Looking back on how decisively the Cold War ended in America's favour, it is easy to forget how much doubt there was at the start, among Americans and Soviets alike, that the United States was up to the task of defending its vision of the post-war world order. George Kennan, the storied American diplomat responsible for the 1946 'Long Telegram' from Moscow, recalled in his memoirs that the Soviets 'thought it probable that... Americans, in particular, would not be able to muster, as a nation, the leadership, the imagination, the political skill, the material resources, and above all the national self-discipline necessary' to prevail in the emerging global contest. Certain members of President Harry Truman's administration apparently harboured doubts of their own: Secretary of State Dean Acheson, for one, thought it necessary to 'shock the country' into the realisation that supplying large amounts of economic and military aid to a devastated Europe was vital to America's interests at a time when American-Soviet nego-tiations over the continent's future were going badly. Truman himself would outline what became known as the 'Truman Doctrine' in a speech before a joint session of Congress on 12 March 1947 requesting aid for Greece and Turkey. In that speech, he made clear his own view that a global struggle was under way and that 'the free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms'. At this opening stage of the Cold War, the president's hawkish stance was a controversial one. Asked to comment on an early draft of Truman's speech, George Marshall, America's military chief of staff during the Second World War and Acheson's predecessor as secretary of state, commented that it contained 'too much flamboyant anti-Communism'.
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