Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  Together, they put together a speech, which Acheson proposed to give at a small college in Mississippi as a trial balloon for, perhaps, a presidential address later on. Acheson went down to Mississippi flushed with the belief that he was proposing nothing less than a plan “to restore the fabric of European life.” Nobody paid attention, and a disheartened Acheson at once got hold of Clayton and made the audacious proposal that General Marshall, who was due to make the commencement address at Harvard, should substitute the body of Ache-son’s speech for whatever else he had meant to say. The general agreed, and Harvard had the honor of hearing the first presentation of the grand plan. But General Marshall’s speaking style was so monotonous, his prose so flat: he was simply too thoroughly decent a man to have a spark of theater, a hint of ham, about him. Again, nobody—including the best newspapers—paid more than polite attention. Moreover, the promise of radical aid to European industries was deliberately vague, for Marshall knew that the temper of the Congress just then was to restrict American help to military aid for countries, like Greece and Turkey, that were palpably threatened by the Communists from within or without.

  However, as I have told elsewhere, Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, saw that the plan was nothing less than a massive attempt to rescue Europe from “hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.”

  Two big problems stood like roadblocks in the way of moving the plan off the drawing board into action. Was the plan to include the Soviet Union, the newfound enemy, which had, like Britain, been a principal beneficiary of the lend-leasing of war materials? The answer was—yes. But would an American Congress pour out money for a former ally which was now giving every sign of meaning to overrun Europe? Luckily, for the other beneficiaries (and the passage of the plan!), the Soviets were against any beneficence to the whole of Europe. They would decide, one at a time, which nations qualified for aid. It was an impossible bid for precedence, and Molotov walked out in a huff proclaiming that the whole plan was an imperialist racket to swamp Europe with American goods and arms.

  The next, and high hurdle, was Congress. Mocked and pilloried by Truman as a “Do Nothing” Congress, its Republican majority was not about to do his bidding. It was embittered by the tendency of the new European governments to turn left and was inclined to revert to its old isolationism, to leave “old sick Europe” to its own devices. This grudge was hardened by the well-publicized derision of the United States even by its most loyal recent allies. Bevin, the very foreign secretary who had “grabbed (the Marshall Plan) with both hands” had recently called Britain “the last bastion of social democracy … against the red tooth-and-claw of American capitalism and the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia.” So now he was begging alms from the red tooth-and-claw!

  At the time, it appeared to be an impossible sell to Congress. Marshall himself appeared before the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee and presented his case in his usual grave monotone. He was followed by Acheson. First, he suggested the folly of a piecemeal approach to this country and that toward which the Soviet Union had obviously malign intentions. He described more graphically than anyone else had done the ruination that Clayton had seen: the hundreds of miles of twisted railroad tracks, the bombed-out factories and shipyards, the rubble heaps of what once were city centers, the charred skeleton of a whole city that was Berlin. He glossed over the creative, more abstract, economic side of the plan and saved his passion for the theme that alone could swing the Senate to approve an appropriation of anything like the thirteen billion dollars that would eventually be disbursed.

  He worked himself up to his main argument by recalling the swift brutality with which the Soviets had imposed Communist governments on Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and warned it was not beyond belief that, unaided and left to rebuild itself, the whole of Europe, a broken continent, poor and hungry—would be raw meat for the Soviet glutton. Seeing him glaring at the committee, his face as purple as a lobster in anger, I marveled then at the passion he managed to manufacture over this hellish prospect. Manufactured or not, his passion won the day. His throbbing testimony had given frightening reality to that Iron Curtain which, only a year before, Churchill had envisioned as the new and threatening division of Europe. “These people,” Acheson pleaded, “are desperate. Simply to restore the fabric of European life, this thing must be done.”

  It was done. And in the long run, the children or the grandchildren of Acheson’s present detractors will know who was the American who did it. More than most presidents, and public magnificoes, he deserves, somewhere in Europe, a statue. Make it an equestrian statue, with his cape rising in the wind from the east, and his mustachios bristling, and the inscription underneath: “Dean Gooderham Acheson, 1893-1971: To Restore the Fabric of Europe.”

  9

  Eisenhower at Gettysburg

  (1967)

  Although as a working correspondent I had “covered” Eisenhower from the convention that nominated him on through his years as president, an invitation to go to Gettysburg and spend some days talking with the general about Churchill was one I accepted with alacrity. During several years of moonlighting as a television master of ceremonies, I had discovered that few casual experiences in peacetime offer such a rewarding and sustained glimpse of a man as that of working alone with him on a long television dialogue.

  Intelligent actors complain that the chronic ordeal of their profession is “the waiting, not the acting.” But it is during the waiting intervals, which tend to be prolonged and uncertain, that you can sit down and talk usefully with a man to no set purpose. And during the three days at Gettysburg, I spent many hours alone with the general (as he preferred to be called) talking in his office, and up at the farm, about everything from politics to golf, from the code of a soldier to the temptations of a newspaperman, from the private trials of the presidency to the public life of a small Kansas town in the early 1900s. We deliberately avoided elaborating on his reminiscences of Churchill, thinking it better to let these come out instinctively in the freewheeling talk that was done under the cameras.

  The general was always cordial and relaxed in the mornings and again at the end of day. In between, he was inclined to fret at the unsoldierly routine of waiting for action that was unscheduled and unpredictable, and very often he would glance at his watch and screw up his eyes—as he always did when in doubt or suspicion—and wonder “what those fellows are up to.” Inevitably, I suppose, a lifelong officer is put at his ease by knowing precisely what his subordinates are doing and when they are expected to appear at the double. He could never understand why a change of lighting or camera setup could take ten minutes or an hour, and to my assurances that everything was under control he would shake his head and concede that “it’s a weird business.” Then I would ask him about his favorite part of England, or what was the toughest course he had ever played, and he would light up again and be off in his earnest, restless, rollicking manner.

  In the late afternoons, he retired to his house for a nap and soon afterwards appeared, amiable again. It was here that you could get a sharp impression of him in the years of his retirement. And it was here too that I found myself bringing into focus my own tentative judgment about his virtues in war and in peace.

  By the time of this, our last, meeting, he was very much an old country squire, sitting on his terrace with his back to the light and the book held high in his hands because like many old men whose eyesight does alarming things from month to month, he was just then in between prescriptions, so to speak. So his glasses were perched on the end of his nose, and by holding the book high and looking through the bottom of the lenses he could get things in focus until the new bifocals arrived. From time to time he put the book down and squinted out across his fields to the pasture. And he would watch the cattle going in, or scrutinize a blighted elm, or remark that a particular feed grass he was using burned out too quickly in the drenching summer heat of that very hot valley.

  We all, they say
, revert to our origins in old age, and if you’d not known who Ike was you would have guessed, and rightly, that he was a lifelong farmer—and by now a prosperous one. They were having a fierce drought that summer in Pennsylvania, as everywhere else in the East, and as the sun declined and the evening became bearable, we strolled out onto the grass and towards a small circular lawn that was a precious thing to Ike. It was a rudimentary putting green and it had only one hole, with a flag stuck in it whose pennant was stamped with the five stars of a General of the Army. But, strangely, this hole was invisible; it was so grown over with weeds that I doubt you could have sunk a small cannonball in it. I asked about this and he said, in that hesitant yet strenuous tone he brought to all questions of conscience: “Well, you see, the governor of Pennsylvania put out a proclamation over a month ago, I guess, asking people to save water and do no watering of lawns, gardens, golf courses and so on. Looks pretty sad, doesn’t it?”

  In retrospect, it was altogether a sad occasion. In his old age, there were two things Ike lived for: his farm and his golf. And the greater of these was his golf. At that time he was beginning to be plagued by innumerable ailments, and I remember on that particular day he was a little querulous because he had had some tests made on an affliction of his diaphragm, and the results were not in. But what worried him most was the arthritis in his hands. The next day he kept rubbing the joints and wondering if he would ever play golf again. I hinted, in a subsequent conversation, that he had the golf bug pretty badly. “In the worst way,” he said. “I didn’t really take it up until after the war when I was in my mid-fifties, when I was at SHAPE. And, as you know, it takes about two years to learn to hit the ball. And sometimes during briefing sessions, I’d let my mind wander from the disposition of the Russian armies and our NATO equipment and so on, and just worry about my game. There was a time when I used to dash out of Paris to St. Cloud and, by golly, I’d say never mind the Russian threat to Europe, if only I can straighten out this terrible duck-hook that I’ve developed.”

  If it happened just like that, I’m sure that no one felt more guilt about it than Ike. For he had, at all times, an overwhelming sense of mission—whether you agreed or not with the mission didn’t matter. While he was in Paris, and while he was in the presidency, there were certain priorities in his mind that had the force of moral absolutes. One was the security of Western Europe, and we ought not to forget, in the ups and downs of European independence, that it was Ike’s authority, and the certainty of the attitude he conveyed to the Russians, which kept Europe untouched in the dangerous days when the Soviet Union was sorely tempted to move into the southern periphery of Europe. It is a curious psychological fact, never satisfactorily explained, why the Russians seemed to respect the peaceful intentions of a professional soldier more than they did those of Ike’s predecessor or his successors. Although American presidential election campaigns tend, by their ferocity and length, to cause the parties to overdramatize their differences and pretend they are offering the people drastically opposite policies, it may appear in time that American foreign policy, towards Europe anyway, was all of a piece from the day that President Truman warned the Russians about Greece to the day that President Johnson warned them again about Berlin. But the man who secured this policy and gave it stamina was Eisenhower. And for that, perhaps more than anything else, I believe, we are all in his debt.

  Whether he was a great president, or even a very good one, is something that I don’t think it possible to decide today. Arnold Toynbee, for example, has the rather alarming conviction that the man responsible for our present ills and the coming of Doomsday is Truman, and that John Foster Dulles’s brinkmanship was only a way of saying what Truman had long ago been doing. Eisenhower, it seems to me, had two golden periods, of which the second was his first term as president. The first, of course, began with his appointment as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces.

  Many harsh things have been said about him as a soldier and about the “luck” of his promotion, over many superiors, to the American command in Europe. Among European commentators, Eisenhower’s total inexperience as a field commander is by now almost a byword. From this literal fact the false inference is readily drawn that he was essentially a desk man quite out of touch with the demands of modern war. Nothing could be farther from the truth or, incidentally, reflect so poorly on General Marshall’s judgment. Marshall had watched Eisenhower’s masterly conduct of the vast Louisiana maneuvers in September 1941, a field exercise in a “war of supply” that few old field commanders had ever experienced.

  It is true that Ike’s most recent professional experience, that of creating a defense for the Philippines, brought him into immediate close contact with Marshall in the days after Pearl Harbor when the Philippines were the most vulnerable of America’s outposts in the Pacific. But a desk man would have been routinely consulted and dismissed. Marshall threw at Ike the whole strategical problem of the Pacific, and Ike’s quick decision that Australia must become the essential base to build and hold for the protection of China, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies coincided with Marshall’s private, and unexpressed, judgment. Moreover, Marshall had at his elbow innumerable Eisenhower reports on what the shape of a two-ocean war might be. For, during his years as confidential adviser to the Army Chief of Staff, Eisenhower had become absorbed by the probable scope and character of a future global war: by “such subjects as the mobilization and composition of armies, the role of air forces and navies in war, tending toward mechanization, and the acute dependence of all elements of military life upon the industrial capacity of the nation. This last was to me of special importance because of my intense belief that large-scale motorization and mechanization and the development of air forces in unprecedented strength would characterize successful military forces of the future."

  The plodding quality of the prose—”such subjects as,” “all elements of military life,” “tending toward mechanization”—disguises the novelty of a strategical doctrine that was revolutionary, at the least highly questionable, to the high command of both the British and French in the mid-1930s. An obscure French major, one Charles de Gaulle, had written by then an obscure little book, which had a pitifully small sale. It was called The War of Movement. It predicted the end of the traditional war of deep fortifications and prepared defensive positions. The Maginot Line, he suggested, was already obsolete. The new war would be one of rapid movement by highly mechanized forces, hundreds of tanks and murderous accompanying aircraft. (The only famous commander who was known to have been impressed by de Gaulle’s book, and by two earlier, equally fantastical, German monographs, was Adolf Hitler. He rendered the Maginot Line obsolete by going round it, and he proved how successfully he “tended toward mechanization” by inventing the Blitzkrieg and devastating Poland within a week.)

  Once the revolutionary nature of Eisenhower’s thesis is recognized, it is not hard to see why General Marshall, having succeeded in resisting Roosevelt’s persistent pleas to take the Supreme Command in Europe, had no other candidate in mind than the man who had started his career in tank training, the obscure fifty-year-old (named in early press reports Lt. Col. D. D. Ersenbeing) who had brilliantly conducted that mock “war of movement” with four hundred thousand men in Louisiana only two months before Pearl Harbor.

  Eisenhower may not have been, like Montgomery or Rommel, a soldier’s soldier (which, for good or ill, means a practiced old warrior). But he was, for the war years, the ideal choice also for a human task which the Allies of the First World War, bristling with a long tradition of military chauvinism, so stubbornly and grievously evaded: that of uniting by one likable and fair-minded personality the warring elements of many nations, many diverse temperaments, and some very rum characters. So that, apart from Eisenhower’s early perception of the industrial shape of modern war, he had one touch of genius that could probably not have been found in any other known Allied military commander. Very soon after his arrival in England, and his ear
ly meetings with Prime Minister Churchill and the combined Allied command, he devised for himself a code, at once compassionate but strict, which forbade the use of pejorative slurs on any nationality of the alliance: “Any time I heard a man condemning somebody and saying he was a British so-and-so or an American so-and-so or whatever, I pointed out there was an order.” An American colonel apparently defended himself by saying that his opposite number had argued harshly: “I don’t care how harshly you argued, you said he was a British so-and-so. Go home!” The man was sent back to America and his military career was as effectively tarnished as that of one of Ike’s oldest friends, General George Patton, after he had slapped a wounded soldier in a hospital bed. His fate was worse than any journey home. He was relieved of his beloved command, and from then on did Eisenhower’s bidding.

  Eisenhower’s touch of genius was nothing very dramatic or much admired by the military of any nation. It was to be a peacemaker among Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Poles and others crackling with national pride and driven by personal ambition. It may be that such immortality as, in the long run, Eisenhower achieves will be guaranteed by two qualities that do not usually, in a worldly world, secure a man much more than the affection of his friends. By the force of these qualities, Eisenhower was able to make trusting friends of about two hundred and fifty million people fighting for their lives. They are candor and decency.

  10

  Harold Ross

  (1951)

  One evening toward the end of 1923, there appeared this item, in the daily column of a popular New York journalist who often wrote a parody of Pepys’s diary: “And to H. Ross’s, and we talked about the low state periodical comick literature is sunk into.”