Thinking anew.

The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism, by Elizabeth Edwards Spalding (University Press of Kentucky, 336pp., $40)

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NAME the American president who said, "God has created [the United States] and brought us to our present position of power and strength" in order to defend "spiritual values--the moral code--against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them." Hint: the same one who said "the spirit of liberty, the freedom of the individual, and the personal dignity of man, are the strongest ... most enduring forces in all the world." Further hint: It's not George W. Bush or George Washington. It's Harry S. Truman--by Elizabeth Spalding's account, the most misunderstood president of our time.

Usually we get Harry Truman as the simple plain-speaking Missouri Bantam, as in David McCullough's biography or James Whitmore's one-man Broadway show. Or he is the stolid if not very bright quarterback of a team of Cold War "Wise Men."

Now Mrs. Spalding reveals that it was the quarterback who designed and called the plays all along. Hers is a book about Harry Truman the policymaker and thinker--one could say the quintessential American thinker. Like Bush and Ronald Reagan, Truman was no intellectual in a formal sense. But like them he thought deep and hard about the role that global events had thrust on the United States. In his blunt, uncompromising way, Truman compelled his team to come up with a plan to deal with the Soviet challenge. In the process, he gave us a new kind of foreign policy--one with more relevance today than ever.

Sixty years ago totalitarianism of the Right was dead, buried in the rubble of Berlin and Hiroshima. Totalitarianism of the Left was just starting its run, with Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China not far behind. Who could stop them? Europe was shattered; it seemed, to many, beyond repair. Asia was in worse shape. Truman understood instinctively that the U.S. faced a dramatically new global responsibility.

Like 9/11, World War II had cleared the conceptual decks. Truman had before him two failed models of American foreign policy. The first was isolationism, which had once appealed to his fellow citizens from the heartland. It had assumed America could protect liberty at home by ignoring what happened to liberty abroad. Appeasement and Pearl Harbor had taught otherwise.

The other failed model, Spalding points out, was Roosevelt's. Together with Churchill, FDR had guided the Free World to victory. But he also believed a return to peace meant returning to an orthodox balance of great powers, including the USSR. Roosevelt's faith that Stalin could be dealt with like other politicians had almost given away the game at Yalta in 1945. FDR's ghost, forever believing every dictator as long as he came from the Left, haunted the political world of 1946 in the form of former vice president Henry Wallace--just as he has haunted the Democratic party's view of foreign policy ever since.

Truman charted a new and potentially dangerous course. At the Potsdam conference in 1945 he learned Stalin's word was worthless. "I've no faith in any totalitarian State be it Russian, German, Spanish, Argentinian, Dago [sic], or Japanese," he wrote afterward, because "all start with a wrong premise--that lies are justified and that the old disproven Jesuit formula [again, sic--it's not Give 'Em Hell Harry for nothing] the end justifies the means is right and necessary to maintain the power of government."

For the foreseeable future, Truman realized, the world would be divided into a camp that lived by that maxim--and tortured, murdered, and enslaved tens of millions--and a camp that did not. Truman's task, and America's mission, was to equip the latter camp against the former--by economic assistance when possible, like the Marshall Plan; by military force if necessary, as in Korea.

Spalding compellingly argues that Truman's moral clarity infused every aspect of America's strategic effort to contain Soviet Communism, from the Marshall Plan and NATO to the creation of the CIA--everything leftist historians of the Cold War now deplore. All Truman's efforts, whether unilateral like the Berlin airlift or multilateral like the U.N. intervention in Korea, were directed to a single simple end: the defense of liberty against tyranny.

"It was the spirit of liberty which gave us our armed strength and which made our men invincible in battle," Truman insisted at the end of World War II. It was that spirit, he believed, that would eventually save the world. But only as long as the totalitarians, who rely on "terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms," were kept at bay. And only as long as the United States led instead of followed.

Even at the time, few understood what Truman was doing--or how successful he was. Republicans dismissed him as an ignorant boob; liberals, as a heartless warmonger. When he left office in 1953, his approval rating had sunk into the mid-20s. His successor, Dwight Eisenhower, barely spoke to him at the inauguration.

It took Winston Churchill, the student of history, to understand the size of Truman's achievement. They were sitting on the presidential yacht; Churchill was once again British prime minister, while Truman's popularity was at low ebb. America was fixated on its war in Korea, which John Murthas of both parties furiously denounced as "Truman's war." Yet Churchill told Truman, "You more than any other man have saved Western civilization."

Santayana said those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Elizabeth Spalding shows us that in the bright light of moral clarity, some history bears repeating.

Mr. Herman's most recent book is To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World.