Reagan’s Secret Iran Decision Recalls Aborted Truman Plan

Ronald Reagan is not the first President to make a secret foreign policy decision without bringing his secretary of state into the plan, but at least one earlier proposal was killed by a secretary’s 11th-hour objections.

The circumstances of the earlier case were different but just as extraordinary as those that persuaded Reagan to approve clandestine arms shipments to Iran despite reservations by Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

In October, 1948, President Harry S. Truman decided on a foreign policy move fraught with unpredictable consequences, both political and geopolitical. Truman was dissuaded at the last moment from sending an emissary to try to change the mind of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, the toughest Russian leader since Ivan the Terrible; the hostages were 3 million Berliners and the peace of Europe.

Previous Iran Dealings

The stakes were also high when Reagan sent former national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane to try to improve relations with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime and persuade the Iranians to encourage the release of American hostages in Lebanon.

In 1948, Truman, battling uphill to defeat Republican Thomas E. Dewey and just back from the first leg of his flamboyant whistle-stop campaign to win a full term in his own right after assuming the presidency on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was looking for a way to counter left-wing attempts to label him a warmonger.

An idea hit him: Send a high-placed emissary to Moscow to convince Stalin that Americans still sought peace, even in the face of the Red Army’s continuing blockade of Berlin.

No Word to Marshall

Without a word to Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Truman approached Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who reluctantly agreed to undertake the mission. Vinson, a former congressman and an old friend of Truman, owed his Supreme Court appointment to the President.

“Truman doubtless thought of the mission in terms of Vinson’s making a plea to Stalin for mutual understanding and not in terms of diplomatic negotiation, circumventing Marshall,” Truman biographer Robert J. Donovan wrote. Allied emissaries had conferred twice with Stalin about the Berlin deadlock, Donovan noted, and all lower-level negotiations had been fruitless.

Marshall, then in Paris working with his French and British counterparts on a joint Allied position for placing the Berlin blockade issue before the U.N. Security Council, had reached agreement with the other Allies late in September that none of the three governments was to continue to negotiate with Moscow on the question.

Truman was probably unaware of these developments, in Donovan’s view, when he directed Undersecretary of State Robert A. Lovett to arrange for Vinson to call on Stalin and instructed his press secretary to ask the radio networks for 30 minutes to make a presidential address on the night of Oct. 5.

Negative Reaction

Hours before he was to deliver a speech appealing for a new era of trust in U.S.-Soviet relations, Truman sent a teletype message to Paris, informing Marshall of the plan. Marshall’s reaction was prompt, vigorous and vehemently negative.

“The objections were obvious,” Donovan wrote in “Conflict and Crisis,” the first volume of his Truman biography. “The mission would leave the British and French in the lurch. It would appear to circumvent the (White House’s National) Security Council at a critical time. It would look, reasonably, like the injection of politics into diplomacy.”

Truman bowed to Marshall’s objections and immediately instructed his political advisers to cancel the plan and withdraw the request for air time.