Korea and United States Foreign Policy During the Truman Adminietraticn

Abstract

This thesis is intended to be primarily all exposition and analysis of the Truman Administration's policies towards Korea. The greater part of the work deals, of course, with the Korean war and the response of the United States Government to that conflict; I have also made some attempt to fit President Truman's Korean policy within the framework of his overall foreign policy. The traditional criticism directed against those who write about recent history is that one must inevitably lack sufficient perspective. While acknowledging the validity of this charge, I feel that a start must be made somewhere, and that those who write first on a topic perform some service, even if it is only the dubious one of stimulating a desire in others to improve on such inadequate beginnings. A more serious problem in doing research on recent events is the limited quantity of source material available. I did not, however, find this a great handicap, thanks to the speed with which the United States government releases documents, and the general openness of the American system of government. As Max Freedman, the Washington correspondent of the Manchester Guardian has said, "Everything that a reporter wants to know about the United States Government is spread out openly before him in the records of committee hearings, Congressional debates and transcripts of press conferences. There's no such complete freedom from mystery in the rest of the world."