How Harry Truman, Arthur Vandenberg crossed party lines to save the world

His foreign policy decisions would change the course of the 20th century. But in the months before he became president, not everyone thought Kansas City’s own Harry S. Truman was ready to be a global leader.

As Lawrence J. Haas notes in his new book, President Franklin D. Roosevelt “didn’t know Truman well before tapping him as his running mate in 1944” and declined to include his second-in-command when White House advisers discussed international relations.

By the time Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Truman had “met with FDR only twice during his eighty-two days as vice president, leaving him strikingly ignorant about foreign policy,” Haas writes. “He didn’t know what FDR had promised Churchill and Stalin at Yalta (during peace talks that February), and he didn’t even know about the Manhattan Project that would later produce the atomic bomb.”

Truman was forced to learn in a hurry. In August 1945, he effectively ended World War II by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands of Japanese were instantly killed; countless others died from aftereffects. The rationale was that if the fighting had been prolonged, many more would’ve perished in a conflict that had already claimed 400,000 American lives.

Truman’s decision remains a subject of debate. But in his enlightening book, Haas, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and Al Gore’s former communications director, considers the 33rd president’s foreign policies from a different angle.

“Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World” focuses on the bipartisan teamwork that allowed Truman, a Democrat, and Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan, to forge a series of enduring alliances and programs after the war.

As Truman assumed the presidency, millions were dead in Europe, and entire cities and economies had been destroyed. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was inciting fear with its aggression in Poland and other countries, and its aspiration to develop a nuclear weapon.

In response, Truman and Vandenberg set aside political disagreements and went to work.

Together, they helped craft an active, if flawed, peacekeeping organization (the United Nations); assumed a leading role in a formidable military coalition (NATO); and extended a multibillion dollar lifeline to Europe (the Marshall Plan).

These landmark developments were key components of the “Truman Doctrine,” which, as the president told a joint session of Congress in January 1947, was informed by the conviction that America “must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”

As Haas sees it, Truman, Vandenberg and other Washington powerbrokers who appreciated the need for bipartisanship “transformed the United States from a reluctant giant on the world stage to a self-confident leader; from a nation that traditionally turned inward after war to one that remained engaged to shape the postwar landscape.”

Haas skillfully guides readers through the battles that accompanied the White House’s push for momentous mutual defense treaties and foreign aid packages. With the first phase of the Marshall Plan pending in Congress, Vandenberg urged his GOP colleagues to support the Democratic commander-in-chief: “To repudiate the president of the United States at such an hour could display a divisive weakness which might involve far greater jeopardy than a sturdy display of united strength.”

One needn’t be a political scientist to appreciate sentiments like these, or to wish that they were a little more common in 21st-century Washington.

This story was originally published April 2, 2016 at 4:00 AM with the headline "How Harry Truman, Arthur Vandenberg crossed party lines to save the world."