difficulties was needed to persuade Congress, and
Dean Acheson supplied it. Aid to Greece was
placed in the context of combating the designs of
a communist assault on the free world. Kennan
and Marshall thought that Truman’s celebrated
message to Congress, which was to go down in
history as the Truman Doctrine, was rather too
sweeping, indeed an overstatement of the case,
especially as Turkey was now included.
But on 12 March 1947 Truman went ahead
regardless and delivered the message in person to
Congress. The Soviet Union was not mentioned
by name, but no one doubted which enemy he
had in mind. ‘I believe it must be the policy of
the US to support free peoples who are resisting
attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by
outside pressure’, he declared. ‘In helping free
and independent nations to maintain their
freedom, the US will be giving effect to the prin-
ciples of the Charter of the United Nations.’
Truman then asked for financial aid for Turkey
and Greece and authority for American military
and civil personnel to assist their governments.
Voices were raised in opposition, but the great
majority of both Houses of Congress approved.
As far as American and world opinion was con-
cerned, the Truman Doctrine was regarded as a
dramatic turning point in US policy. On close
examination it can be seen to have been steadily
evolving during the first two years of the Truman
administration. But it still left many questions
unanswered. Was the US committed to aid every
government, however corrupt, provided it was
faced with internal or external communist pres-
sure? The world after all was not simply divided
between communist tyranny and free nations.
The Truman Doctrine did not provide a guide
that could be uncritically and automatically
applied regardless of all other considerations.
The Truman Doctrine set the stage for its
natural complement, the Marshall Plan, publicly
unveiled in a speech delivered by Secretary of
State George Marshall at Harvard on 5 June
- He appealed to American altruism and gen-
erosity to help check hunger and destitution in
Europe, but he made no references to combating
communism, although that was the Plan’s princi-
pal aim. On the contrary, all of Europe, as well
as the Soviet Union, was included in its scope. In
1945 the US had extended economic aid on no
more than a short-term basis in the belief that
Western Europe would speedily recover. The
problem at that time seemed to be one of inter-
national financial mechanisms, a temporary dollar
shortage, to be solved by pressuring the European
recipients of American loans to accept the new
international financial order worked out at
Bretton Woods. In 1947 the Truman administra-
tion recognised that West European recovery was
desperately slow and without further American
aid would be slower still. Severe food shortages
continued and Western Europe could not pay
with its exports what it needed to import from
North America. Without American aid, the West
European peoples would experience not only
great hardship but possible internal disruption.
Distress was the seedbed on which communism
flourished. Occupied Western Germany, Italy and
France were believed in Washington to be most
directly threatened.
In extending massive economic help to
Western Europe, however, the Truman adminis-
tration faced several problems. How to ensure
that the enormous funds required would be
properly used? The Americans intended to run
the programme, yet a way of doing this without
injuring European national susceptibilities had
to be found. Which countries were to be offered
aid? The Americans rightly believed that it was
essential for the recovery of Western Europe that
the West German occupation zones should be
included, yet the recovery of West Germany
would create difficulties with France.
It was clearly not America’s aim to extend eco-
nomic aid to the Soviet Union, yet Marshall did
not wish to be accused of dividing Europe, so he
avoided excluding any European nation by name
from his proposals.
Marshall and his advisers, above all Dean
Acheson, solved these problems with subtlety. In
his speech announcing the Plan, Marshall said
that the offer of aid was directed not against any
country but against hunger, desperation and
chaos; assistance, he continued, should not be
piecemeal, nor a mere palliative, but should
provide a cure. The gist of Marshall’s proposal