This book is right out of the KGB's disinformation file. It is the line they peddled for 40 years, until the whole corrupt system collapsed around their ears. Apparently there are still true believers living as free men in the USA (thanks to the likes of Harry Truman & Ronald Reagan) where they are able to diseminate the tired old, and now defunct, party line without fear of censorship.
Has this guy read none of the voluminous material that has been made available during the 1990's by both the Russian government (ie. KGB archives - published by Yale UP) and that of the US (ie. the Venona transcripts)? Or does he think, as many of the comrades do, that they are all forgeries?
Had this author been a Soviet academic living under the Communist regime who wrote a book accusing Stalin of being responsible for the Cold War not only would his work not have been published, but he would have found himself in the GULAG.
Such are the blessings of American Democracy and the American Capitalist system that even someone who has nothing intelligent to say can do so without fear of govenment reprisals, and find a publisher willing to publish his nonsense in the hope of making a few bucks.
Stanford UP should have more sense than to publish such rubbish.
There are plenty of Marxist/Maoist publishing houses around where this kind of book could find a more appropriate outlet. What's more the History Book Club should be ashamed of itself for diseminating it.

This is an interesting book, with its own eccentricities. When Truman left office he was one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. But his fundamental decency and frankness only endeared people after the presidencies of Johnson and Nixon, and his academic reputation only increased after the first clash with the cold war revisionists in the early seventies. Whereas his next five successors were all tarred by the Vietnam debacle, Truman's confrontation with Stalin and the formation of the western alliance appears to be the hallmark of responsible realism. Offner's critical account, by contrast, is the lengthiest denunciation of his foreign policy since Gabriel and Joyce Kolko's The Limits of Power, published thirty years ago.

The greatest weakness of this book is how little new there is in it. Although this book has 98 pages of notes to 474 pages of text, the most common primary source are the documents published in the foreign relations series, most of which were published two decades ago. Although Offner cites more than 30 sets of private papers, most have been readily available for years. Indeed, this book is not all that different from Melvyn Leffler's A Preponderance of Power (1992). The most important difference is that whereas both books provided a large amount of damning criticism of Truman, Leffler's overall verdict was somewhat softer than Offner's. Offner's book is also more focused on Truman's own personal role. Offner does provide more on the creation of Israel, and the partition of Germany, though he says little about the cold war's consequences in Latin America, where the confrontational atmosphere helped cut short a brief liberal interlude. There are a few errors: Thomas Dewey won 189, not 89, electoral votes in 1948 and Klement Gottwald in 1947 was Czechoslovakia's prime minister, not its president. Somewhat more discouragingly, Offner, in his criticism of the atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, does not discuss the counter-arguments of Richard Frank in his book Downfall. And many scholars would vigorously disagree with his assertion that half the Palestinian refugees in 1948 left voluntarily or at the instigation of their leaders.

With these caveats in mind, Offner provides a compelling case. It may not be new, but it is based on strong evidence. Truman was a parochial man, giving to making blandly prejudicial comments about blacks, Asians and Jews. The history he read was uncritically patriotic, didactic and melodramatic and this encouraged unhelpful tendencies in Truman's diplomacy. Offner does not say the cold war was Truman's fault, but clearly he did many things to make things worse. He accused the Soviet Union of clearly breaking treaty committments when the language was ambiguous, simplied complex problems in Korea and Greece to Soviet agression, and wrongly viewed Mao as a Soviet puppet.

Truman's positions usually had considerable support from the other members of his adminstration. But it is also true that Truman ignored Harriman's advice to be more accommodating towards the Soviet Union in Japan. He failed to support Byrnes' suggestion of demanding Chiang Kai-Shek's support for a coalition government as a quid pro quo for transporting Nationalist troops to Manchuria, and in doing so lost his best chance to stop a civil war, that Chiang would almost certainly lose. He ignored Kennan's and Elsey's belief that the Truman Doctrine was overstated, and he believed that the Russians were about to attack Turkey when even the Turks knew that was not going to happen. Truman ignored General Clay's and General Marshall's calls for compromise in Germany, which lead to partition. He ignored Acheson and Lillienthal's proposals for sharing atomic energy and by choosing Bernard Baruch to head the plan, guaranteed that the Soviet Union would never support it. Truman ignored the consensus of most State Department experts that recognition of Mao was inevitable. Truman never dealt with Enrico Fermi's opposition to making an H-bomb, and he and Acheson ignored George Kennan's belief that they should at least try to negotiate in good faith with Stalin over the latter's offer to reunify Germany in 1952.

One should point out that Truman's bombing of Nagasaki, if not Hiroshima, showed a horrifying moral blindness and indifference. Truman and Acheson did not even try to discuss Mao's offers of a relationship in 1949. Truman and his advisers also ensured that the Marshall Plan would only offer aid to the Soviet Union on terms that they knew it would reject. In the Korean war Truman unwisely supported MacArthur's expansive plans, ignored clear Chinese warnings, supported elements of MacArthur's dangerous policy even after firing him, and probably extended the war two years because he did not recognize that "voluntary repatriation" of POWS violated the Geneva Convention and under South Korean and Taiwanese police was often a farce. Even in Poland, where Stalin's conduct was most unforgivable, the United States could have conceded the Oder-Neisse border, which it eventually did. If one had to point out the fundamental flaw of Truman's foreign policy, it was that it sought to rehabilitate Germany economically without doing the same for the Soviet Union it had so viciously ravaged. Ultimately, Offner provides a clear case against the limitations of Truman's foreign policy.