By Westbrook Murphy, General Counsel, Truman Scholarship Foundation

In the words of the old Kingston Trio song: “They’re rioting in Africa!”  And in the Middle East.  Tunisia. Egypt. Libya. Yemen. Bahrain. Maybe even Saudi Arabia and Iraq.  What should we (the Untied States) do?

September, 1953, Dean Acheson—Truman’s former Secretary of State (both then having been out of office about eight months)—offered advice that still may be pertinent. 

Acheson was concerned about what he called the “liberation ideas” of his successor, John Foster Dulles.  Acheson feared that Dulles’ talk of “rolling back communism” in Central and Eastern Europe would give the peoples of those countries false hope of U.S. support should they revolt against their Moscow-controlled dictators.  Such a hope, in fact, may have influenced the 1956 abortive Hungarian revolution, which was brutally crushed by the Soviet Military.

On September 24, 1953, Acheson sent Truman comments on draft of a speech Truman was to give four days later when accepting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award.  Acheson worried that—as written—the speech seemed to commit former President Truman—

. . .to an impossibility broad program and one which I am afraid will get you tangled up with the Dulles liberation ideas.  I do not think that you want to say that it is our task to establish the Four Freedoms everywhere in the world—Russia, China, South Africa, etc.—and that there is no end save victory in the struggle. . . .  Therefore, I suggest that this whole section be written as follows:

“It is not enough to defend our freedoms at home only. We must be concerned with a world environment in which free men can live free lives.  Franklin Roosevelt knew that we could not exist in an oasis of freedom in a world of totalitarianism.  ‘The world order which we seek,’ he said, ‘is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.’  The Four Freedoms for us, as for all free nations, depend upon a world in which peace and justice are maintained by the concerted effort of free nations.”

Good approach to today’s problems?

Westbrook Murphy serves as General Counsel of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation.