In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  THEY WILL DISBAND THEIR ARMIES/ When this great strife is won/ And trust again to pacifists/ To guard for them their home …,” wrote Geprge Patton, during the fighting, of his countrymen; he mocked his short-sighted fellow Americans and concluded happily, “THERE IS NO END TO WAR.” The regular army colonel was one of the few Americans in the postwar years who regarded war as a normal form of international behavior. He studied hard and read omnivorously to prepare himself for his country’s next major conflict.

  Patton was assigned in 1919 to a command post at Camp Meade, Maryland, where a heavy tank battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower had moved from Pennsylvania. Patton got hold of an army tank handbook—seventy problems with approved solutions—that he and Eisenhower then studied together. The two officers decided to collaborate on writing articles about the future of tank warfare. They took a tank apart and put it back together again. They championed the work of a designer who aimed at building a vehicle that could speed over rough terrain.

  Eisenhower’s real military education was about to begin—in the 1920s, when most Americans assumed that there would be no more wars. After Camp Meade, Ike was assigned to Panama, where he came under the influence of a general named Fox Conner, who had been the operations officer of the AEF in France. Conner was a cerebral officer who introduced Eisenhower to the pleasures of military literature: first historical novels, then history, then works of military history and theory. Conner taught the younger officer that the Peace of Versailles was no more than an armed truce; that there would be another round in the world war; that in thirty years the Germans again would take the field against an alliance of western Europe and the United States; that the alliance would fight under a unified command; and that American officers should learn to master the art of commanding multinational coalitions. The officer to watch and to follow, Conner told Ike, was George Marshall: a man who had the qualities needed to lead the allied armies in the war to come.

  PERHAPS THE ONLY common ground between Conner and the American public was that the negotiations in Paris had been a failure. In the years to come, those who wanted to learn from the experience set out to inquire what had gone wrong.

  One answer, supplied by Harold Nicolson in 1933, was that it was France that had blocked the United States and Britain from realizing their vision of a durable peace, and that she had been driven to do so because her geographic position was different from that of the English and the Americans. The English-speaking powers were surrounded by water and could not be invaded by Germany. France had no such defenses, and therefore had to take steps to protect herself that Wilson and Lloyd George regarded as either unnecessary or unwise.

  Nicolson had not yet discovered that a resurgent Germany could threaten Britain with invasion as well as France. Nor did he take full account of the progress of modern science, which had shrunk the crossing time and value of even America’s ocean moats. Nicolson was not alone in failing to see how greatly technology had changed the fundamentals of military geography. In 1923, writing with the authoritativeness of one who had been assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt, in an article in Asia magazine, argued that it was technologically impossible for Japan to attack America’s Pacific coast.

  WALTER LIPPMANN SENSED that Wilson’s failure to put his program across in Paris had been due to some cause other than the moral failings of European politicians or the exposed geographical position of France. The Wilsonians, as Lippmann well knew, had gone to Paris convinced that they held the power to remake foreign politics in the image of America’s. They were aware in advance that Europe’s old-line politicians would oppose them; but they had been confident of overcoming that opposition. Wilson had counted on public opinion to bring the heads of other governments around to his views. That did not happen, so Lippmann concentrated on the question of why public opinion did not perform as Wilson expected it to.

  Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) proved to be a troubling book. A firsthand knowledge of journalism and of wartime propaganda led him to conclude that the public forms opinions on the basis of faulty information. The media, he explained, are not set up in such a way as to either discover or reveal the true story. His unconvincing solution was to create and publicly fund intelligence agencies of experts who would provide unbiased knowledge to those who need it.

  Lippmann missed seeing the more basic flaws in Wilson’s theory—and his—that public opinion can be relied on to compel governments to behave decently. One was that public opinion carries little or no weight in countries that are not democratically self-ruled—which was most of the human race in 1919, and almost the entire globe outside of western Europe, Canada, and the United States. The second flaw was that, even in democracies, the mass of the people favor the interests of their own countries. The President’s theory that even in their own cause people will judge fairly and impartially proved in practice to be every bit as naive as it sounds. A third flaw was that, considerably more than Wilson supposed, opinions differ as to what is right and wrong; alien cultures and foreign political philosophies may produce views that Americans regard as unacceptable. Finally—and most visibly—public opinion is of no avail against invasion by an enemy army.

  As of 1922 Lippmann’s education in these matters was just beginning. Even in his disillusionment he still failed to grasp the essential inadequacy of his and Wilson’s approach to the remaking of world politics. They placed too little emphasis on irrational impulses, on national and religious fanaticism, on xenophobia, on the darker side of human nature, and on the realities of military and political power—and too much on the power of ideals and speeches and the value of promises.

  On display in the 1920s were two outstanding examples of America’s belief that laws and treaties can change people and peoples. One was the law prohibiting the consumption of alcoholic beverages. The other was the negotiation by the United States of a multilateral treaty, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which the countries of the world agreed to renounce war forever.

  Yet nations continued to make war; Americans continued to drink alcohol; and the effect of the attempt to enforce Prohibition was to turn normally law-abiding citizens into criminals, and such cities as Chicago into communities ruled by gangsters.

  35

  GOING ON THE BIGGEST SPREE IN HISTORY

  IN RESIGNING HIS POSITION at the Paris Peace Conference, William Bullitt told his friends that he was so disgusted by Wilson’s betrayal of liberalism that he was giving up on ideals and causes; he was going to the Riviera “to lie down on the sand and watch the world go to hell.” As he so often did, he set the trend for his generation. They were going to give up on doing good. They would make a lot of money and have fun.

  Harry Truman and a partner opened a haberdashery in Kansas City. Their plan was to stock merchandise of top quality to attract a wealthy clientele—good business contacts, they reckoned, for the future.

  Averell Harriman, a failure in wartime shipbuilding, decided he would make a fortune in sea transport like the one his father had made in railroading. He raided a competitor, set up a business combination with a leading German shipping line, and in a short time had made himself “the Steamship King.” But a bust in shipping followed the boom, and he was lucky to be able to sell out his interest to his German partners.

  In downtown New York he opened offices as “W. A. Harriman & Co.” in his own building. He gathered wealthy contemporaries around him. He was joined by David Bruce, scion of a famous Virginia family, who had distinguished himself in the war and who had married Ailsa Mellon, perhaps the richest woman in America. Another recruit was the son of the lawyer who had taken over the management of the Harriman empire from Averell’s father: Robert Lovett, somehow unable to concentrate his mind on finishing law school after years of excitement as a naval aviator, threw in his lot with the new firm, too. Another partner was George Herbert Walker, whose grandson George Bush grew up to be elected President.

  While Harriman continued to
dabble in business, he devoted himself increasingly to playing polo. Tall, thin, rich, athletic, and good-looking, he became a playboy star of the international set. His romantic liaisons were a feature of the tabloid press, and eventually led his wife to divorce him. His idle and luxurious life was envied by many.

  But it was noticeable that many of the fortunes on Wall Street were being made by new men who, unlike Harriman and Bruce, had neither inherited their money nor married it. Tough and unscrupulous, they were not always easy to distinguish from the bootleggers who supplied their whiskey. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it pegged: in his novel about Jay Gatsby, the mysterious, debonair millionaire turns out to be not the financier he appears to be, but a creature of the crooked gamblers notorious for fixing the World Series of 1919. Not until 1929 did the hordes of ordinary Americans who played the stock and bond markets discover that the game in which they were gambling their savings was as rigged as the baseball finals of ten years earlier.

  Rough, redheaded Joseph Kennedy, leaving the shipbuilding business at war’s end, speculated in stocks, bonds, and real estate, profiting from inside information. He alternately organized and foiled bear raids, took over companies and sold them, and went long the booms and shorted the busts. His escapades with movie stars and other glamorous ladies were another expression of his acquisitive lust, less noticed at the time than in the later glare of publicity focused on his famous sons.

  Nobody in real life was more a figure out of nowhere—like Gatsby—than James Forrestal, who wiped out all memory not merely of his Catholicism, but of his family origins. He never spoke of his past.

  His best friend since college, Ferdinand Eberstadt, joined him at Dillon Read, the bond house to which he returned after the war. Eberstadt also was running away from his past: in his case, a father who was Jewish. Their employer, Clarence Dillon, had erased his background, too; he did not wish to be known as the son of a Jewish clothing store owner named Samuel Lapowski.

  They were a lean, driven, innovative team, specializing in syndications that allowed them to compete against better capitalized rivals. Forrestal and Eberstadt earned fortunes in their daring corporate rescues and reorganizations. Forrestal married a dazzling ex–chorus girl and society columnist; and though he and his wife went on living the promiscuous sex lives that the jazz age seemed to demand, and therefore ran with a fast set of friends, they were enabled to mix with the traditionally wealthy, too. The Robert Lovetts, to whom they became increasingly close—both husbands having been naval aviators during the war—opened the doors for them into established society.

  Forrestal continued to remain silent about his origins, refusing to tell even his wife, and later his sons, who his parents were and where he had come from. But the America of the 1920s was a country in which people no longer cared. It was unlike prewar America: Not even the old families to whom Lovett introduced him asked Forrestal about his family origins. What mattered was that he had money.

  EVEN THOUGH NOT EVERYONE lived the 1920s that way, many did: those years as Fitzgerald wrote about them—the gaudy years of the jazz age—were what impressed themselves on the national consciousness. The young novelist spoke the same language Bullitt and Berle did in Paris in saying that “we were tired of Great Causes.” The postwar decade was “an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess.…” It was discovered that “we were the most powerful nation,” and the proof of it was that British tailors were obliged to change the cut of their suits to accommodate “the American long-waisted figure.”

  The automobile, enabling couples to park in distant secluded spots, out of sight of others, had made it possible for unmarried young people to explore the pleasures of sex. Then their elders “had discovered that young liquor will take the place of young blood.” The sequel, wrote Fitzgerald, was “like a children’s party taken over” by the adults. It was “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.”

  “The people over thirty, the people all the way up to fifty …”—and for young Fitzgerald that seemed a terminal age—“had joined the dance.” The generation that had fought overseas to change the world no longer cared about changing anything; “the Jazz Age now raced along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money.”

  THE SOLDIERS HAD RETURNED under the guidance of a self-effacing staff officer of whom few were aware. Colonel George Marshall had become Pershing’s aide in the aftermath of victory, and as such had organized the transport of 2 million American troops from Europe back to the United States. The financiers in whose circles Pershing moved grew to respect and admire the general’s aide. The Morgan bank offered Marshall a position at $30,000 a year. He declined, but in 1921 entrusted Morgan with the management of his investment portfolio—for even he was in the market. It seemed that everybody in America was.

  At the end of the war, the army chief of staff, General Peyton March, continued a long-standing feud with Pershing. Searching for a new superintendent for West Point to modernize the service academy, March was determined not to award the post to any of Pershing’s favorites, especially not the staff officers such as Marshall who had served under Pershing at his French headquarters in Chaumont during the war. He hit upon the idea of appointing MacArthur, who regarded himself as the victim of intrigues organized by “the Chaumont clique.”

  MacArthur adored West Point. His mother joined him there, proud of his star and his position, and served as his official hostess. But one night at a party on the Hudson, MacArthur met a wealthy, divorced, sophisticated woman of the jazz age, and they decided to marry. “Of course the attraction is purely physical,” snorted MacArthur’s mother, who was shocked as well as brokenhearted. Pershing’s was a parallel but different unhappiness: he had understood that the lady was to marry him.*

  Douglas and Louise MacArthur were married Valentine’s Day 1922. MacArthur’s mother moved out of, and his wife moved into, the superintendent’s mansion at West Point. But soon afterward Pershing posted MacArthur to the Philippines—and Louise complained to the press that she was being exiled as a punishment for jilting Pershing.

  Louise was bored by the Philippines. She tried to persuade Douglas to quit the army and become a stockbroker; that was where the action was at the time. She induced Morgan to make him an offer, but he declined it.

  Deciding that if he were promoted they could go home, she went to Washington and used her money and connections to obtain a second star. “I don’t care what it costs,” she told her political attorney. “Just go ahead and send the bill to me personally.…” MacArthur’s mother campaigned, too, pleading with Pershing (“Dear Old Jack”), now chief of staff, to give her son a second star. Just before retiring, Pershing granted the promotion.

  MacArthur was posted to Maryland, where Louise had a large estate. But the move did not reconcile her to her husband’s profession. She went about with other men, enjoying the nightlife she had missed and the gaiety of society. She decided to divorce again, and her attorneys arranged it. The decree became final, as did many things, in 1929. So ended Douglas MacArthur’s romance with the jazz age.

  BILL BULLITT KEPT ON THE MOVE, with all the restlessness of his generation: a generation that either did not find what it was looking for or was not satisfied with it when it was found. For a time he edited film scripts for Paramount Pictures in New York. When his wife left and then divorced him, he married Louise Bryant, the widow of his romantic revolutionary friend John Reed. Some guessed that he wanted to become Reed. With Louise he went to France; then, for a while, to Turkey. There he rented a villa on the Bosporus, where he and Louise settled—for a short time—to write.

  He wrote a novel about the Philadelphia society in which he had grown up, only thinly disguising the characters. Indiscretion had been his weakness; he made it into a career. The book when published was a sensation and a best-seller; Bullitt claimed that it sold 150,000 copies. The Bullitts returned to France.

  He now lived the ideal Lost Generation life. In
the Paris of the 1920s, of Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, where everyone wanted to be a famous writer, he was a famous writer—and his novel sold more copies than other people’s books did. Hemingway was jealous of him.

  Moreover, he was tinged with the glamour of the revolutionary Left: John Reed’s mantle was on his shoulders, John Reed’s widow was on his arm. Yet he also enjoyed the luxury of an independent income.

  And still he was not satisfied. He seems to have been unable to forget that in the war and in the peace negotiations, there had been something further that he had been looking for in life.

  GEORGE KENNAN, who served as a young diplomat under Bullitt in Moscow in the early 1930s, once wrote: “I see Bill Bullitt, in retrospect, as a member of that remarkable group of young Americans, born just before the turn of the century [it included such people as Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, John Reed, and Jim Forrestal—many of them his friends] for whom the First World War was the great electrifying experience of life.”

  At first that seems puzzling, for on both a personal and a public level, the war was disappointing and profoundly unsatisfying to Americans who dreamed of doing high deeds. Of course, it was not a terrible experience, as it was for Britons and Frenchmen who suffered the tortures of years of trench warfare; and indeed, American authors who wanted to show the absurdity or the horrors of war had to write their stories from a European point of view. Ernest Hemingway, though he much preferred to write from personal experience, could make his antiwar point in A Farewell to Arms only by writing of the Italian defeat in 1917, which he had not witnessed, rather than the victory of 1918, which he had.