| The relationship between Democratic President Harry S. Truman and the Republican-controlled 80th Congress was investigated to determine why these competing political forces cooperated to produce three policies critical to the origins of the Cold War: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Vandenberg Resolution, which laid the foundation for NATO. National and international factors combined to persuade Democrat and Republican to forge a foreign policy which dominates decision-making to this day.; Investigation showed that the major domestic factor was the agreement by Truman and the Congress that "politics should stop at the water's edge," i.e., partisan domestic considerations should not affect U.S. foreign policy. Bipartisanship was also strengthened by the leadership of Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, who, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, set Republican foreign policy and prevented isolationists from wielding influence.; Internationally, continued Soviet intransigence and aggression, such as Molotov's walkout from the Paris Conference on the Marshall Plan in June 1947 and the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, convinced U.S. foreign policy makers that economic and military steps should be taken to defend the West against possible future Soviet aggrandizement.; Finally, the question was posed whether this was the "golden age" or the only age of bipartisanship. It was concluded that except in an actual state of war, it was unlikely that a firm commitment by President and Congress to refrain from partisan politics, the open threat of an external enemy, the absence of an effective international arbiter, and the overwhelming support of the foreign policy establishment, the news media and the public would occur simultaneously again, producing another era of bipartisanship. |
