In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Two days before Christmas, MacArthur’s field commander was killed. On Christmas day Matthew Ridgway, perhaps America’s most competent general, arrived to replace him. MacArthur gave him full authority.

  Within weeks, Ridgway had stopped what Truman’s latest biographer has called “the longest retreat in American military history.” Then he turned the troops around. A month after he arrived, Ridgway started the U.S.-UN forces moving forward again. He had shown that MacArthur was wrong; it could be done without starting a wider war—though perhaps nobody but Ridgway could have done it.

  Washington could breathe easy. But the narrowness of the escape retrospectively threw doubt on the wisdom of having intervened in the Korean conflict. So did the limitations on what Ridgway could accomplish: liberation of South Korea, with a standstill near the prewar frontier, but no victory over North Korea. As Acheson pointed out: “We can’t defeat the Chinese in Korea” because “they can put in more than we can.” But the American people would not sustain for long a war of attrition with no hope of winning in sight. Truman fired MacArthur for insubordination in April 1951, but it was the general’s view that there is no substitute for victory that rang true to the public.

  Nor was the public necessarily wrong. When the administration thought it had the chance to take the whole of Korea, it had reached for it. Only when that goal proved to be beyond its grasp did the American government let it be known that the stalemate arrived at near the thirty-eighth parallel was its objective. It was a freak stroke of luck that the United States had held on to even that—or indeed any portion of the Korean peninsula. Before Ridgway took up his command, all that Secretary of Defense Marshall asked was to “get out with honor.”

  When they defended the rightness of their decisions, Truman and Acheson could be understood to suggest that when similar challenges were posed in the future, they would once again allow America to be drawn into limited wars: where it was heads, the United States does not win; tails, the United States loses.

  The administration took the view that in the atomic era, to risk war against other great powers would be suicidal. The Truman government also had decided and said that it made no strategic sense to try to defend South Korea. Yet inflamed by an act of communist aggression, Truman and his advisers forgot their prudence and their strategy. Maddened by the waving Red flag, they charged blindly at the wrong place: a spot chosen by the matador. It was the price of the frenzy they themselves had aroused, in which American public figures now felt obliged to prove their patriotism by showing they were not soft on communism.

  JAMES FORRESTAL’S MANY FRIENDS and allies tried to minimize the significance of the form his mental breakdown took, not wanting it to color appreciation of his views while he was still in control of himself. He always had been tense and moody, and his lifelong conflicts about his religious and family origins apparently were severe. Whenever he invited political or business colleagues to the house, he had to worry about what drunken scene or crazed conduct to expect from his wife. Enemies among newspaper columnists printed what he claimed were lies about him. At one cabinet meeting, Clark Clifford, seated behind him, watched in fascinated horror as Forrestal, with his fingernail, scratched a spot at the back of his head—first until it was raw, and then until it bled.

  Forrestal suffered from severe nervous exhaustion, and as his service as secretary of defense—America’s first head of the unified armed services—came to an end in 1949, he was a physical wreck and virtually unable to speak. That his wife had paranoid delusions that Reds were plotting against her may have been related in some way to his own similar fears. He claimed that Russians were about to invade the United States, or perhaps already had. Visiting his friend Robert Lovett in Florida, Forrestal confided, as he had to his old Wall Street colleague Ferdinand Eberstadt: “The Russians are after me, the FBI is watching me, the Zionists are after me.” He searched the closets at Lovett’s house and looked under the beds.

  It was his wife, whom he had refused to send to a mental institution because it would ruin her reputation, who decided not to send him to one because it would ruin his. He was sent instead to a hospital, while columnist Drew Pearson charged in print and over the air that the American atom bomb arsenal had been in the hands of a madman.

  That same year, Forrestal jumped to his death from a window of Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington. A new biography suggests that his suicide may have been triggered by the poem he was copying out at the time. What had stopped his copying, and seemingly had plunged him into gloom, was the word “nightingale.” It was a code word for a secret operation he had authorized, the organization of an underground army in Soviet Russia. The army was to be composed of Ukrainians who, in Hitler’s service during the war, had carried out mass murders of Jews and fellow Ukrainians. It would have made a great scoop for Drew Pearson: “FORRESTAL HIRES NAZI DEATH SQUADS TO WORK FOR U.S.”

  DURING BOTH WORLD WARS it had been America’s intention to remake the enemy powers when the fighting was over. Wilson hoped to turn Germany into a civilian democracy—that was what the war was all about, he had told Congress in 1917—but in the end he never had the chance. In 1945 Truman, MacArthur, and their aides meant to rebuild Germany and Japan in America’s liberal democratic image. But barely had they made a start of it when the cold war forced them to make compromises. To fight the Russians in Europe, they sometimes had to recruit the very forces against which they had been crusading under FDR.

  As Acheson wrote, summarizing his views as of 1949: “To me, one conclusion seemed plain beyond doubt. Western Europe and the U.S. could not contain the Soviet Union and suppress Germany and Japan at the same time.” Nor, in that endeavor, could they do without the aid of the rocket scientists, industrialists, intelligence officers, and others who had been the willing servants of Nazi Germany and Tojo’s Japan, many of whom the Allies had earlier planned to punish for war crimes.

  The balancing act performed by American occupation officials in building democracy in Japan and western Germany, while at the same time employing people deeply implicated in the shameful past, was a challenging one.

  A MONTH AFTER BECOMING PRESIDENT, Truman wrote in his diary: “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. F.B.I. is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex life scandals and plain blackmail when they should be catching criminals.… This must stop.”

  Truman also disliked the idea of having an espionage service, yet some sort of centralized foreign intelligence and/or operations directorate was an essential element of the national security government Truman and Clifford were creating; and between 1946 and 1950 they thrashed out the question of what it should be.

  After false starts by three predecessors, General Walter Bedell Smith, a Marshall protégé who had headed Eisenhower’s staff in the European war and later served as ambassador to the Soviet Union, took charge in 1950 and created the modern CIA—which among other things mounted clandestine operations. But the public never felt comfortable with such covert activities; they were not in the American tradition. Having to stoop to such practices was one of the costs of the cold war.

  TO ENJOY THE PRIVILEGE of operating beyond the law, licensed by a government to commit what otherwise would be crimes, is a heady experience, a constant temptation, and a power that can corrupt. But it was not the grant of the power, but its grant to an entity beyond his control, that aroused the jealousy of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—the FBI. He was frustrated by the independence of the emerging CIA, and it became evident that he coveted the entire world of American secret agents for his own domain.

  It was typical that by the summer of 1950 Hoover had authorized a surveillance of the CIA’s Carmel Offie, the former Bullitt aide who had been forced to resign from the State Department; and it was to last more than twenty years. Offie had mysteriously become wealthy a decade before. By 1942 he had a house in Georgetown where Bullitt used to stay, and Vice President Wallace wrote in his diary that
“Bill said that Offie had sponged off him for many years and now he was sponging off Offie.”

  When brought into the CIA by its head of covert operations, Frank G. Wisner, Offie began to recruit all sorts of people, and Wisner’s widow later said that “before long he was starting to bring in people Frank didn’t know, friends of Bill Bullitt’s.” He rebuilt ties with people who had worked for the Nazis and now could be used against Russia, and with the many exiled eastern Europeans of shady past with whom he had contacts. This was the dark side of the crusade against communism. Offie represented something that would be attacked by critics who believed the United States was selling its soul in order to beat the Russians.

  Hoover, now generally believed to have been homosexual, also was a homophobe and was enraged that a “degenerate” such as Offie could hold office. It was Offie, of course, a homosexual himself, who had been in charge of Bullitt’s campaign to smear Sumner Welles for his homosexuality.

  Hoover joined forces with Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose attacks on Offie as a high official who “spent his time hanging around the men’s room in Lafayette Park” brought about his instant resignation from the CIA. But Offie found immediate employment with the American Federation of Labor, in a program he had set up for the CIA to counter communist influence.

  The FBI could not get at him because he was not employed by the government. Hoover was furious: “Offie is dangerous to the security of the country,” he wrote, and “it is outrageous for such a character to escape prosecution on such a technicality.”

  The FBI file expanded as more and more unsubstantiated charges went into it: gunrunning, white slavery, election fraud, bribery, and while on trips to Rome, “chicken-hawking behind the Vatican in recognizable embassy cars.”

  IN A SENSE Bullitt, along with Offie, had been a forerunner of the witch-hunters by hounding Welles out of government as an alleged security risk. Now, joining the McCarthyite throng who won headlines by denouncing others—often falsely—he turned his back on friends and colleagues of a lifetime and charged that communist sympathizers were in the top ranks of the government, having come in with the New Deal: “the State Department and the Foreign Service are still rancid with these men.” Bullitt, Offie, and Offie’s enemy, Hoover, had all descended into the same sewer. And it could be argued that this was a result—though perhaps not a necessary one—of the decision to fight the unscrupulous communist empire with its own weapons, which brought with it a certain moral corruption that proved contagious.

  In the pages of Life magazine, Bullitt outlined his thesis that because FDR had not listened to him, the Soviet Union had been allowed to expand. As an insider who supposedly knew all the secrets, Bullitt wove a story of a feeble, incompetent, dying President tricked by Stalin at Teheran and Yalta into giving Russia central and eastern Europe. George Elsey, keeper of the map room at the White House and the man who really knew all the secrets, was furious. In comments to Chip Bohlen, FDR’s interpreter at Yalta who had been with the President at all meetings with Russians, Elsey wrote on White House stationery (April 3, 1948): “real slander” and “lying in his teeth.” But it was Bullitt’s version that survived in popular mythology.

  Louis Wehle, who had introduced Bullitt to FDR in 1932, had become a Republican, and in 1948 promised Bullitt that he would be named undersecretary of state—the long-sought-for Sumner Welles job—if the Dewey-Warren ticket won. But by 1953, when a Republican President finally was inaugurated, Bullitt’s political credit was exhausted, and his friends long since were estranged.

  * Except for a Military Advisory Group of 500 officers and men.

  † In retrospect, it seems to have been North Korea, rather than Russia, that initiated the proposal to attack. According to Georgi Arbatov, director of the Institute of U.S. and Canada Studies in Moscow (1990), it was Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s dictator, who proposed the attack to Stalin, who rejected the proposal. Kim then brought the idea to China’s leader, and Mao said yes. Kim then came back to Moscow, where Statin said yes rather than look less courageous than Mao. More recent evidence to be discussed in a forthcoming book by Professor John Lewis Gaddis will offer a different interpretation, showing Stalin to have played a more positive role, but will confirm that the initiating force was Kim.

  ‡ At a meeting with congressional leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House at 11:30 a.m., June 27, 1950, Acheson briefed those assembled on the Korean situation. When he had finished, Truman thanked him, “but pointed out that the Secretary had overlooked a most important element in the situation”—that the UN Security Council had passed a resolution pursuant to which the U.S. was acting. According to official notes of the meeting, “the Secretary of State was quite obviously embarrassed at his failure in mentioning the United Nations.” The UN loomed much larger in Truman’s thinking than in Acheson’s.

  § Or its ships, which are American territory.

  58

  FORGING A CONSENSUS

  EVER SINCE 1898, the fundamental question about American foreign relations had been whether the United States would choose to play a continuing role in world affairs. The showdown on that issue was scheduled to occur on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Chicago in July 1952.

  Only in the Republican party did isolationists still command a mass following. Yet they had lost every nomination since 1936, and even they must have sensed that 1952 was their last opportunity. Their candidate was Senator Robert A. Taft—“Mr. Republican”—the hero of the conservative wing of a party in which liberals were in the minority. A liberal-minded internationalist New York lawyer had taken the Republican nomination from an Ohio conservative isolationist—and then had gone on to lose the general elections—three times in a row: in 1940, 1944, and 1948. In 1952 there was a widespread feeling that it was only fair to give Taft his chance.

  The emergence of Dwight Eisenhower as a candidate meant that Taft would have to fight for it. Now NATO commander, Ike was a national hero. A seeming nonpartisan, he for years had hidden his ambition to be President and had given no indication of party preference. Democrats had longed to nominate him in 1948, but for various reasons the timing was not right: it was the wrong year for him* as well as the wrong party.

  In a year in which any Republican nominee looked to be the likely winner, Ike had framed the issue masterfully. Disclaiming personal ambition, he had offered to support Taft if the senator would pledge himself to international alliance in the cause of collective security. Of course, the Ohioan would not renounce the views of a lifetime, so Eisenhower—as he told visitors to NATO headquarters—felt it his duty to seek the nomination in order to lead the party and therefore the country away from isolationism.

  Dewey placed his organization, which had proven twice that it was the best in the business of winning Republican conventions, at Eisenhower’s disposal, under the leadership of its manager, New York lawyer Herbert Brownell. Although Taft believed he was coming into Chicago with enough pledges to win, Brownell outmaneuvered the Ohioan on a series of procedural issues affecting the seating of delegates. On the first ballot, Ike, with 595 votes, was nine short of victory, and Taft had 500. Then Minnesota switched the nineteen votes it was casting for favorite son Harold Stassen to Eisenhower.

  Minnesota’s shift finished isolationism as a political force in American life. After Eisenhower won the general election over Adlai Stevenson and was sworn in as President, Taft became his loyal Senate majority leader. When Taft died shortly afterward, the “fortress America” strategy was buried with him.

  In Taft’s last months it became evident that what was required was a revolution in the thinking of his colleagues. They were used to blaming big government and large budgets on the Democrats. On April 3, 1953, Eisenhower’s press secretary received a telephoned report from the Senate Appropriations Committee that “Senator Taft blew up and said the overall budget was the same as the Truman budget; he did not think he could publicly defend it nor could other Republicans in Congress
and we would lose the Congress.”

  Again Taft and his colleagues wanted to renounce the accords reached with the Soviet Union at Yalta, while the Eisenhower administration was willing only to denounce Russia for having “perverted” those agreements. For the administration knew that the commitments made at Yalta were those America favored: introduction of democracy in eastern Europe, for example. The Taft wing of the party remained a prisoner of its own propaganda: when both Taft and Dulles charged that FDR had given the countries of eastern Europe into captivity, the difference between them was that Taft believed what he was saying while Dulles was consciously lying.

  ISOLATIONISM HAVING BEEN dealt with, other foreign policy approaches were available to be examined. For in the long years of government by Roosevelt and Truman, the Republican party had become the refuge of critics of administration foreign policy from almost every angle. In the Eisenhower years all the right-wing alternatives to the hitherto bipartisan foreign policy of the United States came up for review, to be rejected or to be tested but in any event to be resolved.

  Yet the story of how all of them were discarded is unclear: the record of the Eisenhower administration, though extremely well documented, and though the subject of penetrating studies, is more murky than that of others. In part, this has to do with Ike himself, a military politician who was an expert in the arts of deception. Privately he had a short and violent temper; in public he wore a relaxed grin. Throughout his career, he had been known for the clarity of his style, but at presidential press conferences he so scrambled his sentences that he seemed to be talking nonsense; it was difficult to pin him down and he always could retract what anybody thought he might have said. As President, he gave the impression of spending full time on the golf links and leaving decisions to Dulles and others; it now transpires that he was in total command but had placed his officials in a position where they, and not he, were the ones blamed for whatever went wrong.