Truman "cold War Consensus" Of The Formation

This thesis consists of four chapters, which firstly explores the concept of the ColdWar Consensus then mainly focuses on the causes of the construction of the consensusduring tenure of Truman Administration. The major point of this thesis is that the Cold WarConsensus, which had deep ideological resource, was the result of Truman Administration'smanipulation. Now, the following is the primary content of each chapter:The so-called "the Cold War consensus" means not only a basically commonviewpoints about the world affairs shared by all parties, races and classes in the politics,society and culture of America, but also the identifying-with ideologically and thesupporting-to behaviorally the America's domestic and abroad Cold War policies, againstthe background of America-Soviet relations' development from the cooperation to theconfrontation and the launching of American Cold War policies after the Second WorldWar. With respect to the idea factors of the Cold War consensus, it expressed the basicallycommon viewpoints about the world affairs shared by all the American society. Accordingto the viewpoint, America should be the leader of a free world;the Soviet Union was acompletely evil socialist nation;other socialist nations obeyed the command of the Moscowand attempted to rule the whole world;the third world's freedom means to break away fromthe control of communism and to develop following the western mode;America's westernallies must be brought into a global system of containment communism. Behaviorally, theCold War consensus manifested itself from bipartisanship in the foreign policy and theestablishment of presidential dominance over Congress on foreign affairs;the reaching ofagreement on Cold War policies in the public opinion, the producing of a "thesis of theconsensus" in American society in the academia.The Cold War consensus was constructed deeply on some ideological foundations,including anticommunism, internationalism as the diplomatic principle, and a strongnationalism.The Truman Administration played a decisive role in the formation of the Cold Warconsensus. It mobilized completely various strength and resources of American society afterthe Second World War. It not only established a whole set of Cold War system to coordinateall fields at home, but also launched a crazy large-scale anticommunism propaganda andbrought thoroughly the domestic political life into the mode of Cold War, which resulted in ahysterically political environment characterized as anticommunism in the whole country. Inaddition, the Truman Administration manipulated the mass media and publicized strongly thegovernmental anticommunism idea and the Cold War policies by the means of holdingperiodically news conferences and cultivating elite public opinion, etc. The emergence offree-conservative ideology in the academia resulted mainly from the TrumanAdministration's effort to establish the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.