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The Truman Doctrine and the origins of McCarthyism;: Foreign policy, domestic politics, and internal security, 1946-1948

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Freeland wrote this treatise to answer his own curiosity about the world in which he was raised. Why was the United States simultaneously so dominant and so frightened, so powerful in the world and yet so certain that the tiniest enemy victory would inevitably spell doom for its entire way of life? Indeed, what made the US government ready to invest so heavily in Vietnam for no tangible gain?

It would be easy to say that Joe McCarthy was the man behind the paranoia. Yet Freeland finds that McCarthy's career was merely the toxic outgrowth of political maneuvering in the Truman administration, in an effort to enact the Marshall Plan. In the space of one year, the Truman Administration almost completely reversed US political opinion to support an increased military budget and a massive aid package to western Europe. Yet to do so, they fanned the flames of the coming Red Scare which would ironically lead to blowback against the Truman Administration itself.

The most eerie aspect of this book, writtn in 1970 and 1971, is that the process by which the Truman team laid the groundwork for the Marshall Plan is almost identical to the process by which the Bush Administration laid the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq. Even if no one else read this book, apparently Karl Rove did, and learned the lessons. And historical revisionism to the contrary, the Truman team used the police power of the state to shift public opinion, rather than to maintain order in society. Among other things, they instituted the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, to weaken opposition to the Truman Doctrine; conducted invasive and intimidating background checks on members of the press who questioned the legitimacy of the Attorney General's List; refused to issue passports to some reporters who refused to go along with the party line; and conducted large sweeps for subversives in government, almost all of them targeting people who did not support the Truman Doctrine with sufficient fervor. All of this before McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling.

A fascinating work of political archaeology and essential to understanding McCarthyism.