Truman Foreign Policy: A Traditionalist View
Ferrell, Robert H.
Aid to Greece and Turkey was only a precursor to the Marshall Plan which funded the resurrection of modern Europe and cost $13,348,800,000. Truman was also responsible for the Point Four program, a...
...New York, 1971 ), p. 64...
...It may have been the genera- tion gap, the fact that for the most part the older generation of the Second World War could not believe in absolutes...
...Here one comes to the issue, so much heard about in recent years, of a usable past...
...Answer: "In short, a diplomatic momentum had by this time taken control of policy...
...There are few presidents in this cen- tury who have matched his performance and none of his successors is comparable --though Mr...
...This unprecedented flow of letters to the editor, to which the authors responded article, which still seems to the present writer an admirable piece in every way, with as much heat and sarcasm as l'he critics bestowed...
...was dropped each of the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised that it was highly likely An important point about Russian participation in the war is that the impact that Japan could be forced to surrender'unconditionally;without use of the bomb of Russian entry on the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive and without an invasbn...
...Scholars, he says, "'face a peculiar prob- lem" in that "we have little reliable in- formation about what went on inside the Kremlin during the same period...
...The revisionists also are expert at some of the old ploys of writers attempting to make points, as when they try to run in arguments on the unsuspecting reader...
...His integrity was un-shakable...
...For the to this quotation...
...Korea, like Vietnam, now seems like just another imperial war for spheres of influence, and the cold war itself little more than a power con- test between rival empires, both preven- ted from launching a full-scale war from fear of suffering instant obliteration...
...Hav- ing come to their own stations of life without interruption they considered the preceding generation to be a kind of fountainhead of stupidity: "...our elders seem mired in the dead past: the De-pression, the War, and the competition with Russia...
...At the present writing (1972),State Department archives have just become available for events through the year 1946...
...Herbert Feis believed in retrospect that the western allies should have risked a break with Stalin at Yalta, rather than tnake the Eastern European agreements, but the bleakness of the western position emerges clearly in Feis' estimate of the result in such a case --"I think that if they had taken that risk, Stalin would have given in slightly about Poland...
...Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was upset because of the anti-Russian feeling among Truman's advisors, notably Averell Harriman and the latter's Moscow assistant in charge of Russian lend lease, Major General John R. Deane...
...Alperovitz omitted these final, emphasized words, and one...
...He said, "Do your duty and history will do you justice...
...Pres- ident Roosevelt and his advisers did place great emphasis on reviving a multilateral system of world trade, but this was only one element of a larger scheme for avoiding future wars, influ-enced primarily by a determination to avoid the mistakes of World War I and the interwar period...
...It all reminded the present writer of the feeling that Schlesinger had skewered several of their favorite illusions, to the nineteenth-century raileries from and to Thomas Carlyle in which critics use Gardner's word...
...All these points have been made many times and are well known...
...2nd ed., 1972), p. 20...
...the series is now dealing with 1947, and it can be assumed that the records for 1947 will be opened in the near future...
...A c onference of resea rchers and a rchivists sponsored by the General Services War, and the threat to civil liberties...
...Cold War Essays, p. 4. sionists that an American policy of uni- versalism, in particular the open door in Eastern Europe, was a major reason for the origins of the cold war...
...Baruch had threatened to get off the reservation during debate over the man Front," The Mar/lend Historian, II (1971 ), 41-55...
...see also t thoroughgoing analysis in Charles Historiography," American Historical Review, vol...
...The q uotation appears in "Cold War: Ger- 19...
...Williams, Gardner, and other revisionists, good socialists, are bothered, indeed haunted, by capitalism, a kind of bogey...
...I'm not going to spend hours and hours on that old goat, come what may...
...The satellite armies were unreli-able, and after Soviet and American ac-quisition of medium-range and intercon- tinental ballistic missies in the 1950s and 1960s the territory of the satellites pos-sessed no discernible military value...
...History is not a very neat story...
...17-19...
...One of their impulses for using the thesis was understandable...
...The President's La Feber's documentary volume, Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, prints the advisers had a time bringing Baruch around...
...Russia, and the Cold War makes much of a letter from Alfred P. Sloan to Ber- nard Baruch written in 1945 that La Feber found in the Bamch papers at Princeton) 6 Yet Sloan's view of what should be postwar policy toward Ger-many (he wanted the American govern- merit to revive German industry, con-trary to the joint Chiefs of Staff paper numbered 1067 which was supposed to guide American military governors) was Sloan's view, and whether it figured in the calculus of the American govern- otherwise explain the constant appear-ance of citations to the unpublished Ba-ruch papers at Princeton in La Feber's text on the origins of the cold war when most writers about the post-1945 period, and surely a majority of the in- clividuals alive today who took part in the politics of the era, know that Baruch was a vain, pompous, egotistical self-advertiser ("that old goat," Truman once remarked to Clark Clifford), who by his own recounting had made a for-tune in the stock market and whose opin- ions were highly unrepresentative but who occasionally had to be brought in on American political issues, partly be-cause of the sheer publicity he gener-ated, partly because his conservative po- litics tended to scare away Republican and crackpot critics...
...quotation from Marshall, Alperovitz cites to the Potsdam documents in...
...In truth Bullitt was one of the oddest ducks ever to inhabit any duck run of foreign policy, a most quixotic individual who contrary to the innuendo in Gardner's essay had almost no influence on Roosevelt by the time FDR began to think about the country's entrance into war, not to mention later years when "Bill" Bullitt was painfully isolated from influence on anyone except possibly ~ expert that is, convenient explana-tions) s La Feber's revisionist America...
...it is pleasant indeed to be able to relate that the brouhaha over Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confron- tation with Soviet Power which began with publication of that sensational volume in 1965 is now virtually at an end...
...The contemporaries of the Hit- ler-generation professors were running the federal government and domina-ting foreign policy, and as there were many stupid things about the conduct of universities in the 1960s so too the domestic and foreign policies of the United States government during the decade were having a few problems...
...2 One should perhaps explain at this point that the older generation has not found itself charmed by the cold war revisionists...
...41he had trimmed the quotation so as to give it a quite different meaning from what Marshall intended...
...Gar Alperovitz, Cold War Essays (Garden City, N. Y., 1970), p. 92n...
...The essay itself will appear in The Truman Period as a Research Field edited by Richard S. KirkendalI...
...As Irwin Unger has said, how easier could the younger generation have hoped to tangle with the older, than to assert that the war against Hitler was only a war for American markets...
...9 tory...
...There is either a doctrinaire politics here, or the operation of an irrational will, which in either case belies the assertions of the revi36...
...It is true that during this period the forces of free- dom suffered setbacks in China, and the Russian presence in Eastern Europe was not dented...
...Kolko is constantly talking about the necessary preconditions of this and that, which al- most always are economic...
...i Truman Foreign Policy: A Traditionalist View In this issue appears the first part of a two-part article examing the Cold War revisionists and Truman foreign policy...
...Everyone does...
...2' Roosevelt was a compromiser, sometimes to the point of dissimulation...
...The young men who came into the teaching profes- sion in the early l.q60s looked upon this scene with the impatience of all young men, an impatience in fair part genera-ted by the fact of youth, their having been too young to have made many mis- takes or to have known deep disappoint- ment, the fact also that out of sheer luck they came to manhood at a time when the draft calls for the US army were ti...
...See Robert J. Maddox, "Cold War Revisionism: meeting was "to grease the old boy...
...The a most attractive young scholar with essay on Bullitt the aging traditionalist letter does play into the beliefs of many a iiarvard Ph.D...
...Apparently the Russians, for all their supposed political savvy, could not understand the impossibly weak position of the little countries of Eastern Europe, and came to think that even a small evidence of democracy was dangerous...
...In similar manner he manages to bring into sudden focus the highly dubious point of Alpero- jungle, undeT which Lloyd Gardner is operating as a Vietcong, and that Gard-ner darts out to make a tendentious point, only to become a black-pajama part is an attack on cold war revisionism has praised the books of Kolko and La Feber, saying that these revisionist au-thors and not the older scholars of the ritz and assert it as truth: "'In 1945, when blur as he bolts for cover before the his- establishment "have written the basic the []nited States sought to liberate East- ern Europe with 'atomic diplomacy,' Lippmann subtly warned...
...For another piece of Baruchiana see my George C. Marshall at Princeton University Press...
...k nowing who his boss was, one must assume tha t the Soviet statesman was exag- 31...
...l am again indebted to Gaddis, and to his publisher, Columbia University (Chicago, 1971...
...a9 His supporters were reduced to saying that Alperovitz had widened their horizens, making them see that some officials in the American government did believe that the atomic bomb might help them in their troubles with the Russians...
...s La Feber and Gard- ner passed from their doctoral thesis into analyses of the cold war, using the Williams principle...
...But if the.Russians thought they could panic or daunt him, they had misper-ceived him, for with typical resolve he ordered the U.S...
...20 To add another detail to the above points about documentation, one should not fail to notice how the revisionists love to cite the works of each other...
...For another, he was properly sensitive to the fact that he had been elected Vice- President only because he was on the ticket with Roosevelt, and it would have been presumptuous of him in April, 1945, to have started off on his own presiden- tial policies, foreign or domestic...
...An individual with this makeup could drive his straightfor- ward subordinates to distraction, or fury...
...But the revisionist perhaps will refuse to change his thesis when contrary evidence appears...
...Adam B. Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia since World War II 1970), pp...
...It is amusing to observe the virtuoso performances, up and down the 4. Ecanomk Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy was published by the University of 8. "Domestic Influences on American Policy Toward the Soviet Union, 1941-194 7." Wisconsin Press in 1964...
...From Trust te Terror, p. 26...
...Origins of the Cold War," Foreign Affairs, vol...
...So he had many of the attributes of a great leader as well as many of the endearing qualities of a first-rate char- acter...
...The revisionists have advanced a third theory about American foreign policy during 1945 and the origins of the cold war, that the American government drop- ped two atomic abombs On the Japanese not so much to end the war, which was coming to a finish anyway, but to impress the Russians who were giving trouble in Eastern Europe...
...This is hardly to blame Truman for the vagaries of the New Left, but to suggest that politics must have some influence on civility...
...General Marshall's June 18 appraisal was the most cautiously phrased failed to print the preceding two sentences, moving the quotation comadvice offered by any of the Joint Chiefs: 'The impact of Russian entry on pletely out of context...
...The revisionist, Paterson, in his edited volume, Cold War Critics has brought Press, for allowing me to read his book in galleys...
...but this opinion had given way to more maturity of thought long before 1945 and the presidency, and there is every reason to believe that despite the little talk ses- sion with Molotov the President loyally undertook to carry out the foreign policy of his predecessor...
...Truman's policies saved much of the world from communist domination and left it with a bit more peace than might have been expected...
...The arrange(continued on page 28) 26...
...237- of their subordinates...
...Alperovitz needs to show that there was no military justificat=on for the ~s not an easy, bloodless way to victory =n war and it is the thankless task of bomb...
...Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism 1972...
...this is his key piece of evidence, because it would mean that President the leaders to maintain their firm outward front which holds the resolution Truman obviously hod ulterior reasons for using atomic weapons...
...His primary duty is not to be attuned to the currently fashionable trends in public thinking or to be a counselor to statesmen...
...S. Maier, "Revisionism and the Interpretation of Cold War Origins," Parapet6. Walter La Feber, ed., Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947: Documents and fives in American History, vol...
...17 Donald is an expert on the Lippmann "'did not know that Secretary cited study of the American occupation American Civil War and on ReconstrucByrnes had already tried to use atomic diplomacy to frighten the Soviets out of Eastern Europe...
...The emi- nent diplomatic historian Dexter Perk-ins, eighty-three years old, a past presi- dent of the American Historical Associa- tion, author of twenty-three books, most of them about American foreign policy, in a recent communication to the News-letter of the American Historical Association has cautioned his young col- leagues, the revisionists, in a pointed manner...
...U. of Missouri Press...
...75 (1969-1970), 1780-1782...
...3 Gardner's thesis, likewise pub-lished, likewise now available in a pa-perback edition, comes very close to say- ing that in the 1930s the effort to push a cl~plomacy of American commerce, the open door for American products, led to a clash with the Axis 1. "The Cold War- our Contemporary Appraisals," American Historical Review, pire (New York, 1971 ), pp...
...75, 2155- stirred the revisionists to fury...
...In the preface to his collection of his essays published in 1970 he related that they were his last on foreign policy and that he hoped "to help edit a reader and perhaps help devise some ways to constrain policy, by making it more responsive to popular sentiment...
...On Modern History: re-reading the Cold War," excerpted in Paterson, ed., I, and that it might even be necessary to land troops on Honshu, tile iskJnd Origins of the Cold War, p. 115...
...He saw not only countless changes in politi- cal and social America, but also the completion of a library focused on the years of his career, which became the center of his attention...
...All the while, through a series of careful moves, the administra- tion was creating a new state in Europe, West Germany, for the purpose of en-listing German industry and eventually a German army to protect the free world against world communism...
...ii (New York, 1964), 163-164), that the President said: "I'm just not going to do 17...
...For a third, his actions in the spring of 1945 showed that he wanted to get along with Stalin...
...the historian, Ulam says, must accept the past as he finds it: "Before he becomes a philosopher of history or a judge, he must tell us what actually happened...
...In a recent article Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has pointed out how in the course of the changes of the past quarter-century the individual often has found himself in the hands of a kind of soulless, uncontrollable organization, and rather than seeking to control change so as to allow for the continuing move- ment of the individual will, many people are railing against change or attributing some single, simple cause to it when in fact it is a vast complex of ideas and interests all shaking against each other in almost cosmic proportions...
...Davies, to be sure, was a well-known "softie" on communism, who must have made a simply awful impression on Churchill, who when ambassador to Rus- sia prior to the Second World War had justified the purge trials and in his book, Mission to Moscow, described how Stalin was no tyrant, that a child would sit on the dictator's lap and a dog would sidle up to him...
...Alperovitz found himself reduced to psychology, claiming that possession of the bomb influenced American officials more than they knew or said...
...At such a point the trap of the present will close not with a bang but ever so softly, over the would-he student of the past...
...veys without attribution, an odd procedure for a scholar who maintained that one could not trust the Department of State in any manner, shape, 1 5. John Gimbel, The American Occupation of Germany: Politks and the Mili- or form...
...1892...
...and the Cold War an "excellent sur- vey," and remarked his "'indebtedness to Professor La Feber...
...46 (1967-1968), 22-52...
...Alperovitz's emphasis...
...no simple listing of revisionist views can do justice to individual, dissenting members of the group...
...7 If the farmers wanted markets, Degler has countered, that might explain their support of the war, but how about the city folk who, if the farmers had been denied foreign markets, would have had cheaper food because of overproduc- tion at home -- what did they have to gain by supporting the farmers...
...But Herbert Feis' last book, From Trust to Terror, points out that at this time Harriman was not on the inside of Truman's group of advisors, nor for that matter was Stimson...
...Walter La Feber and Lloyd Gardner had been trained at the University of Wisconsin and were Williams' students...
...But from a careful reading of Foreign Relations: the Con- ference of Berlin, 1945, I (Washington, 1960, 905, the same page used by Alperovitz, it is clear that Marshall anticipated the necessity of American troops landing on Kyushu, an operation then being planned for November 39...
...Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence advises the opposite course...
...Truman's retirement was dividhd into three parts: the first, from January 1953 to July 1957, was spent in gettirig reacquainted with private life (never as private as the Trumans would have liked), in travel, and in a busy politichl life...
...As compared to Roosevelt, Truman was an enormous breath of fresh air, so open and businesslike...
...It is to ascertain what...
...Robert H. Ferrell He was a truly unpretentious presi-dent...
...From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York, gerating...
...Stalin made the well-known remark at Potsdam that "any freely elected government would be anti-soviet and that we cannot permit," but was this really a smart observation...
...It turns out that their footnotes are Farrestal called up Lewis Strauss, who attended, and said the purpose of the a mosaic of misrepresentation...
...Tru- man was a very fine president whose achievement is all the greater because of the predicament from which he start- ed...
...Alperovitz" has written that "one would expect Alperovitz to adduce at least a Single instance of an American negotiator saying in effect to a Russian during the period in question (1945-46), 'You ought to remember we have the bomb,' or 'If you go easy on the Poles we might share our nuclear know-how with you.' Or he might offer a public statement by an American official that 'the Rus-sians ought to keep in mind before they go too far in Rumania that we have this weapon.' Dr...
...If he feels strongly that Vietnam was not merely a great error but only the most recent collapse in a row of dominos, he will tend to feel that, to use Kolko's Marxist phrase, the necessary preconditions are there and hence the thesis cannot be wrong, despite the evidence...
...72 (1966-1967), ;1248...
...Then early in 1946 the Americans seized upon an admitted Sov- iet slowness to get out of northern Iran and virtually forced the Russians out, in a public confrontation at the United Nations...
...23, 1947, The Journals of David E. Ulienthal, gart speech of Sept...
...The Second World War, which most of us are too young to re-member except through the movies, was the last war that conceivably could be defined as just...
...Williams gave a paper showing how the open door policy was naught but a continuation of the old frontier thesis of Turner, and how hope for an open door for American commerce had dominated American for- eign policy since the 1890s, if not before...
...The Truman Doctrine inspired the aaministratlon to sponsor the Marshall Plan, a program worthy in itself but which had the unfor- tunate effect of dividing Europe...
...Taft, black critics of colonialism and the colcl war, I. F. Stone and the Korean 24...
...Only two presi- dents lived to greater ages than he, and only six for longer periods after leaving the White House...
...31 At the outset Truman's opinions on foreign policy seem to have been so uncertain that at the same time he sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow to assure Stalin of the new ad- ministration's desire to cooperate with the Soviets to achieve European peace he enlisted Joseph E. Davies to go on a mission to see Churchill in England...
...you take his advice, then you have him on your hands for hours and hours, and 1 8. The revisionists have had a field day with their scholarship,-so-called, be- it is his policy...
...And always there was that generation gap, the feeling that the older scholars --not so old, the oldsters themselves might have thought, but it made no difference what they thought- were if not over the hill then intellectually trapped in fantasies about the Second World War and what they believed had happened afterward...
...The Velocity of History," Newsweek, July 6, 1970...
...The heterogeneous, huge body of documentation makes a cold war his- torian, revisionist or traditionalist, long for the task of the scholar of the Middle Ages who in confronting a problem of documentation may have to deal with three documents, two of which are fakes (the task being to discover the original...
...The latter two revisionists subject their read- ers to heavy doses of socialism...
...19 La Feber knows this, but the Baruch papers happened' to be open and they were full of opin- ions, a convenient quarry from which 12...
...At times during his presidency he was an appal-lingly unpopular man...
...For the article see AHR, vol...
...And it does not strike me as a flight of fancy to draw a nexus from his kind of wanton partisanship to the politics being inflicted upon America today by the New Left...
...It is a grim fact that there 41...
...In trying to show that Truman took a hard line after Roosevelt's more subtle approach, the revisionists in one respect have struck some fire, at least some good quotations...
...75 (1969-70), 1046-1064...
...One is somehow reminded of communist historiography where it is only the past that changes, never the present...
...At other times he could be so devious, or unable to communicate his purposes, as in his withdrawal of support of James F. Byrnes for the vice-presidential nomi- nation at the Chicago convention in 1944, that to the present day one is uncertain what he originally had in mind, if he had anything in mind...
...Walter Lippmann and the Early Cold War," in Thomas G. Paterson, ed., to War (Chicaao, 1952), the voiurne which he and his supporters claimed was Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years based on the Deportment of State archives...
...129-131) as Document 34...
...Under his leader- ship Germany was rescued from a "ciga- rette economy," and recovered rapidly...
...The President's counsel, Clark Clifford, told Lilienthal, who put the ment on Germany, and Number 35 is Secretary of State James F. Bryrnes' Stutt- remark in his diary (entry of Mar...
...Lloyd C. Gardner presently professor of history and chairman of the depart-ment at Rutgers, had no thoughts about such'a vocation in 1939 when he was five years old...
...Ellipsis marks in original...
...It concerns general- ly the morass of material, unpublished and published, that a researcher finds available...
...lace...
...In the second period, from July 1957 to June 1966, he spent six-and-a-half days a week in his office at the Tru- man Library close to his home in Inde- pendence, reading, writing, keeping up a massive correspondence, continuing his political interest, and seeing innumerable visitors--leading figures of public life, groups of all kinds, personal friends, and strangers who were often surprised to be able to talk with him...
...Any irresolution in the leaders may result in costly 238 of Atomic Diplomacy, Alperovitz writes as follows: "...before the atomic bomb weakening and indecision in the subordinates...
...He had never been spoken to like that before, exclaimed Molotov...
...General George C. Marshall never really trusted Roosevelt, and the only time Marshall Went to Hyde Park to see the President, despite many invitations, was on the occasion of Roosevelt's funer- al...
...8 Carried to its logical conclusion, the revisionist economic interpretation indicates, of course, that the cold war was an irrepressible con-flict, a clash for which individuals could bear no responsibility.9 But then the revi- sionists wobble on their one-cause inter- pretation and spend much analysis on how certain individuals, had they been listened to, could have changed history...
...the President, the revisionists believe, pro-bably had this divisive effect in mind from the outset, as in his memoirs he described the Truman Doctrine and Mar- shall Plan as being two halves of the same walnut...
...Athan G. Theoharis, who is concerned about the effect of foreign policy in bringing on the McCarthyist excesses, is convinced that Truman's new ol~_tlook was of major importance...
...Kolko cavalierly has brushed this personal argument aside and accused some of the revisionists of being enamored with personalities in his- tory, instead of forces, the latter of which according to Kolko are the deter- minants in the inexorable movement of capitalism toward its Waterloo...
...Consider the ideas about the origins of the cold war that were being proposed in the early 1970s -- what a difference from the views of a decade before...
...As for American goals in the Second World War, John L. Gaddis in a paper at the Boston meeting of the American Historical Association in 1970 has shown that economics cannot possib- ly explain the United States' motives in fighting the Axis powers: "Public and private statements made by policy-mak- ers at the time.., indicate that they did not accord the Open Door the importance revisionist historians have given it...
...6, 1946...
...Those who attempt to plot it according to some preordained ideological theory write bad history...
...And in the course of observing their uses of the past it is not necessary to agree with Unger, who sees a good deal of historical revision as an effort to domesticate American radicalism, to conclude that cold war revisionists are not very tidy about their methods...
...26This view, one might add, echoes the contemporary opinion of many New Deal Democrats who for a while after the war found themselves moving toward support of Henry Wal20...
...Barton J. Bernstein was born in 1936, Gar Alperovitz in 1937, and David J. Horowitz in 1939...
...Perhaps because of his unpretentious origins he did not worry much about popularity, but rather worried about performing his duty to his country and to his God, for he was a religious man...
...What-ever the dissenting opinions there does seem to be a belief on the part of most revisionists that Truman stiffened up American diplomacy to such an extent that he may have reversed it...
...On Modem History: Re-reading the Cold War," Interplay Magazine, vol...
...Are they not sophisticated enough students of American history to know that if there ever was a predatory, power-seeking era, an unabashed period when the cap- italists prowled through the cottages of the proletariat like wolves, that time has long since passed...
...2 Some years ago of Germany, has complained at length about "'the kind of hocus-pocus that is often passed off as historical research tion, the Pulitzer prize biographer of Charles Sumner, but he is dead wrong about cold war revisionism, for he obin a small meeting at the Truman Library, several scholars and the present author were treated to a bland assump-tion of the Alperovitz thesis by Bernstein, and when challenged on the subject his by those who write cold-war history," and this sorcery is sometimes observable in the summoning of nonexperts to give viously has not checked out the revision- ists' footnotes...
...For the first year of the cold war, 1945, the revisionists have advanced three con- tentions, the initial one of which is that President Roosevelt was a subtle, sophis- ticated operator in foreign relations as in domestic politics, and that President Truman was pretty much the opposite, and hence for personal reasons alone, the change in the presidency, American foreign relations took a downward plunge once the feisty, harttiitting Missouri pol- itician became President...
...68 (1962-1963), 69-75...
...Truman in 1941 had delivered himself of a snap judgment that Soviet publicists, and the revisionists, would never forget, for shortly after the Germans attacked the Soviet Union he had said he was de- lighted and hoped they would fight each other to the death, with the United States helping whichever side was losing...
...The elders mired in the deep past sometimes recall wistfully a now little-known work by Dale Carnegie, who was not a relative of Andrew Carnegie, a volume which might help the revision- ists if they could manage the time to read it...
...so-called revisionist historians were writ- ing tlaat President Franklin D. Roose- velt's subtle treatment of the Soviet Union had been reversed by his successor Harry S. Truman who saw foreign affairs as a checker game instead of the chess game it really was...
...Any researcher on the cold war, getting into a huge body of material even with- out using the American archives, looking for some meaning amidst the near-chaos, must quickly fix upon two or three or four principles and from them try to de- rive some overriding theme or thesis by which, at least in his own mind, he can order the material...
...The Yalta Myths: An Issue in U.S...
...Can there be anybody under forty who sin- cerely believes in the morality of Ameri- can foreign poucy, or that such a word is relevant to any nation's diplomacy...
...Gardner is not, apparently, too sure of this argu-ment, although it is perhaps in another particular that he has spoken of a devil theory of history...
...Document 33 is the Potsdam agree- old man...
...4 (1970), 313-347...
...Air Force to transport supplies into the city, and he began mar- shalling what was to become the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
...Some-what later, beginning in 1950, the administration would get what it deserv- ed for this tactic, at the hands of a senator who took a free : ;de on the anti- communist bandwagon...
...Much of their footnoting is as phony as Charles C. Tansill's do~- mentation of twenty years ago about Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor...
...But behind the hurt feelings, critics of the cold war revisionists constantly wonder why the new left writers (as some of them describe themselves) have become virtual slaves to one special in- terpretation of American foreign policy, the Williams interpretation about the open door...
...Mr...
...On pp...
...Indeed, this characteriza- action levering them into capitulation at that time or shortly thereafter if tion of the position taken by the senior military advisers is a conservative we land in Japan...
...From the heartfelt nature of the wrath one had 2164...
...Simi- lar pieces of oneupmanship appear in the writings of another attractive revi-sonist, one of the authors of the present irrelevant and the well-known, so Kolko and La Feber can produce an array of footnotes that look like the real thing...
...Meanwhile the United States government used every economic weapon at hand, such as cutting off lend lease to the USSR, reneging on the repa- rations agreements concluded at the end of the war, and refusing to consider seri- ously the pressing Russian need for a postwar loan...
...can write, presumably without the grin, a spotter plane on a triple-canopied David Donald in what for the most that "'A year before the global crusade of the Truman Doctrine...
...In the early 1960s a well-known student of American history, the late John L. Snell, published an article in the Amer-can Hisorical Review in which he dealt with several books on the origins of the cold war, and after criticizing two of them severely he issued a call for his- torians to turn their attention to that part of the recent past and write about it in the best traditions of their discipline...
...This is a thoughtful recommendation in view of the fact that Alperovitz has never taught in college...
...Otherwise he could spend a lifetime behind the paper barricades...
...6.-7...
...In addition to relying for diplomatic advice from Admiral Leahy, Truman turned to Byrnes, and almost immediately designated the South Caro- linian to be Secretary of State, after the end of the San Francisco Conference when it would be possible to get the hopelessly naive Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., out of the secretaryship...
...The Alternative April 1973 literary, keyboard, of Barton Bernstein, Henry Luce...
...Should historians conclude that the era after 1945 was a sudden throwback not to American prac- tice but to the statecraft of Renmssance Italy...
...The au-thors of the revisionist books and articles were young men who remembered little or nothing about the Second World War...
...CaM War, p. 171...
...The young mili- tary historian Stephen E. Ambrose, who recently has slipped into cold war revi-sionism, can write agreeably that the policy of containment of Russia "was never more than a euphemism for the expansion of American influence and dominance...
...Everyone, apparently, bum the President, who says been in the fore of the disbelievers in revisionism.Maddox has a book forthcoming he just won't...
...They came of age in the middle and late 1950s, and shortly thereafter found themselves in graduate school and then entering the teaching profession in colleges and uni- versities in the early 1960s...
...Whatever one might think of the dated- ness of one-cause history, the revisionists almost without exception have espoused the open door theory of American for-eign policy and in books and articles have pushed the theory for all the traffic will bear, and a good deal more...
...But to push them into a con- clusion that Truman, whose modus oper- andi was so different, sought to reverse Roosevelt's foreign policy is to make an historical mistake...
...7. Review of The Ronts of the Modern American Empire (New York, 1969), in 2 (Mar., 1968), 51-53, reprinted in part in Thomas G. Paterson, ed., The Ori- American Historical Review, val...
...5. "The 'New Left' and American History: Some Recent Trends in United States 9. Gaddis, "Domestic Influences...
...did not fail to mention Carlyle's wife Jane, one of them remarking that Tfiornas 30...
...The next year, 1947, marked a rapid development of American-Russ- ian antagonism, for President Truman intervened in the Greek civil war with the Truman Doctrine, and in order to gain support scared hell out of the country, to use a phrase attributed to Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg...
...56 (1969-1970), 863...
...if 19.1970...
...37 Most of the revisionists have so hedged their acceptance of Alperovitz's thesis as almost to remove it from sight, and Alperovitz himself has retired from the scene of his triumph, or near-disaster, and turned to other things...
...in terms of our knowledge, is a fact, what could be a reasonable hypothesis, and what must remain a conjecture...
...What- ever the reason, older historians have been almost incredulous in observing the easy way in which the revisionists picked up the favorite thesis of Williams and used it as a basis for their writings...
...And again: torian-reader can aim a smoke and call in the fighter-bombers...
...For one thing, he was too new at the job to have many detailed opinions on foreign policy...
...l The new historical views of the cold war were fascinating interpretations, and in seeking to understand how such a lit- erature could arise the inquiring observ- er noticed, first of all, the relative youthfulness of the interpreters...
...For one thing, whatever their view of American responsibility for the cold war, the revisionists in their writings have adopted an unhistorical --and also un- fair --tactic by virtually assuming that a statesman is wrong until proved right...
...But what he lacked in formal intel- lectual training he more than made up for in character...
...the Anglo-American Forces from the Soviet Zone of Occupation," M~..thesis at 28...
...Philip C. Brooks yl President in Retirement and History Harry S. Truman's physical vigor and his habit of regular exercise helped him to survive many years in retirement...
...gins of the Cold War (Lexington, Mass., 1970...
...continued next month) [[] Foreign Relations...
...The point remains that most of the revi- sionists could not have remembered much if anything about the Second World War, the beginning of the cold war, and even about the Korean War...
...HIS Memoirs abound with spiteful references to opponents...
...American military leaders, he remarked, believed the bomb mmec-essary for victory over Japan, and the American government failed to reassess the military situation, and why did "the momentum remain when the military reasons disappeared...
...tary, 1945-1949 (Stanford, Calif.: 1968...
...He had idealism enough, and his resources of common sense served him well --especially when so many ,~e his advisers were panting through the White House full of the most foolish enthu-siasms...
...The documentation is incomplete...
...Administration and held at the National Archives in the summer of 1969 intro21...
...3-6, 16-19...
...When he came to crucial points his State | 3. Architects of Illusion: Men and ideas in American Fore/gn Policy, 1941-1949 Deportment documentation thinned down to nothing...
...La Feber's sub- sequently published Origins of the Cold War, a book of documents and pseudo documents (he includes the Sloan letter), credits Gardner's Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy as "the best syn-thesis of the entire 1933-1945 period," and relates that Architects o] Illusion "'is the best work covering the entire 1940s...
...Access to the archives of the Department of State is tied to publication of annual volumes in the documentary series Foreign Rela- tions of the United States...
...Might it not be that the concern of the revisionists with their open door theory shows that they are bothered by the enormous international, domestic, politi- cal, economic, and social transforma-tions during the past decade and the de- cades prior to it, changes which many of the revisionists do not like, and for which they are seeking a satisfying ex- planation...
...Truman was also responsible for the Point Four program, a kind of world-wide equivalent of the Marshall Plan...
...But he discovered the (Chicago, 1970), p. 6. unpublished Department records helpful in other ways...
...If he does not meet that test, he is a moral- ist or a publicist bat not an historian...
...A1- perovitz in a footnote for his paperback of collected essays recommends La Fe- her's America, Russia...
...See AHR, vol...
...Even so, there are generally held theories and hypotheses...
...At the risk of seeming unduly analyti- cal about a group of young men as fasci- nating as their interpretations- individu- als who are good, sharp writers, who have a way of cutting quickly to their point or points, who must all of them be fine lecturers and impressive seminar teachers --one should venture to suggest another factor in their intellectual growth, namely, that they came into the teaching profession in a heady decade when the student population was doub-ling, faculties were doubling, grants were easy to come by, books easy to pub- lish, when indeed anyone with brains and ambition could find himself with the title of doctor and professor in an almost miraculously short time, and with quite a decent salary too, and quick pro- motions and more salary...
...To Churchill's intense chagrin Truman refused to allow American troops to re-main in the parts of the Soviet-desig-nated zone of Germany into which they had entered in the last days of the war against Hitler...
...Radical Historians on the Move," New York Times Book Review, July it...
...40 By this time half of the .graduate stu-dents in the country were believing Alperovitz and the other half were look-ing for holes in his argument, and one of the latter at the University of Tennessee found that where Alperovitz had claimed that on June 18, 1945, Truman's military advisers had agreed that Japan could be forced to surrender unconditionally without use of the bomb and without an invasion (and the diplomatic momentum was, therefore, about to set in), and had quoted General Marshall as saying that "The impact of Russian entry on the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive action levering them into capitulation...
...The present writer remembers keenly the first time he heard this interpretation, from Williams himself in the mid-1950s, during a little seminar for historians conducted by George L. Anderson at the University of Kansas...
...At last a historian has gone behind those notes, V. Forrestal gave a dinner for Baruch, and Secretary of War Robert P. Pat- back to the sources, checking out the contexts of quotations, especially watching terson and Secretary of Commerce Averell Harriman were there...
...The President said there was a de- cause historians have failed to look at their footnotes,other than to be' impressed cision to make and it was going to be made...
...Adam Ulam in a caustic analysis of "Dr...
...La Feber's doctoral thesis, entitel The New Empire, a survey of American foreign policy from 1860 until 1896, concluded that a search for raw materials and mar- kets was the dominant force of the time...
...Truman answered Russia's North Korean epigones with an American army and United Nations support...
...On this point, which surely needs a book, see William M. Franklin, "Zonal and Jane deserved each other...
...Speaking of the American side it is a fact not well understood even within the historical profession, not to mention the public at large, that cold war revisionists and other scholars interested in foreign policy after the Second World War have used US government archival materials to a very slight extent, hecause almost all of those materials have been closed until recently...
...containing Tokyo, which latter landing eventually was scheduled for April 40...
...beforehand for the revisionists' use of ellipsis points...
...The military advantage of an Eastern European cordon sanitaire proved to be slight...
...Gardner's Architects of Illusion found his good friend I,a Feber'sRussia...
...America, Russia, aM tee Cold War (New York, 1967...
...32, 46, 36...
...21 In regard to documentation, John Gaddis in the preface to his new and very able nonrevisionist study, The Uni- ted States and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947, relates that historians of the era after 1945 must constantly remember that they are dealing almost entirely with American materials...
...3 Gardner's essay on William C. Bullitt in Architects of Illusion is a masterly example of how to influence readers a combination of fact and surmise, a kind of glancing commentary about the era of Bullitt, assuming that the Ameri- can ambassador to Russia and to France during the 1930s represented some large body of American opinion...
...The basic task," as Schlesinger proposes it, is not to run off against some windmill but "to control and humanize the forces of change in order to prevent them from tearing our society apart...
...3. The New Empfre, winner of the Beveridge Prize of the American Historical 2. Ronald Steel,lmpmedists aid Other Heroes: h Chronicle ef the American Era- Association, was published by CorneU University Press in 1963...
...here, and yet this theory about a change in policies has less to it than meets the eye...
...But Brooklyn College, 1972, done under the direction of Hans L. Trefousse...
...That to get the attention of the Rus- sians the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese...
...Perhaps the political problems of his presidency prevented the mastery of events that might have marked a less partisan administration...
...Cold War Essays, p. 3. The psychology is on p. 71: "Thus it appears that 1S, 1946...
...sill was proving a commonplace...
...Alonzo Hamby, "The Liberals, Truman, and FDR as Symbol and Myth," Jour- Herschler, "The Grand Alliance and Germany - 1945: the Decision to Withdraw nal of American History, vol...
...f% 1 7~ [ '@ " ,:,, ;) / J ,,,, small and there was no large war in being or even a police action like Korea so that their careers were not blighted or interrupted by military service...
...76 (1970-1971 ), 575-580,856-858...
...It is true that the L teacher of some of the leading revision- ists, a charismatic figure who has in-spired them to adopt his own "open door" approach to their historical judgments about the cold war, William A. Williams, was an adult in 1939, a first-year student at the United States Naval Academy...
...It was a case of men who could think of little except Hitler, Munich, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the long war, and especially the Russians' refusal of friend- ship after the fighting was over...
...It would be possible to point out other ages, such as that of the later foreign service officer and jour- nalist, and a markedly good one, Ronald Steel, born in lil34...
...his many impressive 14, Beatrice Farnsworth, William r Bellitt and the Soviet Union (Bloomington, citations to newspapers indicated that he used the Department's press surInd., 1967...
...The fallaciousness of such an approach as the open door has often been pointed out, but the explanations evidently have not been convincing...
...I'm not going to do it...
...As is well known, the Prime Minister wanted a showdown with the Russians...
...As for Tansilt, the present writer was once shown (New York, 1966), p. 223...
...The winner of the Pulitzer prize for history in 1972, Carl Degler, in a review of Williams' latest book has shown the improbability of an economic cause of the Spanish-American War of 1898, which Williams attributes in fair part to the desire of American farmers to expand their mar-kets...
...The United States and the Origins ef the Cold War: 1941-1947 (New York, 1970...
...powers and eventually war...
...Orgins of the ably edited by Herman Vioio...
...Problems (New York, t971), p. 3; Stephen E. Ambrose, "The Failure of a Policy 10...
...my future work will be concerned almost exclusively with domes- tic policy matters and with efforts to transform the political economy of our domestic institutions...
...2a How can David Donald say that some of the revisionists have produced the basic books, resting upon massive re-search, when for the most part they have not even had the benefit of published volumes in the Foreign Relations series, not to mention the mountain of documen- tation that lies behind Foreign Rela-tions ? 24 The size of the American unpublished records leads to a final observation about the methods of the cold war revisionists, although this observation is only indi-rectly related to the State Department files in Washington...
...2s Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson in one of their explanations of their rambunctious article on "red fascism" published in the American Historical Review assert that Truman "was clearly more blustering, less cautious, and less willing to compro-mise...
...2 In analyzing the revisionist view of the cold war in some-detail it is neces- sary to say at the outset that there is no accepted body of revisionist doctrine, that the loose aggregation of young scholars, a few older scholars, and some journalists who have received the name of revisionists are not agreed even upon the name, which to some of them is a foolish term...
...38...
...Jay Gould is dead (d...
...The third period, understand the President's political prob- lem in dealing with such senators as Vandenberg of Michigan who had a large group of Polish constituents, failing also to understand the need for any decent human being to speak out against the repression behind the iron curtain...
...the outbreak of that conflict, they believed, was at least in part attributable to the policies of the United States...
...Let no reader hesitate to accuse the cold war revisionists of taking the present into the past...
...and the Cold War as "the best brief one-volume survey of the postwar period," which can be "usefully supplemented" by Richard J. Barnet's Intervention and Revolution: America's Confrontation with Insurgent Movements Around the World...
...Soon there would be a siz-able literature on the origins of the cold war, it would find enthusiastic accept-ance among college and university stu- dents throughout the country, and it would describe Snell and his aging colleagues as traditionalists, their historical opinions as received truths, and their conclusions as cold war rheto-ric...
...Nixon still might make the grade...
...should not exceed the price we have paid for Luzon...
...4' ---, 1{ ".s--.9...
...Churchill was after the new pres- ident, for the old Britisher as well as many of the members of Roosevelt's disgruntled official family eagerly antici- pated a more straightforward presiden- cy...
...What followed the defeat of Germany and Japan was a series of dynastic struggles between the new super-powers...
...at the outset of the Truman presi- dency these liberals believed that the country's leader from Missouri was junk- ing FDR's foreign policies just as he was abandoning the Roosevelt heritage in domestic politics.27 The usual demon-stration of Truman's tough attitude toward the Russians is to point to his treatment of Molotov when the Soviet foreign minister passed through Wash-ington in April, 1945, en route to the San Francisco Conference of the United Na-tions.28 It is an interesting speculation to think of one leader reversing the policy of his predecessor, and Schlesinger has pointed out the dramatic temptation (The conclusion of this article will appear in next month's issue...
...This article carefully with Baruch for another reason, and noted that "They really work is introduced by Oscar Hondiin, the distinguished Harvard historian, who has at it, too...
...According to La Feber, the post-1945 years saw an ironic and tragic clash between the United States' open door policy toward trade and poli- tics in Eastern Europe (the American Century) and the USSR's desire for secu- rity around its borders...
...But underneath those awesome citations volume, Gardner, who among other can be a remarkable thinness...
...Truman Doctrine, largely because the President had the temerity to recommend 16...
...By the early 1970s the revisionists had begun to turn to American postwar policies in the Far East, and were re-examining the origins of the Korean War...
...and a ready grin who historian has a kind of scholarly dream present-day students who are sure that teaches at Stanford University, and who that he, the reader, is looking down from General Motors is up to monkeybusiness...
...Rooted in Fear," Progressive, Nov., 1970...
...Much of the other documentation by revisionists cycles a-round the commentaries of critics of pol- icy such as Walter Lippmann, Henry A. Wallace, Claude Pepper, Glen Taylor, or James A. Warburg, who always were operating on the outside of affairs, whose opinions were so flighty that no sensible statesman could have welcomed them into the inner councils of power...
...But it did seem diffi- cult to understand why at Wisconsin, where a half-century earlier Fredrick J. Turner had taught about the impor-tance of the frontier before going to Har- vard and making a name for himself with that interpretation, Williams was able to capture so much attention for another monocausal interpretation...
...Constant and unrestrained political struggles within a democracy must have a corrosive effect on the social fabric...
...Secretary of the Navy James with the variety and thickness...
...The new President had turned for advice to FDR's chief of staff, now his own, Ad-miral William D. Leahy...
...By reforming the German currency and seeking to revive the prostrate nation Truman triggered the most belligerent Russian threat yet, the Berlin Blockade...
...1~ Cold war revisionism surely has fallen into several errors of historical method...
...Before he died, he said something to his daughter that should renew our faith in that democratic ideal, for though it was right in an uncompli-cated way, it also had a touch of the numinous to it...
...About this time Lilienthal was moving Abusing History," Freedom at Issue, Sept.Oct., 1972, pp...
...a8 The truth was that after making a large impression with a dramatic thesis, and after engaging in several polemical articles in The New York Review of Books and so irritating Herbert Feis that the latter in his book on the origins of the cold war refused to mention the author of Atomic Diplomacy by name, Alperovitz could not prove his major contention...
...There are very considerable disagreements in regard to the origins of the cold war...
...He was brave, prudent, disci- plined, and deliberate in making deci- sions...
...Following is a properly full quotation of Marshall's opinion the natural m=!ita ry assumption that the bomb would be used became intermeshed (in the document the general was reading, the designation "Japan" meant the with diplomatic strategy in a wcLy so subtle it was probably not completely Honshu landing): "There is reason to believe that the first 30 clays in Kyushu understood by the participants themselves...
...AHA Newsletter, May, 1971...
...In a side-ways movement in one of his New York Review essays Alperovitz also took re-fuge in logic...
...His weakness for partisanship was per- haps unavoidable, but it did flaw his ser- vice to his country...
...The revisiomsts as moral men speak out against the present war in Vietnam, but they cannot understand similar efforts by the United States government for the suffering peoples of Eastern Europe...
...It produced an utterly 29...
...confidentially a most painstaking analysis of the footnotes to Tansill's Beck Deer to take commentaries, such as the letter from Sloan about free enterprise in Ger- many...
...To make ideological claims about Truman's intentions is foolish...
...Now it has...
...They not merely gathered around their arguments against American management of the cold war an old-fashioned aura of the open door (everyone knew, of course, that the open door proved a failure in China when tried at the turn of the century), but they point- ed out how such a more recent piece of English composition as Henry Luce's "American Century" editorial in Life magazine in 1941 was only an assertion of the open door...
...When two years later aggressive communism struck at the opposite corner of the world...
...He spent most of his time in the handsome Victorian house in Indepen-dence which has been the Truman home for more than thirty years, and in an office in Kansas City only ten miles away...
...TM Perusing the Gardner ment must at the least be suspect...
...a~ The revisionists like to show that at the outset of his presidency Truman was listening to some hard-line advisors (to use a later expression...
...Alperovitz does not cite any such instances because there weren't any...
...Ba rnet's duced many scholars to the complexities of the national records, and further de- book was published by the New American Library and World Publishing Com- tails have appeared in successive issues of I~obgue, the new Archives journal pany, New York and Cleveland, 1968...
...Adam Ulam has written an injunction about historical scholarship that the revision-ists would do well to take to heart...
...Little could he have imagined that in the next years some very able young historians just out of graduate school together with a young student of English literature, a disillusioned foreign service officer, a linguist, and a few other indi- viduals would take the views which Snell and his contemporaries had advanced about American-Russian relations in 1945 and thereafter and stand them on their heads...
...Politks, 1945-1955 (Columbia, Ma., 22...
...Washington offi-cials articulated with at least equal em- phasis such other goals as unconditional surrender, the disarmament of defeated enemies, self-determination, and the establishment of a new collective secur- ity organization...
...That the American government under Truman's direction had tried to oust the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe, giv- ing little or no attention to Russia's secu- rity needs in an area close to Soviet bor- ders...
...Both, he relates, "'are excellent, especially for college teaching...
...The publisher of Atperovitz was Simon and Schuster...
...John Gimbel, the author of a rocket much- books, resting upon massive research, on the last three decades of our foreign relations...
...I am greatly indebted to John Garry Clifford of the the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive action levering them University of Connecticut, who in 1968-1969 taught at Tennessee and into capitulation...' " The ellipsis points at the end of this quotation are AI- devoted part of a seminar to the Alperovitz book, for calling my attention perovitz's, after which he passes to the opinion of Admiral Leahy...
...Boundaries ancl Access to Berlin," World Politics, vo116 (1963-1964), 1-31 ; David 27...
...How tricks can juxtapose two irrelevant facts: ~'Even before Bullitt's note arrived in the White House, the Presi-dent had acted...
...In dealing with them Truman showed little restraint or magnanimity...
...I am much indebted to Gaddis for a copy of this perceptive paper...
...36 What in retrospect strikes one as peculiar about the situation in Eastern Europe is not that the Soviets feared an open door to American trade and hence erected barriers to American capitalism (it never seems to have bothered them much), nor that the Americans saw Soviet domination as the camel's head of socialism under the tent of Western Europe (there is not much American official testimony in this regard), nor that the Russians were sensitive about the politics of the states along their borders (undoubtedly this was the case), but that the Soviets found it necessary to make the Eastern European countries utterly subservient to Russian rule, when they had the example of Finland, a little country that behaved and paid its reparations on time, or Czechoslovakia until 1948 which likewise showed careful appreciation for Soviet sensibilities...
...But most historians would assert that such a presumption about American national leaders has not squared with the record of, now, almost two hundred years...
...37...
...That they sought to keep Russian attention on the Ameri- can atomic monopoly, and largely for such a purpose advanced a system of international control of atomic weapons, the Baruch Plan, which was almost bound to fail...
...Should one mention again the phrase "double standards...
...Truman flatly refused to court the Sloan letter (pp...
...This older generation had written the text-books and the monographs and was in control of the departments and the dean- ships and it could not get Hitler out of its mind...
...Truman's penchant for ripping arid snorting might have been the only way he could summon Americans to his gen- erally wise policies, but as with so many other things, it was not without cost...
...See also Architects, p. 354...
...But just as the Tennessee sharpshooter was about to draw a bead on Alperovitz, the enfant terrible of 1965 was, as men-tioned, rapidly disappearing over the historical horizon...
...At the end of the paper the present writ- er was chosen to respond first and could only remark his simpleminded incredu-lity at such an all-encompassing thesis --this after his generation had been brought up on a historical diet of the essays of Charles A. Beard and Carl L. Becker which taught that historical truths were relative...
...Responsible historians, one might conclude, should not use the memora-bilia of old goats...
...22 Un- less they can get access to the Russian side they surely must write with some-thing less than dogmatism...
...It certainly was whenever Tan- (Chicago, 1971), pp...
...together essays on the above individuals together with chapters on Robert A. 23...
...6 Perhaps the revisionists' fascination with the Williams theory of the open door, a belief that American commercial ex-pansion was at the bottom of the cold war as of other discreditable episodes in American history, derives from the politics of several of the revisionists...
...America...
...18 As Tanresponse was, with a grin: "I thought sill was accustomed to document the everyone agreed with Alperovitz...
...Williams and Gardner are socialists, and so are Horowitz and Gabriel Kolko...
...Greek-Turkish aid to the country without consulting Baruch...
...But ~ao American president is given a magic wand, and even without considering his foreign policy failures, or his difficult domestic political circum- stances, Truman's accomplishments in international affairs seem breath taking...
...1~ But all this discussion of what is at the center of revisionist thought about the cold war, or what might be at the center, is to say nothing about the schol- arly techniques of revisionist writers --about which something needs to be remarked in general before turning to specific points of revision and how the revisionists seek to prove them...
...There are.., reasons," he writes, "'for great modesty in dogma-tizing about the history of American for- eign policy in the last quarter century...
Vol. 6 • April 1973 • No. 7
