Truman Doctrine 1947: Vandenberg's Scare Advice and Acheson's Rotten Apple

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After World War II Moscow pressed Turkey for joint control of the Turkish Straits, and Washington answered with 100 million dollars in aid and the carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. In Greece the White Terror against leftists drove recruits to the communist KKE, which boycotted the 1946 elections and launched an insurgency. Its main backer was Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, acting against Stalin, who had conceded Greece to Britain in his percentages agreement with Churchill. Then a brutal winter of coal shortages broke Britain, and in February 1947 it told the State Department it would pull out of Greece within weeks.

George Kennan's Long Telegram had already argued for containment. Dean Acheson told congressional leaders that a communist Greece would infect its neighbors like a rotten apple, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg advised Truman to scare the hell out of the American people. Over objections from George Marshall and Kennan, Truman delivered an 18-minute speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, pledging to support free peoples resisting armed minorities or outside pressure, framed in images of disease, quarantine, fire and flood. By May a bipartisan majority approved 400 million dollars for Greece and Turkey, and the Greek communists were defeated by 1949.

• Truman's quarantine language echoed Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1937 speech on containing Nazi and Japanese aggression.
• Truman faced a Republican 80th Congress campaigning on tax cuts and isolationism.
• American advisers retrained the Greek National Army and supplied napalm against the insurgents.
• Critics noted that the Greek monarchy being defended as free was repressive.
• The doctrine laid the groundwork for the Marshall Plan and the founding of NATO in 1949.