Two weeks ago, we’ve looked at the first period of Soviet liberalization under Nikita Khrushchev from the 1950s on. While these reforms ended the era of Stalinist totalitarianism, they petered out when Khrushchev lost interest in them and was eventually overthrown and replaced by the more conservative Leonid Brezhnev. It would take another generation until a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, would undertake another broad reform program. These reforms – like last time, in the realms of domestic, foreign, and economic policy – are the subject of this article. Of course, you’ll also find a few board games in it!

Freer Press, Freer Elections

The Soviet Union’s political landscape had ossified under Brezhnev. This stagnation (or, if you want to phrase it more positively, hyperstability) also ruled out any experiments after Brezhnev’s death in 1982, and so the Politburo selected his loyal lieutenant Yuri Andropov. Unfortunately, Andropov was already 68 and severely ill then. He died in 1984, to be succeeded by another Brezhnevite stalwart, Konstantin Chernenko, who was similarly afflicted and even older (72 at his accession). Chernenko died in 1985. The rapid succession of aging Soviet leaders is poignantly captured in the contemporary joke: Margaret Thatcher calls Ronald Reagan: “It’s a pity you didn’t come to the funeral of the Soviet general secretary. Marvelous. A great spectacle. I’m totally going again next year.”

Another quasi-contemporary (1986) satirical take on the Soviet gerontocracy is Kremlin (Urs Hostettler, Fata Morgana): Players support the various Politburo members in the hopes of advancing those they have influence with to the top jobs, but many a hopeful candidate will die of stress and old age before realizing their ambitions.

After Chernenko’s death, even the most conservative Politburo members saw the need for a different tack: They elected Mikhail Gorbachev as their new leader in 1985, a real baby at age 54. Gorbachev’s reformist leanings were well-known, but he proceeded cautiously in his first year. As with Khrushchev, the big programmatic changes were first announced at a Party Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s first slogan for his reforms was glasnost (openness). That included sweeping changes to Soviet citizens’ freedom of expression: Gorbachev encouraged the Soviet press to scrutinize politics instead of simply parroting the party line. Dissidents were released from prison. Even non-state-sponsored demonstrations were allowed – a powerful tool to express malcontent with the government. Of course, these reforms undermined the power base of the Communist Party – but Gorbachev hoped that he could steer the ship of state in the new environment and might even benefit from a freer populace.

Even more radical were Gorbachev’s institutional reforms, usually referred to as perestroika (restructuring): The Communist Party’s monopoly on power was cut off by establishing the Congress of People’s Deputies as an independent parliament, and while the first elections in 1989 were not fully free, it was the first time that Soviet citizens could select from several candidates in a contested election. Gorbachev himself chose to base his power no longer on his role as General Secretary of the Communist Party, and instead was elected President of the Soviet Union by the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1990.

This nascent democratization drive – eventually rather envisioned than enacted – makes for the most powerful card in the last phase (1985—1991) of the Cold-War-in-a-nutshell which is Twilight Squabble (David J. Mortimer, AEG): It’s a bit of speculation on the internal and external legitimacy and attractiveness a more democratic Soviet Union could have enjoyed.

Détente, Arms Control, and Sinatra

Speaking of external legitimacy and attractiveness: Gorbachev’s policies (and he himself) would prove immensely popular in the West… after he had weathered the initial suspicion. Gorbachev began to advocate for a return to détente soon after he assumed office, but US president Ronald Reagan assumed this to be a Soviet ploy. Only after Gorbachev had met Reagan at the 1986 Reykjavík summit did the president believe Gorbachev’s intentions to be genuine.

In the following years, the two of them agreed on far-reaching mutual disarmament, most notably the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Gorbachev’s immutable advocacy for arms reduction is reflected in Wir sind das Volk! – 2+2 (Richard Sivel/Peer Sylvester, Histogame) as his event card cannot be used for the arms race.

Besides the lofty realms of nuclear arms reduction, Gorbachev also had more grounded problems to deal with: The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up the failing pro-Soviet government there and had been embroiled since then in a costly and futile counter-insurgency. As the Soviet military could not present Gorbachev with a convincing roadmap on how to win the war, he decided to pull the Soviet forces out in 1988. By that time, the unsuccessful war had undermined the Soviet government’s legitimacy which had rested on its status as a military superpower, exacerbated by the new avenues of political expression open to disaffected citizens – the mothers of Soviet soldiers who fought (or had died) in Afghanistan were among the first to form associations, to pressure the government, and to protest.

In that sense, it is surprising that the withdrawal from Afghanistan can still net the Communist player points in 1989 (Jason Matthews/Ted Torgerson, GMT Games) – but the general principle holds true: The later the Soviets withdraw, the more their failure in Afghanistan becomes an asset to the opponents of Communist power.

Finally, Soviet power was the rock on which the Communist governments in Eastern Europe rested. Whenever they had been challenged – most importantly in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 – Soviet tanks had quashed the dissent. This limited sovereignty within the Eastern bloc had been the central tenet of Soviet foreign policy, after 1968 named the Brezhnev Doctrine. Gorbachev adopted a new approach: He would not militarily intervene in Eastern Europe anymore. Instead, the countries of the Warsaw Pact were free to “do it their way” – thus humorously called the Sinatra Doctrine.

Disruptive New Impulses for the Economy

Finally, Gorbachev’s reform agenda of perestroika also aimed to transform the Soviet economy. All Soviet leaders had engaged in some kind of economic reforms, so Gorbachev’s activity did not seem very surprising… until observers inside and outside of the Soviet Union realized how radically it would change the tenets of the Soviet economy, traditionally based on central planning, large state-owned companies, and very limited contacts with the outside world.

First, Gorbachev gave the state-owned companies much more leeway over what to produce and how to set prices. These market incentives were supposed to improve efficiency, but clashed with the existing structures.

Undeterred, Gorbachev went a step further and loosened the restriction on private enterprises. More Soviet citizens could start their own store or workshop and offer goods and services at their own responsibility.

Then, Gorbachev allowed for joint ventures with Western companies (provided the Soviet part owned a majority share), and even let them set up dependencies in the Soviet Union – the famous first McDonald’s restaurant in the Soviet Union opened in January 1990.

The End of the Cold War and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Gorbachev’s daring move to end hostilities with the West was an unqualified success. In late 1989, he and US president George H.W. Bush could merrily declare together that the Cold War was over.

The consequences of Gorbachev’s foreign policy reverberated through the Eastern Bloc: The allied Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe were swept away in 1989.

The Perestroika and Glasnost event in Wir sind das Volk! – 2+2 neatly shows the way in which Gorbachev’s reforms put stress on the system: On the one hand, it increases Soviet dominance and makes socialism more attractive (lower two icons). However, it also increases unrest in East Germany (fist icons).

Within the Soviet Union, the political freedoms granted allowed citizens to demand more freedoms. These centrifugal effects became particularly visible as most of the non-Russian republics soon had nationalist independence movements which began to eat away the Soviet Union from its ethnic fringes. Gorbachev responded by proposing a looser federation between the Soviet Republics.

The political reforms also had negative interaction with the economic reforms: On the one hand, the flurry of changes created new inefficiencies; on the other, the increased freedom of the press highlighted economic problems no matter if they were new or had existed for centuries. As Soviet economic performance thus both objectively worsened and also became more obvious to the average citizen, Gorbachev’s legitimacy eroded.

Hardliners within the Communist Party couped against Gorbachev in August 1991 to prevent the loose federation between the Soviet Republics. A coup might also spell the end for the player in the solo game Gorbachev: The Fall of Communism (R. Ben Madison, White Dog Games). It’s a States of Siege game with a twist: Whenever the marker on any of the five paths (four of which refer to various ethno-national groups in the Soviet Union, the fifth represents the Communist Party) reaches the center, the game is not lost immediately, but a coup is staged: If Gorbachev has enough elite support to weather it, he goes on to fight another day.

In history, that was not the case: While the coup failed, it made Gorbachev a lame duck. The supporters of reforms turned away from him and toward his erstwhile ally Boris Yeltsin (who had cut a much more dashing figure during the coup), and away from the Soviet Union and toward their respective ethno-national identities. Gorbachev resigned as president and the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991.

Games Referenced

Kremlin (Urs Hostettler, Fata Morgana)

Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)

Twilight Squabble (David J. Mortimer, AEG)

Wir sind das Volk! – 2+2 (Richard Sivel/Peer Sylvester, Histogame)

1989 (Jason Matthews/Ted Torgerson, GMT Games)

Gorbachev: The Fall of Communism (R. Ben Madison, White Dog Games)

Further Reading

The most influential work on Gorbachev’s time in office and his policies remains Brown, Archie: The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996.

A magisterial mosaic of Soviet social, economic, and cultural life is Schlögel, Karl: The Soviet Century. Archaeology of a Lost World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2023.

For the age of hyperstability before Gorbachev (and the discussion if it was an age of stability or stagnation), see the essays (in German, but with English abstracts) in: Belge, Boris/Deuerlein, Martin (eds.): Goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation? Perspektiven auf die sowjetische Ordnung der Brežnev-Ära, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2014.

On the transformative last third of the 20^th century in Russian history, see Kotkin, Stephen: Armageddon Averted. The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001.

On the end of the Cold War, see Dockrill, Saki Ruth: The End of the Cold War Era. The Transformation of the Global Security Order, Hodder, London 2005.

For the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, see Braithwaite, Rodric: Afgantsy. The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979—1989, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2011.

The Soviet Union was one of the great dictatorships of the 20^th century. It applied an immense amount of coercion on its own citizens as well as many of its neighboring countries. Yet the almost seventy years between the Soviet Union’s founding from the ashes of the Russian Civil War in 1922 and its fragmentation into 15 nation-states in 1991 are no monolith of unfreedom. There were two distinct periods of liberalization around a generation apart from each other – one that began under General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, and one that began under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Let’s look at them, beginning with Khrushchev’s thaw, in terms of domestic, foreign, and economic policy. The post on Gorbachev’s reforms will follow in two weeks. As always, there will be board games along the way.

Freedom of Thought, Speech, and Political Expression

Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union curtailed its citizens’ expression dramatically. Historiography has recounted Stalin’s reign of terror in detail, yet the best-known expression of the totalitarian control to which the Soviet Union aspired from the 1930s on is George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: Its one-party state does not only control citizens’ access to information (they are being exposed to constant propaganda and expected to keep up with its frequently changing, often contradictory contents), but demands active participation in the daily reconstruction of the system, ranging from institutionalized “two-minute hate” against political enemies to unlimited devotion to the “Big Brother” at the top of the pyramid.

The Soviet equivalent to the “Big Brother,” of course, was Stalin who was exalted in an official cult of personality as a wise and infallible leader, working tirelessly for the security and well-being of the Soviet Union. Whatever went wrong on the Soviet Union’s inexorable march of progress was the fault of an inept underling or a shadowy enemy.

When Stalin died, his lieutenants fought briefly, but viciously over his succession. Nikita Khrushchev emerged victorious. Khrushchev had been as loyal to Stalin as his chief rivals and immediatly used Stalinist methods to depose Lavrentiy Beria, the powerful Minister of Internal Affairs (and thus chief of the domestic security services). Beria was charged with treason, put through a mock trial, and executed.

Khrushchev’s skillful power politics could also swing the other way, though. He prepared a report on Stalin’s crimes which he delivered to a stunned audience at the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956. For four hours, Khrushchev detailed Stalin’s party purges, his deportation of whole peoples deemed unloyal, and, most of all, how Stalin had established a cult of personality in which he was almost worshipped like a god.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization drive did not stop at mere proclamations. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a lessening of censorship: Alexander Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish his Gulag novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.

There were limits, however: Criticism of Stalin’s Gulags was one thing, criticism of the October Revolution another. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was not published in the USSR. When Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in literature for it, he and his family were threatened by agents of the state. Cowed, Pasternak did not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize.

Still, Khrushchev’s pivot represented an important turn in the state’s relationship with violence. While Soviet citizens were still routinely surveilled and subjected to coercion, it was neither with the overwhelming force of Stalinism nor with its unpredictability. The age of escalating purges, in which the accusers of today would be the accused of tomorrow was over.

Peaceful Coexistence and Khrushchev’s Many Other Schemes

Khrushchev’s 1956 speech was meant to remain secret, known only to its direct recipients and the allied Communist governments in Eastern Europe, but a member of the Polish Communist party smuggled a copy abroad via the Israeli embassy in Warsaw. From there, it soon gained wide circulation, and while Khrushchev had intended it to be a domestic power play only (it delegitimized his rivals Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov), he now also reaped benefits abroad: The post-Stalinist Soviet Union was naturally a more attractive ally and role model for both the socialist movements in Europe and the decolonizing and freshly independent nations in Africa and Asia.

This unintended benefit is the focus of the foreign-policy heavy Twilight Struggle‘s De-Stalinization card: The Soviet player may move up to four points of influence around on the globe. That may seem like a zero-sum game – after all, the influence is not added, but only moved. But the Soviet Union typically has a lot of spare influence in Eastern Europe after the first one or two turns, and De-Stalinization is the earliest and best way to gain access to faraway continents, chiefly South America (and, to a lesser degree, Africa).

Even before Khrushchev’s speech was leaked, his approach to foreign policy markedly differed from Stalin’s last years. When the relationship with the Soviet Union’s erstwhile allies had deteriorated after the end of World War II, Stalin had adopted a confrontational stance based on the assumption that the world was split in two hostile camps. Khrushchev, on the other hand, approached the western powers under the new motto of peaceful coexistence. Socialism and capitalism could both inhabit the same world. Of course, Khrushchev as a convinced Communist believed that his system would eventually triumph. Until then, peaceful coexistence would not only foster peace, but also make socialism more attractive, and free up resources for economic development and consumer goods (more on that below).

Khrushchev was always better at initiating things than at seeing them through. Peaceful coexistence gave way to other projects – be that the support of nationalist movements in the global south or a re-newed competition with the West over Central Europe. And while Khrushchev thought that the Soviet Union and the western powers could live next to one another, that tolerance did not extend to heterodox socialist ideas within his own sphere of influence: When the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party announced to withdraw the country from the Warsaw Pact and hold free elections, Khrushchev had the reform movement quashed by Soviet tanks.

Consumer Goods, (Non-)Communal Apartments, …Corn?

The Soviet economy under Stalin had been tuned to increase heavy industrial output to achieve a fast industrialization on the one hand and provide the basis for the country’s military security. This approach was validated by the country’s survival of the Nazi invasion and its eventual military victory in 1945. The proponents of this economic policy which usually went together with ideological mobilization and a confrontational foreign policy were called to adhere to politika. Yet after Stalin’s death, the rival faction of tekhnika gained ground: Its advocates favored a less aggressive foreign policy, less ideological mobilization, and, most of all, more market elements in the economy which would then produce more consumer goods.

Khrushchev positioned himself in the middle: Heavy industry would have priority (the Soviet Union was in a nuclear arms race with the United States whose economy was around three times as large as the Soviet, after all), but more attention would be given to consumer goods than before. Soviet citizens enjoyed a limited amount of prosperity with radios, washing machines, and sometimes even cars. Khrushchev saw this also as an instrument in the systemic competition of the Cold War: Material comfort and personal lifestyles would influence people’s allegiances as much as military strength or ideological treatises.

Khrushchev’s confidence in that regard led him to agree with the United States on mutual national exhibitions which would showcase their respective country to the citizens of the other. The confidence, however, was not quite justified: The Soviet exhibition in New York aroused curiosity, but the American one in Moscow was positively overrun. It also produced one of the iconic pictures of the Cold War with Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice President Richard Nixon debating the merits of their respective systems surrounded by American household appliances – the “Kitchen Debate.”

Some Soviet citizens might have dreamed of living in America, but their personal lifestyles already became more akin to those of Americans under Khrushchev. Even more important than the new consumer goods were their living conditions: Housing in big Soviet cities had been dominated by kommunalkas – large apartments from pre-revolutionary times which had been split to accommodate several families, each living in a single room and sharing the kitchen and bathroom with the others. These crammed living spaces afforded their inhabitants no privacy whatsoever. Only the elites of Stalin’s Soviet Union had apartments to themselves. Khrushchev started an ambitious housing program based on prefabricated, concrete-paneled apartment buildings which allowed millions of Soviet citizens to move into an apartment just for their own family for the first time.

As with foreign policy, Khrushchev started more economic reform projects than he saw through. The ambitious “Virgin Lands” campaign which aimed at alleviating Soviet food shortages by cultivating vast swathes of Siberia and northern Kazakhstan petered out after a few years. His scheme to introduce an Iowa-style corn belt fared even worse, discrediting both corn and Khrushchev in the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev’s Ouster

The economic starts and shifts of Khrushchev’s tenure undermined his position, as did his foreign policy unpredictability ranging from arms control to confronting the United States over Cuba. Most damaging to him, however, were his constant shuffles in the Communist Party. Disaffected cadres who feared they might lose their offices overthrew Khrushchev in October 1964. They installed the less fickle Leonid Brezhnev as new General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The conservative Brezhnev would tone down some of Khrushchev’s domestic reforms, resulting in a more restricted cultural and literary climate, but stuck with Khrushchev’s economic reforms and conducted foreign policy along the lines of détente with the West.

In the end, Khrushchev himself was one of the beneficiaries of the liberalization he had pushed: Unlike the victims of the purges of the 1930s (or even Beria), he was not subjected to a mock trial and executed. Instead, he officially resigned for health reasons and was allowed to live out his days at a comfortable dacha in the countryside.

Games Referenced

Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)

Wir sind das Volk: 2+2 (Richard Sivél/Peer Sylvester, Histogame)

Days of Ire (Katalin Nimmerfroh/Dávid Turczi/Mihály Vincze, Cloud Island)

Further Reading

The authoritative biography remains Taubman, William: Khrushchev. The Man and His Era, Norton, New York City, NY 2004.

A magisterial mosaic of Soviet social, economic, and cultural life is Schlögel, Karl: The Soviet Century. Archaeology of a Lost World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2023.

On the suppression of the Hungarian revolution and its impact on Soviet and western foreign policy, see Békés, Csaba: The 1956 Hungarian Revolution and World Politics, (Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 16), Washington, D.C. 1996.

On the politika/tekhnika split, see Priestland, David: Cold War Mobilization and Domestic Politics: the Soviet Union, in: Leffler, Melvyn P./Westad, Odd Arne (eds.): The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Volume I. Origins, 5^th edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013, pp. 442-463.

The Soviet Union was one of the great dictatorships of the 20^th century. It applied an immense amount of coercion on its own citizens as well as many of its neighboring countries. Yet the almost seventy years between the Soviet Union’s founding from the ashes of the Russian Civil War in 1922 and its fragmentation into 15 nation-states in 1991 are no monolith of unfreedom. There were two distinct periods of liberalization around a generation apart from each other – one that began under First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, and one that began under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Let’s look at them, beginning with Khrushchev’s thaw, in terms of domestic, foreign, and economic policy. The post on Gorbachev’s reforms will follow in two weeks. As always, there will be board games along the way.

Freedom of Thought, Speech, and Political Expression

Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union curtailed its citizens’ expression dramatically. Historiography has recounted Stalin’s reign of terror in detail, yet the best-known expression of the totalitarian control to which the Soviet Union aspired from the 1930s on is George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: Its one-party state does not only control citizens’ access to information (they are being exposed to constant propaganda and expected to keep up with its frequently changing, often contradictory contents), but demands active participation in the daily reconstruction of the system, ranging from institutionalized “two-minute hate” against political enemies to unlimited devotion to the “Big Brother” at the top of the pyramid.

The Soviet equivalent to the “Big Brother,” of course, was Stalin who was exalted in an official cult of personality as a wise and infallible leader, working tirelessly for the security and well-being of the Soviet Union. Whatever went wrong on the Soviet Union’s inexorable march of progress was the fault of an inept underling or a shadowy enemy.

When Stalin died, his lieutenants fought briefly, but viciously over his succession. Nikita Khrushchev emerged victorious. Khrushchev had been as loyal to Stalin as his chief rivals and immediatly used Stalinist methods to depose Lavrentiy Beria, the powerful Minister of Internal Affairs (and thus chief of the domestic security services). Beria was charged with treason, put through a mock trial, and executed.

Khrushchev’s skillful power politics could also swing the other way, though. He prepared a report on Stalin’s crimes which he delivered to a stunned audience at the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956. For four hours, Khrushchev detailed Stalin’s party purges, his deportation of whole peoples deemed unloyal, and, most of all, how Stalin had established a cult of personality in which he was almost worshipped like a god.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization drive did not stop at mere proclamations. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a lessening of censorship: Alexander Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish his Gulag novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.

There were limits, however: Criticism of Stalin’s Gulags was one thing, criticism of the October Revolution another. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was not published in the USSR. When Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in literature for it, he and his family were threatened by agents of the state. Cowed, Pasternak did not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize.

Still, Khrushchev’s pivot represented an important turn in the state’s relationship with violence. While Soviet citizens were still routinely surveilled and subjected to coercion, it was neither with the overwhelming force of Stalinism nor with its unpredictability. The age of escalating purges, in which the accusers of today would be the accused of tomorrow was over.

Peaceful Coexistence and Khrushchev’s Many Other Schemes

Khrushchev’s 1956 speech was meant to remain secret, known only to its direct recipients and the allied Communist governments in Eastern Europe, but a member of the Polish Communist party smuggled a copy abroad via the Israeli embassy in Warsaw. From there, it soon gained wide circulation, and while Khrushchev had intended it to be a domestic power play only (it delegitimized his rivals Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov), he now also reaped benefits abroad: The post-Stalinist Soviet Union was naturally a more attractive ally and role model for both the socialist movements in Europe and the decolonizing and freshly independent nations in Africa and Asia.

This unintended benefit is the focus of the foreign-policy heavy Twilight Struggle‘s De-Stalinization card: The Soviet player may move up to four points of influence around on the globe. That may seem like a zero-sum game – after all, the influence is not added, but only moved. But the Soviet Union typically has a lot of spare influence in Eastern Europe after the first one or two turns, and De-Stalinization is the earliest and best way to gain access to faraway continents, chiefly South America (and, to a lesser degree, Africa).

Even before Khrushchev’s speech was leaked, his approach to foreign policy markedly differed from Stalin’s last years. When the relationship with the Soviet Union’s erstwhile allies had deteriorated after the end of World War II, Stalin had adopted a confrontational stance based on the assumption that the world was split in two hostile camps. Khrushchev, on the other hand, approached the western powers under the new motto of peaceful coexistence. Socialism and capitalism could both inhabit the same world. Of course, Khrushchev as a convinced Communist believed that his system would eventually triumph. Until then, peaceful coexistence would not only foster peace, but also make socialism more attractive, and free up resources for economic development and consumer goods (more on that below).

Khrushchev was always better at initiating things than at seeing them through. Peaceful coexistence gave way to other projects – be that the support of nationalist movements in the global south or a re-newed competition with the West over Central Europe. And while Khrushchev thought that the Soviet Union and the western powers could live next to one another, that tolerance did not extend to heterodox socialist ideas within his own sphere of influence: When the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party announced to withdraw the country from the Warsaw Pact and hold free elections, Khrushchev had the reform movement quashed by Soviet tanks.

Consumer Goods, (Non-)Communal Apartments, …Corn?

The Soviet economy under Stalin had been tuned to increase heavy industrial output to achieve a fast industrialization on the one hand and provide the basis for the country’s military security. This approach was validated by the country’s survival of the Nazi invasion and its eventual military victory in 1945. The proponents of this economic policy which usually went together with ideological mobilization and a confrontational foreign policy were called to adhere to politika. Yet after Stalin’s death, the rival faction of tekhnika gained ground: Its advocates favored a less aggressive foreign policy, less ideological mobilization, and, most of all, more market elements in the economy which would then produce more consumer goods.

Khrushchev positioned himself in the middle: Heavy industry would have priority (the Soviet Union was in a nuclear arms race with the United States whose economy was around three times as large as the Soviet, after all), but more attention would be given to consumer goods than before. Soviet citizens enjoyed a limited amount of prosperity with radios, washing machines, and sometimes even cars. Khrushchev saw this also as an instrument in the systemic competition of the Cold War: Material comfort and personal lifestyles would influence people’s allegiances as much as military strength or ideological treatises.

Khrushchev’s confidence in that regard led him to agree with the United States on mutual national exhibitions which would showcase their respective country to the citizens of the other. The confidence, however, was not quite justified: The Soviet exhibition in New York aroused curiosity, but the American one in Moscow was positively overrun. It also produced one of the iconic pictures of the Cold War with Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice President Richard Nixon debating the merits of their respective systems surrounded by American household appliances – the “Kitchen Debate.”

Some Soviet citizens might have dreamed of living in America, but their personal lifestyles already became more akin to those of Americans under Khrushchev. Even more important than the new consumer goods were their living conditions: Housing in big Soviet cities had been dominated by kommunalkas – large apartments from pre-revolutionary times which had been split to accommodate several families, each living in a single room and sharing the kitchen and bathroom with the others. These crammed living spaces afforded their inhabitants no privacy whatsoever. Only the elites of Stalin’s Soviet Union had apartments to themselves. Khrushchev started an ambitious housing program based on prefabricated, concrete-paneled apartment buildings which allowed millions of Soviet citizens to move into an apartment just for their own family for the first time.

As with foreign policy, Khrushchev started more economic reform projects than he saw through. The ambitious “Virgin Lands” campaign which aimed at alleviating Soviet food shortages by cultivating vast swathes of Siberia and northern Kazakhstan petered out after a few years. His scheme to introduce an Iowa-style corn belt fared even worse, discrediting both corn and Khrushchev in the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev’s Ouster

The economic starts and shifts of Khrushchev’s tenure undermined his position, as did his foreign policy unpredictability ranging from arms control to confronting the United States over Cuba. Most damaging to him, however, were his constant shuffles in the Communist Party. Disaffected cadres who feared they might lose their offices overthrew Khrushchev in October 1964. They installed the less fickle Leonid Brezhnev as new First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (an office soon to be re-named to General Secretary, like under Stalin). The conservative Brezhnev would tone down some of Khrushchev’s domestic reforms, resulting in a more restricted cultural and literary climate, but stuck with Khrushchev’s economic reforms and conducted foreign policy along the lines of détente with the West.

In the end, Khrushchev himself was one of the beneficiaries of the liberalization he had pushed: Unlike the victims of the purges of the 1930s (or even Beria), he was not subjected to a mock trial and executed. Instead, he officially resigned for health reasons and was allowed to live out his days at a comfortable dacha in the countryside.

Games Referenced

Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)

Wir sind das Volk: 2+2 (Richard Sivél/Peer Sylvester, Histogame)

Days of Ire (Katalin Nimmerfroh/Dávid Turczi/Mihály Vincze, Cloud Island)

Further Reading

The authoritative biography remains Taubman, William: Khrushchev. The Man and His Era, Norton, New York City, NY 2004.

A magisterial mosaic of Soviet social, economic, and cultural life is Schlögel, Karl: The Soviet Century. Archaeology of a Lost World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2023.

On the suppression of the Hungarian revolution and its impact on Soviet and western foreign policy, see Békés, Csaba: The 1956 Hungarian Revolution and World Politics, (Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 16), Washington, D.C. 1996.

On the politika/tekhnika split, see Priestland, David: Cold War Mobilization and Domestic Politics: the Soviet Union, in: Leffler, Melvyn P./Westad, Odd Arne (eds.): The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Volume I. Origins, 5^th edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013, pp. 442-463.

We’ve been assessing the merits of political leaders in (more or less) democratic countries on this blog for a few years now – UK prime ministers, US presidents, German chancellors. Today, we’re returning to German presidents, looking at Friedrich Ebert. And which game could be more appropriate for him than Weimar (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx)?

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The presidents will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as president.

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A president can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the president is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the president increase German influence in the world and the security of Germans at home? Did the president wield German power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected?

Domestic policy: Did the president increase the liberty of Germans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the president promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the president facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Germans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the president’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the president have an idea of what Germany and Europe (the latter counting for more in times of German influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the president’s policies steer Germany (and, if applicable, Europe) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the president succeed in seeing their policy through from inception to completion? How well did the president manage the support from parliament, society, the administration, the media?

Integrity: Did the president understand the office as a means to benefit themselves, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the president respect the boundaries of the office?

Note: If you have read my UK prime minister or US president ratings, you will remember that I rated them on the global impacts of their vision as well. As the rating system is only really applicable to democratic leaders and no democratic German leader ever had the chance to conduct a truly global policy, I only assess their vision on national and European grounds.

In all other ratings (UK prime ministers, US presidents, German chancellors) the subject’s life after holding the office is also assessed (for they are still seen as ex-office holders, but as a secondary consideration). This does not apply here, as – spoiler! – both Weimar Republic presidents died in office.

In Ebert’s special case, I will not only assess his conduct as president, but also as chancellor before, as he held the post at a time when Germany did not have a head of state.

Ebert’s Life

From Saddler to Chancellor

Friedrich Ebert was born on February 4, 1871, as the son of a tailor. He learned the trade of a saddler and became involved with the workers’ movement during his journeyman years. In 1891, he settled down in Bremen, where he ran a pub while working for the trade union. Ebert’s political work in the trade union and the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) assumed ever more importance. He was elected to the Bremen city council (1899) and became a full-time trade union secretary. In the following years, Ebert rose to national prominence: He was elected to the SPD national party committee (1905) and to the Reichstag, the national parliament of Germany (1912). One year later, he became one of the leading Social Democrats in Germany when he was elected co-chairman of the SPD.

The Social Democrats faced their crucible at the outbreak of World War I. Ebert successfully advocated supporting the government’s war efforts (instead of attempting to forge an international workers’ coalition against the war). In the later years of the war, more and more Social Democrats took up a strict anti-war stance, forming up as Independent Social Democrats (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD). Ebert maintained his previous stance and kept most of his allies within the party (now known as Majority Social Democrats (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, MSPD), yet tried to mediate between workers protesting and striking against the war and the government (notably during the January Strike of 1918).

When the military situation looked grim for Germany in fall 1918, de facto military dictator Erich von Ludendorff resigned and pushed for a new government to assume responsibility for the impending defeat. Ebert joined a parliamentary government and became its interim chancellor on the day that emperor William II was forced to abdicate. Two days later, Germany and the Allies agreed on the Armistice which ended the fighting on the Western Front.

Chancellor in the Revolution

Many socialists, especially from the USPD, now pressed for a full-scale political and social revolution based on the workers’ and soldiers’ councils sprouting up everywhere. Ebert, who abhorred the Russian Revolution, wanted to bring about gradual change which would transform Germany into a democracy by parliamentary means. The sweep of revolution brought MSPD and USPD together in an uneasy government alliance. The opposition between moderate and radical socialists provides the basis for the SPD and KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands – Communist Party of Germany) players’ relationship in Weimar (all forms of radical socialism are subsumed under the umbrella of the KPD (which was historically only founded in January 1919) in the game). The USPD is a minor party in the game which can be aligned with either SPD or KPD (starting in the latter’s camp) and which provides more gumption for actions in the street and sizable parliamentary bonuses in the early game.

In the heady first days of the revolution, MSPD co-chairman Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the German Republic (Ebert had opposed it and wanted Germany to become a parliamentary monarchy). The new government also proclaimed wide-ranging individual liberties and promised sweeping economic and social reforms (ranging from the eight-hour work day over housing programs to social security) as well as democratic elections in which both men and women would have the right to vote – here Ebert and the USPD agreed in substance, yet not in process: The USPD regarded the consent of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils as enough legitimation; Ebert insisted to carry out the reforms through a parliamentary process. Ebert outfoxed the USPD by having the Reich Councils’ Congress agree to hold parliamentary elections at the earliest possible date.

While Ebert outmaneuvered his rivals on the left, he also secured his right flank. Millions of German soldiers streamed back from the frontlines after the armistice. They needed to be demobilized in an orderly fashion, and, most of all, the threat of a military coup against the nascent republic needed to be warded off. Ebert thus struck a bargain with the army’s conservative leadership: The army would not act against the republic. In return, the new government would forgo the democratization of army structures. The deal already paid off for Ebert by December 1918: When the conflict of the government with the left-leaning People’s Naval Division over outstanding pay and the choosing of its commander escalated, Ebert had the Division dissolved by armed force. The same fate awaited the singularly ill-prepared Spartacus Uprising of January 1919.

When the National Assembly had been elected in January 1919, Ebert’s MSPD was by far the strongest party. Its allies, the Catholic Zentrum (Center), and the progressive-liberal DDP (Deutsche Demokratische Partei, German Democratic Party) also fared well at the ballot box. Due to the armed unrest in Berlin, the National Assembly was convened in the quiet provincial town of Weimar, thus providing the common name for the first German republic (and, consequently, also for the alliance of SPD, Zentrum, and DDP – the “Weimar Coalition”). The Assembly elected Ebert the first president on February 11, 1919.

The Parliamentary President

The National Assembly established wide-ranging rights for the president in the constitution. Yet Ebert interpreted these as powers to be used in emergencies. In his view, the president was a steward whose role was to guard the constitution and integrate the nation. Thus, Ebert only rarely got involved in the day-to-day business of the cabinet, now headed by Philipp Scheidemann – for example, when the Allies presented Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, Ebert remained publicly non-committal.

Even when the republic as such was threatened, the president was not always the first to respond: The right-wing power grab by Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz was stopped by a general strike. While Ebert’s name appeared on the pamphlet calling for the strike, it is likely that he was in fact not involved in the move. Ebert’s main contribution to the failure of the coup was of a different kind: When the coup leaders occupied Berlin, the federal civil service refused to do their bidding. Even though most of the civil servants had been hired under the emperor and felt attached to the monarchy, they had come to respect Ebert and would not enable the coup against his lawful government.

The 1920 parliamentary elections dealt the (M)SPD and its allies a heavy blow. They lost their parliamentary majority. Ebert advocated for a “grand coalition” which would include not only the parties of the Weimar Coalition, but also the pro-business, national liberal DVP (Deutsche Volkspartei, German People’s Party). His counsel was not heeded. Instead, Zentrum and DDP formed a bourgeois minority government.

As the government had no parliamentary majority, the president might have assumed a greater role. Ebert, however, maintained his interpretation of the presidency as a stewardship, detached from party politics and the day-to-day decisions of the cabinet. In economic and social matters, Ebert retained his representative role, mediating at times in collective bargaining struggles. In foreign policy, the president’s constitutional role was larger, and while Ebert generally supported the general foreign policy of the bourgeois minority governments, he was left out of the actual decision-making. In the meantime, Ebert tirelessly lobbied for cooperation among all democratic parties. It took a plunge into catastrophe for the young republic to heed his counsel.

When Germany reduced the reparation payments to the Allies in January 1923, France occupied the industrial heartland on the Ruhr. The German government called on the workers of the Ruhr not to collaborate with the occupation force in extracting the reparations in kind (“passive resistance”). That required the government to pay out ersatz wages to millions of people, accelerating inflation to a ludicrous degree. By August 1923, prices compared to January had multiplied by 100 (!), and France was still occupying the Ruhr. With Ebert’s support, all democratic parties from the SPD to the DVP formed a grand coalition under chancellor Gustav Stresemann.

Stresemann ended the ruinous passive resistance. While economically sound, this blow to German national sentiment caused backlash: The Bavarian state government declared a state of emergency, aiming to build a new authoritarian system in Bavaria (equivalent to the establishment of a right-wing regime in Weimar) and then exporting it to the Reich as a whole. In response, SPD-KPD state governments formed in Saxony and Thuringia (both in the path for a “March on Berlin” from Munich).

Ebert used the constitutional emergency powers granted to the president to depose the Saxon and Thuringian state governments. Federal troops quelled the unrest there before any uprising had even materialized. Yet while the army would march against leftist challenges to the republic, it was notoriously unwilling to confront right-wing movements (as Ebert knew from the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup). Thus, while Ebert formally put the army’s commander Hans von Seeckt in charge of Bavaria, he did not order any concrete action. In the end, the authoritarian government of Bavaria was overthrown from the fringe of the right-wing movement – Germany’s erstwhile military dictator Ludendorff and an ambitious demagogue named Adolf Hitler took the key government players captive and called for a march on Berlin. It was stopped within its first kilometer by 130 policemen. After that, the authoritarian government collapsed. The republic had been saved.

While the Weimar Republic stabilized, Ebert fought for the dignity of his office. He had been smeared by enemies of the republic from the beginning of his term. When Ebert had visited a beach town in 1919, a local photographer had snapped a picture of him in swimming trunks. The monarchists bought that picture and kept circulating it, often contrasting the half-naked president with one of the emperors of the old Germany in full regalia.

Ebert’s detractors also attacked his conduct. Most famously, they attacked him for his role in the January Strike in 1918. A court found those calling Ebert a “traitor to his country” for his participation in the strike guilty of defamation, but added that they were factually correct – symptomatic for the monarchist leanings of the Weimar courts, still staffed with jurists from the ancien régime. The court’s ruling was only overturned in 1931. Ebert would not live to see it. He had put off surgery for appendicitis due to the trial and died of the resulting peritonitis on February 28, 1925. He was only 53 years old.

Ebert’s death is a watershed moment in a Weimar game. As long as the Ebert token occupies the Reichspräsident spot, the presidency is neutral, and nobody gains any benefits from it. When Ebert dies, an election is held in which the parties’ popularity with the voters is measured. Each party fields a candidate. The two candidates with the most votes advance to the second round, in which the two parties whose candidates have been eliminated can pledge their votes to any of the remaining candidates. That is a crucial moment to make deals, to forge alliances, to exact promises in return for the votes, and, more often than not, to pivot away from an ally who has become too strong. (I have seen my Social Democratic candidate defeated by a very grand coalition of the other three parties – Nationalists, Conservatives, and Communists.) From then on, the party holding the presidency can play a card both for the event/actions and for a debate once per round, effectively giving the party one more party card (which, as you typically only draw three of them per round, is huge). This less restrained approach to the presidency reflects the presidential activism of Ebert’s successor Paul von Hindenburg.

The Rating

Foreign Policy

Even though foreign policy was the area in which the president’s role was constitutionally confirmed, Ebert followed rather than led. While he – much like his head of government Philipp Scheidemann –  personally found the terms of the Versailles Treaty unacceptable, he stayed on when Scheidemann resigned, displaying a keen sense of duty and order. Ebert supported the various governments in their unpopular, but necessary fulfilment of the stipulations of the Versailles Treaty and their orientation toward the western powers. At times, he was entirely sidelined, as when chancellor Joseph Wirth and foreign minister Walther Rathenau forged the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union.

Domestic Policy

Ebert’s achievements in this realm lie during his tenure as chancellor. His Proclamation (Nov 12, 1918) ushered in an unprecedented era of personal liberty and social equity, exemplified in the commitment to freedom of the press and women’s suffrage. Ebert’s integration of the army into the new republic avoided a civil war. Later, his uneven use of force dealing with the uprisings of 1923 was pragmatically understandable, but failed to conciliate the political right with the republic or make the army more accountable to the political leadership.

Economic Policy

The Proclamation of November 12, 1918 laid the foundation for the eight-hour work day, a milestone for the working population of Germany. An overlooked contribution of Ebert’s to economic development is his advocacy for the “grand coalition” – only this broad alliance could bring about the far-reaching currency reform which ended hyperinflation in 1923. That Ebert’s calls to alleviate the social hardships which came as a side effect to the currency reform went unheeded by the bourgeois minority government which followed the grand coalition is symptomatic for the limited power of the presidency in the realm of economic and social policy.

Vision

Ebert has often been criticized from the left as too cautious, not able or not willing to dream big. And indeed, in hindsight his thought and practice seems much less imaginative than his critics’ utopias of socialist republics based on grassroots councils. Yet in 1918, the thought of a liberal, parliamentary Germany – the realization of the dream of 1848 – was revolutionary, and, most importantly, it was achievable. Ebert helped to bring about the German democracy and guided it into calmer waters during his tenure.

Pragmatism

Ebert made it possible for the bourgeois politicians, the army, and the civil service to get along with a Social Democratic government. While this was an impressive feat in itself, his pleas for cooperation were often not heeded – neither from his own party nor from those he sought as allies. His natural inclination to compromise veils his deft handling of his political opponents: The USPD joined the provisional government on equal footing in November, yet ended up entirely outmaneuvered by January – its moderates falling in with Ebert’s call for elections as soon as possible, its radicals reduced to a singularly ill-advised attempt at armed uprising.

Integrity

Ebert is the rare politician who, presented with the opportunity to make wide-reaching decisions with a free hand, refused it. His belief that a freely elected parliament must make the important choices guided him during the revolution. Later, Ebert understood himself as a steward of the republic, a president of all Germans, and was unwilling to use his office for the gain of particular individuals or groups. He used the wide-ranging emergency powers assigned to the president in the constitution only when presented with a grave crisis. His thoughtful wielding of power becomes ever more apparent in comparison with his successor’s liberal use of the emergency powers which contributed to the fall of the republic.

Overall

Friedrich Ebert took on the highest duty in tumultuous times. He wielded power responsibly, with the best of intentions, and remarkable success. His restraint and willingness to compromise were admirable in themselves, but sometimes emboldened the enemies of the republic he had helped to create.

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
12. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Ebert? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

For a short introduction to Ebert (and all other German chancellors in history), see: Sternburg, Wilhelm von (ed.): Die deutschen Kanzler. Von Bismarck bis Merkel [The German Chancellors. From Bismarck to Merkel], Aufbau, Berlin 2007, pp. 187—210 [in German].

The standard scholarly biography remains Mühlhausen, Walter: Friedrich Ebert. 1871—1925. Reichspräsident der Weimarer Republik [Friedrich Ebert. 1871—1925. Reichspräsident of the Weimar Republic], Dietz, Bonn 2007 [in German].

For the broader context, see: Herbert, Ulrich: A History of Twentieth-Century Germany, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019.

Two years ago, I have inaugurated a new irregular series on my blog assessing the merits of UK prime ministers (illustrated through the lens of a single board game each). The rating system seemed robust enough to apply it to other countries/leaders (at least if they are more or less democratic). Thus, we branched out to American presidents and a German chancellor. Today’s subject is another US president – John F. Kennedy, an almost mythological figure despite – or because? – his short tenure. And which game could be more appropriate for him than 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis (Asger Harding Granerud/Daniel Skjold Pedersen, Jolly Roger Games)?

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The presidents will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as president, but includes their life after holding the office (in which they will still be regarded in the public eye as (ex-)presidents).

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A president can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the president is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the president increase US influence in the world and the security of Americans at home? Did the president wield US power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected (the latter counting for a greater deal in times of US power being great)?

Domestic policy: Did the president increase the liberty of Americans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the president promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the president facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Americans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the president’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the president have an idea of what the United States and the world (the latter counting for more in times of US influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the president’s policies steer the United States (and, if applicable, the world) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the president succeed in seeing his policy through from inception to completion? How well did the president manage the support from Congress, society, the administration, the media (the latter counting for more in more recent years)?

Integrity: Did the president understand the office as a means to benefit himself, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the president respect the boundaries of the office?

Kennedy’s Early Life

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917. Both his paternal and maternal ancestors had played important roles in business and politics within the community of Boston’s Catholic Irish Americans – and his grandfather John Fitzgerald and father Joseph Kennedy (Sr.) envisioned that the next generation could break out of this religious/ethnic niche onto the national stage. Their hopes, however, did not rest on “Jack,” as the family called him, but on his older brother Joseph (Jr.). While Joseph (Jr.) seemed to succeed at everything he touched, Jack developed a rebellious streak at school and suffered from frail health (particularly back and intestinal problems) from a young age on.

Jack enjoyed the opportunities his privileged background offered to him: He enrolled at Harvard University and travelled through Europe. His contacts there – his father was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to the United Kingdom – provided him with a wealth of information on the brewing crisis in Europe, which coalesced into his senior thesis attacking British appeasement policy (finished in 1940, when World War II had already begun). One year later, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.

Jack, still unsure about his own path in life, had entered the United States Naval Reserve just weeks before the attack. He now zealously took up his service in the hopes that his military prowess would support Joseph (Jr.)’s later political career. While his physical state would have still prevented him from a frontline role, his father pulled some strings to have him assigned to the command of a patrol torpedo (PT) boat, one of the few parts of the Navy enjoying success against the Japanese early in the war.

From April 1943 on, Jack commanded PT-109 in the South Pacific. In August of that year, his boat collided with a Japanese destroyer and was cut in half. Jack and his crew swam to an island several miles away from the wreckage, with Jack towing one of the injured sailors by the strip of a life vest he held between his teeth. They swam out to find help in the following days, until they encountered a native with a canoe whom they entrusted with a message to bring to the American forces nearby. The stranded were rescued after seven days on the island, and the story immediately garnered lots of press attention. Jack became a war hero.

As Jack had injured his back again during the collision, he spent most of the rest of the war receiving medical treatment and was decommissioned in March 1945 already – half a year after Joseph Jr. had died flying an experimental plane in the European theater of operations. Jack was now the heir to the Kennedy ambitions.

The Congressman

After a brief stint in journalism, Jack Kennedy ran for Congress in 1946 and was elected to the House of Representatives in a working-class, Catholic Boston district. Despite these local advantages, his election made some waves – after all, Kennedy’s Democrats had received a shellacking elsewhere, owing to the unpopularity of sitting president Harry S. Truman. While Kennedy was aware that his influence in the House was limited, he used his position to travel the world and get more foreign policy experience, and – helped by his large staff, paid for with his father’s financial assistance – ingratiate himself with the local voters. The House was only to be the first step for him.

In 1952, Kennedy ran against the incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge to represent Massachusetts in the Senate. While Lodge could rely on his experience and the momentum (the Republicans would win the presidential election of 1952 both nationally and in Massachusetts), Kennedy ran the more dynamic campaign. It was a family affair: His mother and sisters organized events focusing on women voters, his younger brother Robert managed the campaign, and his father bankrolled everything. Kennedy won a close race, and, at age 34, he was a United States Senator.

Once more, the Senate was only supposed to be a stepping-stone. Not least importantly for a man who wanted to become president, Kennedy got married during his time in the Senate – to the glamourous Jacqueline Bouvier (Kennedy). Jack Kennedy did not introduce any remarkable legislation during his time in the Senate (and spent a good deal of time in treatment for his worsening back, taking ever more medication, and even receiving last rites at one point). He did, however, gain some national stature and made sure the voters looked upon him favorably. When the Democrats selected their presidential ticket in 1956, Kennedy ran for Vice President, but was narrowly defeated on the third ballot by Estes Kefauver. This setback might have been to Kennedy’s advantage: Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson and Kefauver went down in the worst electoral showing for a Democratic ticket in decades. The unscathed Kennedy won his own Senate reelection with the biggest landslide in Massachusetts history two years later.

The stage was set for his presidential campaign. Once more, Robert managed the campaign and Joseph Sr. funded it. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson was Kennedy’s toughest opponent for the Democratic nomination, yet the Texan’s appeal outside of the South was limited. Kennedy clinched the nomination and made Johnson his running mate. They faced off against sitting Vice President Richard Nixon and Kennedy’s old rival Henry Cabot Lodge on the Republican ticket. In one of the closest races of American history (the two tickets were separated by a mere 113,000 votes nationwide), Kennedy’s charm (and funds) prevailed. At age 43, John F. Kennedy was the youngest person ever to be elected President of the United States.

Early Presidential Setbacks

Kennedy dedicated himself chiefly foreign policy – by inclination, but also because the bipartisan coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans in Congress blocked his legislative initiatives for housing, health, and tax reforms. He had inherited several crises from his presidential predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower. Closest to home was the Cuban revolution, during which Fidel Castro had not only deposed the US-aligned dictator Fulgencio Batista, but also nationalized the assets of US enterprises. The Eisenhower administration had started planning the overthrow of Castro by an invasion of Cuban exiles, which were to be supported by CIA and US forces if necessary. Kennedy distanced himself from the planning process, but approved the operation anyway. The results of the landing in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs were disastrous. Not only did the invasion fail, it also damaged the goodwill which the nations of Latin America held toward the new president, and made Castro actively seek Soviet support to maintain his rule.

A few months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy first met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. Kennedy took a rhetorical beating (and Khrushchev threatened action over the divided city of Berlin). Yet while Khrushchev was concerned over the ongoing exodus from East German via Berlin, he did not want to risk war, and so he authorized the building of the Berlin Wall instead (to the relief of Kennedy). Kennedy signaled the willingness of the United States to secure the rights of the West Berliners, and thus strengthened American ties with its European allies. All the while, Kennedy worked on a military build-up to reduce US dependence on its nuclear arsenal – in his words, to give him a “wider choice than humiliation or all-out war,” the beginning of what would be called the “Flexible Response” doctrine.

The military buildup was helped along by economic recovery. Unemployment receded and growth picked up while inflation was low. Then some of the large steel firms hiked their prices right after the unions had agreed to a very modest, non-inflationary pay raise. Kennedy met the challenge head on, having the FTC investigate the price fixing, the IRS launch a tax probe, and the Department of Defense announce that it would only buy from companies which had not raised prices. The firms quickly rescinded the price hike.

Civil Rights and Cuban Missiles

Civil rights were the dominant domestic issue of the day. While Kennedy insisted that Black Americans were given more opportunities and visibility in public service, he was not willing to spend political capital to advance their cause outside of the federal government. On a day-to-day basis, he was mostly concerned with the problems racial discrimination presented to his foreign policy (for example, in reaching out in the new post-colonial nations of Africa) – both the discrimination itself and the protests against it, which in Kennedy’s eyes created disharmony.

Kennedy’s attention was soon to be grabbed by foreign policy anyway: Khrushchev, emboldened by Kennedy’s weak showing in Vienna, had found a willing partner in Castro to establish a strategic balance by stationing nuclear weapons on Cuba (in Khrushchev’s own colorful imagery, “planting a hedgehog in Uncle Sam’s underpants”). That would have left the United States vulnerable to Soviet medium-range missiles. When a U-2 spy plane took pictures of the missile site, the most dangerous two weeks of the Cold War began. Kennedy almost continually met with closest advisers to explore possible responses. Initially, most of them favored an unannounced airstrike on the missile sites (possibly followed by a full-scale invasion) before the missiles were ready. Kennedy thought such a course of action would not only taint the reputation of the United States (as Pearl Harbor had done for Japan), but also entail a high risk of escalating into full-scale nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Instead, he opted for a “quarantine” – ships entering or leaving Cuban waters would be stopped and searched by the US Navy. In the meantime, he and Khrushchev exchanged letters and public announcements. Tensions ran high when US ships forced Soviet nuclear-armed submarines to surface with depth charges and when an American plane was shot down over Cuba on October 27, 1962 (“Black Saturday”). Sobered by these near-brushes with nuclear war, Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed that the missiles would be removed from Cuba (in exchange for the secret removal of the older American missiles in Turkey, which Kennedy had wanted to remove anyway).

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy pursued a policy of détente with the Soviet Union. He established a direct communications connection between the White House and the Kremlin, and in summer 1963, concluded the first nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets.

In the meantime, the Civil Rights situation became ever more urgent. Universities now turned into flashpoints of the struggle for equal rights – federal marshals and troops had to protect James Meredith’s right to enroll at the University of Mississippi as the first black student there ever; Alabama governor George Wallace personally barred the door of the enrolment office to black would-be students at the University of Alabama. The clashed between federal and state forces, Civil Rights protesters, and segregationists escalated – state police used dogs and fire hoses on peaceful Civil Rights protesters, and segregationists bombed black churches and killed protesters. Kennedy could not evade the issue any longer. Strengthened by his successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he threw the weight of the presidency behind the Civil Rights movement (while still urging them not to act too radically): He announced a legislative program which would provide equal access to public schools as well as the ballot box.

As his Civil Rights package went into Congress, Kennedy had to deal with another foreign policy issue: The United States had taken an ever greater role in Southeast Asia as the former colonial power France withdrew from the region. By the early 1960s, the United States propped up the deeply unpopular Southern Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem against the challenges of Communist North Vietnam to reunify the country on their terms. An ever-growing force of American “military advisers” flowed into the country – during Kennedy’s tenure alone, their number expanded from 1,000 to 17,000. As Diem grew both more authoritarian and less effective, Kennedy authorized American tacit support for a military coup against him.

While Kennedy still explored options for Vietnam (ranging from sending more troops to pulling them out entirely) and his Civil Rights legislation was far from complete, his presidential tenure ended abruptly: On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated while on a trip to shore up political support in Dallas. The circumstances of the assassination remain contested. He was only 46 years old.

The Rating

Foreign policy:

Kennedy’s tenure began with the Bay of Pigs disaster and ended with the crisis in Vietnam out of which America’s greatest military defeat would develop. There were, however, no US combat forces in Vietnam when Kennedy was in office, and we can only speculate if he might have failed as abjectly in resolving the issue as his successors. In between these bookends, Kennedy’s foreign policy was successful – he made the American toolbox to deal with security crises more flexible, strengthened the relationship with the European allies and reached out to the newly decolonized nations of Africa, resolved the single greatest challenge of the Cold War (the Cuban Missile Crisis) both peacefully and advantageously for the United States, and initiated the détente with the Soviet Union which would permanently lessen the risk of nuclear war.

Domestic policy:

Kennedy was a latecomer to the dominant domestic policy issue of the day. While he supported Civil Rights verbally and in the federal government, he saw it otherwise as a distraction which would drain political capital from more important tasks like foreign policy. Only when the situation in the South had made a massive federal intervention inevitable did Kennedy rise to the occasion. He was unable to pass Civil Rights legislation before his death.

Economic policy:

As with Civil Rights, Kennedy was no successful legislator in matters of economic policy. The cross-party conservative coalition in Congress defeated his early initiatives. Yet the American economy was fundamentally sound and did not need major legislation. When presented with the biggest economic challenge – the steel price hike – Kennedy met it firmly, and the specter of inflation fueled by corporate greed was defeated.

Vision:

Kennedy came to the presidency by personal ambition rather than ideological conviction, and his approach to the office was decidedly tentative. He held varying positions on the same topic over time – from Vietnam to Cuba – and shifted his priorities ad hoc (for example with Civil Rights). In his short tenure, he did not develop any policy hallmark – yet it is conceivable that détente with the Soviet Union might have become just that.

Pragmatism:

Here Kennedy’s performance is ambiguous. On the one hand, Kennedy’s skill as a legislator were minimal. He never got a good grasp on Congress (despite his own fourteen years of experience there) and was unable to secure any major legislation. On the other hand, Kennedy’s winning personality ensured popular support for himself (even when his policies failed, for example the Bay of Pigs invasion). He thrived in the modern politics-media environment to whose establishment he contributed – as the winner of the first televised presidential debate as well as the inaugurator of the free-flowing, question-and-answer presidential press conference.

Integrity:

During the 1960 presidential election campaign, many of Kennedy’s political opponents alleged that he would be beholden to his Catholic and Irish-American brethren, or even a puppet of the Pope. None of this turned out to be true. Nonetheless, Kennedy regarded politics a little too much as a family business – naming his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver head of the Peace Corps and his brother Robert Attorney General (a practice which has since been made unlawful). 

Overall:

In the words of Kennedy’s biographer Robert Dallek, his life was “unfinished.” So was his presidency. Public opinion, of course, is not bound by the confines of historical scholarship, and in this sphere, Kennedy lives large as the promise of a youthful, vigorous, optimistic America, not yet tainted by the disaster of the Vietnam War, or the Watergate Scandal. Historical scholarship, however, is left to assess Kennedy’s short, and sometimes contradictory time in office. Here Kennedy shows himself to be a president whose flashes of brilliant leadership (most notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis) are not the norm, but the exception in an overall solid presidency.

All leader ratings so far:

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
12. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Kennedy? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

Dallek, Robert: An Unfinished Life. John F. Kennedy 1917—1963, Little, Brown and Co., Boston, MA 2003.

As always when it comes to American presidents of the 20^th century, see the respective chapter in Leuchtenburg, William E.: The American President. From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, pp. 386-424.

For a quick introduction to the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Hershberg, James G.: The Cuban Missile Crisis, in Westad, Odd Arne/Leffler, Melvyn (eds.): The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Volume 2. Crises and Détente, Cambridge 2010, pp. 65—87.

A detailed treatment of the crisis can be found in Fursenko, Aleksandr/Naftali, Timothy: „One Hell of a Gamble“: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958—1964, John Murray, London 1997.

Last year, I have inaugurated a new irregular series on my blog assessing the merits of UK prime ministers (illustrated through the lens of a single board game each). The rating system seemed robust enough to apply it to other countries/leaders (at least if they are more or less democratic). Thus, we branched out to an American president and a German chancellor. Today’s subject is another US president – Harry S. Truman, the first Cold Warrior in the White House. And which game could be more appropriate for him than Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)?

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The presidents will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as president, but includes their life after holding the office (in which they will still be regarded in the public eye as (ex-)presidents).

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A president can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the president is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the president increase US influence in the world and the security of Americans at home? Did the president wield US power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected (the latter counting for a greater deal in times of US power being great)?

Domestic policy: Did the president increase the liberty of Americans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the president promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the president facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Americans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the president’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the president have an idea of what the United States and the world (the latter counting for more in times of US influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the president’s policies steer the United States (and, if applicable, the world) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the president succeed in seeing his policy through from inception to completion? How well did the president manage the support from Congress, society, the administration, the media (the latter counting for more in more recent years)?

Integrity: Did the president understand the office as a means to benefit himself, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the president respect the boundaries of the office?

Truman’s Life

Harry S. Truman was born on May 8, 1884 as the son of Missouri farmers. He took a few classes at a local business school, but remains the only US president of the 20^th and 21^st century to not have attended college. After a few years of odd jobs, he returned to help on his parents’ farm. As he had political ambitions, he joined the National Guard in 1905 and volunteered for service during World War I.

Back from the war, Truman opened a haberdashery (which went bankrupt in 1921) and was elected county judge (in 1922). His political career was tied to Tom Pendergast’s political machine. Over the course of the following years, he struggled both economically and politically. His fortunes only improved when he was named Missouri’s director for the Federal Re-Employment program (which got him in touch with important people from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs) in 1933 and was elected senator in 1934.

Truman’s first term in the Senate was unremarkable and he only barely won re-election in 1940. The following year, his career took off when he headed a special committee to investigate inefficiencies in US war production – a crucial task with war ravaging both Europe and the Pacific, which the United States would enter later that year. Truman’s reputation for honesty and efficiency recommended him to president Roosevelt who was looking for a running mate in the 1944 presidential elections. As the favorites of the two wings of the Democratic party – Henry Wallace for the liberals, James F. Byrnes for the conservatives – were anathema to the respective other wing, Roosevelt chose Truman as a non-offending alternative – the “second Missouri compromise”. Roosevelt barely met with Truman either on the campaign trail or after their successful election and kept him in the dark about his political initiatives, particularly regarding foreign policy. When Roosevelt died barely three months after the start of his term, Truman entered the presidency woefully unprepared.

His first task was the victorious conclusion of World War II. Germany surrendered only weeks after Truman’s inauguration. When soon after the first nuclear bombs were successfully tested, the United States dropped them on Japan in order to “shock” the country into surrender – a policy which Truman endorsed, but did not specifically authorize (the bomb was treated like any other weapon at the disposal of the commanders in the theater).

In the meantime, Truman grew more distant to America’s erstwhile Soviet allies. He had wanted the Soviets to join the United Nations and the war against Japan, but once they had done both, Truman took a hard line against what he perceived as Soviet expansionism. The first test of strength was Soviet refusal to leave Iran – in violation of the agreement among the Allies after their invasion of Iran in 1941, which specified that they would leave the country six months after the cessation of hostilities. Truman’s   tough stance won the day by spring 1946 – but in a pattern typical for his presidency, he did not receive the credit for it among the American public.

At home, Truman was faced with the transformation of the economy back to peace time. Increased unemployment and inflation dashed the hopes for a beautiful, carefree post-war life for many Americans. Truman’s heavy-handed handling of a railroad strike – he proposed a law that would draft strikers into the army – intimidated the strikers into submission. Yet while it antagonized labor (and questioned Truman’s commitment to constitutional practices), it did not win him support among business or the middle class. Truman’s Democrats were shellacked the 1946 midterm elections.

The electoral defeat freed Truman from his obsession to walk a middle course and please everybody. Instead, he proposed the policies that he thought were right. Domestically, that encompassed a series of ambitious bills to preserve and expand civil and economic rights which he called the “Fair Deal.” Most of them were squarely defeated by a cross-aisle conservative majority in Congress, but Truman’s activity put Congress on the defensive and no further New Deal legislation was rolled back.

Truman’s greatest achievements belong to the realm of foreign policy. Faced with the challenge of possible Soviet inroads into the Eastern Mediterranean (from where the United Kingdom was about to withdraw), Truman countered with the promise of aid to any free nation which resisted subjugation – the Truman Doctrine. He backed this unprecedented American commitment to internationalism up with the European Recovery Program – or, as it was more popularly called, the Marshall Plan. (Truman was wise enough not to attach his own name to it, as his unpopularity in Congress would likely have resulted in a defeat of the proposal.) The ERP did not only help Europe in its recovery from the destruction of World War II, but also provided a welcome stimulus for the American economy on whose goods the money was spent, and it was a major PR success for the United States in the nascent Cold War with the Soviet Union. When the Soviets played hardball in 1948 and blockaded West Berlin, a western-controlled island within the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, Truman found a measured response in supplying West Berlin from the air – steering clear of both abandoning West Berlin and risking war.

Truman’s relationship with both wings of the Democratic Party had been uneasy through his tenure – the liberals disliked him for his handling of labor disputes and his tough stance on real and perceived Communists. As the Cold War developed, a second “Red Scare” swept the country. Truman, who personally did not believe that a large number of Communist spies had infiltrated federal institutions, nonetheless lent this conspiracy theory credence with the vain attempt to ward off more radical legislation on the matter by examining the loyalty of all federal employees – with “reasonable doubts” sufficient to be fired. Even though the past of five million federal employees was scrutinized, not a single Communist spy was found.

On the other hand, the conservatives, particularly those from the Democrats’ southern bastions, warily regarded his Civil Rights stance. Truman created a committee to make proposals for Civil Rights whose recommendations he endorsed. Yet only when the Southern Democrats abandoned him in the election year 1948 (and supported the segregationist Strom Thurmond instead) did he stick out his head and decreed the desegregation of the armed forces and the federal civil service.

Truman took to the campaign trail and vigorously attacked the Republicans for not supporting his domestic reform agenda. Against the predictions of the pollsters, Truman defeated his Republican opponent Thomas E. Dewey soundly, with Thurmond coming in a distant third (and defeated in most southern states as well). Truman’s inauguration in 1949 was the first to which Black Americans were invited as guests.

Truman’s second term was less eventful than his first – and less successful.

When North Korean forces crossed the 38^th parallel to unite Korea by force (with Stalin’s approval), Truman faced another Cold War crisis. Truman attached an importance to it that went far beyond Korea – if such a blatant breach of the peace was not checked, it would spell doom for the rules-based peace order embodied in the United Nations. Thus, he sent in US forces to stop the Northern invasion and attained UN approval for the operation. US troops under General Douglas MacArthur blunted the offensive of the North Koreans and landed in their rear – thus throwing the entire invasion force back in disarray. As the coalition forces approached the 38^th parallel, Truman disregarded Chinese warnings and authorized a crossing into North Korea. The ensuing Chinese entry into the war now caught the coalition forces off guard and forced them into an ignominious retreat. MacArthur then pressured Truman to extend the war to China – and the use of nuclear bombs. Truman refused, and as MacArthur kept defying presidential authority, relieved him of his command. For the remainder of Truman’s tenure, the Korean War would be a bloody stalemate.

Domestically, Truman did not fare better. His attempt to prevent a full-on Red Scare by the loyalty check program turned out to have failed entirely – instead Representative Joseph McCarthy levelled (unfounded) charges of Communist sympathies and activities at government officials, academics, left-leaning politicians, labor activists, and entertainers (especially in the film industry). The climate of fear which infringed on free speech also damaged the United States’ standing abroad.

Finally, another strike – this time in the steel industry – aroused the president’s anger. He seized the steel mills from their private owners to deal with the strike. This was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in April 1952. By the time of the Court’s decision, the deeply unpopular Truman had already announced that he would not seek re-election. The Democratic Party instead chose the governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, as their nominee. Stevenson lost in a landslide against the Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general credited with winning World War II in Europe.

Harry S. Truman lived a relatively modest post-presidential life, devoting much of his time to writing his memoirs. He died on December 26, 1972.

The Rating

Foreign policy: Truman shifted from cooperation to confrontation with the Soviet Union with remarkable skill. He found adequate responses to most foreign policy crises – from the first test of strength in Iran over the Greek/Turkish crisis which prompted the Truman Doctrine to the Berlin Blockade and the North Korean invasion of the South. His rare misstep was the foolhardy decision to push further in Korea which drew the Chinese into the war.

Structurally, Truman’s influence is even more profound: Almost the entire modern US security architecture was founded by him – the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and NATO.

Domestic policy: Truman’s domestic record is mixed. While he was the first 20^th century president to stick his head out for the equal treatment of Black Americans, he only turned to action after the Southern Democrats had abandoned him already. His anti-Communist loyalty checks infringed on the individual liberties of federal employees and did not achieve their goal of pre-empting more radical measures by the anti-Communist conspiracy theorists like Joseph McCarthy (and rather emboldened them). Finally, Truman’s invasive meddling in the economy – both his law to draft strikers and his seizing of the steel mills – show an instinctive preference for a security-based war presidency over individual economic freedoms.

Economic policy: Truman faced the challenge to transform the US economy back to peace time – for which conservatives/business and liberals/labor had starkly different ideas. Truman initially attempted a middle course, but turned more liberal after his electoral victory in 1948. His Fair Deal legislation (most notably the near-doubling of the minimum wage, the expansion of Social Security to another 10 million Americans, the rural electrification programs, and the building of homes for low-income Americans) contributed to the broad prosperity of the post-war decades.

In the end, it was Truman’s foreign policy that was most influential for the economic development of the US: The Marshall Plan had shown how a further internationalization of American businesses could be profitable for them. Truman’s turn toward the security state after the outset of the Korean War led to a quadrupling of defense spending which would never again fall to the level of the inter-war years. This perpetual state of war-readiness and the resulting military-industrial complex of the United States play a crucial role for the structure of the US economy until today.

Vision: Nobody regarded Truman as a visionary when he entered the presidency. Yet his policies captured not only the present but also the future: The Truman Doctrine, a sharp break with the American isolationist tradition, was employed for the remainder of the Cold War. Every other Cold War presidential doctrine rested on it (and usually interpreted it for a particular region). Its basic tenet – to aid free nations against attempts to subjugate them – informs US policy until today (say, in Ukraine). In practice, the Truman Doctrine resulted in the “containment” of the Soviet Union and global Communism – another basic principle of US foreign policy for the next 40 years.

Truman’s predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt, much more a visionary in the public perception, had relied on his own personality to see through all the great breaks with political tradition. Truman, on the other hand, built the institutionalized security state which is until today the foundation of the US presidency. Despite the pivot to “security” as the new main goal of American government activity, Truman maintained the primacy of politics over the military and defeated the specter of Bonapartism when he fired MacArthur over his insubordination.

Pragmatism: Truman’s early attempts to chart a middle path often antagonized both sides – and sometimes led to contradictions (as when he publicly endorsed both Henry Wallace’s and James F. Byrnes’s foreign policy statements which differed markedly on the matter if the Soviet Union was an ally or an opponent of the United States).

Truman was at best middling at winning public support for his initiatives. While he won the 1948 election, his Congressional allies fared badly both in 1946 and 1950, and Truman had low approval ratings through most of his tenure (excepting the honeymoon period in 1945 and his time of foreign policy glory in 1947), sometimes as low as 23%.

Despite these troubles with both Congress and the wider public, Truman could see some of his key policy initiatives through Congress despite their impulses towards isolationism and a limited role of government.

Integrity: Truman honestly strove for the interests of the whole nation. Yet he tested the limits of the Constitution with his reaction to strikes and when he did not seek Congressional approval for the war in Korea. His appointments were often based on loyalty rather than merit (and turned out lackluster in these cases more often than not). While Truman never used the presidency to enrich himself personally, his reputation for being extraordinarily honest is rather an artifact of being compared favorably to his morally flexible successors Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon in the 1960s and 1970s.

Overall: Despite Truman’s unassuming personality and his low popularity during his tenure, he laid the foundations for American foreign policy for decades. His many moments of foreign policy brilliance are interspersed with a mixed record at home and many individual mistakes in running the office. He was an above-average, but not great president.

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
12. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Truman? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

For a short and accessible biography, see Dallek, Robert: Harry S. Truman, St. Martin’s Press, New York City, NY 2008.

As always when it comes to American presidents of the 20^th century, see the respective chapter in Leuchtenburg, William E.: The American President. From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, pp. 243—326.

Last year, I have inaugurated a new irregular series on my blog assessing the merits of UK prime ministers (illustrated through the lens of a single board game each). The rating system seemed robust enough to apply it to other countries/leaders (at least if they are more or less democratic). Thus, I’m branching out! After our first US president earlier this year, we now do a German chancellor – Ludwig Erhard, nicknamed “The Father of the Economic Miracle”. After a quick introduction to the rating system and an overview of Erhard’s life, we go straight into the rating. The accompanying game will be Wir sind das Volk! (Richard Sivél/Peer Sylvester, Histogame).

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The chancellors will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as chancellor, but includes their life after holding the office (in which they will still be regarded in the public eye as (ex-)chancellors).

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A chancellor can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the chancellor is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the chancellor increase German influence in the world and the security of Germans at home? Did the chancellor wield German power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected (the latter counting for a greater deal in times of German power being great)?

Domestic policy: Did the chancellor increase the liberty of Germans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the chancellor promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the chancellor facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Germans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the chancellor’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the chancellor have an idea of what Germany and Europe (the latter counting for more in times of German influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the chancellor’s policies steer Germany (and, if applicable, Europe) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the chancellor succeed in seeing their policy through from inception to completion? How well did the chancellor manage the support from parliament, society, the administration, the media (the latter counting for more in more recent years)?

Integrity: Did the chancellor understand the office as a means to benefit themselves, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the chancellor respect the boundaries of the office?

Note: If you have read my UK prime minister or US president ratings, you will remember that I rated them on the global impacts of their vision as well. As the rating system is only really applicable to democratic leaders and no democratic German leader ever had the chance to conduct a truly global policy, I only assess their vision on national and European grounds.

Erhard’s Life

Ludwig Erhard was born on February 4, 1897. His parents owned a clothing store in Fürth, a city in the south of Germany. Erhard was initially destined to follow them in the business, but came back from World War I badly wounded and unable to stand for an extended period of time (as we would have had to as a store owner). He thus turned to academia and studied business. After graduating, he managed his parents’ store for a short time before it went bankrupt in 1928. Erhard then succeeded in following his academic aspirations and worked at various institutes and universities. Erhard was no supporter of the Nazi regime which took power in 1933, but conducted advisory research for them. In 1942, he failed in a bid to head his university’s institute for economics (losing to a member of the Nazi party) and was soon after forced out of the institute. He then set up his own one-man think tank, writing on how to re-build Germany’s economy after the war.

These studies – and Erhard’s relative distance from the Nazi regime – recommended him to the post-war authorities. After quick stints on the local and regional level, he was appointed Head of the Special Office for Money and Credit (and soon after Director of Economics) of the Anglo-American occupation zone in Germany. When he was informed by the Allied authorities of their decision to introduce a new currency (the Deutsche Mark) in the three western occupation zones, Erhard went ahead and also announced the lifting of price-fixing and production controls for most goods.

Economically speaking, the monetary reform and abolition of state control over the economy were not an immediate success. Prices shot up (while wages were still fixed) and unemployed quadrupled to 12%, thus, unrest (leading to a general strike) spread in West Germany. However, the abolition of price-fixing all but abolished the previously ubiquitous black markets. Erhard’s reputation thus was stellar, and the newly formed big-tent center-right party CDU (Christlich-Demokratische Union, Christian Democratic Union) invited Erhard to join forces with them. Erhard, who personally was more of a classical liberal than a conservative, joined with the intent of committing a large party to his ideas of free markets, and successfully ran for parliament on the CDU ticket in West Germany’s first national elections in 1949. Erhard then became Minister for the Economy in the new administration, a post he would hold for the next fourteen years.

Early in Erhard’s tenure, economic success blossomed: The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 re-committed the American economy to war production – and West Germany seized the opportunity to produce the civilian goods not made in America anymore. The West German economy boomed. Unemployment fell. Wages rose. Exports grew manifold. And Erhard, who steadfastly (but not always successfully) defended his liberal economic principles against any attempts to introduce more state intervention, became the lucky charm of the German “economic miracle”.

Erhard’s corresponding popularity made him a natural contender for the succession of West Germany’s first chancellor Konrad Adenauer. When Adenauer finally resigned in 1963 (aged 87), the CDU and its allies in government elected Erhard as the new chancellor. Erhard, never a politician’s politician, refrained from domestic initiatives. His foreign policy was based on the attempt to align West Germany closer with the United States and Great Britain at the expense of the cordial Franco-German relationship his predecessor had built. Erhard won a resounding electoral victory in 1965, but his relationship with his own party remained frail. When a mild recession hit West Germany and the budget was threatened by Erhard’s earlier commitment to payments to the United States and Britain to make up for the spending of their troops stationed in Germany (the “offset arrangement”), his government broke down (1966). Erhard was forced to resign. The new government which was based on the CDU and the long-time oppositional Social Democrats elected Kurt Georg Kiesinger as his successor. Erhard retired to a quiet life, but remained a member of parliament until his death on May 5, 1977.

The Rating

Foreign policy:

Erhard’s only field of ambition during his chancellorship – and also the area of his most obvious failure. His pivot away from France damaged the Franco-German relationship and European integration (which he, against his general economic principles, did not seek anyway). On the other hand, Erhard could not make good on his aim to improve German-American relationships – his professed dislike for France took any kind of lever out his hand, and his willingness to accede to American demands (like promising full payment in the offset arrangement) did not result in any favors in return from the United States (the key prize would have been if America had continued to seek a Multilateral Force with nuclear weapons – which would have resulted in Germany’s nuclear sharing).

Domestic policy:

Erhard did not start any domestic policy initiatives and ignored the growing societal pressures beyond his favorite topic of the economy. In the rare cases that such topics were forced onto him, Erhard, to his credit, deviated from the previous course of German policy which had been to largely ignore the Nazi crimes: When he found out that his Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees, and War Victims had been an active Nazi party functionary, Erhard forced his resignation (in a striking difference to his predecessor Adenauer, who kept his Chief of Staff for ten years despite the man’s well-known involvement in drafting the Nazis’ laws prosecuting German Jews).

As German law knew a statute of limitation preventing criminal prosecution after twenty years, all Nazi crimes would have gone unpunished from 1965 on. Erhard was in the minority of government members who wanted to extend the period of prosecution. Parliament passed an extension with a mixed-party majority – Erhard, however, had nor been able to convince his own government colleagues and was not instrumental in securing this majority.

Economic policy:

Another policy field of Erhard inaction – this time, however, by design. Erhard’s liberal economic credo kept him from intervening in the economy. That was defensible in the narrow view – economic activity in the short term – but defective otherwise: Erhard knew (more than a year before the budgetary crisis of 1966) that the economic downswing lowered public revenue while his promises concerning the offset arrangement would raise expenses. Erhard thus brought the budgetary crisis, over which he’d fall, onto himself. In the longer term, Erhard’s torpedoing of European integration denied the German economy export markets and delayed the innovation stimulus of increased competition.

Vision:

Erhard’s overarching vision in life was to allow free individuals to pursue their ambitions in a market economy – but when he entered office, he felt the preconditions for that were already achieved (a debatable claim). Thus, his policy mostly consisted of staying the course. He did pitch a foreign policy plan to refuse the Soviet Union loans and then “buy” German reunification when the Soviet economy collapsed, but was met with (justified) bewilderment by both his domestic and foreign interlocutors. Domestically, his only contribution which went beyond the immediate needs was his idea of a “Formed-Up Society” in which both egoism and pluralism would be overcome – an idea that he brought up during the 1965 election campaign and did not return to afterward.

Pragmatism:

Likely Erhard’s weakest suit. While he did not attempt much, what he attempted usually fell flat because Erhard was unable to secure support for it (or because he wavered and dropped it in the face of resistance). He had lost his own party’s support for his foreign policy within his first year in office. Their support for his domestic activities (or, rather, the lack thereof) withered soon after. Particularly instructive is the aftermath of Erhard’s 1965 electoral victory: Erhard squandered this testament of his popularity with the voters within weeks. He had intended to downsize the cabinet (and thus to get rid of ministers appointed by his predecessor and unfriendly to him) but waited too long to begin that process. In the end, the parliamentary parties of the coalition partners CDU, its Bavarian sister party CSU, and the pro-business FDP prevailed in securing all the posts for ministers they wanted. Erhard was forced to accept a virtually unchanged cabinet. Only one year after his electoral victory, the remainder of his political capital was spent and he resigned.

Integrity:

Erhard came into office planning to abolish his predecessor’s “democracy of favors” which was based on securing the support of powerful interest groups like the churches, the farmers’ associations, the employers’ associations, or the trade unions by passing legislation and channeling government funding in their favor. While Erhard was not above combatting European economic integration (against his liberal credo of open markets and the benefits of competition) to protect the German farmers from their French competitors, he doled out distinctly fewer favors than his predecessor. He also confined himself to the limits the constitution spelled out and did not attempt to shape the state offices to his liking (as Adenauer had done when he tried to move from the chancellorship into the presidency – but, of course, turning the presidency into the more important office). Finally, Erhard’s more collegial government style confirmed that Germany had moved beyond authoritarianism.

Erhard is the rare case of a politician not defined by the highest office he attained: He took the decisive action of his life as Director of Economics for the Bizone. He is best remembered by the public as Minister for the Economy. Looking at his chancellorship, it’s easy to see why: During this short period in office, Erhard did not attempt much, and what he attempted usually failed. His successors were left to respond to pressures resulting from the changing civil society and to repair the damage done to Franco-German relations (only achieved around ten years later). Erhard positions himself on the lower rungs of the leaders rated.

Full ratings so far:

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
12. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Erhard? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

For short overview essays on all German chancellors from Bismarck on, see Sternburg, Wilhelm von: Die deutschen Kanzler. Von Bismarck bis Merkel [The German Chancellors. From Bismarck to Merkel], Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2006 (in German).

For a recent English-language biography (or, rather, a hagiography), see Mierzejewski, Alfred C.: Ludwig Erhard. A Biography, University of North Carolina press, Chapel Hill, NC 2005.

The standard, primary-source based, scholarly biography (which is a bit vitriolic, but generally sound in its judgment) is Hentschel, Volker: Ludwig Erhard. Ein Politikerleben [Ludwig Erhard. A Politician’s Life], Olzog, Munich 1996 (in German).