In 1952 Winston Churchill told Harry Truman that at the time of their first meeting seven years before, “I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt. I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.” Some historians have seconded Churchill’s judgment, insisting that Truman‘s decisions united the West, contained a relentless Soviet Union, and advanced economic prosperity. Other scholars take a different view and maintain that the Truman policies were needlessly provocative and resulted in international tension, a national security state, and the military industrial complex.

In this course, which will be a mix of lecture and discussion, we’ll examine various episodes of the early Cold War—the atomic bomb, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, NATO, the fall of Nationalist China, McCarthyism, the Korean War—and try to sort out the successes and failures of Harry Truman’s Cold War.