My 17-year-old son just wrote a paper for his American History class laying much of the blame for McCarthyism on Truman's anti-Commuinist rhetoric. I said to him, among other things, "Read The Candy Bombers." Yes, Truman was not above harvesting political advantage by blurring the distinction between naive admirers of the Soviet Union like Henry Wallace, and outright Communists; but to read Andrei's book is to be struck by how very measured, and how fine-grained, were the responses of Truman and those around him to the very terrible threats of 1946-8. Andrei makes clear that the Soviet blockade of Berlin seemed to many leading figures to offer little choice save withdrawal, on the one hand, or a nuclear strike against a hopelessly superior Russian land force on the other--or quite possibly the one followed by the other. Truman had the steadiness, and also the confidence, to choose the one path which required neither surrender nor cataclysm.

Truman is enjoying a great renaissance of reputation nowadays. Peter Beinart, in The Good Fight, and Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, in Ethical Realism, extol the courage and wisdom Truman showed in standing up to both the anti-militarist followers of Wallace and the bellicose advocates of "roll-back." Truman feels like a role model waiting to be taken off the shelf. Indeed, Condoleezza Rice speaks constantly of the immediate post-war era as a paradigmatic moment in American history; she keeps in her office a portrait of George Marshall, Secretary of State in Truman's first term. But she has lost the right to invoke that comparison. Reading The Candy Bombers, one can not fail to be struck by how very much darker was the moment Truman faced than the one we faced even after 9/11; and how much finer was the judgment of this Missouri haberdasher than that of the equally inexperienced Texas governor.

Reading about Truman, Marshall, Lucius Clay and the other key players of the airlift makes you wonder all the more how things might have turned out had, say, Sandra Day O'Connor not followed the party line in Bush v. Gore. So little of the calamity we have suffered in recent years seems to follows inevitably from the terrorist attacks. On the one hand, Truman and his team were cautious where the magical thinkers of the Bush Administration were cocksure (a point repeatedly made by Lieven and Hulsman). On the other hand, and perhaps more strikingly, they were confident where the Bush team was consumed by our vulnerability. The generosity of the airlift, and of the Marshall Plan--which we offered to extend to the Soviets--was a sign of that confidence, in history and in our own prospects. And it was self-reinforcing: We acted in a way that enhanced our status, and thus enhanced our power--just the opposite of the downward spiral in which we seemed to be locked today.

Perhaps I'll write more later about what this could or should mean for our future