INTRODUCTION

Historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued that “… the convergence of external and internal trends in late February and early March 1946, produced a fundamental reorientation of United States policy toward the Soviet Union.” That brief period thus marked a turning point in American policy, the end of hopes for a satisfactory accommodation between the wartime Allies. Gaddis offers impressive supporting evidence. Following Byrnes's conciliatory approach to the Russians at Moscow in December 1945, the secretary of state came under heavy fire from White House Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy and Republican leader Arthur Vandenberg. The president himself rebuked Byrnes, and the secretary's subsequent statements indicated a new inclination to hold the line against Russia.

On February 9, Stalin made a speech predicting another world war unless the capitalist system were transformed. Opinion polls in the United States reflected a growing distrust of Russia, and the Iran crisis and Soviet spy scandal in Canada reinforced the emerging anticommunist consensus. On February 23, George Kennan's 8,000-word analysis of Soviet behavior arrived at the State Department in Washington. The effect of the “long telegram,” as its author later noted, “was nothing less than sensational.” Kennan's missive was seized on by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal as a brilliant statement of his own visceral anti-Soviet feelings and made required reading in the military and foreign affairs bureaucracy. Churchill captured the new mood in his famous Iron Curtain speech delivered at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5.