* This policy shift has a fascinating and evocative genealogy. Truman, Marshall, and Clay (as a West Point cadet) had all served in the military in World War I, and Marshal and Clay in the years between the two wars, with a vantage point on the crushing of Germany after Versailles and its ascendance in the 1930s. Suggestively, moreover, all three grew up in southern and (in Truman’s case) border states in the decades after the Civil War and Reconstruction and witnessed the results of the policies imposed by the victorious North on the defeated South. |