since ancient times. Not since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power on this earth. … It was clear that the Soviet Union was aggressive and expanding. For the United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Soviet aggression or Communist subversion was to protect the security of the United States.
The argument carried, and the decision was made to give aid to Greece. As was to become a common pattern in such situations, a request for such aid was drafted in Washington by the State Department and suggested to the Greek government, which then made a formal request.
The Truman Doctrine was the name later attached to the speech Truman made before Congress, March 12, 1947, in which he asked for $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey:
The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the Government’s authority. … Meanwhile, the Greek Government is unable to cope with the situation. …
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. …
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid, which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. …
If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East. …
There were at least three questionable elements in Truman’s speech. First, his description of the “second way of life … terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms,” while it might conceivably fit some imagined future left-wing regime in Greece, at that time most accurately described the right-wing government for which Truman was asking support. Second, the connection between the Greek rebellion and the “outside pressures” of world communism ran counter to one basic fact: although the Greek rebels were getting some useful aid from Yugoslavia, their manpower was Greek; internal conditions and indigenous support made it a Greek affair. The “outside pressures” were largely British; they were about to become American.
Back in the fall of 1944, in Moscow, Churchill and Stalin had agreed on the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence; Rumania, Poland, and Bulgaria would be in the Soviet sphere, and Greece in the British. When the British were suppressing the ELAS rebellion in 1945, the Russians sat by. They studiously refrained from giving aid to the insurgents. Churchill wrote later that Stalin had “adhered strictly and faithfully” to their agreement to give the British a free hand in Greece. Historian and biographer Isaac Deutscher has pointed out that in 1948 the Soviet Union expelled Yugoslavia from the Comintern and President Tito closed the border to the Greek rebels. Tito’s aide, Milovan Djilas, reported that in early 1948 Stalin told the Yugoslavs that “the uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible,” that it did not have a chance of succeeding. The “international communism” excuse for American intervention ignored the fact that Soviet communism was as nationalistic as American communism, and that like the United States, the Soviet Union preferred revolutions it could control.
The third questionable element hidden by the moralistic language of the Truman Doctrine was that the traditional interests of political power and economic profit were involved in the American decision to keep a rightist government in power in Greece. Presidential adviser Clark Clifford had suggested that Truman’s speech to Congress should also say that “continued chaos in other countries and pressure exerted upon them from without would mean the end of free enterprise and democracy in those countries and that the disappearance of free enterprise in other nations would threaten our economy and our democracy.” But Acheson decided this language, with its disguised reference to saving capitalism, might embarrass the new Labor government of Britain. Also kept out of the message was another Clifford suggestion that Truman refer to “the great natural resources of the Middle East.” What Clifford had in mind here, of course, was oil. When Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery of Britain, in the fall of 1946, asked the U.S. Chiefs of Staff how important Middle East oil was to them, “their immediate and unanimous answer was—vital.” In his book Greece and the Great Powers, Stephen Xydis concludes that at least one motive in the Greek intervention was to “contribute to the preservation of American oil concessions” in the Middle East.
It did not take long, once Congress rubber-stamped the Truman Doctrine, for American military equipment to begin pouring into Greece: 74,000 tons was sent in during the last five months of 1947, including artillery, dive bombers, and stocks of napalm. Other factors also worked against the rebels. The Tito-Soviet split of 1948 led to factionalism among the Greek Communists, poor military tactics, and ugly, desperate measures against villagers whose support they needed. A group of 250 U.S. Army officers, headed by General James Van Fleet, advised the Greek army in the field; Van Fleet also initiated a policy of removing thousands of people from their homes in the countryside to try to isolate the guerrillas. The final blow to the rebel cause came when Yugoslavia closed its border in the summer of 1949. A few months later they gave up—two years after the first American guns had arrived. What was won for Greece by American intervention? Richard Barnet summed it up in his book Intervention and Revolution:
For the next twenty years the Greeks struggled to solve the staggering economic and social problems that had led to the bloody civil war. Despite massive U.S. economic and military aid the Greek government has remained unable to feed its own population. … Despite improvement in the economy, the same basic conditions of the forties—widespread poverty, illiteracy, shortage of foreign exchange, repressive and ineffective government—remained in the sixties, leading to a series of constitutional crises and, most recently, to a particularly brutal and backward military dictatorship. …
From 1944 to 1964 the United States gave Greece almost four billion dollars, of which a little over two billion dollars was in military aid. … Although private U.S. capital had flowed into Greece from such U.S. companies as Esso, Reynolds Metal, Dow Chemical, and Chrysler, and large sections of the economy are effectively controlled by U.S. capital, the financial health of the country remains precarious.
Twenty years after the first American guns arrived to fight against “the suppression of personal freedoms” in Greece, a military dictatorship, this time under the leadership of Colonel George Papadopoulos, took over the country. Roy C. Macridis, a political scientist and specialist in European politics, wrote shortly after the 1967 coup:
Last Sunday, May 28, free elections were scheduled for Greece. Instead, a military junta is in power, thousands of political prisoners are in jail, the newspapers are under control, and local representative institutions are set aside. …
Two years later, an American journalist interviewed two hundred persons, some still in Athens, others who had escaped, who told sickening stories of torture in Greek prisons. Special military courts sentenced hundreds of Greeks to years in jail for being guilty of distributing leaflets stamped LONG LIVE DEMOCRACY.
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