Soviet desires for a revision of the Straits had
been raised by Stalin during the wartime Allied
conferences. The Turks had secured in 1936
complete sovereign rights over the Straits, and the
Russians indicated their wish to reverse this,
reverting to a degree of international control. At
the time Roosevelt and Churchill told Stalin that
they thought Russia’s aims reasonable and just.
But by August 1946 the wartime comradeship in
arms had given way to deep distrust. The Soviet
Union did not persist in its pressure on Turkey,
and the tension eased.
By the winter of 1946–7 communist forces
were also threatening the stability of Turkey’s
neighbour Greece, which was in the throes of a
civil war, with Britain assisting the royal Greek
government financially and militarily. By this time
a consensus was emerging in Washington that the
West was facing a tenacious and persistent
Moscow-led communist offensive designed to
expand Soviet control and to undermine the cohe-
sion of the West through subversion or through
local communist parties wherever points of weak-
ness could be exploited. What was probably true
up to a point became exaggerated in Washington
into a belief that there was a masterplan in exis-
tence in Moscow and that everything that was
happening was in accordance with such a plan.
No doubt schemes were being devised in the
Kremlin, argued about and constantly changed
when the unfolding of events did not correspond
to the scientific precepts of Marxism–Leninism.
Nor were communists outside the Soviet Union
entirely free from primitive nationalist deviations,
as Yugoslavia was so soon to demonstrate to the
world. In 1947, Moscow’s communist empire was
by no means secure and the devastated Soviet
Union was far behind the West in economic
strength. Stalin would not hesitate to take advan-
tage of Western embarrassments where he could,
and in the longer term would hope to benefit
from social revolutions in the West. But the Soviet
Union was in no condition to risk war.
The Greek communist guerrillas had received
help from their communist neighbours, and it was
believed in Washington and London that the
Russians were really behind the conflict. The
Greek communists on the contrary felt let down
by Stalin. The most likely explanation is that
Stalin kept to his undertaking not to help the
Greek communists directly. The help they did
receive from Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria and
Romania branded them, in the eyes of many
Greeks, as traitors to the national cause, especially
as this assistance was being offered by former
enemies. The American administration was no
partisan of the corrupt and inefficient royalist gov-
ernment but the need to check the Soviet Union,
which stood to gain from a communist victory
in Greece, overshadowed other considerations.
When Foreign Secretary Bevin’s telegram arrived
in February 1947 announcing that Britain could
no longer sustain the financial burden of sup-
porting the anti-communist Greek government,
Washington was ready to respond. Kennan’s long
telegram and the discussions in Washington
during the course of 1946 and 1947 prepared the
way for a spectacular American reaction to the
‘Soviet communist threat’. The response would
be global, not piecemeal, and so would mirror the
perceived global communist threat. Greece was
the catalyst, not the cause.
Secretary of State General George Marshall was
helped in his new task by the experienced Dean
Acheson, under secretary in the State Department
and a strong supporter of Soviet containment. A
difficulty to be overcome, however, was Congress,
which would have to vote the funds, and the
Senate was controlled by the Republicans, who
were in no mood for high federal expenditures
and had already blocked much of Truman’s
domestic programme. If bipartisan support could
not be secured, Truman knew that his world poli-
cies would be wrecked just as surely as Wilson’s
had been after the First World War. So he carefully
cultivated the Senate and was extraordinarily for-
tunate in that the leading Republican on the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee was Arthur
Vandenberg from Michigan. Once an isolationist,
he had been converted by Pearl Harbor to a global
view of America’s national and security interests.
On 27 February 1947 Truman met congressional
leaders, including Senator Vandenberg, in the
White House and put forward the case for aid to
Greece. Yet something more striking than Greek
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