 could be sold to labor unions as well as to the Right wing.
Possibly his most controversial idea was that thermonuclear war was winnable. He believed that the “best way to avoid a nuclear clash was to prepare to win one,” wrote Nicholas Thompson in The Hawk and the Dove.
A little-known document
NSC-68, the 68th policy paper of the National Security Council and formally entitled “United States Objectives for National Security,” is little known. Yet NSC-68 posited that the Soviets were madmen who led a worldwide movement dedicated to destroying America. Historian William Taubman called NSC-68’s tone “chilling.”
“The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this republic but of civilization itself,” stated NSC-68. The Soviet Union, it said, sought to “impose its absolute will over the rest of the world.”
If that were true, then the only choice for the United States after World War II was to prepare for World War III. Indeed, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, a veteran State Department official, said the paper’s logic “leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable.” War, at that time, would have meant a nuclear conflict because the Soviets had just developed the A-bomb.
This critical NSC paper was a continuation and expansion of the 1947 commitment to the Truman Doctrine. It called for supporting “free peoples who are resisting outside subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
Today Americans might ask how their nation became an empire. How did their country end up involved in almost every war or possible war on the planet?
The mindset of this controversial paper is one reason why. Its worldview is a rationale for how the United States could expand its interventionist policies around the world. “NSC-68 proved to be a blueprint for waging the Cold War,” wrote historian Walter LaFeber in The American Age.
It also represented a remarkable foreign-policy change. The United States, which had once spurned permanent military alliances and huge peacetime military establishments 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 d