This paper examines the geo-political reaction to President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 Inaugural Address, wherein he catalyzed post-war global development in the form of his Point Four program. Truman proposed sharing American scientific and technical expertise, ostensibly aimed at reducing or eliminating poverty in the developing world. Newspaper accounts and analysis of internal CIA documents reveal domestic and international responses to the policy initiative. Predictably, these responses mostly varied along early Cold War ideological lines. Examining Truman’s plan and other anti-communist American policies in the late 1940s reveals that although global development may have been a laudable effect of the plan, the primary aim was to prevent communism from spreading to countries viewed as vulnerable to subversion. The Cold War imperatives behind the plan seem to have been either implicitly assumed or ignored in the historiography. A brief sampling of Cold War historians shows a lack of explicit attention to Truman’s initiative.
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机译：本文探讨了对哈里·杜鲁门（Harry S. Truman）1949年就职演说的地缘政治反应，其中他以第四点计划的形式促进了战后全球发展。杜鲁门提议共享美国的科学和技术专门知识，表面上旨在减少或消除发展中国家的贫困。报纸上的报道和对中央情报局内部文件的分析揭示了国内外对该政策倡议的反应。可以预见，这些反应在冷战初期的意识形态上大都不同。对杜鲁门的计划和1940年代后期的其他美国反共政策进行审查后发现，尽管全球发展可能是该计划的值得称赞的结果，但其主要目的是防止共产主义蔓延到被视为容易被颠覆的国家。该计划背后的冷战势头似乎已被历史学隐含地假定或忽略了。对冷战历史学家的简短抽样表明，对杜鲁门的倡议缺乏明确的关注。
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