the Cold War, although in many ways the Cold War actually began at Yalta in February 1945, where the Big Three met for the last time to divide up the spoils of Europe.  Stalin was permitted control over Poland, Bulgaria, Roumania, and other eastern territories, although he promised to permit them to hold free elections.  The USSR was also asked to step into the war with Japan, and agreed, under terms that would end up giving them de facto control of most of Manchuria and any other areas they could take.

*Many have accused Roosevelt of selling out Chiang Kai-shek and the peoples of Eastern Europe, and there is a measure of truth to this, since none of the free elections ever materialised, or at least had any effect.  In part FDR trusted ‘Uncle Joe,’ or so it has been said, in part FDR was very sick and not at his best, and in part he knew he had no choice but to accede to the requests of the man with the largest army on the planet, a force already occupying much of the land he asked for.

*The truth is that, despite the war-time alliance, the USA and the USSR had never much liked one another, and this did not much change during the war.  Both nations held strongly to ideologies that united large populations across large spaces, ideologies, moreover, that were essentially internationalist in nature yet mutually incompatible.  Totalitarianism and democracy did not get along well in the best of times, and having different economic systems tied in with their ideologies did nothing to ease mistrust.

*Russians resented the US and UK’s slow and small entrance into the war in Europe, the US gave less lend-lease to the USSR than to other major allies, the US tried to keep the Soviets out of their atomic research (although Communist spies ended up keeping Stalin better informed about the bomb than Truman was), and as soon as the war ended the United States cut off support to all her allies, but soon began making new loans to the UK and other nations—but not the USSR.

*Americans resented not only Soviet Communism in its own right, but also the fact that the Soviets were apparently carving out an empire of their own from Germany’s old eastern territories—hardly the desired outcome of a war to keep the world safe for democracy.  The Russians, though, remembered two German attacks through Eastern Europe in the 20th Century alone, and wanted a better buffer than German goodwill.

*Defeated Germany was dealt with in several ways.  First, the Potsdam Conference just outside Berlin divided up the post-war world.  Germany was reduced, Poland was moved west to take up the last German land (losing land in the east to the USSR in return) and East Prussia ceased to exist.  Germany was split into four zones of occupation, as was the city of Berlin.  Austria, again separate from German, was initially split up, but later was jointly occupied in all area, and ended up remaining cautiously neutral during most of the Cold War.  The rest of Eastern Europe (including Finland at the moment) were added to the Soviet Sphere, and the free elections promised to the region never materialised in fact, and when elections did occur, they were heavily influenced by the USSR and the Red Army.  Soon all of Eastern Europe, including the state of East Germany, was under Communist rule, and steadfastly opposed to the West.  According to Winston Churchill, ‘From Stettin in Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.’

*Within Germany, war crimes trials were held at Nuremberg.  The showcase trial put 22 major German and Nazi leaders on trial.  12 were hanged, Hermann Göring committed suicide before he could be executed, 7 more leaders got long jail terms (the last of them to die in prison was Rudolph Hess, who supposedly committed suicide in Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he was the only prisoner; earlier, he was the last prisoner incarcerated in the Tower of London), and all the rest got prison terms of greater or lesser duration.  Lesser Nazis were prosecuted in trials lasting for years.  ‘I was just following orders’ is not good enough.

*German scientists were captured by or surrendered to both sides.  Some were known to have gone to great effort to be captured by the Americans, rightly figuring them to be kinder than the Soviets.  Perhaps the most famous of these was Werner von Braun, who became instrumental in the American rocket programme.

*Despite this rapid growth of tensions among the great nations of the world, an attempt was made at co-operation.  In 1945 the United Nations was founded, allowing all nations representation in the General Assembly and with the USA, UK, France, USSR, and China holding permanent seats with veto powers on the 15-member Security Council.  FDR, unlike Wilson, had made the creation of the UN a bi-partisan effort, and it was accepted by the USA and, after FDR’s death, fully supported by Truman, who sent a very distinguished group to the early meetings, including Eleanor Roosevelt.  The UN had organisations all over the world managing food distribution, health care, and other development efforts, but an attempt to create an international regulatory commission to oversee nuclear development was vetoed by the USSR.
*The UN helped create Israel as a modern nation-state, seen at the time as a great humanitarian move.  Since then it has been at the heart of almost every regional war in the Middle East.

*In Eastern Europe, the Red Army ensured that the promised ‘free elections’ were won by Communists, and in Western Europe and elsewhere, starving nations devastated by war also seemed ripe for Communist revolutions or takeovers.

*To rebuild Europe, Truman and his Secretary of State, former General George Marshall, implemented a plan, the Marshall Plan, to encourage Europeans to create a joint plan for rebuilding the continent.  The incentive for co-operation was that the USA would pay for it.  Congress was initially reluctant to spend the billions of dollars required by the plan, but agreed to do so after watching a weak democratic government in Czechoslovakia overthrown by a Soviet-backed Communist insurrection.

*From 1948 to 1951, the Marshall Plan rebuilt much of Western Europe, paying over $13 billion (perhaps $100 billion in to-day’s funds).  The Communist Countries were invited to take advantage of it as well, but the Soviet Union forbade them, creating their own version in its place.  That version in fact did little for the conquered nations, and in most cases the Russians actually dismantled German factories and moved them back to Russia as a form of reparations.  With this help most of Western Europe was more prosperous (or at least had a higher industrial output) than they were before the war, and local Communist parties declined in popularity.

*In addition to backing the Marshall Plan for economic aid to friendly nations, Truman also supported helping nations under more direct attack from Communism.  This became obvious in 1947, when the British became unable to send money to Greece to support their struggle against Communist insurgents.  Fearing that the fall of Greece would also lead to the fall of Turkey, Truman called a join session of Congress and addressed them asking for money for Turkey and Greece, declaring that ‘it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’  This became known as the Truman Doctrine, the promise to support any country that was resisting Communism.  It was part of the process whereby the entire world became essentially two armed camps in which everyone was either with us or against us.

*The Cold War grew colder in 1948 when the USSR, tired of sharing Berlin with the other Allies (who refused to allow reparations to be demanded of Germany) cut off all contact between Berlin and West Germany, shutting down rail traffic and closing off all roads.  The USSR assumed that the Allies would be starved out, but, instead, the Berlin Airlift began.  For almost a year, the US Air Force flew food and other supplies into Berlin, supplying not only their own and allied troops, but the civilian population as well.  Although the blockade lifted in 1949, this event, combined with the obvious electoral fraud in all the supposedly free nations of Eastern Europe over the past few years, convinced the West that the Soviets were not to be dealt with.

*In fact, 1949 is one of the most frightening years in American history, perhaps as scary as 1831.  In 1949 the Soviets tested an atomic bomb, and the Communists under Mao Tse-tung took over China.

*Until that time, the Asian situation had seemed relatively simple.  Douglas MacArthur commanded the US reconstruction of Japan essentially single-handedly, and did so with great skill, becoming loved by the Japanese people.  Although seven war criminals had been hanged by the US, the American presence, the American-written constitution, and American dollars were largely welcomed.  In China, however, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists had fought Mao Tse-tung’s Communists for years, sometimes even at the same time both fought off the Japanese.  Although Chiang was supported by US dollars, he was a poor leader with a corrupt administration, while Mao was more efficient and had better access to Soviet assistance.  Nonetheless, Chiang’s defeat was a serious blow to American morale, despite his escape to Formosa and his continuation of the Republic of China in opposition to Mao’s People’s Republic of China.  Many Republicans blamed the Democrats, accusing them of withholding support from the Nationalists.  While there may be some truth in this, the fact is that Chiang lacked support from his own people as well, and that is why his government fell.

*In response to the world situation, America and Western Europe began to re-arm.  The United States had already re-organised the structure of the armed forces.  The old departments of War and the Navy were subsumed, along with a new department of the Air Force, into the Department of Defense.  Located in the new Pentagon office building, this unified command would, at least in theory, allow the different branches of the armed services to work together more efficiently and effectively.  Military reformers had wanted a unified Defense Department for years, and the difficulties of co-ordinating the massive effort of WWII, along with the promotion of many new, young officers to important posts, finally accomplished it.  With this new force, the United States did something else unprecedented in peace-time:  in 1949 the USA joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation along with eleven other nations, pledging than an attack on any one of them was an attack on all of them.  Later more nations would join, including beleaguered Greece and Turkey.  In response, the Soviet Sphere signed the Warsaw Pact, pledging much the same thing to one another (with the exception of Yugoslavia, which, under Marshal Tito, began to go its own route—still Communist and totalitarian, but not dominated by Moscow, making it almost unique in Communist Europe).

*As a member of NATO, the USA had to re-arm and prepare.  The US created a peace-time draft in 1948.  The National Security Council was created to adcise the president and the Central Intelligence Agency was formed out of the old Office of Strategic Services to spy on foreigners while the ‘Voice of America’ began broadcasting American radio across the Iron Curtain.

*The United States exploded the world’s first hydrogen bomb (or H-bomb) on November 1, 1952, on Elugelab Island in the Eniwetok Atoll of the Marshall Islands, code-named Mike. It yielded 10.4 megatons of explosive power (equal to 10.4 million tons of TNT), which is over 450 times the power of the bomb that fell on Nagasaki. The detonation obliterated Elugelab, leaving an underwater crater 6240 ft wide and 164 ft deep where an island had once been.  A year later the Soviets would test a smaller (i.e. more easily delivered) h-bomb a year later.  Thenceforth both the USA and USSR would seek ‘nuclear superiority,’ hoping to have more atomic weaponry than the other.  Britain announced the possession of atomic bombs in 1952, and France and Red China would also develop atomic weapons during the Cold War.  This escalation and proliferation of nuclear armaments would characterise the Cold War for decades to come.

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