ABSTRACT
Whatever lingering hopes Harry Truman harbored for reviving the Fair Deal perished due to the victory of the CCP in China and the war in Korea. In his 1950 State of the Union address, Truman devoted most of his attention to foreign policy, but also included a series of domestic initiatives. When war broke out in Korea, at first liberals hoped that a swift and firm response there might immunize the administration against further red-baiting, but subsequent reversals in Korea produced the opposite effect. The initial rally-around-the-president phenomenon soon gave way to criticism of Truman’s handling of the war. The fight in Korea would have been unnecessary, the China lobby argued, if Truman had prevented the triumph of Mao. By reversing course and adopting a more militant and military approach to the cold war, Truman implicitly agreed that his administration’s policy before Korea had been inadequate. McCarthy claimed that the ‘Korean deathtrap we can lay to the doors of the Kremlin and those who sabotaged rearming, including Acheson and the president’ [37 p. 295].
