Dean Gooderham Acheson was an American statesman and lawyer. As the 51st U.S. Secretary of State, he set the foreign policy of the Harry S. Truman administration from 1949 to 1953. He was also Truman's main foreign policy advisor from 1945 to 1947, especially regarding the Cold War. Acheson helped design the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He was in private law practice from July 1947 to December 1948. After 1949 Acheson came under partisan political attack from Republicans led by Senator Joseph McCarthy over Truman's policy toward the People's Republic of China.
Clark McAdams Clifford was an American lawyer who served as an important political adviser to Democratic presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. His official government positions were White House Counsel (1946–1950), Chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (1963–1968), and Secretary of Defense (1968–1969); Clifford was also influential in his role as an unofficial, informal presidential adviser in various issues. A successful Washington, D.C. lawyer, he was known for his elite clientele, charming manners, and impeccable suits.
The Truman Doctrine is an American foreign policy that pledges American "support for democracies against authoritarian threats." The doctrine originated with the primary goal of containing Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, and further developed on July 4, 1948, when he pledged to contain the communist uprisings in Greece and Soviet demands from Turkey. More generally, the Truman Doctrine implied American support for other nations threatened by Moscow. It became the foundation of American foreign policy, and led, in 1949, to the formation of NATO. Historians often use Truman's speech to Congress on March 12, 1947 to date the start of the Cold War.
Henry Lewis Stimson was an American statesman, lawyer, and Republican Party politician. Over his long career, he emerged as a leading figure in U.S. foreign policy by serving in both Republican and Democratic administrations. He served as Secretary of War (1911–1913) under President William Howard Taft, Secretary of State (1929–1933) under President Herbert Hoover, and again Secretary of War (1940–1945) under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, overseeing American military efforts during World War II.
James Vincent Forrestal was the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense.
John Jay McCloy was an American lawyer, diplomat, banker, and presidential advisor. He served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II under Henry Stimson, helping deal with issues such as German sabotage, political tensions in the North Africa Campaign, and opposing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, he served as the president of the World Bank, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Warren Commission, and a prominent United States adviser to all presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.
John Lewis Gaddis is an American international relations scholar, military historian, and writer. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War and grand strategy, and he has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. Gaddis is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan. George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011), his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men."
Containment was a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States during the Cold War to prevent the spread of communism after the end of World War II. The name was loosely related to the term cordon sanitaire, which was containment of the Soviet Union in the interwar period.
United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, better known as NSC 68, was a 66-page top secret National Security Council (NSC) policy paper drafted by the Department of State and Department of Defense and presented to President Harry S. Truman on 7 April 1950. It was one of the most important American policy statements of the Cold War. In the words of scholar Ernest R. May, NSC 68 "provided the blueprint for the militarization of the Cold War from 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s." NSC 68 and its subsequent amplifications advocated a large expansion in the military budget of the United States, the development of a hydrogen bomb, and increased military aid to allies of the United States. It made the rollback of global Communist expansion a high priority. NSC 68 rejected the alternative policies of friendly détente and containment of the Soviet Union.
William Averell Harriman, better known as Averell Harriman, was an American Democratic politician, businessman, and diplomat. The son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, he served as Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman, and later as the 48th governor of New York. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 and 1956, as well as a core member of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".
The "X Article" is an article, formally titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", written by George F. Kennan and published under the pseudonym "X" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. The article widely introduced the term "containment" and advocated for its strategic use against the Soviet Union. The piece expanded on ideas expressed by Kennan in a confidential February 1946 telegram, formally identified by Kennan's State Department number, "511", but informally dubbed the "long telegram" for its size.
Robert Abercrombie Lovett was the fourth United States Secretary of Defense, having been promoted to this position from Deputy Secretary of Defense. He served in the cabinet of President Harry S. Truman from 1951 to 1953 and in this capacity, directed the Korean War. As Under Secretary of State, he handled most of the tasks of the State Department while George C. Marshall was Secretary.
Charles "Chip" Eustis Bohlen was an American diplomat, ambassador, and expert on the Soviet Union. He helped shape United States foreign policy during World War II and the Cold War and helped develop the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe.
The Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy was written by a committee chaired by Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal in 1946 and is generally known as the Acheson–Lilienthal Report or Plan. The report was an important American document that appeared just before the intensification of the early Cold War. It proposed the international control of nuclear weapons and the avoidance of future nuclear warfare. A version, the Baruch Plan, was vetoed by the Soviets at the United Nations.
Roswell Leavitt Gilpatric was a New York City corporate attorney and government official who served as Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1961–64, when he played a pivotal role in the high-stake strategies of the Cuban Missile Crisis, advising President John F. Kennedy as well as Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy on dealing with the Soviet nuclear missile threat. Gilpatric later served as Chairman of the Task Force on Nuclear Proliferation in 1964.
Loy Wesley Henderson was a United States Foreign Service Officer and diplomat.
This is an English language bibliography of scholarly books and articles on the Cold War. Because of the extent of the Cold War, the conflict is well documented.
The main issues of the United States foreign policy during the 1945–1953 presidency of Harry S. Truman include:
The Cold War from 1947 to 1948 is the period within the Cold War from the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to the incapacitation of the Allied Control Council in 1948. The Cold War emerged in Europe a few years after the successful US–USSR–UK coalition won World War II in Europe, and extended to 1989–1991. It took place worldwide, but it had a partially different timing outside Europe. Some conflicts between the West and the USSR appeared earlier. In 1945–1946 the US and UK strongly protested Soviet political takeover efforts in Eastern Europe and Iran, while the hunt for Soviet spies made the tensions more visible. However, historians emphasize the decisive break between the US–UK and the USSR came in 1947–1948 over such issues as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the breakdown of cooperation in governing occupied Germany by the Allied Control Council. In 1947, Bernard Baruch, the multimillionaire financier and adviser to presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Harry S. Truman, coined the term "Cold War" to describe the increasingly chilly relations between three World War II Allies: the United States and British Empire together with the Soviet Union.
