The Greece that the United States inherited from the British after World War II was not only poor and war-torn, much of the population homeless, but also corrupt, oligarchic, and violent, ruled by a despised king, a tiny right-wing elite, and a vast network of thugs, port dwellers, and longshoremen, who served as the king’s underground army. Up in the mountains, Communist guerrillas, many of them former resistance fighters who had battled the Nazis on behalf of the Allies, as much as for themselves, continued their ugly war. If they were beholden to anyone, it was to Tito’s Yugoslavia, not to the Kremlin; Stalin had little respect or concern for the Greek guerrillas. That fact didn’t matter to the Americans. As they saw it, all of the countries around Greece had fallen: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania. Greece would be the place where the West would take its stand. The Americans’ “domino theory,” introduced to American students in lesson plans about Vietnam, originated with Greece, which was seen as the first piece to fall before knocking down Iran in one direction and Italy in the other. Greece would stay anti-Communist at any price. In 1947, Truman went to Congress and pleaded with them to pass the Truman Doctrine.
The president’s language seventy years ago sounds surprisingly familiar. “The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the government’s authority,” the president told Congress:
The United States must supply this assistance. We have already extended to Greece certain types of relief and economic aid but these are inadequate. There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn. No other nation is willing and able to provide the necessary support for a democratic Greek government.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
Totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union would “undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States,” Truman said. “I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way … The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.”
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. Thus began a key component of American exceptionalism: the idea that America’s duty to the world was to liberate foreign peoples. What Truman had meant was that this liberation would come only to those who imitated the American way of life. The catalyst for most of the foreign policy of the postwar era, the foundation of the new world order, the place that enshrined a moral rhetoric and self-belief in all Americans, was Greece, a country whose history few of us cared to learn. This was part of the “American intervention” I kept hearing about: the Truman Doctrine.
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ONE OF THE FIRST VICTIMS of the Cold War era was the American journalist George Polk, who was murdered one evening in Thessaloniki. Polk was handsome, flirtatious, outspoken, ambitious, and skeptical of the American project in Greece. “We have to stand for decency and for freedom,” he said. “We’re no better than the Russians otherwise.” He stood among several prominent reporters of the time—William Shirer, Edward Murrow—who saw dark clouds in Truman’s vision. In Greece, they observed the beginnings of America’s imperial reflex; a satellite country only had to cry “communism,” and more funds and weapons would follow. Polk repeatedly questioned the wisdom of Truman’s policy and exposed Greek political corruption. His reporting undermined American aid to Greece and threatened America’s collaboration with the Greek government against the Communists. When his body washed up in a Thessaloniki bay, the authorities pinned the murder on the reds.
Some fifty years later it emerged that the American journalist was most likely killed by Greek thugs hired by the Greek regime, which was covered up with the assistance of American embassy staff, high-ranking CIA officials, and even American journalists. Every year, awards in George Polk’s name are given to American journalists—I had friends who had been recipients—but never had I heard anyone mention that one of the most prestigious American journalism awards was in the name of an American journalist who had been silenced with the collusion of his own country.
In the late forties, the United States was giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Greece in economic and military aid. The USS Missouri paid a visit to Athens, as it had to Turkey. Greece soon experienced the circus-troupe invasion of Pax Americana: advisors, soldiers, teachers, spies, businessmen, diplomats, and agronomists. “Americans are now so numerous here that practically every large café in Athens prints its bill of fare in both Greek and English,” said Polk, according to his biographer Kati Marton. Americans worked in Greek government ministries. They set up shop at the embassy near the royal residence; many of the Americans lived in the same building off Constitution Square. According to the bilateral agreements signed around the administration of economic aid, the historian John O. Iatrides writes, “American officials were given authority to supervise virtually every function of the Greek state.”
The rest of the American money went to the military, with which the Greek government began a series of emergency measures to purge Communists and disloyal citizens from society. On some of the thousands of islands strewn across the Aegean Sea, the Greeks constructed internment camps, where citizens were “reeducated” and forced to renounce communism. The government tortured them with truncheon beatings, and gave them electric shocks, and bound their skin with wire. So-called and supposed Communists—or anyone who criticized the regime—were regularly executed, cities locked down under curfews. The streets of Athens were festooned with American military regalia.
But unlike the stream of images we see today from war-torn places, in Greece, as Marton writes, there were “no cameras to expose the ravaged faces of hunger, the broken bodies of those held captive on barren islands merely on suspicion of Communist activity.” Many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times and Henry Luce’s Time, instead reinforced the Americans’ and Greek royalists’ propaganda. It was these policies, the American policies, that drove more Greeks to join the dreaded Communist resistance.