Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World

After Franklin Roosevelt's death in 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg inherited a world in turmoil. They built a strong partnership to address the challenges, crafting a new foreign policy that transformed the US from a reluctant global giant to a self-confident leader. They created the United Nations, pursued the Truman Doctrine, launched the Marshall Plan, and established NATO.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 05 April 2022
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil with Franklin Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Europe was flattened, and the Soviets emerged as America's new adversary. Truman and Vandenberg built a tight partnership to address the challenges. Working in strong bipartisan fashion at a bitterly partisan time, they crafted a dramatic new foreign policy through which the United States stepped boldly onto the world stage to protect its friends, confront its enemies, and promote freedom.

These two men, unlikely partners by way of personality and style, transformed the United States from a reluctant global giant to a self-confident leader. From a nation that traditionally turned inward after war to one that remained engaged to shape the postwar landscape, and from a nation with no real military establishment to one that now spends more on defense than the next dozen nations combined.

Lawrence J. Haas, an award-winning journalist, reveals how Truman and Vandenberg created the United Nations to replace the League of Nations, pursued the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom from Communist threat, launched the Marshall Plan to rescue Western Europe's economy from the devastation of war, and established NATO to defend Western Europe.

Weight: 486g
Dimension: 301 x 284 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781640124820