George Elsey was a key foreign policy aide to President Truman. Along with Truman special assistant Clark Clifford, he helped formulate the Clifford-Elsey report, a seminal analysis of Soviet expansionism that helped harden U.S. Cold War policy and contributed to the development of the Truman Doctrine. The COLD WAR production team interviewed Elsey in November and December of 1995.

On Truman's preparation for assuming the presidency:

President Truman was unprepared for the presidency in the sense of being fully briefed and up to the minute on all that was going on. But as a senator for the past 10 years, as chairman of one of the most important congressional committees of the war, the Truman War Investigating Committee, he was well aware of the major problems that a president had to face. He wasn't briefed on Yalta, he wasn't briefed on the Manhattan Project -- which was the name for the atom bomb project -- he didn't know the details of those things, but that doesn't mean he was unprepared to assume responsibilities of the presidency.

On the Potsdam Conference:

Potsdam was exhilarating and exciting in a number of ways. First of all, the fact that the Nazis had been defeated and thoroughly, completely. Secondly, that Truman wanted to get, and did get, Stalin's affirmation that he would enter the war within three months after the defeat of Germany. That was a major aim of why President Truman wanted to go to Potsdam: he wanted to get first-hand acquaintance with Churchill, whom he had not met, but he wanted most of all to get that assurance that the Soviets would enter the war against Japan.

On informing the Soviets about the atomic bomb:

Stalin took the news very casually, said he hoped the weapon would be put to good use against the Japanese, and walked away. There [was] some question amongst the Americans as to whether Stalin had really understood what Truman was saying. As we now know, they knew all about the Manhattan Project through espionage and their own agents. Of course, we were unaware of that at the time.

There was no problem in deciding whether or not to use the bomb. Anything that would bring the war to a quick and speedy conclusion was uppermost in President Truman's mind. He was appalled at the estimates of American casualties. He was appalled at the continuing casualties in Japan from the air raids that were going on, and so loss of life on both sides could be saved if the war could be brought to a quick end. And the bomb seemed one way to do it -- the only way to do it.

On receiving, from Truman, the actual cable message authorizing the use of the atomic bomb:

President Truman received a message from Washington that came through us in the map room: we were his communication officers there, saying that the timing, the weather circumstances and all -- everything was very propitious for an early dropping of the bomb, and his permission was requested to release information about the bomb. ...

And Truman, reading this very hastily one morning, misunderstood: [he] thought he was being asked whether or not to drop the bomb itself. So he wrote out in longhand, and handed me for dispatch: "OK, release [it], but not before August 2." Why August 2? That was the day we were set to leave Potsdam to return to the States. Truman wanted to be away from Stalin before the bomb was dropped, or before there was any announcement, because he didn't want to have to answer any questions from the Soviets as to what is this all about.

On George Kennan's 'long telegram' warning about Soviet intransigence:

Kennan's telegram of February '46 created quite a splash throughout Washington. Copies came to the White House. Admiral Leahy, who was chief of staff -- had been chief of staff to FDR and continued as chief of staff to President Truman -- saw it, read it, discussed [it] with those of us in the map room. It reinforced ideas he had long held. I can't personally say that I know that President Truman saw it and read it, but it's inconceivable to me that he didn't, given the interest in the White House. So, [I'm] 99.99 percent certain that he studied it with care.

On confronting the Soviets on Iran and Turkey:

In the winter of '45-'46, word began to get back to us that Soviets were taking no steps to pull their troops out of Iran, as they had pledged to do, by the first of March of '46. That date came [and] Soviet troops were still in Iran. And Truman, with Secretary of State Burns, began to let Stalin know that they were very, very displeased with this; and our ambassador in Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith, was instructed by Truman to take it up personally with Stalin -- that Truman's message to Smith was, "I'd always thought the marshal was a man of his word. He hasn't kept his word here and this upsets me very much" -- words to that effect. There was no public protest, although Secretary of State Burns did make a radio address on the matter, but it was sort of a low-key diplomacy and it worked: the Soviets did begin to withdraw from Iran.

With respect to Turkey, it was perhaps a little bit blunter. It was apparent that the Soviets had designs on Turkey, and the Turkish ambassador in Washington died suddenly. And on the advice of State and the military, President Truman took the rather bold step of sending the body of the Turkish ambassador back to Turkey on the battleship Missouri, the biggest, strongest battleship in the American Navy at that time. The Missouri had the additional distinction of having been the ship on which the Japanese surrender had been signed, so it had a symbolic value as well, and that was the first presence of the United States Navy in the eastern Mediterranean. And it has maintained a task force there ever since. But this was symbol to Stalin: "Don't push us, and don't push Turkey, because if you push Turkey we'll be there."

On preparing, with Clark Clifford, the Clifford-Elsey report to the president on the Soviet Union:

In July of '46 President Truman ... asked his special counsel, Clark Clifford, to compile a list of the agreements that the Soviets had made that they had broken, or were not living up to. And I was then Mr. Clifford's assistant and he turned the task over to me.

We talked about it a bit, and I said, "Well, it seems to me that that's only scratching the surface -- a list of agreements broken. There are much more fundamental problems in our relationship with the U.S.S.R. than that. So let's go at it in a somewhat broader way." We requested replies from the secretaries of the Army and the Navy, secretary of state, the director of the FBI, the attorney general, all the agencies [of] the United States Government, the executive branch, that would have significant information on American relations with the U.S.S.R.

The replies came in, quite extensively, and detailed; and I consolidated [and] compiled them in a report for Mr. Clifford to submit to the president. The gratifying, if you will, aspect was that there was absolute unanimity in all of the agencies concerned as to the nature of the problems we had, and the kind of response we were going to have to make. President Truman for the first time realized he didn't have a divided administration; he had strong support. Just a few weeks earlier, or matter of fact days earlier, before we submitted that report, he'd had a falling out and had to fire the secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace, who'd been a very much pro-Soviet voice. And Wallace had given the impression that he was speaking for a large number of people throughout the government and the public. This report on Truman's desk made it apparent that Wallace ... was very much an isolated voice. Truman would have the backing of his administration, a very solid backing in any tough stance against the Soviet Union.

On the Truman Doctrine speech:

President Truman took the Truman Doctrine speech -- he didn't call it that, of course -- he took that speech very, very seriously. [He] knew it was a momentous step in American foreign policy -- in American relations with the rest of the world. He delivered it in a joint session of Congress. I was there in the balcony listening, and I was struck by the absolute concentrated attention of the Congress. Usually a president is interrupted many times by applause -- ordinarily by the people of his party, on whatever the occasion is, there is unnecessary applause and commotion and so on and so forth. On this occasion everyone in the hall realized that this was a major historical event. He was interrupted very rarely by applause.

By the end he got a polite applause, but mostly it was the riveted attention on [the idea that] here is a great change in the direction of the country: a commitment that's of major importance. Congress took it very seriously, as did the president. He was fortunate in that the Republican leader of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate was Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a very broad-gauged internationalist -- he'd been an isolationist in earlier years, but he had swung around, and Vandenberg led the Republicans in support of this approach of the president's.

On offering Marshall Plan aid to the Soviets:

There never was any thought that the Soviets would actually join the Marshall Plan. It would have been impossible for them. They would have had to open up their society; they would have had to come clean with all sorts of detailed statistics on their industry, their whole social structure, which was inconceivable. But it was a desirable step to persuade the world that we really were being altruistic here; this was not basically an anti-communist, anti-Soviet measure, and should by some miracle the Soviets themselves join, or some of their satellite countries, we would have welcomed them in it. But we didn't think that was a realistic possibility.

On whether the Cold War was necessary:

If by the Cold War we mean the events since World War II, it was necessary. Otherwise, we definitely would have had Soviet continued expansion -- taking over most, if not all, of Western Europe; moving into the Middle East; causing problems not only with India but other countries in Southeast Asia; Africa is a basket case in itself in many ways, tragically, and there would have been fertile grounds for communist subversion and takeover there. All of these things were prevented, sometimes prevented with great cost to blood and treasure, but nevertheless were prevented by the resistance of the United States and other Western countries to Soviet communist expansionism.

On the Cold War in general:

The Cold War -- if by that phrase we mean the resistance of the United States and its colleagues in the West against the Soviet Union -- the Cold War achieved an uneasy balance for a half century with no major outbreak of wars -- troubles here, there and elsewhere, but no major struggle comparable to World Wars I or II. And the continued strength and the continued economic as well as military strength of the West forced the Soviets to realize the failure of their system -- with the result that communism and the Soviet system as we knew it collapsed and the former Soviet Union broke up. We don't yet know how that's going to work out. It'll take us another perhaps half century to see how that works, but at least we have a totally different world now than we had when the Soviet Union was throwing its weight around, flexing its muscles and thumbing its nose at the rest of us.