David S. Foglesong – From Allies to Enemies: Truman, Stalin and the Start of the Cold War
In April 1945, not long after Harry Truman succeeded Franklin Roosevelt as President, US, British, and Soviet troops met at the Elbe River and celebrated their impending victory over Nazi Germany. Two years later, just a month after Truman announced his doctrine for support of free peoples against outside pressures or internal subversion, financier and political advisor Bernard Baruch declared that the United States was in the midst of a “cold war,” with enemies “abroad and at home.” This lecture will analyze and explain the drastic deterioration of US-Soviet relations from the culmination of the wartime alliance to the first use of the term “cold war” in the United States. It will emphasize the influence of US domestic politics and the major changes in American public opinion about the Soviet Union during those two tumultuous years.
Dr. Fogelson is a historian of American Foreign Relations and Professor of History at Rutgers University Most of my research has focused on American Soviet and American-Russian relations.