| Summary/Abstract |
On March 12, 1947, Harry Truman addressed a joint session of Congress with a very specific proposal: emergency aid for Greece and Turkey, which were menaced by a communist insurgency and facing Soviet intimidation, respectively. But Truman, speaking at the dawn of the Cold War, framed the matter far more expansively. Allowing the countries of the world to “work out a way of life free from coercion,” he explained, had been a “fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan.” At a time when “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life,” the United States must once again “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities by outside pressures.”
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