ANXIETIES OF EMPIRE AND THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION

The election of Dwight Eisenhower as president of the United States in November 1952 marked the end of five Democratic terms (20 years!) in the White House. Scholars who came of age in that period focused their energies on explaining the rise of Democratic Party hegemony in the New Deal and World War II. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. famously called this period the “Age of Roosevelt ” (Schlesinger, 1957–60). Roosevelt’s Democratic successor, Harry Truman, received comparatively little attention from historians at the time. Those who wrote about American foreign policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s focused on the figures around President Truman, especially Secretaries of State James Byrnes, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson. Walter Lippmann (1947), the most prominent journalist in the country, popularized the term “Cold War ” in his analysis of the Soviet threat confronting the United States, and what he criticized as the failure of Byrnes, Marshall, Acheson, and others to pursue effective negotiations over areas of conflict with Moscow. Lippmann described American foreign policy after World War II as reactive, defensive, and fearful. He contended that American efforts to contain Soviet advances were wise, but much too dismis-sive of broader diplomatic opportunities to forge compromises, even with threat-ening figures like Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Lippmann implied that President Roosevelt would have been more effective, had he lived longer, at limiting Soviet-American hostilities. I.F. Stone (1952), another prominent but much more radical journalist at the time, defined American foreign policy differently. Stone believed that President Roosevelt’s death had contributed to the Cold War, but he saw a deeper and more consistent phenomenon at work. He pointed to a “hidden history ” exemplified, he argued, by postwar American military commitments in Central Europe, Japan, an