In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  ALL THAT FOLLOWED was implicit in the decision to support Greece and Turkey. It was logical to ask, as Acheson did March 5 after meetings with Forrestal and Robert Patterson, what other countries might need similar aid—and to ask a committee to study the question and report. After the President addressed Congress a week later to propose supporting the two countries, the press raised the same issue. The Washington Post and The New York Times told their readers that helping Greece and Turkey was just a “starter.” Columnists James Reston, Marquis Childs, and Joseph Alsop all foresaw the need for massive financial programs to reconstruct Europe.

  Walter Lippmann addressed on March 13 the essential issue: that priorities would have to be established. “Never was it so necessary to define our commitments by a unified strategical conception as to where our available power, prestige, money, and expertness, which are not unlimited, can be invested with the best prospect of achieving the best that is judged to be possible.”

  On April 5 he told his readers: “The truth is that political and economic measures on a scale which no responsible statesman has yet ventured to hint at will be needed in the next year or so. To prevent the crisis which will otherwise engulf Europe and spread chaos throughout the world, the measures will have to be very large—in Europe, no less than an economic union, and over here no less than the equivalent to a revival of Lend-Lease.”

  Some of the best foreign policy minds in the United States were seizing on the same point at the same time: as Lippmann wrote May 1, “if we allocate our contributions to each European government separately,” that would “merely put them all on the dole.” For the United States to finance the successful reconstruction of Europe, the Continent would have to make itself into a viable economic proposition. Instead of remaining fragmented into many small national markets, it would have to reduce trade barriers and aim at creating a Europe-wide market.

  The logic of their international situation led American leaders in 1947 to arrive at the same position Woodrow Wilson had taken for theoretical reasons in 1917: the world would become safe for America only when Europe was converted into something somewhat like another United States.

  GEORGE KENNAN, appointed to head the new Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, told Marshall that the reconstruction of the European economy required the recovery of Germany. In a public speech some months earlier, Republican spokesman John Foster Dulles came to the same conclusion from the opposite direction. The logic that compelled him to support German reunification drove him to advocate European unity. William Fulbright in the Senate and Hale Boggs in the House were Democratic sponsors of a congressional resolution calling for creation of a United States of Europe.

  In April Marshall attended a foreign ministers conference in Moscow, and Dulles came along as an adviser. Failure to reach a settlement with the Soviet Union at the meeting, and the news of the terrible conditions prevailing on the Continent, led the bipartisan American delegation to conclude that a new sort of lend-lease program (for FDR had taught the country to think in such terms) indeed had to be initiated. On his return to Washington, Marshall directed Kennan to put his Policy Planning Staff together and propose details of such a program in two weeks. Kennan took three. He made good use of the work done by the committee Acheson had put into motion in March, and of the resources of Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Will Clayton.

  On June 5 Marshall outlined the plan that carries his name in a commencement speech at Harvard University. He invited the countries of Europe to take the initiative in drawing up a program for their own recovery that the United States could support. His speech, which was drafted by Bohlen, had none of the anticommunist rhetoric that had been so striking in the Greece-Turkey message to Congress that Acheson had drafted for Truman. Marshall said: “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”

  The Marshall Plan therefore was an offer addressed to all of Europe, including the Soviet Union and its newly acquired satellite countries in central and eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia was pulled back from accepting by Moscow; the Soviet Union kept the countries in its sphere from joining the plan. Their refusal of it marked the economic division of Europe into West and East, in which international organizations dealing with investment, trade, currency, and similar issues—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the various European recovery agencies, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the like—functioned for the non-Soviet world, while the Russian-dominated part of the world kept to itself.

  The plan went hand in hand with American support for the drawing together and possible unification of western Europe and—most intensely feared by the Kremlin—of western Germany. Indeed, the Truman administration was advancing along a road that would lead two years later to the merger of American, British, and French zones into a new German state, the Federal Republic. Seeing the direction in which the Americans were moving, Stalin reacted violently. In 1945 and 1946 he had kept to the agreement he had made partitioning Europe; within the British sphere, he had abandoned the communists of Greece to Churchill’s armies, and he had ordered the Communist party of France to help de Gaulle and his successors restore that country’s infrastructure and economy. In 1947, retaliating against Washington’s policy for Germany, Stalin had a chief aide instruct the leaders of western Europe’s communist parties to change course. In a secret meeting to which they were summoned in Poland in September 1947, they were ordered to subvert the governments and sabotage the economies of their respective countries.

  So as the United States went to work to restore the prosperity of Europe, west of the Russian sphere, Soviet leaders ordered their followers to disrupt it.

  THE BIRTH OF THE MARSHALL PLAN in 1947 gave rise to an economic alliance between the United States and western Europe. At that time, the U.S. government had no intention of also entering into a military alliance.

  The strategy the United States should adopt in response to the Soviet threat was the subject of the famous debate in print that year between George Kennan, writing under the nom de plume “X” in the pages of Foreign Affairs, and Walter Lippmann. Kennan’s identity soon became known, and he emerged as a public figure. Viewing Soviet Russia as Bullitt had done in his amoeba memorandum,‡ he argued that she would flow forward (perhaps like a river that has overflowed its banks?) at every point that it was not checked; what therefore was called for was containment—a sort of wall or dike around the Soviet bloc.

  Lippmann replied in a series of articles, reprinted in book form, that gave currency to “the cold war” as a description of the strange U.S.-Soviet duel that was to take center stage in world politics for decades to come. He argued that the United States should react to Soviet moves only at points and on battlefields and with weapons of America’s own choosing.

  To garrison the whole length of the Soviet frontier was beyond America’s resources; it would require the United States to acquire dozens of puppet, client, and allied countries all around the globe to fight America’s fights. But as such satellites as were available to the United States in Asia and the Middle East were too flimsy to hold back the Soviet Union, America would find itself not defended by a ring of client states, but defending them.

  Instead of recruiting new allies in the vastnesses of Eurasia, the United States, Lippmann argued, should limit itself to perfecting its natural alliances with countries of the Western Hemisphere—and with those of western Europe, which when restored to health would be able to contribute significantly to the common defense.

  The two men were more in agreement than was supposed at the time, for Kennan regretted not having limited and qualified a number of his statements. But the “X” article was enduringly valuable in making the point that rather than fight a war against Soviet Russia, the United S
tates should hold the line against its expansionism and await its collapse from within.

  LIKE HITLER, Stalin gained control of Czechoslovakia in two stages. The second of them—the total takeover—was dramatized by the fate of Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, son of the republic’s founder, a much-loved man of liberal ideals and the only noncommunist remaining in the cabinet. Nobody could have tried harder to work in partnership with the Soviet Union and the Communist party. But at the end he knew that even he was a marked man. He sent the woman he loved, Marcia Davenport, an American novelist, to the safety of London, promising to escape and join her within days. On March 10, 1948, he was pushed from the fourth-floor window of the foreign ministry to his death in what was made to look like a suicide.§ For many, his murder removed the last lingering illusions about Soviet intentions.

  The next day Norway told the United States and Britain that she had been informed the Soviet Union was about to attempt to intimidate her into a treaty making far-reaching concessions. Finland already had been bullied into signing such a treaty, but the Norwegian government had decided to refuse.

  Britain was in the process of negotiating the first stages of a European consortium to become America’s partner in the Marshall Plan. Norway asked Britain “what help Norway might expect to receive if attacked.” Within days the British and other European negotiators turned the proposed Western European Union into a defensive military alliance. Truman told Congress that the United States should help. From its spies, the USSR knew that Kennan and Bohlen were among the high American officials opposed to going any further than supplying Europe with arms, and that many in Congress opposed entering into any military alliance with western Europe.

  Nonetheless, the Soviet Union escalated the conflict and on April 1 cut off western rail access to Berlin as the start of a full-scale blockade. The local American military commander, General Lucius Clay, proposed to send a convoy through to run the blockade. His British counterpart, General Sir Brian Robertson, told him it could not be done: the Russians had only to blow up the bridge over the Elbe and the convoy would be stranded in the Soviet zone. Robertson suggested instead supplying Berlin by air.

  To recommendations that he abandon the city, Truman said: “We are going to stay. Period.” He added: “The Russians have no right to get us out.” He ordered the airlift that saved the city.

  Truman had referred to Vandenberg, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the politically explosive issue of how America should respond to the western European defensive alliance that British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin was whipping into shape. Spurred on by the Soviet blockade, Vandenberg decided that the United States should enter into an alliance with the Europeans and (with an eye to the 1948 elections) that the Republican Senate rather than the Democratic President should take the initiative in doing it. “Why should Truman get all the credit?” he asked.

  Thus the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was born. It was the sort of alliance Theodore Roosevelt had espoused: like-minded nations pursuing a common goal. The NATO treaty pledged each country that signed it to regard an attack on another—in Europe or North America—as an attack on itself. Once the airlift had beaten the Berlin blockade, Truman therefore felt free to cut the defense budget. Backed by the atomic bomb, the public warning that the United States would go to war would, he felt, deter the Soviet Union from attacking western Europe.

  THE AMERICANS WANT an integrated Europe looking like the United States of America.” Such was the assessment of a British civil servant, and it may not have been wide of the mark. But it was not what they got, and what they got was not entirely of their doing.

  Initially the United States invested $12.5 billion—somewhat more than $70 billion in today’s dollars—in the Marshall Plan.‖ It provided the short-term liquidity, and restored the business confidence, that enabled Europe to finance her own reconstruction. The first tranche of $6.8 billion amounted to 18 percent of the 1949 U.S. budget. Yet in the plan’s first two years, some 80 to 90 percent of capital formation came from Europe herself.

  Truman intended to appoint Dean Acheson or Will Clayton to oversee the plan. Either man might have done so with a broad strategic conception in mind. But Vandenberg vetoed them, fearing that Marshall Plan funds somehow might flow into Democratic party coffers, and insisting that the administrator should be a businessman, not a politician. He selected the nominee: Paul Hoffman, an automobile company executive. Under Hoffman, an array of American business, community, and labor leaders offered advice and guidance, but it was the Europeans themselves (as Marshall had intended) who shaped their own economic recovery.

  It was curiously and uniquely American to appoint a businessman to oversee the creation of a new Europe and to imagine that to be a nonpolitical function. Nor was there a parallel for an American automobile company executive, on orders from Washington, helping Italians and Frenchmen and Germans to put together car companies that could compete against U.S. motorcar manufacturers.

  Of course, in designing the new Europe the United States did not have it entirely its own way. Britain stood in the way of the integrated economic system—the free trade—that the United States advocated, and France blocked the integrated European army that America proposed in order to allow German rearmament to take place under controlled conditions. American economic and political goals were best realized by the Schuman Plan for a united coal and steel community, but it was a Frenchman (Jean Monnet) who was the chief architect of it.

  Still, the chief objective of the Marshall Plan was to restore the vitality of the countries of western Europe so that they could function, if they chose, as America’s allies; and that objective was achieved.

  BETWEEN THE END of the Second World War and the outbreak of the Korean War, the United States, which until then never had joined alliances outside of the Western Hemisphere, constructed and entered not one but two parallel—and in a way, alternative—international alliance systems intended to prevent the outbreak of a major war.

  One centered around the United Nations, a creation Wilsonian in conception, but modified in light of FDR’s insight that the world could be run only by the great powers acting in concert, and that if the great powers are divided—as they were in the late 1940s—the world cannot be run at all. Like a sort of Sleeping Beauty, the United Nations system of administering the affairs of one world was left in repose until international politics should change in such a way as to bring it to life and allow it to function.

  The other alliance system, nominally operating as a self-defense organization pursuant to the UN Charter, was a Theodore Roosevelt sort of conception. The Atlantic alliance, in its several forms, was a grouping of countries brought together by a shared interest in protecting the existing balance of power against Soviet attempts to overthrow it. Having experimented with both, Truman, Marshall, Acheson, Kennan, and their colleagues found that it was the second alliance system that was the more useful in answering America’s needs in their time.

  * Six years earlier, the War Department had moved out of the building and into the largest office complex in the world, the Pentagon.

  † Marshall had replaced James Byrnes, his former political sponsor and, to some extent, Truman’s. Truman claimed that Byrnes had tried to conduct foreign policy without consulting the President, but the evidence suggests that Truman was exaggerating, and he probably fired Byrnes for other reasons.

  ‡ See this page.

  § Some still believe the official story that it was a suicide.

  ‖ Writing in The New York Times (March 7, 1990), Zbigniew Brzezinski estimated that between 1946 and 1955, the United States contributed to western European recovery in all (including the Marshall Plan) a sum equal in 1989 dollars to $170 billion.

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  BREAKING WITH THE PAST—AND PAYING THE PRICE FOR IT

  WE MUST NEVER fight another war the way we fought the last two,” Truman told his aide Clark Clifford. “I have the feeling that if the Army a
nd the Navy had fought our enemies as hard as they fought each other, the war would have ended much earlier.” In his view the United States was “damn lucky” to have won the Second World War. Soon after he became President, Truman decided to unify the armed services and to organize a national security structure suited to the twentieth century. In recognizing that the United States would be fighting wars in the future, the President was departing from tradition.

  TRUMAN’S GOOD QUALITIES, including his willingness to face facts, were not appreciated in his first years as President. His party lost the 1946 congressional elections the year after he took office. It was so complete a political disaster that Arkansas Democratic senator J. William Fulbright, an admirer of the British parliamentary system of government, called on Truman to resign in favor of the Senate leader, Vandenberg, a Republican. And despite the Truman administration’s inspiring foreign policy leadership in 1947, it was generally not so much predicted as assumed that Truman would lose a four-way 1948 presidential race to the Republican candidate, New York governor Dewey.

  Dewey, an isolationist before the war, had moved with the times. With his authorization, his foreign policy adviser and intended secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had played a key role in shaping the administration’s bipartisan foreign policy. Unity was to be the Republican theme; foreign policy was not at issue in the campaign once Dewey had crushed Taft at the Republican convention in Philadelphia.