The Battle for Truman's Ghost
Everyone wants to claim the mantle of "Give'm Hell" Harry, the architect of our victory in the Cold War. Liberals. Conservatives. The President.As I mentioned below, I have something of a personal interest in this battle. And I have some opinions about who deserves to wear the Truman mantle.The place to begin this discussion is with the President's commencement address at West Point to the Class of 2006. Although talk of Truman was in the air, the President brought it to center stage with his commencement address.
He told the Class of 2006 that:
By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged and the doctrines he set down, President Truman laid the foundations for America's victory in the Cold War...Today, at the start of a new century, we are again engaged in a war unlike any our nation has fought before -- and like Americans in Truman's day, we are laying the foundations for victory.Interestingly, Bush didn't take the analogy between himself and Truman much further. His next paragraph entails an extended analogy between the Communism of then and the terrorism of now, but that is a point Democrats tend to agree with.
With regard to himself and Trumn, Bush allowed much of his message to remain implicit.Implicit but crystal clear to those who know their recent history. Truman also committed the United States to a bloody and indecisive war that made him a pariah in the White House by the time he left office. For decades, historians reviled Truman while Democrats preferred to identify themselves with FDR.Although Bush never reminds his audience how reviled Truman was, Bush does take care to point out that Truman predicted his own vindication:
As President Truman put it towards the end of his presidency, "When history says that my term of office saw the beginning of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we set the course that can win it."The question then, is should George Bush derive such confidence from the belated vindication of the haberdasher from Missouri? Peter Beinart says no, in a column entitled Hijacking Harry Truman.
According to Peter, the problem with Bush's address as West Point isn't that he said, but what he didn't say:
Truman did not believe merely in promoting democracy and peace; he believed that doing so required powerful international institutions, which could invest American power with the credibility that the Soviets lacked.In the years immediately after World War II, the United States encased itself in a web of such bodies -- from the United Nations and NATO to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization). And Truman was frank in recognizing that such institutions gave weaker countries an influence over American actions.For the moment, Peter will have to forgive me for relying on his column as the authoritative source of his opinons, since I still have not read his book, even though it is sitting on my coffee table as I write this. But I will get to it soon.Anyhow, I think it is fair to say that Beinart represents multilateralism as an integral part of the Truman legacy. In short, Truman traded power for legitimacy.But is that really what Truman did? Although NATO is a multilateral institution it really doesn't belong in the same category as the United Nations. NATO was a military alliance of like-minded anti-Communist states, almost all of them democratic. The primary value of NATO was not that it legitimized American power, but that it reassured those in Europe who believed that America might retreat into isolationism once again.As for the United Nations, it doesn't really belong in the same category as the United Nations either. When it was born in San Francisco in 1945, China and the Soviet Union were American allies. The institution itself was as much an extension of the wartime alliance (to which FDR referred as "the United Nations") as it was an effort to trade power for legitimacy.Of course, the alliance did not last for long. In that regard, Noemie Emery argues in the Weekly Standard that Truman recognized the inevitable dysfunction of a United Nations with the Soviet Union on its Security Council. Thus, when preparing to go war in Korea,
Truman did not consider the approval of the Security Council to be necessary. Emery writes that:
[Truman] did get its consent, only because the Soviet Union blundered by boycotting the Council. But as Max Boot reminds us, "Truman had already committed air and naval forces to combat before the vote," later writing to Acheson that without the U.N., "We would have had to go into Korea alone."Although I've spent some time studying Truman's foreign policy, I cannot personally vouch for Emery's interpretation of this episode, although she is certainly correct that the Soviets boycotted the relevant vote.Nonetheless, the more relevant point may be that Truman's aspiring heirs on the Democratic side of the aisle never seem to recognize that the Truman of Korea is not the good multilateralist they want to canonize.
For example, the index at the back of Peter Beinart's book doesn't even have an entry for Korea (south, north or otherwise).I would also like to suggest to my friends in the Truman National Security Project that they begin to grapple with this aspect of Truman's legacy, since it is a subject that comes up very rarely, if at all, during the Project's meetings (at least that I've attended.)Emery drives this point home mercilessly:
Do not expect the subject of Asia to come up all that often in these [Democrats'] hymns to the liberal hawks.Above all, do not expect Korea to be brought up at all. Korea, in fact, is Iraq on steroids, a compendium of every complaint that the liberals bring against Bush and his administration: a war of choice that began with an error, that became in effect the mother of quagmires, that cost billions of dollars, killed tens of thousands, and dragged on years longer than anyone looked for, to an inconclusive and troublesome end.
It began with a mistake...What, one wonders, would today's liberal hawks have made of him and Korea, given their penchant for neat, well-planned wars that end quickly, and their standard of zero mistakes?...If they quail at the expense of Iraq, what would they have said to the expense of Korea? If they quail at casualties of under 3,000, what would they have said to the more than 37,000 dead? Would they have been among the 23 percent who stayed loyal to Harry? Or would there have been second thoughts, mea culpas, and abject, not to say groveling, apologies to the antiwar left?I'm guessing that Beinart and others would argue that Korea was directly relevant to our national security, whereas Iraq wasn't.
Anyhow, as you can tell from the passage above, Emery is a fierce partisan whose primary concern is the political stakes of today rather than a comprehensive understanding of what Truman stood for back then. Liberal hawks will find plenty objectionable about her article, but I think that she is very much correct about liberal hawks evading the Truman of Korea.So then, do I have a firm stance on who deserves to appoint themselves as Truman's heir? No, unfortunately I don't. I think that I would really have to develop a much better understanding of how Truman thought about international institutions and about alliances before passing judgment.But for the moment, I think the ball is in the liberals' court, since they have to explain Korea.
He told the Class of 2006 that:
By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged and the doctrines he set down, President Truman laid the foundations for America's victory in the Cold War...Today, at the start of a new century, we are again engaged in a war unlike any our nation has fought before -- and like Americans in Truman's day, we are laying the foundations for victory.Interestingly, Bush didn't take the analogy between himself and Truman much further. His next paragraph entails an extended analogy between the Communism of then and the terrorism of now, but that is a point Democrats tend to agree with.
With regard to himself and Trumn, Bush allowed much of his message to remain implicit.Implicit but crystal clear to those who know their recent history. Truman also committed the United States to a bloody and indecisive war that made him a pariah in the White House by the time he left office. For decades, historians reviled Truman while Democrats preferred to identify themselves with FDR.Although Bush never reminds his audience how reviled Truman was, Bush does take care to point out that Truman predicted his own vindication:
As President Truman put it towards the end of his presidency, "When history says that my term of office saw the beginning of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we set the course that can win it."The question then, is should George Bush derive such confidence from the belated vindication of the haberdasher from Missouri? Peter Beinart says no, in a column entitled Hijacking Harry Truman.
According to Peter, the problem with Bush's address as West Point isn't that he said, but what he didn't say:
Truman did not believe merely in promoting democracy and peace; he believed that doing so required powerful international institutions, which could invest American power with the credibility that the Soviets lacked.In the years immediately after World War II, the United States encased itself in a web of such bodies -- from the United Nations and NATO to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization). And Truman was frank in recognizing that such institutions gave weaker countries an influence over American actions.For the moment, Peter will have to forgive me for relying on his column as the authoritative source of his opinons, since I still have not read his book, even though it is sitting on my coffee table as I write this. But I will get to it soon.Anyhow, I think it is fair to say that Beinart represents multilateralism as an integral part of the Truman legacy. In short, Truman traded power for legitimacy.But is that really what Truman did? Although NATO is a multilateral institution it really doesn't belong in the same category as the United Nations. NATO was a military alliance of like-minded anti-Communist states, almost all of them democratic. The primary value of NATO was not that it legitimized American power, but that it reassured those in Europe who believed that America might retreat into isolationism once again.As for the United Nations, it doesn't really belong in the same category as the United Nations either. When it was born in San Francisco in 1945, China and the Soviet Union were American allies. The institution itself was as much an extension of the wartime alliance (to which FDR referred as "the United Nations") as it was an effort to trade power for legitimacy.Of course, the alliance did not last for long. In that regard, Noemie Emery argues in the Weekly Standard that Truman recognized the inevitable dysfunction of a United Nations with the Soviet Union on its Security Council. Thus, when preparing to go war in Korea,
Truman did not consider the approval of the Security Council to be necessary. Emery writes that:
[Truman] did get its consent, only because the Soviet Union blundered by boycotting the Council. But as Max Boot reminds us, "Truman had already committed air and naval forces to combat before the vote," later writing to Acheson that without the U.N., "We would have had to go into Korea alone."Although I've spent some time studying Truman's foreign policy, I cannot personally vouch for Emery's interpretation of this episode, although she is certainly correct that the Soviets boycotted the relevant vote.Nonetheless, the more relevant point may be that Truman's aspiring heirs on the Democratic side of the aisle never seem to recognize that the Truman of Korea is not the good multilateralist they want to canonize.
For example, the index at the back of Peter Beinart's book doesn't even have an entry for Korea (south, north or otherwise).I would also like to suggest to my friends in the Truman National Security Project that they begin to grapple with this aspect of Truman's legacy, since it is a subject that comes up very rarely, if at all, during the Project's meetings (at least that I've attended.)Emery drives this point home mercilessly:
Do not expect the subject of Asia to come up all that often in these [Democrats'] hymns to the liberal hawks.Above all, do not expect Korea to be brought up at all. Korea, in fact, is Iraq on steroids, a compendium of every complaint that the liberals bring against Bush and his administration: a war of choice that began with an error, that became in effect the mother of quagmires, that cost billions of dollars, killed tens of thousands, and dragged on years longer than anyone looked for, to an inconclusive and troublesome end.
It began with a mistake...What, one wonders, would today's liberal hawks have made of him and Korea, given their penchant for neat, well-planned wars that end quickly, and their standard of zero mistakes?...If they quail at the expense of Iraq, what would they have said to the expense of Korea? If they quail at casualties of under 3,000, what would they have said to the more than 37,000 dead? Would they have been among the 23 percent who stayed loyal to Harry? Or would there have been second thoughts, mea culpas, and abject, not to say groveling, apologies to the antiwar left?I'm guessing that Beinart and others would argue that Korea was directly relevant to our national security, whereas Iraq wasn't.
Anyhow, as you can tell from the passage above, Emery is a fierce partisan whose primary concern is the political stakes of today rather than a comprehensive understanding of what Truman stood for back then. Liberal hawks will find plenty objectionable about her article, but I think that she is very much correct about liberal hawks evading the Truman of Korea.So then, do I have a firm stance on who deserves to appoint themselves as Truman's heir? No, unfortunately I don't. I think that I would really have to develop a much better understanding of how Truman thought about international institutions and about alliances before passing judgment.But for the moment, I think the ball is in the liberals' court, since they have to explain Korea.
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