Obviously, Truman was not so effective in domestic affairs as his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, had been in the 1930's.

Truman's record in foreign affairs, while also flawed, was more significant. He effectively developed a larger role for the nation in world affairs than it had played before World War II. Truman's policy helped the recovery and reconstruction of western Europe, but more importantly they help contain the rapid spread of Communism, such policies were the hallmark of the cold war.

Seeking to carry out Roosevelt's policies, Truman brought to fruition the plans for the unconditional surrender of Germany, which came on May 8, 1945 and the establishment of the United Nations. He attended the UN founding conference in San Francisco in late April. Truman made the decision to use atomic bombs against Japan, believing that they would end the war quickly,

These steps, which added up to a policy of "containment" of communism, constituted unprecedented U.S. involvement in Europe during peacetime. Truman not only made the decisions but used all his power to get the policies accepted.

The momentous new steps included the Truman Doctrine, which granted aid to Greece and Turkey and promised assistance to other nations threatened "by armed minorities or by outside pressure"; the Marshall Plan, which used American economic resources to stimulate the recovery of European economies outside the Soviet sphere; the Berlin airlift, designed to maintain the Western presence in that city, which was surrounded by the Russian-occupied zone of Germany; and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the nation's first peacetime military alliance. Truman's Point Four program helped new nations develop economically.

Containment also called for extensive economic aid to assist the recovery of war-torn Europe. With many of the region's nations economically and politically unstable, the United States feared that local communism parties, directed by Moscow, would come to power. On June 5, 1947, George C. Marshall presented at the Harvard commencement exercises the European Recovery Program. Built on the Truman Doctrine, the program provided the economic foundation for the recovery of Europe's war-shattered nations. Marshall's speech offered aid to all the countries of Europe, East as well as West, program was "directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos." The Soviets participated in the first planning meeting, then departed rather than share economic data on their resources and problems, and submit to Western controls on the expenditure of the aid. The remaining 16 nations hammered out a request that finally came to $17 thousand million for a four-year period. The "Marshall Plan", as it came to be know, has been generally regarded as one of the most successful U.S. foreign policy initiatives in history.

In 1949, Marshall's successor as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, together with the foreign ministers of eleven other nations, signed the North Atlantic Treaty, the third great turning point in American foreign policy. The North Atl

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Approximate Word count = 1507
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)