The Cold War Read Free

next? Soviet troops began to mass on the borders with Turkey.
    As early as January 5, 1946, the new American president, Harry S. Truman, worried out loud to his secretary of state, James Byrnes, that the Soviets intended to invade Turkey. “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language,” Truman said, “another war is in the making.” Then he added (and remember, this was a time when the American armed forces were demobilizing thousands of men each day), “Only one language do they understand—‘How many divisions have you?’” A month later, the Soviet ruler, Joseph Stalin, gave a speech announcing a new five-year plan. He went on to attack capitalism and to remark threateningly that his nation should be prepared for “all kinds of eventualities.”Back in Washington, Justice William O. Douglas remarked to the secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, that Stalin's speech sounded like “the declaration of World War III.”
    The gloves were off. The former British prime minister, Winston Churchill, spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5; Truman introduced him. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill said, “an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.” His words were not a call for war—not yet—but a counsel of preparedness. The time had come to check Soviet expansionism. “From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.” Stalin could not let the Fulton speech go without a public comment: “Mr. Churchill is now in the position of a firebrand of war.”
    Truman's January 5 outburst, Stalin's February broadside, or Chur-chill's Missouri warning: One might pick any number of symbolic days when the ideological and military struggle that was to consume the world for the next forty-five years began. James Chace, the biographer of Dean Acheson, argues that the pride of date belongs to August 19, 1946. That was the day when the Truman administration publicly rejected Stalin's call for joint Soviet-Turkish defense of the Straits—and backed up its words by dispatching a naval task force to Istanbul. For the first time (and not for the last), the United States had proclaimed to the Soviets that, to protect its interests, it was not afraid to resort to arms.
    JAMES CHACE, who died in the fall of 2004, was a distinguished historian, foreign policy analyst, editor, and teacher. He is best known for his biography,
Dean Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World,
as well as several books on international affairs, including
Solvency, America Invulnerable
(with Caleb Carr),
The Consequences of the Peace,
and a memoir,
What We Had
. His final book was
1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—the Election That Changed the Country
. The former managing editor of
Foreign Affairs
and editor in chief of
World Policy Journal,
Chace was the Henry Luce Professor in Freedom of Inquiry and Expression at Bard College.
    I N LATE AUGUST 1946 the world's largest aircraft carrier, the
Franklin D
.
Roosevelt
, accompanied by two destroyers, weighed anchor for Gibraltar and the eastern Mediterranean. The ships were to rendezvous off Lisbon with three more American destroyers and two cruisers dispatched from British waters. Their final destination: Istanbul. There they would join the U.S.S.
Missouri,
the battleship on which the Japanese surrender had taken place a year earlier. The
Missouri
had already arrived in the Straits of the Dardanelles on April 5.
    And for what purpose was this formidable array of sea power intended? None other than to confront the Russian navy at the mouth of the Black Sea if required. At the very least, this flexing of military muscle was aimed at making the Soviets think twice about putting any more pressure on Turkey.
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