Harry Truman, warned by leading GOP senator Arthur Vandenberg that he would have to “scare the hell out of the American people” to gain congressional approval for a $400 million aid package for Greece and Turkey, delivered an alarmist speech in March 1947 intended to stake out the American role in the postwar world. Communism, the president declared, fed on economic dislocation and imperiled the world. “If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority,” he gravely concluded in an early version of the domino theory, “the effect upon its neighbor Turkey, would be immediate and
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