Dean Acheson, President Truman’s prim, patrician undersecretary of state, was sitting in his office on February 21, 1947, when he received a visitor whose short message would change the course of history. Acheson’s quarters, for the time being, were at the Old Executive Office Building, a cramped wedding cake of a structure next to the White House, which the State Department was in the middle of vacating for new, expansive digs in the nearby Foggy Bottom neighborhood, a more fitting home for the diplomatic arm of an emergent superpower. Half his belongings were in boxes. Crates lined the hallways.
In a profile of Acheson for England’s Manchester Guardian, the journalist Alistair Cooke called him a “six-foot-two Velasquez grandee who has submitted, with a twinkling eye, to his present reincarnation in fine tweeds as a Connecticut Yankee.” He was the East Coast elite personified. Born in 1893 in Middletown, Connecticut, he had been raised according to the exacting standards of Yankee Protestant breeding.
The son of a Canadian liquor heiress and the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, young Dean had moved easily through Groton and Yale, Phi Beta Kappa and Scroll and Key. He was considered something of a wild hare as an undergraduate, but he found his bearing at Harvard Law, where he finished fifth in his class. Along the way he fell under the tutelage of Felix Frankfurter, the school’s renowned constitutional law expert. Like many brilliant climbers before and since him, Acheson went on to summit all the usual peaks: Supreme Court clerkship; partner at Covington, Burling, a top-tier law firm; high-level jobs at Treasury and State.
It is impossible to overstate just how overpowering this fear of a new world war became, and how quickly, and how it in turn distorted the debate over Communism at home.But even among the rarefied elite, Acheson stood out. It started with the way he dressed. Savile Row suits. Homburg hats. Cream-white shirts with starched collars that stood as stiff and straight as he did. Then there was his reddish gray guardsman’s mustache, around which entire magazine profiles were written. He waxed it every morning with Pinaud’s, so that its ends extended, winglike, beyond the edges of his mouth, with which it moved in careful synchronization: When he smiled, his mustache smiled; when he shouted, which was often, it seemed to yell in chorus.
For decades Acheson had come in and out of government, each time landing a little higher up the chain of diplomatic command, until he found himself, at the end of the war, in the State Department’s number two position. Acheson’s boss, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, was a respected military man who had overseen the war effort as Army chief of staff. He had assumed the position of secretary of state in January 1947, exactly one month earlier, and already found himself out of sync with the clubby Ivy Leaguers who populated the department’s upper echelons. It was Acheson, not his boss, who best reflected the ideals and self-image of the State Department, among both supporters and critics. It was Acheson, not Marshall, who was understood to be in real control. And it was Acheson, much more than Marshall, who would come to signify the successes—and failures—of Harry Truman’s foreign policy. As such, he would become a ripe target as the Red Scare unfolded.
Acheson’s visitor that Friday afternoon was the private secretary of Lord Inverchapel, the British ambassador. Following the circuitous protocol of high diplomacy, the secretary asked if the ambassador might be permitted to deliver a message to Marshall, without telling Acheson what it was. But Marshall had already left on a weekend trip to Princeton for the university’s bicentennial celebration. Acheson replied that unless Lord Inverchapel felt like traveling to New Jersey, he would have to wait until Monday. The visitor cleared his throat. The message was, he said, a “blue piece of paper”—diplomat-speak for a message of utmost urgency and confidentiality. He needn’t say more. Acheson knew immediately what it concerned: Greece was about to fall to the Soviet-backed Communists, and the British were not going to stop them.
In the long list of foreign policy crises that Americans expected to confront after World War II, the fall of Greece likely did not rate very high. Millions of returning GIs and their families at home had hoped their sacrifices overseas would settle the world’s appetite for conflict, at least for a while, so that they could return to some semblance of normal life. From a high of 12 million servicemembers at the end of the war, the United States shrank its military to just 1.7 million, with entire units deployed in Europe seeming to vanish overnight. But the world was not going to wait. In China, the Communist forces of Mao Zedong were making steady advances against the Nationalists, who were foundering despite massive amounts of U.S. support. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviets were not pulling back their forces, but reinforcing them. They had made clear that they were not going to withdraw from territory they had taken from the Germans, and would either absorb these lands into the Soviet Union, including the Baltics and Ukraine, or treat them as puppet states, including Poland, Eastern Germany, and Romania.
The Allies had agreed to carve up Europe during the conference of the “Big Three”—Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin—at a summit at Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula, in February 1945. But now it seemed Stalin was unsatisfied with his slice of the geopolitical pie. In 1941 he had sent forces into northern Iran, ostensibly to protect oil fields vital to Allied war aims; he failed to withdraw them after the fighting ended, claiming they were supporting newly declared “people’s” republics—in reality Soviet puppet governments. In response, President Truman took the issue to the newly created Security Council at the United Nations in January 1946.
In hindsight, the postwar era is often remembered as a time of economic growth and national confidence, of sprouting suburbs and American industrial might. It eventually became that, in the 1950s. But the immediate years after the war were full of anxiety and insecurity. Housing was scarce. Jobs were scarce. Those who had seen combat returned with emotional injuries that many on the home front could not understand. Fears of renewed inflation, or even a return to the Depression, kept Americans on edge. Labor unrest in the Great Lakes region and along the West Coast and racial unrest in the South made it seem like the country might come apart. And then, added to all this, was the possibility of a new armed conflict, this time with a former ally.
During the war the government and Hollywood had done their best to sell Stalin as “Uncle Joe,” and the Soviets as sincere friends of the American people. Films like Song of Russia, released by MGM in 1944, praised everyday life in the Soviet Union, while thrillers like The North Star, Mission to Moscow, and Days of Glory valorized Russian soldiers and the U.S.-Soviet alliance. Soviet ships in the Pacific regularly made friendly visits along the West Coast. Salka Viertel, an Austrian émigré screenwriter in Hollywood, recalls a visit by a warship manned by a mostly female crew, and with a female captain. A reception for the guests took place at Los Angeles’s Shrine auditorium, with Charlie Chaplin as a headliner. Lyudmila Pavilichenko, the famed “girl sniper” credited with 309 kills during the sieges of Odessa and Sevastopol, toured the United States in 1942, speaking to overflow crowds on behalf of military assistance. In 1944 the War Shipping Administration, a federal agency that managed the civilian shipping sector during the war, launched the SS U.S.S.R. Victory, a supply carrier, out of a Los Angeles shipyard. On hand to christen it was the wife of the Soviet vice consul for Los Angeles. And aid efforts were everywhere: Even as they scrimped change and rationed food to help the war effort, Americans gave openly and eagerly to groups like Russian War Relief, with its heart-tugging appeals about valiant Russian soldiers and their starving children.
Suddenly, after the war, Americans were being told the opposite: that Stalin was the enemy, and that the Russians could not be trusted. The Soviet leader did not do much to help counter that image. After two months of hemming and hawing over the troops in Iran, Stalin withdrew them, but immediately put pressure elsewhere. He picked a fight with Turkey over its control of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, the two narrow waterways linking the Black Sea, and in turn southern Russia, with the Mediterranean. In mid-1946 Truman sent a naval task force to support Turkey, and eventually offered $100 million in aid to stave off Moscow-backed political and guerrilla forces. But the real crisis came next, in Turkey’s neighbor to the southwest: Greece.
The Italians and Germans had occupied Greece during the war, and while they exacted untold horrors on the Greek people, the country had been lodged far in America’s peripheral vision. In the logic of European imperialism, Britain had held sway in the Eastern Mediterranean, at least outside the French foothold in Lebanon. Postwar Greece was supposed to be London’s concern. The United States was focused on rebuilding Western Europe. But it was also becoming clear that the Soviet problem was too big for such a divide-and-conquer approach. That point was rammed home in February 1946 by a lengthy telegram sent to Washington by a mid-level Foreign Service officer in Moscow named George Kennan.
Soviet Marxism, he wrote, was just the latest window dressing on a deep-seated “neurotic” Russian leadership class that would continue to press outward to maintain security at home. It was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi,” one that disrupts “the internal harmony of our society,” seeks to destroy “our traditional way of life,” and breaks “international authority of our state…if Soviet power is to be secure.” In a subsequent article in the journal Foreign Affairs, which Kennan wrote under the pseudonym X, he called for “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” This concept, containment, soon became the basis for America’s early Cold War strategy. The details would be filled in later. For now, containment meant Truman and Clement Attlee, the British prime minister who replaced Churchill in 1945, had to draw a line: The Soviet orbit could expand no further. Greece would be the first test.
For almost two years, Greek Communist guerrillas had been receiving aid and training from the Soviet Union and its allies in Albania and Bulgaria, neighbors of Greece and newly Communist themselves. It seemed just a matter of time before the country joined them. Its economy was in tatters, its people were starving, and the government in Athens was barely functioning. “Greece was in the position of a semiconscious patient on the critical list whose relatives and physicians had been discussing whether his life could be saved,” Acheson wrote in his memoirs.
Britain was having a hard time itself: Aside from the damaged cities and shattered families wrought by the war, it was in the middle of a devastatingly cold winter that had wiped out personal savings and government fuel reserves. Washington had heard rumors, going back to the fall of 1946, that as a result of its economic straits, Britain might have to pull back its commitments in Greece, including the four thousand soldiers who sometimes seemed the only thing keeping the Communists from marching on Athens. And yet the blue envelope from Lord Inverchapel, an informal copy of which Acheson finally received later that Friday, was much worse than anyone in Washington had expected. The British were pulling everything out—troops, money, aid, the whole thing—by March 31, 1947, precisely one month away. On top of that, the British ambassador estimated that Greece needed between $240 million and $280 million in aid immediately, money the British would not—could not—provide.
Truman ordered Acheson to devise a response by Monday. And so, rather than retreat to his farm in the Maryland countryside north of Washington, Acheson and Charles Bohlen, one of his closest advisers, set up camp amid the packing crates and went to work. There was no question in their minds that America had to take up Britain’s slack. The pivotal issue was how, and how much, and then how to sell the commitment to a Congress and a country still trying to get back to normal. “Under the circumstances there could be only one decision,” Acheson wrote. “At that we drank a martini or two toward the confusion of our enemies.”
The choices that were made that weekend were among the most crucial of the twentieth century. They set the stage for the Cold War, and for the establishment of the United States as the self-described “defender of the free world.” And they put the country back on a war footing—not a shooting war, but one that nevertheless required all the vigilance and commitment of an actual conflict. Fortunes would be spent. The armed forces, shrinking rapidly, would be rebuilt. And the possibility of a new world conflagration, this time with atomic weapons, would loom always in the background. It was not a fight that most Americans welcomed. The Second World War had just ended. Was a third about to begin?
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In the history of the anti-Communist hysteria that was to come, it is impossible to overstate just how overpowering this fear of a new world war became, and how quickly, and how it in turn distorted the debate over Communism at home. America had rapidly militarized during the war, but until then it had not been a country used to being always on the ready to fight, or to having much to do with the rest of the world at all. Its citizens had fought and sacrificed greatly during World War II. Maybe they suffered less than Great Britain and Europe, the Russians or the Chinese, but that was cold comfort to the millions of Americans who had lost sons and husbands and fathers, who had scrimped and saved and gone hungry to ensure victory. Now, suddenly, they were being told that they might once again have to sacrifice. Unsurprisingly, they looked for someone to blame.
The following Monday, after Acheson spent the weekend locked in his office, he and Secretary of State Marshall made the short trip to the White House next door to present their recommendations on Greece, and again the next day to sell the plan to congressional leaders. “I knew we were met at Armageddon,” Acheson wrote. Marshall opened the presentation, but his delivery failed to impress upon the legislators the meaning of the moment. Acheson took over. “No time was left for measured appraisal,” he told them. The Soviets were on the move, and would not stop unless the United States stepped in. “Like apples in a barrel infected by a rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France.” This was the domino theory, a linchpin of American foreign policy long before its application to Southeast Asia led to the war in Vietnam.
Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan once known as a hidebound isolationist, was impressed. He told Truman that if he could deliver the same message to Congress, he would make sure the votes were there to make the aid package happen. But he also cautioned the president: To seal the deal, he needed to “scare the hell out of the country.”
A new strain of isolationism was emerging, as old instincts about America as an island apart from the world merged with widespread exhaustion over the war.Truman did just that. On March 12, he traveled to the Capitol to deliver a message to both chambers of Congress. Acheson watched from near the front row, sitting as straight in his seat as a mourner at a funeral. He listened as Truman bemoaned the plight of Greece and Turkey. The president then asked for $400 million (or about $6.8 billion in 2023) over the coming year, along with the deployment of advisers and other resources. But in a speech that Acheson had helped write, he also swung bigger, further. This request, Truman declared, was about more than Greece. “Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East,” he said. “If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.” The applause, when he finished, filled the chamber. The only member to remain seated was Vito Marcantonio, a progressive representative from New York who, though not an open member of the Communist Party, was understood to speak for it in Congress. No one paid attention: Both chambers quickly approved the president’s request.
Still, not everyone in Congress, or in the public, was sold. A new strain of isolationism was emerging, as old instincts about America as an island apart from the world merged with widespread exhaustion over the war. At the crux of the matter was Truman himself: It was one thing for a giant like Roosevelt to ask for sacrifice; it was entirely another to hear it from the political unknown who seemed to have none of the dash or brilliance of his predecessor. A self-described ordinary man from Independence, Missouri, Truman was a former farmer and haberdasher without a four-year college education—the last president to lack a degree, and the first since William McKinley. Elected a county judge in 1922, he functioned mostly as a cog in the St. Louis political machine, which found him useful enough to send to the U.S. Senate in 1934. A decade later Roosevelt picked him as his running mate, more out of frustration with the moon-eyed incumbent, Henry Wallace, than out of any real affection for the Missourian.
Truman’s accidental ascendence to the White House, just months after Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration, struck much of Washington as a sad but inevitable turn in the history of the New Deal, the end of its heroic era, the inevitable moment when great leaders hand over the reins to little men. The left-leaning journalist I. F. Stone said that Truman brought in “the new mediocrity” of leaders valued more for loyalty and bonhomie than competence: The folksy Tom Clark replaced the renowned Francis Biddle as attorney general; Truman’s crony Fred Vinson replaced the patrician Henry Morgenthau Jr. at Treasury. Acheson and Marshall, both widely regarded by the East Coast Establishment, were outliers. Everywhere else, Stone saw “big bellied, good-natured guys who knew a lot of dirty jokes.”
Even those who gave Truman the benefit of the doubt believed that he was too much of an operator to be entrusted with the legacy of the New Deal, which by the end of the war had become something of a secular religion among liberals and progressives, or to navigate the foreign policy dangers of the postwar era. Because he came from a border state, Truman was assumed to be weak on civil rights. Because he came from a political machine, he was assumed to be anti-labor. Because he came from the heartland, he was assumed to have no interest in or capacity for international affairs. “A curious uneasiness seems to pervade all levels of the Government,” read an editorial in Progressive magazine. “There is a feeling at times that there is no hand at the wheel.”
One person who saw the man differently was Acheson. The New England Brahmin noticed, and valued, little details about the new president. How he kept his desk (neat). How he kept appointments (not a minute early or late). His loyalty. His decisiveness. How he read, voraciously, omnivorously—despite his lack of a college degree, Truman was better-read on history and politics than many of his Ivy League advisers. Where some saw the pigheadedness of a country simpleton, Acheson saw clarity of thought and vision. “He could, and did, outwork us all, with no need for papers predigested into one-page pellets of pablum,” Acheson eulogized in his memoirs. “He would take what time was available for study and then decide.” When Truman returned to Washington’s Union Station from a campaign trip in support of Democrats during the 1946 midterm elections—which saw the Republicans retake Congress for the first time in fourteen years—the only person waiting for him at the terminal was Dean Acheson.
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Excerpted from Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America by Clay Risen. Copyright © 2025 by Clay Risen. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
