Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  On September 18, 1947, Andrei Vishinsky, Soviet deputy foreign minister, denounced the U.S. government as “warmongers” in the United Nations General Assembly, and on October 5, Moscow announced the creation of the Cominform, successor to the Comintern (Communist International) that Stalin had theoretically discontinued in 1943 as a sop to Roosevelt and Churchill. On November 29, the United States and the Soviet Union pushed through the United Nations a resolution approving the partition of the Palestine Mandate into predominantly Jewish and Arab areas. Britain announced it would withdraw its 50,000 soldiers from Palestine within six months, and pressures immediately arose within and on the United States in particular for and against the creation of a Jewish state. Marshall and Forrestal were strongly opposed, because of the animosity it would cause in the Arab world, and Forrestal emphasized that the United States did not have the military personnel to replace the British in the area, which the Pentagon estimated would require 100,000 men, more than three times what was available.

  On February 25, 1948, a coup d’état in Prague installed the Communists and on March 10, Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister, who had been through the Munich betrayal 10 years before, apparently committed suicide, though rumors have abounded ever since that he was murdered by the Communists, and successive subsequent investigations have come to different conclusions. The coup and Masaryk’s death, however it happened, dramatized the steadily rising tension in Europe. On March 17, Truman addressed a joint session of Congress, cited the Soviet Union as a menace to peace which sought the conquest of all Europe, and asked for immediate passage of the Marshall Plan and restoration of the military draft.

  The Italian election of April 18 was an unprecedented slanging match between the Christian Democrats led by Alcide De Gasperi and the Communist-dominated Popular Front led by Palmiro Togliatti. There was considerable violence in northern Italy and the Christian Democrats accused the Communists of seeking to seize the nation’s children and turn them into witnesses against their parents in criminal proceedings. The two leading parties were heavily funded by the CIA and the Soviet Union, and Pope Pius XII intervened decisively, implying that a vote for the Popular Front was an act of self-excommunication. (“When you cast your ballot, God sees you; Stalin doesn’t” was the popular formulation.) It was a clear victory for the Christian Democrats, 48.5 percent to 31 percent, and the Socialist Party soon flaked off the coalition with the Communists.

  On May 14, the United States recognized the new state of Israel as soon as it was proclaimed, after a rending struggle within the government in which General Marshall said he would vote against Truman in the next election if he went ahead with it. Marshall never again spoke to Clark Clifford, a champion of Israel, Truman’s chief assistant and a future secretary of defense, and one of Washington’s greatest power brokers for 50 years.

  On June 11, 1948, Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan presented and had adopted a resolution authorizing military alliances with regional collective-security groups, in furtherance of the United Nations Charter. On June 23, the Western Allied Powers in Berlin enacted currency reforms in West Berlin, contrary to the Soviet ambition to circulate Russian currency throughout the city. The next day Stalin abruptly closed the land access from West Germany to West Berlin. The United States, with full British and French cooperation, began the air supply of the 2.1 million residents of West Berlin. It was well understood that East bloc interception of Western aircraft would be considered an act of war. On June 28, Truman ostentatiously sent two squadrons of B-29s to Germany, which were assumed to be there to execute an atomic attack on Russia if provoked. (This was a ruse, as the aircraft were not equipped to carry atomic bombs, but the Russians never discovered that.)

  This was another disastrous error by Stalin, seeming to break his undertakings, threaten war, and strangle the prostrate city of Berlin, in which there were no military targets. And he failed; he was clearly afraid of the power of the United States, and after 321 days, he abandoned the effort and reopened land access to West Berlin from West Germany. The United States had ceased its industrial dismantling of Germany in May 1946, as that policy had never been anything but a sop to Stalin anyway, and henceforth the objective in Germany was to resurrect it as a powerful, democratic ally in the constellation of states determined, under American leadership, to keep the Russians out of Western Europe. The British and American occupation zones were merged administratively on December 2, 1946. And the coordinated policy was the swiftest possible resuscitation of Germany as a democratic, stable, industrial power.

  6. THE PEOPLE’S TRIUMPH

  As the Democratic convention neared, there was great disillusionment with Truman. He had spoken in favor of civil rights for African Americans, which seriously rattled the South, and his hard-line Cold War stance had driven off Henry Wallace and the left; Wallace had publicly criticized Truman and was promptly fired. There was a stampede to draft Eisenhower, who had retired as army chief of staff and was now president of Columbia University. Eisenhower was not interested, but Roosevelt’s ne‘er-do-well sons and liberals Claude Pepper of Florida, Chester Bowles of Connecticut, and Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis; Auto Workers’ leader Walter Reuther; southerners Senator John Sparkman and South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond; and bosses Jake Arvey of Chicago, Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York, and Frank Hague of New Jersey all started screaming for Eisenhower (whom none of them knew, and who had never been a Democrat). Truman was nominated anyway, with Senate Majority Leader Alben W Barkley of Kentucky for vice president, after midnight at Philadelphia on July 15. The event was celebrated by the release of a large number of long-cooped, agitated, and incontinent pigeons, portrayed as doves of peace, including the two that landed on former (and future) Speaker Sam Rayburn’s glabrous head.138 It was generally assumed that the Republican nominees, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York and Governor Earl Warren of California, would win easily. Humphrey had moved to pass a pro—civil rights resolution, and when Truman finally addressed the convention, he was direct, tough, and feisty, and portrayed the campaign as the underdog, the working people, the small farmer, against the slickers, the privileged in their country clubs, and the ancient enemies of everything he and Roosevelt had done to save the country, in the last 15 years, from the Republicans’ Depression and isolationism. It was an instant reinvigoration, and he ran a very spirited campaign.

  Two days later, the “Dixiecrats,” as they called themselves, southern segregationists, nominated Thurmond for president and Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi for vice president, and two weeks later, in the same hall in Philadelphia where the Republicans and the Democrats had met, the Progressive Citizens of America, in the biggest convention of all, nominated Henry Wallace for president, and the “Singing Cowboy” of Idaho, Senator Glen H. Taylor (“Oh Give Me a Home By the Capital Dome”), for vice president. Wallace refused to repudiate his communist support, and his platform opposed the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and the draft, and advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament. Acidulous commentators H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker, and even perennial Socialist candidate Norman Thomas, denounced Wallace as a communist dupe. His candidacy effectively sank at the outset.

  Truman embarked on his historic, 22,000-mile “whistle-stop tour” of the country in Roosevelt’s well-traveled railway car, the Ferdinand Magellan, on September 17. The polls were unfavorable, but the reception, everywhere in the country, was very positive. Everywhere he sounded the theme of the dauntless underdog, and the Dewey campaign responded with torpid overconfidence. The president generally began: “I’m Harry Truman, I work for the government, and I’m trying to keep my job.” The crowds grew and called out “Give ’em hell, Harry,” and he did. He was greeted by over a million people in New York on October 29. Closing polls showed Truman had narrowed Dewey’s lead to five points, and the commentariat—Alistair Cooke, Walter Lippmann, Drew Pearson, Marquis Childs, the Alsops, and H.V. Kaltenborn—were, as usual, all chanting
the conventional wisdom: that Truman would lose badly.

  The 1948 election is generally reckoned the greatest electoral upset in American history: Truman took 24.2 million votes, 49.6 percent of the total, and 303 electoral votes, to Dewey’s 21.99 million votes, 45.1 percent of the total, and 189 electoral votes, to Thurmond’s 1.18 million votes, 2.4 percent of the vote, and 39 electoral votes, and Wallace’s 1.16 million votes, 2.4 percent, and no electoral votes. Truman won Ohio, Illinois, and California by a total of just 57,000 votes, and if any two of those states had gone to Dewey, Thurmond could have forced the vote to the House of Representatives (where the Democrats were again in control and Rayburn assumedly could have saved the election for Truman). General Marshall, who with uncharacteristic pique had threatened not to vote for Truman over his support of Israel, wrote him: “You have put over the greatest one-man fight in American history.” This was almost certainly true and the world had now to take note of a determined, sage, and very considerable reelected president. Harry Truman was assured of a challenging second term, but probably would not have wished it any other way.

  7. THE FALL OF CHINA

  The new term opened very smoothly. General George C. Marshall, facing a kidney operation, retired, and was replaced as secretary of state by the very experienced and capable Dean G. Acheson. It was clear that Truman had outwitted Stalin with the Berlin airlift, which, when the blockade was lifted on May 12, 1949, had been broken by nearly 278,000 flights bearing 2.33 million tons of supplies. On April 4, what became the most successful alliance in world history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was launched. The United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Iceland, Portugal, and Norway initially joined in a pact that an attack upon one was an attack upon all. The subsequent clause left some liberty about what steps would be taken by each member in response to such attack, but it was effectively, a United States military guarantee for the other countries. In 1952, Greece and Turkey would join, and in 1955, the fate that Stalin had feared, West Germany would join. Many other countries followed.

  As time passed, the United States would station 300,000 men of their armed forces in Western Europe, and the revival of Western European prosperity and purposefulness would steadily build a formidable defense against any assault from the Red Army, backed by the entire worldwide arsenal of the United States, nuclear and conventional. Roosevelt’s policy of American engagement in Europe and the Far East, and the containment policy originally envisioned as the response to Soviet bad faith by George Kennan, took shape and gained strength, and the domestic Communist parties in Western Europe failed to dislodge the democratic parties.

  On the same day the Berlin blockade was lifted, May 12, the Allied powers recognized the sovereign state of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), with its capital on the Rhine, at Bonn, largely because it was the home of Germany’s leading statesman, Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, who had been mayor of Cologne before the Nazi era, and had been persecuted during the Third Reich. Adenauer became the Federal Republic’s first chancellor. One of the greatest acts of statesmanship of the postwar world in the twentieth century would be Adenauer’s rejection of Stalin’s offer of reunification of Germany in exchange for Germany’s neutrality between the Soviet and Western blocs. Adenauer said that Germany would remain with its allies and would eventually be reunified anyway, as did occur, and he carried German opinion with him.

  When Truman first started exploring, with Acheson, the possibilities for such an alliance, the Dutch had been chiefly concerned with retention of Indonesia, which was impossible; the French with subjugation of Germany, which was impractical; and the British with spiking the mystique of communism by making a success of democratic socialism in Britain, which, as Truman gently pointed out, was not going to deter Stalin’s armed forces, even if it were a success domestically (and it wasn’t). The Americans led the new alliance with great distinction, and Eisenhower retired from Columbia University to become the first military commander of NATO, and did his now very predictably inspired job of putting together a multinational, smoothly operating command structure for NATO in Paris.

  In the Far East, MacArthur was proving an extremely deft and imaginative governor of Japan, instituting women’s rights, a democratic political system, and a free market economy, while preserving the emperor, with whom he developed a good relationship, and adapting Western reforms to Japanese folkways. He was deeply respected in Japan, and very attentive to the sensibilities of the Japanese. There was no Soviet presence in the country at all, except for a very modest military liaison office. MacArthur and other American experts in the area regularly warned Truman and his senior colleagues of the deteriorating situation in China. Mao Tse-tung’s Communists, better organized and galvanized by an ideological faith, steadily gained against Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt and very compromised Nationalists. It was clear from Stalin’s comments at Tehran and Yalta and Potsdam that he had no great affinity for Mao or the Chinese Communists generally, but in the acutely defensive atmosphere that was developing, fed by reports of Communist espionage, the specter of a Communist takeover in China was a very disturbing one.

  Korean War. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

  The Red Scare was fueled by espionage controversies, which began with the defection of the Soviet cipher and coding clerk in the embassy in Ottawa, Canada, Igor Gouzenko, in September 1945. The information he dumped into the lap of the Canadian authorities, the FBI (as the CIA was just being assembled from the war-time Office of Strategic Services), and British MI5 led to the apprehension of Klaus Fuchs, the Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (arrested in 1950 and executed on June 19, 1953), and ultimately the British spy ring of Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. There were television programs in the United States dramatizing the Red Menace and constant warnings that anyone’s friends, neighbors, or even relatives could be communist spies. J. Edgar Hoover was making provocative speeches around the country about the Red Menace and New York’s Francis J. Cardinal Spellman claimed the country was in imminent danger of a communist takeover. This was preposterous; there were very few American communists, even fewer Soviet agents, and none of them in any positions of influence, but it rattled public confidence, though it helped produce the political support for a water-tight containment policy against the Soviet Union.

  Former State Department official Alger Hiss was accused by Time magazine assistant editor Whittaker Chambers of having spied for the USSR in the thirties, and after he denied it, he was, by the efforts of California congressman Richard M. Nixon, indicted for perjury on December 15, 1948. The tense atmosphere was escalated and the capital shocked by the suicide of just-retired Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, who jumped from a 16th floor window at Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 22, 1949. He had had a depressive breakdown, but rumors abounded for a time that he had been murdered in a communist conspiracy (like Jan Masaryk in Prague the year before). Forrestal was succeeded by Louis A. Johnson, who moved quickly to cut costs but antagonized virtually everyone, and General Omar N. Bradley wrote that “unwittingly, Mr. Truman had replaced one mental case with another.”139

  By mid-1949, it was clear that Chiang Kai-shek was finished and was being routed by Mao Tse-tung. Time and Life publisher Henry R. Luce, who had been born to Christian missionaries in China, and believed in Chiang and his Wellesley-educated Christian wife, led the charge in support of the Chiangs, backed by an army of church and Republican groups, and by General Douglas MacArthur, who wrote for Luce’s mass-circulation publications at times. On August 4, 1949, the State Department published a document of over 1,000 pages on the history of U.S.-China relations, with particular emphasis on 1944 to 1949. In a foreword, Dean Acheson wrote that more than $2 billion had been given to Chiang, who was dismissed as corrupt and incompetent. Acheson concluded that the impending fall of China was the result of “internal Chinese forces ...
which this country tried to influence but could not.” Truman told Senator Vandenberg: “We picked a bad horse.”140 Republican demagogues, including California senator William Knowland and Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy (who had defeated Robert La Follette Jr., in a 180-degree ideological turn for Wisconsin), were not going to let Truman and the Democrats off that lightly.

  As the Chinese Nationalists circled the drain, Stalin detonated an atomic bomb, on August 29, 1949. This led to an anguished, semi-public debate about whether the United States should proceed to a “super bomb,” the hydrogen bomb. This controversy was only resolved in favor of doing so on January 31, 1950, when Truman was satisfied that the Soviet Union would proceed to the same destination. The hydrogen bomb was tested by the United States on January 11, 1952, and it possessed the potential to be as much as 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  In the meantime, Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 10, 1949 (the 24th anniversary of the revolution of Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law, Sun Yat-sen, although the relationship was posthumous to Sun), and almost all fighting had ceased on the Chinese mainland by December. Chiang had removed to Taiwan, and declared Taipei the temporary capital of the Republic of China. The United States Seventh Fleet, sailing from Japan, effectively assured Taiwan’s security from invasion, permanently thereafter, at least to the time of this writing.

  8. THE COMMUNIST ATTACK IN KOREA

  On January 12, 1950, in an address to the National Press Club, Acheson described the American defense perimeter. But by not mentioning South Korea he implied that it was outside the perimeter. Korea had been arbitrarily divided at the 38th parallel for the purposes of deciding whether the Japanese occupying forces should surrender to the United States or the Soviet Union. The demarcation had been decreed by two junior officers in the Pentagon one night in the summer of 1945, one of them, then Colonel Dean Rusk, a future secretary of state. The South had two-thirds of Korea’s population and a rather larger area, and was a little larger than the state of Indiana.