In A Cross of Iron, Hogan, best known for his advocacy of the corporatist theory of diplomatic history, traces Harry S. Truman’s struggles to wage the Cold War abroad while fighting off the evils of deficit spending and militarism at home. In the process, Hogan provides the best and most up-to-date history of the origins of the national security state.

Invoking the nation’s struggle to gain and maintain its independence from European monarchism and colonialism, apologists for the national security state fashioned a rationale replete with notions of U.S. exceptionalism, especially manifest destiny. Basic assumptions emerged in the long telegram, the Truman Doctrine, and NSC-68. The struggle with the Soviet Union and its minions was total and long term. Capitalism and communism were mutually exclusive. Even if the West was willing to countenance peaceful coexistence, the Soviet bloc was not. Marxism-Leninism called for world revolution and total victory. In such a cataclysmic conflict, struggle was not limited to the battlefield. All of the nation’s resources and all of its energy and talent had to be mobilized, thereby obliterating old distinctions between civilian and military, between the home front and the front line. Only a monolithic United States could stand up to the monolithic Communist threat. Central to the argument of the national security managers was the notion that peace and freedom were indivisible. The logic of the situation seemed to leave the U.S. people with little choice but to defend their own security and liberty by defending peace and freedom everywhere. Out of this conviction, of course, came the domino theory.

Though they were just as staunchly anti-Communist as the spokesmen for the national security state, conservatives were appalled by the implications of this approach to the Cold War. At the dawn of the republic, according to the historical narrative put forward by these dissenters, free men and women had extricated themselves from the rigidly stratified and monopolized societies of the European continent. They had rebelled against unjust taxes and the abuses of arbitrary military and political authority. They had founded a new nation with a constitution that constrained the state and divided authority in a checked and balanced federal government. Combined with an isolationist foreign policy, this system had produced a society of free and prosperous individuals unmatched in human history. “As conservatives saw it,” Hogan explains, “the welfare state that had emerged with the New Deal and the warfare state that was taking shape in the postwar period imperiled the values and traditions that had contributed to this narrative of national greatness” (p. 8).

Throughout the Truman presidency, these two camps waged a battle without grey areas. Both sides spoke in a language of ideological opposites: freedom vs. tyranny, democracy vs. totalitarianism, civilian vs. military control, free market capitalism vs. a controlled economy. Implicit in the conservative view was the notion that the United States must maintain its separateness to fulfill its historical destiny. Au contraire, declared the national security managers. To spread democracy and free enterprise through force of arms and foreign aid would not repudiate the nation’s destiny, but fulfill it, would not corrupt the nation’s institutions, but validate them. Harry S. Truman’s great contribution to the early history of the Cold War was to mediate a compromise, a compromise most frequently identified with the Eisenhower administration but one that actually emerged during his tenure. Truman shared Robert A. Taft’s concerns about maintaining a balanced budget and civilian control of the military, but he was absolutely convinced of the need to contain communism. “Although conservative critics would not prevail in the Great Debate,” Hogan argues, “the traditional values they defended would lead to a system of collective security based on the principle of specialization and on a capital-intensive strategy of deterrence. Under this system, the United States would contribute foreign aid and high technology weaponry, especially air atomic power, while allied governments would provide much of the military manpower” (p. 20).

A Cross of Iron examines the way in which the Great Debate shaped the various facets of the emerging national security state. First was the struggle over military organization and the contours of the new Department of Defense. Unification raised the specter of military domination of civilian life and the institutionalization of the garrison state. The army took the part of the national security managers and the navy of conservatives. The outcome was, to use Hanson Baldwin’s phrase, “a happy compromise.” Truman and George C. Marshall brokered a solution that left the various branches of the armed forces intact but supervised by a civilian secretary of defense. Institutionalization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the National Security Act coupled with the cabinet status of the secretary of defense established “the National Military Establishment as a major rival to the State Department in the field of foreign policy” (p. 28), but the democratic process had ensured that the garrison state did not become a reality in the early Cold War United States.

No principle was more sacred to Americans than a balanced budget, but the Cold War and the emerging national security state posed far greater threats to fiscal responsibility than the programs of the New Deal-Fair Deal. Taft and the conservatives feared that expenditures for the military force and foreign aid needed to battle communism on every front would bankrupt the nation and lead to the emergence of state-controlled economies at home and abroad. If this scenario were to play out, the Soviets would have won a victory without shedding a drop of blood. Military planners felt no such constraints. They calculated the country’s commitments abroad, noted the gap between these commitments and the nation’s military capabilities (a gap that they portrayed as increasingly vast), and demanded an armed force large enough to meet all contingencies. In the middle were Truman and Marshall, who favored a military establishment large enough to signal U.S. resolve and make the policy of containment credible. Compared to the national security managers and their allies in the military, in other words, Truman and Marshall favored asymmetrical rather than symmetrical containment.

Hogan argues that Truman managed to hold the line until the Korean War. Certainly forces were coalescing in favor of a massive military buildup before that fateful day in June 1950. The military was using increasingly alarmist language in arguing for larger defense appropriations. The detonation of a Soviet atomic bomb, the fall of China, and other events abroad provoked demands from the press and policymakers for Truman to cast fiscal caution to the wind. And by 1950 the growing alliance among the defense establishment, science, and industry was producing a vested interest with a huge stake in ever-expanding defense appropriations. Nevertheless, Truman, in tacit alliance with the conservatives, was able to restrain spending. With the outbreak of war, however, that restraint became impossible. While formulated before hostilities began, NSC-68 was implemented only after war erupted. In the months that followed, the president moved to hammer out a peace treaty with Japan, expand the military assistance program, dispatch U.S. troops to Europe, and push aggressively for German rearmament. An emergency supplemental appropriations bill of $11.6 billion produced an army of 11 divisions, an air force of 58 groups, and a navy of 282 vessels. And that was just the beginning.

Hogan admirably refuses to fall into the trap of economic determinism. Although the economy began sliding into a recession in 1949, with tax revenues falling and expenditures for social programs expected to increase, Hogan does not attribute NSC-68 and the military buildup that ensued to a Wall Street conspiracy. He does blame the neglect of social policies that characterized the second Truman administration, however, on the ballooning defense and foreign aid budget. Observing that the 13 percent increase in the GNP that occurred between 1950 and 1953 was eaten up by the national security state, Hogan declares that the poor, the sick, the aged, and the oppressed of the United States were sacrificed on a “cross of iron,” that is, the national security state.

If there was one issue that conservatives and New Dealers-turned-cold-warriors should have agreed on, it was universal military training (UMT). National security managers favored it because it would provide a substantive and symbolic weapon in the total war being waged against the forces of international communism, a true blending of the civilian and the military. What could be more compelling than the virtuous citizen-soldier training to protect democracy at home and abroad? Conservatives should have supported UMT because it would spare the nation the dangers of a standing army, exert less pressure on the budget than a large professional force, and validate the notion of a virtuous citizenry. Indeed, UMT’s value as a unifying weapon with which to fight the Cold War was underlined by Truman’s fervent support of it.

Instead of rallying to the cause, Taft allied with Henry Wallace and his supporters to defeat UMT. Congress then sought a middle ground by reinstituting Selective Service following the Czech crisis of 1948. One explanation for the failure of UMT was the conservatives’ aversion to anything that smacked of New Deal planning. So great was that aversion that when the issue of control of atomic materials and scientific information arose, Taft and his supporters favored giving it to the military rather than David Lilienthal and the Atomic Energy Commission. (Taft lost.) In fact, what doomed UMT was the opposition of labor, farmers, and church groups. It may have been, even in the overheated atmosphere of the early Cold War, that ideology was important only in the absence of powerful interest groups.

One wishes that Hogan had spent less time on the details of bureaucratic infighting and more on the intellectual-cultural-political underpinnings of the two contending parties. What he says on the subject is richly provocative; indeed, he is at his best when he focuses on the transforming nature of the Cold War, its power, like the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, to force Americans to reexamine their collective and individual identities. He sees the origins of the national security mentality in the corporatism that underlay the New Deal. The architects of Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic programs favored a system of power sharing between the different branches of government and between the public and private sectors. This philosophy in turn borrowed from the strain of progressivism that envisioned a corporate commonwealth based on economic planning and led by disinterested professional experts. Conservatives, comprising in the early Cold War period Taft Republicans and southern Democrats, adopted the rhetoric of Jeffersonian republicans and late-nineteenth-century populists – a political and economic vision in which authority was defused and decision making dispersed. The system would be rationalized by the marketplace and by the virtue of the self-reliant individual.

Hogan, however, does not take us back to the New Freedom and the New Nationalism (rhetorical and philosophical if not political and legislative realities) even though that is the logic of the digression. Indeed, he could have gone back further to the memorable debates over the nation’s appropriate response to European monarchism and colonialism that rent the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author does make a connection between the Taft approach to the Cold War and the New Look defense policies of the Republicans. It seems that Eisenhower’s concessions to the right wing of the Republican party were more than just rhetorical.

There is something bothersome about the thesis implied in the book’s title. Throughout Cross of Iron, Hogan insists on pitting the “warfare state” against the “welfare state,” with the latter eventually consumed by the former. In fact, I would argue, the two merged into an anti-Communist alliance during the early years of the Cold War, and it was that coalition that sustained the United States during its half-century of combat with the forces of international communism. The activist foreign policies of the post-1945 era that helped produce the policy of containment, Korea, and Vietnam were a melding of the philosophies of conservative anti-Communists who defined national security in terms of bases and alliances and who were basically xenophobic, and liberal reformers who were determined to safeguard the national interest by exporting democracy and facilitating overseas social and economic progress. Spearheading the first group were former isolationists like Henry Luce who believed that if the United States could not hide from the world it must control it, rabid anti-Communists who saw any expansion of Marxism-Leninism as a mortal threat to the United States, and elements of the U.S. military and corporate establishments with a vested interest in the Cold War. Taft, former president Herbert Hoover, and the neo-isolationists were rather quickly absorbed by the neo-imperialists.

Joining these realpolitikers, true believers, and political opportunists were the leading lights of the liberal community – Arthur Schlesinger, Dean Acheson, Joseph Rauh (head of the ADA), and Hubert Humphrey. Products of World War II, these internationalists saw U.S. interests as being tied up with those of the other countries. They opposed communism because it constituted a totalitarian threat to cultural diversity, individual liberty, and self-determination. Amid the anxieties generated by the Cold War, anticommunism was a political necessity for liberals whose views on domestic issues made them ideologically suspect. Conservatives and their liberal adversaries may have differed over notions of the ideal United States but not over whether the United States was ideal or over whether it was duty-bound to lead the “free world” into a new era of prosperity and stability.

Hogan’s focus on the domestic in hopes of understanding the international is eminently appropriate. The communization of Eastern Europe, the Soviet detonation of an atomic device, the fall of China, and the Korean War were important, even crucial triggering devices in the Cold War, and the response they provoked was entirely, uniquely American. The key to understanding the United States’s role in the Cold War, as Hogan implies, is found in the nation’s institutions and traditions. And, as a generation of diplomatic historians have discovered, the Cold War is an endlessly productive gateway to understanding those institutions and traditions.