many scholars have pointed to the origins of the hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States as originating as early as 1917, when the Bolshevik Party rested control of the Russian government, establishing the first Marxist oriented revolutionary government. Many Americans were worried about the so-called "Red" government, and a wave of fear was precipitated in the United States just after the 1917 revolution. For example, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, eager to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1920, wrote:
Like a prairie fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order. . . It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, eating into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society (quoted in Weisberger 13-14).
This tone and timbre may remind one of the rhetoric of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, and the next few decades were filled with an ebb and flow of negative and positive relations between the two countries. However, with the advent of Adolf Hitler and the fascist's designs on Europe, Americans tended to view the Soviet Union as a necessary ally, and Josef Stalin as a wartime leader needed by both countries to stop the Nazi onslaught (Fontaine chap. 5).
The primary role of Harry S. Truman and his administration was in the events that occurred after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the end of the war on the European front. Roosevelt had commented that although he did not trust the Soviets, Stalin was a man he could "deal with." Truman, on the other hand, had little international experience, and never trusted Stalin. Interestingly enough, both Roosevelt and Winston Churchill believed that Stalin...