Thinking anew.(books, arts & manners)(The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism)(Book review)

The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism, by Elizabeth Edwards Spalding (University Press of Kentucky, 336pp., $40)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

NAME the American president who said, "God has created [the United States] and brought us to our present position of power and strength" in order to defend "spiritual values--the moral code--against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them." Hint: the same one who said "the spirit of liberty, the freedom of the individual, and the personal dignity of man, are the strongest ... most enduring forces in all the world." Further hint: It's not George W. Bush or George Washington. It's Harry S. Truman--by Elizabeth Spalding's account, the most misunderstood president of our time.

Usually we get Harry Truman as the simple plain-speaking Missouri Bantam, as in David McCullough's biography or James Whitmore's one-man Broadway show. Or he is the stolid if not very bright quarterback of a team of Cold War "Wise Men."

Now Mrs. Spalding reveals that it was the quarterback who designed and called the plays all along. Hers is a book about Harry Truman the policymaker and thinker--one could say the quintessential American thinker. Like Bush and Ronald Reagan, Truman was no intellectual in a formal sense. But like them he thought deep and hard about the role that global events had thrust on the United States. In his blunt, uncompromising way, Truman compelled his team to come up with a plan to deal with the Soviet challenge. In the process, he gave us a new kind of foreign policy--one with more relevance today than ever.

Sixty years ago totalitarianism of the Right was dead, buried in the rubble of Berlin and Hiroshima. Totalitarianism of the Left was just starting its run, with Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China not far behind. Who could stop them? Europe was shattered; it seemed, to many, beyond repair. Asia was in worse shape. Truman understood instinctively that the U.S. faced a dramatically new global responsibility.

Like 9/11, World War II had cleared the conceptual decks. Truman had before him two failed models of American foreign policy. The first was isolationism, which had once appealed to his fellow citizens from the heartland. It had assumed America could protect liberty at home by ignoring what happened to liberty abroad. Appeasement and Pearl Harbor had taught otherwise.