The Soldier and the State

by Samuel P Huntington

  This duality is perhaps best reflected in the personnel employed by the Administration to formulate and execute policy in the two fields. On the domestic side Truman relied upon the same type of official which had been present during the New Deal. While a mass exodus from Washington of the older generation of New Deal officials occurred in 1945 and 1946, their places were taken by a younger generation which was not essentially different. This younger group included ideologically oriented reformers, vote-oriented politicians, and program-oriented governmental careerists: Hannegan and Clifford, McGrath and McGranery, Wyatt and Lili-enthal, Tobin and Steelman, Olds and Clapp. None would have been out of place in the 1930’s. Indeed, their function in the Truman Administration was to carry on the Fair Deal version of the New Deal policies. They were committed to the Fair Deal program of reform liberalism: public housing, expanded social security, farm supports, valley authorities, public power, higher minimum wages, federal aid to education, civil rights for Negroes. All of them were linked in one way or another with one or more of the political forces in the Fair Deal-New Deal coalition: the farmers, labor, public power interests, city machines, ethnic minorities. Virtually all were Democratic partisans.

  The situation was quite different on the foreign policy-defense side of the Truman Administration. Here another type of creature held sway. There were few New Dealers, fewer machine politicians, and still fewer liberals. While the domestic leaders sprang from a variety of sources reflecting the diversified interests of the Democratic coalition, the foreign affairs leaders were a fairly close knit band of bankers and lawyers, soldiers and diplomats. Forrestal, Lovett, Acheson, Patterson, Harriman, Nitze, Finletter, Draper, McCloy were typical of the former; Marshall, Bradley, Eisenhower, Bruce, Kennan, Peurifoy of the latter. They were reinforced by a few stray businessmen like Hoffman, Symington, and Foster. The inner heart of this foreign affairs government was the foursome of Forrestal, Marshall, Lovett, and Acheson. One of these was Secretary of Defense for all but eighteen months during Truman’s two administrations and Secretary of State for all but two years. In addition, during the two years when Byrnes was Secretary of State, Acheson was Under Secretary and had a major role directing the affairs of the Department since Byrnes was frequently away at conferences. Also, Lovett was Under Secretary of State while Marshall was Secretary of State, and Deputy Secretary of Defense while Marshall was Secretary of Defense. These four, together with Hoffman and Harriman in the foreign aid field, formed the nucleus of the Truman foreign policy-defense government.

  The foreign policy leaders and their assistants differed from the domestic policy leaders in being almost completely divorced from partisan politics. They had been selected with little regard to party lines. Some of the most prominent were Republicans: Lovett, McCloy, Foster, Hoffman, Patterson, and Draper. These were reinforced by other Republicans at the second level: Assistant Secretaries of Defense McNeil and Coolidge; Assistant Secretary of War Petersen (later national finance chairman of the Eisenhower clubs); Policy Planning Staff head Paul Nitze; CIA Deputy Director Allen Dulles. The professional diplomats and soldiers, of course, tended to be nonpartisan. Even the Democrats differed from their counterparts in the domestic agencies. Acheson was definitely a Democratic partisan, but he was not cut from quite the same cloth as the Fair Deal domestic leaders, and, to some extent, his partisanship was forced upon him. Forrestal’s party ties were hazy; he was persona non grata to several key groups in the Democratic domestic coalition, and a wide gap existed between him and the “political characters” in “soft gray hats and turned-up overcoat collars” he encountered in the 1944 campaign. A survey by Reston of the Times at the closeof the Truman Administration indicated that of thirty-nine major appointments of Republicans or nonpartisans to important posts, twenty-two were in the State Department, ten in the Defense Department, five in other national security agencies, and only two in domestic departments. In addition to Eisenhower himself, four of his most active supporters, Hoffman, Lewis Douglas, Dulles, and Clay, held key positions under the Democrats.1

  It was rare that a domestic politician or liberal reformer appeared in the Truman foreign-defense agencies. One such example was Louis Johnson. He represented forces, interests, and attitudes quite at variance with those dominating the external half of the Administration. He became the symbol of the popular cause of budget cutting and he was a partisan Democrat reputedly with political ambitions. His intrusion into the foreign affairs-defense field was stormy. The Secretary of the Navy quit; the Chief of Naval Operations was fired; the Secretary of the Air Force openly fought him; the other military leaders and service secretaries engaged him in an administrative cold war; communication between the Defense Department and the State Department declined to a minimum. Eventually his relations with Secretary of State Acheson deteriorated to the point where it was obvious that one of them would have to go. So Truman fired Johnson and brought in Marshall and Lovett, whom Acheson had replaced in the State Department, to replace his opponent in the Defense Department. This restored the harmony and unity of the foreign policy team, and relations between State and Defense again developed the mutual confidence and cordiality which had existed earlier when Marshall and Forrestal had been directing affairs.

  DEFENSE CONSERVATISM. The significance of this sharp dichotomy in personnel between the foreign and domestic sides of the Truman Administration lies in the sharp difference in policy which it reflected. While domestically the Administration followed the path of pragmatic liberal reform, in foreign policy it adhered to a distinctly conservative course. The liberalism of the war years was abandoned. Isolation, universalism, legalism, and crusades were backtracked. The principal characteristics of policy were commitment, caution, firmness, patience, and realism. The entire cast of the policy was well summed up in the name given it by its creators and mocked by its critics: containment. There was nothing revolutionary about this policy and very little that was liberal. It was based on the limited national interests of the United States in self-preservation. Its goals were the creation of “situations of strength,” armed alliances, and the bolstering up of weak noncommunist governments. In its essence, as Edgar Ansel Mowrer pointed out, containment was a return to the balance of power policy of the Joint Board memorandum of September 1941. Symbolic of this shift was Secretary of State Marshall’s declaration on November 7, 1947 that “the objective of our policy from this point on would be restoration of balance of power in both Europe and Asia and that all actions would be viewed in the light of this objective.” 2 From his wartime infatuation with total military victory Marshall thus returned to the goals which he had defined for the nation in 1941.

  The sources of this conservative foreign policy were fourfold. Of primary importance was the President. Liberal at home, Harry Truman was profoundly conservative in foreign affairs. It was his peculiar political genius and personality to be able to represent and embody these two facets of policy. He could deal equally with conservative banker and Fair Deal reformer, ward boss and professional soldier. Forrestal caught the essence of this characteristic when he observed shortly after the 1948 election that “We are very fortunate in having Mr. Truman, a man who, while he reflects the liberal forces both in this country and throughout the world, is nevertheless a conservative in the real sense of that word — a conserver of the things we hope to keep.” 3 Truman’s conservatism stemmed not from political philosophy but from his personal conviction that the only way to get along with the Russians was to get tough with them. Never associated with the wartime policy of the Grand Alliance, Truman had an advantage over many other American leaders in being able to strike out on his own without commitment to the past. Undoubtedly, also, his difficulties, first with Byrnes and then subsequently with Wallace over the desirability of a tough line with the Russians, contributed to the hardening of his viewpoint.4

  The second source of the Truman Administration’s foreign policy conservatism was in the top civilian leadership of the government. The bac
kground of these bankers and lawyers gave them a perspective on affairs quite different from that of the usual American industrialist. The latter is typically a go-getter, an “operator,” aiming at the building of a business empire through the production of the most goods at the least cost in the shortest time. This stimulates an optimistic, individualistic, progressive ethos. Transferred to government, it had a typical manifestation in the desire for “a bigger bang for a buck.” The Truman men, on the other hand, tended to be the investment banker type, concerned less with the concrete production of things and more with the subtle intricacies of high finance. They possessed all the inherent and real conservatism of the banking breed. Transferred to government, they were cautious realists, aware of the complexities of human affairs, the limitations of human foresight and control, and the dangers of extending commitments beyond resources. They were also in some measure another manifestation of the curious way in which Theodore Roosevelt was the intellectual godfather of Democratic administrations after 1933. Former Progressives such as Ickes had contributed much to the New Deal. In the wartime and postwar periods the more conservative wing of Neo-Hamiltonianism played its part. A clear line existed from Root to Stimson to Marshall, Lovett, and McCloy. After the war, the influence of the Forrestal men who spread throughout the government contributed a similar perspective to national policy.

  The professional ranks of the State Department and the Foreign Service were a third source of the Truman Administration’s foreign policy. During the 1930’s, economic concerns had dominated the outlook of the State Department. Subsequently, during the war the Department had become immersed in legalistic and organizational problems involved in planning the United Nations. In both phases the Department’s approach had been fundamentally liberal. With the end of the war, however, and the opening of the Cold War, its dominant tone and complexion changed. A group of Foreign Service officers came to the fore who had long been suspicious of the motives of the Soviet Union but who had previously been in subordinate positions and unable to exercise a significant influence on policy. In 1947 and 1948, however, the views of this group began to prevail in the Department.5 They received their classic expression, of course, in George Kennan’s analysis of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in the spring of 1947, and under Marshall they became institutionally embodied in the Policy Planning Staff of the Department. During the Marshall and Acheson regimes the views of the State Department on policy were frequently even more hard-boiled, power oriented, and realistic than those of the military. Men such as Kennan laid much stress on the importance of military power, and in their analyses almost completely subordinated the ideological factor to the power factor. While the State Department was at times criticized during these years for succumbing to military pressure, its military viewpoint was by and large the uncoerced product of its own thinking on foreign affairs. The general nature of this new outlook in the Department was reflected in the works produced by its supporters after leaving office.6 The common elements of this weltanschauung were the stress on the necessity of power, the recognition of the limitation of American power, and the defense of the morality of using power to further the national security and the national interests.

  The final source of the foreign policy conservatism of the Truman Administration was, of course, the military themselves. Along with Marshall, the Joint Chiefs returned to the professional ethic. But the return was only possible because the wartime union of foreign policy and domestic liberalism had been split asunder. The political outlook of Truman and the top civilian leaders plus the new conservative realism of the State Department furnished a sympathetic environment. The civilians led the military back home. With respect to force levels and the military budget, the Truman Chiefs fairly consistently represented the military needs of national security. As a result, their strategic thinking was frequently divorced from political and economic reality. Their budgetary demands were normally drastically cut. At times, to be sure, they did integrate into their analysis an estimate of what the “country could afford,” but subsequently, General Bradley, at least, recognized that in so doing they were abandoning their proper role.7 With respect to the employment of military force the Truman Joint Chiefs similarly pursued a cautious, conservative line. In 1946, when the Yugoslavs shot down some American planes, the State Department wanted to despatch an ultimatum backed up by a show of force; the Joint Chiefs pointed out the limitations of our military resources and urged moderation. With respect to Korea the State Department again urged intervention and the Joint Chiefs played a passive role.8 In their recommendations regarding the expansion of the Korean War, Israel, the Japanese peace treaty, German rearmament, and the organization and arming of NATO, the Joint Chiefs similarly reflected a paramount concern with military security and a desire to avoid adventurous forays until the United States had strengthened its defenses. General Bradley’s entire outlook with its emphasis on the impossibility of quick and easy solutions, the necessity of basing policy on enemy capabilities rather than intensions, the desirability of a pluralistic strategy embodying many and varied types of force, and the transcendence of political goals over military ones, was an almost perfect formulation of the professional military ethic. In their views on civilian control, the Truman Chiefs likewise espoused the traditional military viewpoint.9

  IMPLEMENTATION. The ability of the Truman Administration to carry out its conservative foreign policy depended upon the extent of popular indifference to foreign affairs, the extent to which foreign policy decisions could be removed from popular control, and the extent to which the people could be won over to the Administration’s viewpoint.

  A key factor favoring the Administration was the relative indifference of its supporters to foreign policy. The interests of the Democratic Party coalition were numerous, varied, conflicting — and essentially domestic in nature. The Administration was returned to office in 1948 by appealing to those interests in an election fought primarily on domestic economic issues. Consequently, only on those issues was it politically committed. The political stalemate among the interests of the coalition, moreover, insured that there would be no overwhelmingly dominant group to insist that its viewpoint prevail on both domestic and foreign policy. The largest bloc of Administration voters, in any event, was drawn from the poorer economic classes, who typically are indifferent to and fatalistic toward foreign policy.10 Consequently, the Administration was left relatively free to pursue a foreign policy derived from unpopular and professional sources. At some points, of course, such as Palestine, conflicts arose between domestic interests and the conservative line, in which case the latter normally had to give way. But in general the Democratic interests had little concern with the foreign policy carried out on their behalf by the bankers, diplomats, and soldiers.

  The Administration also attempted to isolate as far as possible foreign policy decisions from congressional and public control. Ironically, the tradition of executive leadership and decision-making developed by Roosevelt to implement a popular domestic policy and a liberal wartime foreign policy was invoked by the Truman Administration to carry out an unpopular and conservative foreign policy. The sense of sweeping, dynamic leadership which had been so present under Roosevelt was lacking with Truman because the latter asserted the presidential prerogative not as a Jacksonian “tribune of the people” but rather as a Burkeian virtual representative of the nation. Roosevelt embodied the popular will; Truman escaped from it. For nonlegislative matters the typical pattern was for the decision to be made first and then to be publicly announced, and debated, ratified, or modified in Congress. Virtually all the great congressional debates on foreign policy in the Truman Administration took place after the executive had committed the nation. The decisions on the Berlin airlift, the hydrogen bomb, Formosa policy, the Korean War, the proclamation of national emergency, the troops to Europe, the firing of MacArthur all tended to follow this pattern. In effect, the Administration so far as possible adhered to Locke’s federative
power theory that control over foreign policy does not belong to the legislature but instead should be in the hands of those who can better use it for the public good. This theory was, indeed, restated by Kennan who, in almost Platonic terms, argued that foreign policy was no place for mass opinion and that the public should be guided by the judgment of professional experts there just as much as in law and medicine.11

  At times a serious gap existed between the policies demanded by the external affairs side of the Truman Administration and the policies which were politically feasible for it to put into practice. This was perhaps best illustrated by the history of “NSC 68”: the plan for the extensive build-up of American armed strength developed in the winter of 1949–1950 as a reaction to the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb. The conclusions of NSC 68 were in general vigorously supported by the State Department and by the military echelons of the Defense Department. Louis Johnson, Secretary of Defense, was somewhat less sympathetic toward the expansion program, and the Budget Bureau was definitely opposed to it. The President approved the general principles of NSC 68 in April 1950, subject to the development of the detailed implementing programs and further consideration of their cost. Thus, in the spring of 1950 the Administration, in effect, had two defense policies: a public one embodied in the thirteen billion dollar defense budget recommended for the next fiscal year and a private one embodied in NSC 68. This duality was ended only by the outbreak of the Korean War which permitted the Administration in the summer of 1950 to go ahead with the build-up of forces which had been urged the previous fall by the supporters of NSC 68.