The Containment Policy 739An ad in Lifemagazine features the Dodge Coronet, a car suitable
for soldiers.
suddenly fallen upon him. Although he could not
have been quite as surprised as he indicated (Roosevelt
was known to have been in extremely poor health), he
was acutely conscious of his own limitations.
Truman was born in Missouri in 1884. After his
service in a World War I artillery unit, he opened a
men’s clothing store in Kansas City. The store failed in
the postwar depression. Truman then became a minor
cog in the political machine of Democratic boss Tom
Pendergast. In 1934 Truman was elected to the U.S.
Senate, where he proved to be a loyal but obscure
New Dealer. He first attracted national attention dur-
ing World War II when his “watchdog” committee on
defense spending, working with devotion and effi-
ciency, saved the government immense sums. This led
to his nomination and election as vice president.
As president, Truman sought to carry on in the
Roosevelt tradition. Curiously, he was at the same
time humble and cocky, even brash—both idealistic
and cold-bloodedly political. He adopted liberal
objectives only to pursue them sometimes by rash,
even repressive means. Too often he insulted oppo-
nents instead of convincing or appeasing them.
Complications tended to confuse him, in which case
he either dug in his heels or struck out blindly, usually
with unfortunate results. On balance, however, he
was a strong and, in many ways, successful president.
But he lost a major battle early on. In June 1947,
the new Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act. It
outlawed the closed shop (a provision written into
many labor contracts requiring new workers to join
the union before they could be employed). Most
important, it authorized the president to seek court
injunctions to prevent strikes that, in his opinion,
endangered the national interest.
Truman vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode
it. The Taft-Hartley Act made the task of unionizing
industries more difficult, but it did not seriously ham-
per existing unions.The Containment Policy
Although he was vice president during much of World
War II, Truman had been excluded from all foreign
policy discussions. He was not granted full security
clearance and thus knew little about the Manhattan
project. “They didn’t tell me anything about what
was going on,” Truman complained. While FDR had
concluded at Yalta that he could charm or otherwise
personally cope with the Soviet dictator, Truman early
resolved to deal with Stalin firmly.
Repeatedly Stalin made it clear that he had no
intention of even consulting with Western leaders
about his domination of Eastern Europe, and he
seemed intent on extending his power deep into war-
devastated central Europe. The Soviet Union also
controlled Outer Mongolia, parts of Manchuria, and
northern Korea, and it had annexed the Kurile Islands
and regained the southern half of Sakhalin Island
from Japan. It was fomenting trouble in Iran. By
January 1946 Truman had decided to stop “babying”
the Russians. “Only one language do they under-
stand,” he noted in a memorandum. “How many
[military] divisions have you?”
Truman’s problem—and it would bedevil American
policymakers for years—was that Stalin had far more
divisions than anyone else. Truman, a seasoned politi-
cian, had swiftly responded to the postwar clamor to
“bring the boys home.” In the two years following the
surrender of Japan, the armed forces of the United
States had dwindled from 6 million to 1.5 million.
Stalin, who kept domestic foes out of office by shooting
them, ignored domestic pressure to demobilize the Red
Army, estimated by U.S. intelligence at twice the size of
the American army.
Stalin and the mighty Red Army evoked the image
of Hitler’s troops pouring across the north European
plains. Like Hitler, Stalin was a cruel dictator who
championed an ideology of world conquest. Averill
Harriman, American ambassador to the Soviet Union,
warned that communist ideology exerted an “outward
thrust” more dangerous than Nazism. George
Kennan, a scholarly foreign officer who also had served