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The Truman Doctrine Speech: A Case Study of the Dynamics of Presidential Opinion Leadership*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Samuel Kernell
Samuel Kernell*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

During the twenty year period of 1945 through 1965 perhaps the most dramatic example of presumed presidential opinion leadership is President Truman’s speech proclaiming what came to be called the Truman Doctrine. Delivered to Congress and broadcast across the nation on radio, the speech has been widely acknowledged as establishing the temper of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Historians whether sympathetic or critical of the Truman administration agree that this speech more than any other single event marks the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, its implications for the future did not require hindsight available only to historians. Immediately, contemporaries in Washington and abroad grasped that President Truman was advocating a fundamental change in the U.S. responsibility and posture toward the world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , Fall 1976 , pp. 20 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1976 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank John Ferejohn, Brian Job, Clayton Koppes, W. Phillips Shively, and Aaron Wildavsky for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

Notes

1 Jones, Joseph, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: 1955), viiGoogle Scholar (1964 Harbinger edition). Much of the subsequent account of the context of the Truman Doctrine speech will be drawn from Jones’ book.

2 Ibid., 89-99. McLellan, David S. and Reuss, John W., “Foreign and Military Policies,” in Kirkendall, Richard S., ed., The Truman Period as a Research Field (Columbia, Missouri: 1967), 55–57.Google Scholar

3 Freeland, Richard M., The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: 1972), 207–26Google Scholar. There are as many revisionist interpretations as there are scholars writing on the subject. In some respects Freeland’s thesis is among the bolder reinterpretations. All, however, tend to agree in emphasizing the effects of elite rhetoric on mass opinion formation.

4 Alan Theoharis devotes five pages in his Seeds of Repression (Chicago: 1971) to describe and excerpt the speech. He concludes that the “oversimplified moralism of this [the speech’s] rhetoric was to effectively reduce the administration’s own political maneuverability,” (56). See pages 47-49 and 51-53 for discussion of speech. Also see Theoharis’ “The Rhetoric of Politics; Foreign Policy, Internal Security, and Domestic Politics in the Truman Era, 1945-1950,” in Barton Bernstein, ed., Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration (Chicago: 1970), 196-241. Walter LaFeber is more explicit in concluding the speech’s effect on public opinion, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1971, 2nd edition (New York: 1972), 43-48. Joyce and Gabriel Kolko give exhaustive attention to the speech’s construction on pages 338-46. They suggest that the speech “manipulated” public opinion and “did not so much mirror the global facts as tend to transform and create them,” The Limits of Power (New York: 1972), 333,also 338-46. Feis, Herbert, From Trust to Terror (New York: 1970)Google Scholar devotes two chapters (25 and 26) to the Truman Doctrine speech and obliquely refers to its effect on public opinion: “Most Americans found temporary relief for their own exasperation and fears in Truman’s blunt challenge to Communism and its agents in many lands,” (198).

5 Jones, 272-73.

6 Ibid., 178.

7 Bohlen, Charles, The Transformation of American Foreign Policy (New York: 1969), 86–87.Google Scholar

8 Freeland, 100-01.

9 Kennan, George F., Memoirs: 1925-1950 (Waltham, Massachusetts: 1967).Google Scholar

10 Freeland, 100-01.

11 Acheson, Dean, Present at the Creation (New York: 1970), 292–94.Google Scholar

12 Strangely enough the quote is absent from Vandenberg’s own memoirs but is cited in McLellan and Press, 55, Freeland, 89, and LaFeber, 45.

13 Truman, Harry S., Memoirs: Vol. II, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, New York: 1956), 105–09.Google Scholar

14 Freeland, 114-18.

15 Bohlen, 87. This comment has received widespread circulation in revisionist accounts (Feis, 193, and Kolko and Kolko, 342).

16 Three daily newspapers during the period were examined, and subsequent references to the news media reflect the coverage of these: New York Times, Chicago Daily Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle.

17 Sears, David O., “Political Behavior,” in Lindzey, Gardner and Aronson, Elliot, eds., The Handbook of Social Psychology : Vol. 5, 2nd edition (Reading, Massachusetts: 1969), 324–28.Google Scholar

18 Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald, The American Voter: An Abridgement (New York: 1964), 62–63, 215–16, 251–54Google Scholar. Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N., Voting (Chicago: 1954, Phoenix edition, 1966), 24–34Google Scholar. Milbrath, Lester W., Political Participation (Chicago: 1965), Chapter 3.Google Scholar

19 LaFeber, 45 and Theoharis, “The Rhetoric of Politics…,” 206.

20 For example, one item questioned whether communists should be allowed to hold civil service jobs. During the two-week interval between the March 12 speech and the March 26 survey, President Truman issued an executive order instituting a procedure for conducting loyalty checks of federal employees. This makes the item susceptible to contamination from events other than the March 12 declaration. Also, the question was administered to only half of the national sample making elaborate statistical analysis difficult because of the reduced N. However, since the same question had been asked eight months earlier in late July, 1946, it does provide some information about change in ublic opinion over time. In the earlier poll, 69 percent said that communists should not be permitted to hold civil service jobs, 17 percent said that they should, with 14 percent holding no opinion. On the March 26 survey, the public displayed a more libertarian posture—not. less—with 62 percent against holding jobs, 20 percent for, and 18 percent with no opinion. Although the time interval between the polls makes any conclusions tenuous, this finding complements the one reported below.

21 Donald T. Campbell and Julian C. Stanley refer to this quasi-experimental design as “static group comparison” and emphasize the difficulty in adequately eliminating the effects of self-selection in preserving the experimental quality of the test. See Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research (Chicago: 1963), 12-13.

22 The question used as a filter stated, “It has been suggested that Presidents of the United States should be elected directly by the vote of the people instead of having people vote for electors who choose the president. Do you favor or oppose this suggestion?” Don’t Know’s and No Responses comprised over 11 percent of the responses.

23 One might argue that familiarity in itself is insufficient and more direct exposure such as having heard the address live over radio or read the text in the newspaper would have differentiated the public opinion on the civil liberties question in the predicted direction. Given the present findings, this appears unlikely. The 15 percent who claimed unfamiliarity represent a rather pure category and the 85 percent who said they had heard or read about the speech contain respondents who were directly exposed to the stimuli. Therefore, if there is an underlying relationship in the predicted direction, it may be weaker with the cruder operational measures, but there still should be some relationship. Yet, there is none. Only if respondents in the middle range of familiarity are assumed to have responded in the opposite direction—which seems implausible—could this argument be maintained in the face of the slight inverse relationship for most of the subsamples.

24 Hyman, Herbert H., “England and America: Climates of Tolerance and Intolerance,” in Bell, Daniel, ed., The Radical Right (Garden City: 1963), 268–306.Google Scholar

25 The questions are, “In view of the developments since we entered the fighting in Korea, do you still think the United States made a mistake in deciding to defend South Korea, or not?” and “Now that Communist China has entered the fighting in Korea with forces far outnumbering the United Nations troops there, which one of these two causes would you, yourself, prefer that we follow?” The first choice was “pull out... as fast as possible” and the second, “keep our troops there…. “ There was a one and three percentage point difference in the pro-war responses to the questions. Mueller, John E., War, Presidents and Public Opinion (New York: 1973), 161.Google Scholar

26 Levinson, Daniel J., “Authoritarian Personality and Foreign Policy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1957, 1, 37–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The scale is described and evaluated in Measures of Political Attitudes edited by John P. Robinson, Jerrold G. Rusk, and Kendra B. Head (Ann Arbor: 1968), 306-08.

27 Sears, Daivd O. and Whitney, Richard E., Political Persuasion (Morristown, New Jersey: 1973), 3–6Google Scholar. R. B. Zajonc, “Cognitive Theories in Social Psychology,” in Lindzey and Aronson, 1, 320-411.

28 This point is noted in Wildavsky, Aaron, “The Two Presidencies,” in Wildavsky, Aaron, The Presidency (New York: 1969), 230–43Google Scholar. Also see Waltz, Kenneth, “The Electoral Punishment and Foreign Policy Crises,” Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy, edited by Rosenau, James (New York: 1967), 263–93.Google Scholar

29 Campbell and Stanley provide an insightful discussion of the “time-series experiment.” By their criteria, the evidence available here fails to satisfy all of the validity requirements. They emphasize that the critical test is the departure from the trend rather than simply change from T1 to T2, 37-46.

30 An alternative explanation which cannot be evaluated is that some Democrats—such as Wallace supporters in 1948—were alienated by Truman’s address and therefore switched over to disapproval in their evaluations of his job performance. Whether correctly or not the “Wallace” Democrat has been viewed as coming disproportionately from the intelligentsia of the party. In Table 7, however, we can see that it is the poorly educated, FDR voting, disapprovers who are the least willing to endorse the Truman Doctrine (24 percent)—not the well-educated.

31 Note that the exception involves the same subsample noted above which has few members and is particularly susceptible to sampling error.

32 Controlling for education, the relationship between approval of aid to Greece and Forbid Communist Party improves among the poorly educated and to a lesser degree among the well-educated. However, among the moderately educated, the relationship becomes strongly opposite that hypothesized by the revisionist model.

33 Mueller, 122-36.

34 Johannes Pederson, “Sources of Change in Public Opinion: A Probability Model With Application to Repeated Cross-sectional Surveys,” delivered at the 1972 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1972, 17-21.