hments that could draw the nation into war, now adopted a policy of endless enemies. That’s because the policy identified numerous countries that seemed to be allied with the Soviets.
But what did others in government think of NSC-68? How do historians today view it?
Numerous histories and biographies of the Cold War era ignore NSC-68 or hardly mention it. For example, Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right, an excellent book that examines those who opposed the garrison state, has little on NSC-68. For a quarter of a century there was no great debate over it. Truman left NSC-68 out of his memoirs.
A secret foreign policy
Critics reviewing the policies of the Truman administration were at a disadvantage. A big part of the policy was secrecy. Many of them knew nothing about NSC-68 (They also knew nothing of presidential counselor Clark Clifford’s controversial study of Soviet intentions, which we examined in a previous segment. That was a report “so hot” that Truman insisted that all copies of it be locked up.)
Even one of the Old Right isolationist critics of interventionist foreign policies, Sen. Robert Taft, seemed to have known nothing about NSC-68. One is unable to find any reference to it in James T. Patterson’s exhaustive biography of Taft, Mr. Republican.f
Prof. John Moser, a Taft scholar at Ashland University, responding to an emailed message in which I inquired about Taft’s view of NSC-68, replied, “I doubt he [Taft] ever knew anything about it.”
Indeed, Secretary of State Dean Acheson didn’t want NSC-68 disclosed. Why? In part because people might start asking about how much this save-the-world policy would cost.
“He [Acheson] wanted to keep the document classified for distribution only to those with top-secret classification and he wanted to leave out any mention of cost altogether,” according to the book The Wise Men.
NSC-68 was the beginning of a long series of foreign-policy decisions, secret and overt, in which Congress had no say in some cases because it didn’t know what was going on. Sometimes it did know, but was ignored. An example of the latter occurred when Truman sent troops to Korea without congressional approval. Later John Kennedy would send the first U.S. troops into Vietnam without congressional debate.
Congress, in these undeclared wars, was sometimes informed after the fact, leading to debates that were pointless. That’s because actions had been taken and would not be reversed unless Congress insisted on cutting off funding for ongoing military operations. That’s something that would inevitably lead to accusations that Congress was “unpatriotic” or “didn’t support our boys” in Vietnam (Korea, Iraq, et cetera). And how many members of Congress could survive that criticism?
There was no contemporary criticism of NSC-68 because it wasn’t publicly debated. And even in Arthur Schlesinger’s much-celebrated 1970s book, The Imperial Presidency, NSC-68 is never mentioned. He did, however, note that numerous documents were classified and complained about “the shackled historian.”
Yet some Americans, with an awareness of how their country departed from its isolationist traditions, objected to where Truman was taking the country. The NSC-68 mindset of an America ready to confront the world — of a militarized nation with great-power responsibilities almost everywhere, acting as the world’s policeman — has not changed.
An expensive foreign policy
However, as the policy of the Cold War and intervention was conceived in the 1940s, there were some dissenters in the Truman administration. Some opposed it on philosophic grounds. Others couldn’t abide a huge military buildup when the United States was at peace. The Korean War broke out a few months after NSC-68 was written in the spring of 1950. The war ended the internal NSC-68 debate and the document was approved by Truman.
NSC-68 launched the United States on what amounted to a world crusade.
“The Soviet Union,” according to NSC-68, “unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absol