America to the Rescue?

Abstract

The difficulty of American relations with Iran early in the year 1950 was that something seemingly needed to be done and yet no ranking American diplomat knew what it was nor wanted to find out. The very mention of the name Iran within the State Department raised talk of excess American commitments, the impossibility of solving all problems with money, the high cost of the Marshall Plan, the new responsibilities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The Democrats who had returned to office after the presidential election of 1948 talked so much about money they sounded almost like Republicans. The administration of President Truman, to be sure, was a bit on the conservative side. The president himself was a fiscal conservative; Truman for years had read presidential budget proposals and congressional amendments, and not merely knew what the small-point figures meant but had become convinced that the monetary outlays for the relief programmes of the Roosevelt administration and the huge cost of World War II had strained federal credit; he would have liked to see the government take up further burdens, but Western Europe had been enough and in all conscience, and with his experience in Washington for 15 years, he believed he could do no more.