The politics of Vietnam was born in the early Cold War when Republicans made a concerted effort to undercut the national security advantage that Democrats enjoyed after a decisive victory in World War II. The years after the war are often remembered as a period when politics stopped at the water’s edge. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there were a number of factors that moved the US military deep into the jungles of Vietnam, including a “domino theory” positing that if one country fell to communism everything around it would follow, partisan politics was a driving force behind this disastrous strategy. The same political logic and prowess that led President Lyndon Johnson to strengthen the legislative coalition behind his Great Society simultaneously pushed him into a hawkish posture in Southeast Asia.

After World War II, the new king, Mohammad Reza Shah, faced a country in crisis. He took his first trip to the United States and was greeted warmly by the American public. Upon his return, however, he had to confront the rising tide of dissent, from Communists to Islamists. It was in this context that Iran pursued a bill to nationalize its oil industry. America tried to serve as mediator between Britain and Iran, but it ended up on the wrong side of the dispute. A coup removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq from power and tarnished the shah’s rule, and America’s image, thereafter.

This chapter explores the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Increasingly, Provisional Government head Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party, for a time maintaining a veneer of Resistance unity, found themselves in a struggle over the complexion of postwar France. The perception of a communist threat, for many in the French government and their American allies, became pressing as new variables complicated relations and intensified the feeling of crisis. The PCF’s growing strength and popularity in domestic politics, and deteriorating relations with the Soviets, brought the threat to the forefront and shaped French domestic and foreign affairs. Some French factions continued to warn of communist subversion and intrigue through their exchanges with US diplomats and American intelligence. Gaullists sought out contact with U.S. intelligence officers to counter the weakness narrative and prove their anti-communist bona fides. For their part, OSS and (subsequently) State Department intelligence analysts argued that many in France viewed the PCF as a legitimate political party and that there were genuine working class grievances that should be addressed. These contacts—informal and formal—acted as powerful constraints on American policy and explain in sharper relief how the United States was drawn into French affairs.

As Hoover toured the devastated lands of Europe and Asia, Truman described the steps that America was taking to address the crisis, sending one million tons of wheat each month to Europe and Asia. It was drawing down its reserves of wheat still further. He urged every American to reduce their own consumption of food, particularly bread, fats, and oils, as these were essential to the effort. He asserted that we would all be better off, not just physically, but spiritually as well, if we ate less. And in a show of solidarity with the suffering peoples around the world, he asked Americans for just two days a week to reduce their consumption to the level of the average person in the famine-stricken lands. Chapter 13 recounts America’s initial measures to sacrifice on behalf of strangers overseas.

Three leading Americans, each officially out of power, spent 1948 grappling with the coming Cold War. Henry Wallace sought accommodation with the Soviets. Eleanor Roosevelt still viewed Germany as the greater threat and pressed for conciliation with the Russians. Herbert Hoover saw no alternative to confrontation. This chapter tells the story of each person’s efforts to shape both the public discourse and the official policy at the dawn of a cold peace.

In this open letter to the World Peace Council’s 1953 meeting in Budapest, which Du Bois was unable to attend because the US government had revoked his passport, he laments the absence of any representation from his country and offers his insights as a “hereditary outcast.” While Du Bois describes the longstanding American strain of individualism that transformed that nation into a “money-mad people” and set the stage for imperial expansion, he argues that the enmity of the Cold War was a contingent historical development of the Truman era. For Du Bois, the gravest consequence of the county’s embrace of an existential struggle with the Soviet Union is a new “Reign of Terror” within the United States, which threatens to erode the foundations of American democracy. Despite the bleak state of affairs, Du Bois insists that appeal to conscience of America is still possible and that the Cold War can be transcended by marrying together Soviet and American ideals.

Though support for Zionist aspirations in the United States from 1945 to 1947 included some prominent members of the Republican Party, the strongest, most persistent support came from liberals, left liberals, and leftists responding to the Holocaust and World War II. The chapter examines writings by Richard Crossman, Freda Kirchwey, I. F. Stone, Alexander Uhl, Henry Wallace, and Sumner Welles in The Nation, PM, and The New Republic.

Partition of Palestine was also supported by the United States, which similarly came to a policy determination on the matter only shortly before the vote in the General Assembly on partition. The State Department opposed Jewish statehood on the basis of advocating self-determination for Palestine’s population, and because US strategic and energy interests were seen as requiring a close relationship with the wider Arab world. That position was opposed by President Harry Truman’s political advisors, who thought that his chances for being elected president in 1948 would be enhanced if he backed Jewish statehood. Through 1946 and 1947, the State Department and Truman’s political advisors vied to gain Truman’s support for their view. As the General Assembly neared its vote on recommendations, Truman instructed the US delegation to back partition. When partition did not work out, the State Department gained Truman’s assent to proposing a UN trusteeship. When a Jewish state was declared, the political advisors prevailed on Truman to give it diplomatic recognition, over the objection of Secretary of State George Marshall, who told Truman he would vote against him in the upcoming presidential election if Truman recognized the incipient Jewish state.

Describes the circumstances that led to the Accord and the terms of the agreement: removal of the remaining interest rate ceilings in return for a Federal Reserve commitment to support Treasury offerings priced at market.

Chapter 8 examines presidential remarks concerning Court cases prior to the modern presidency. This chapter enables us to place modern presidents in historical perspective and to illuminate how constitutional and political concerns motivated early presidents to discuss Court decisions. We examine all presidential remarks related to Supreme Court cases from 1789 through 1953 (Washington to Truman). We show that historic presidents rarely discussed the Court’s cases in their public rhetoric, choosing instead to share their opinions about the Court’s cases in their private correspondences. However, Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure marked the end of this norm, which was eviscerated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was in regular conflict with the Court.

Beginning with Harry Truman and the Korean War, America’s so-called “first limited war,” too often US leaders have refused to admit that the US is at war, been unclear about what they want, and failed to seek victory. Helping drive this is broken ideas about limited war that intertwine all US thinking about war and poisoned the US ability to fight any war. We need a clear foundation for critically analyzing our wars. The only thing that provides this is the political aim. Do we seek regime change, or something less than this? Anything less is a limited political aim. Our definitions of and ideas about limited war are generally based upon the military means used, something too subjective to provide a basis for analysis. You must understand the aim to understand the nature of the war. If you don’t understand the nature of the war, it is hard to figure out how to win it. Cold War works on limited war also taught us to not seek victory, which injured the US ability to do just this. If you aren’t trying to win the war, you aren’t trying to end it. This leaves us with “forever wars.”

This introductory chapter describes the general theoretical relationship between war and the inclusion of marginalized groups, provides historical background on civil rights politics in the World War II era, and addresses several methodological and definitional issues.

This chapter gathers the evidence from the preceding chapters to offer a refinement of the more general theoretical relationship between war and the inclusion of marginalized groups based on this book's analysis of World War II and the response to black civil rights advocacy. The chapter then discusses questions that remain open for future scholarship, particularly possibilities that might arise from expanding the scope of the analysis to other political institutions and other marginalized groups. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of studying war to better understand the outcomes of not just civil rights politics, but domestic political processes more generally.

This chapter examines the effects of World War II and its aftermath on the Truman administration’s civil rights actions. In conjunction with broader political pressures and electoral incentives, the chapter points to Truman’s belief in the republican virtues of military service as a variable that can mediate between his personal racism and relatively more extensive civil rights program. It then shows how civil rights advocates—particularly by highlighting incidences of violence against returning black veterans in the immediate postwar period— convinced Truman to issue an executive order establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. The chapter then discusses his executive order calling for equality of opportunity and treatment in the armed forces, issued after congressional inaction on his civil rights committee’s proposals, which eventually led to the desegregation of the U.S. military. This was not without its challenges, however, particularly from the Army, which frequently pushed back against the committee tasked with implementing the order.