Unlike other countries that achieved mastery in their own times and places, the United States sought to avoid the involvement in wars and politics abroad that empire brings. Americans of all political parties fiercely resisted the idea of sending armies overseas. They consented to do so only when the United States was attacked, and even then insisted on bringing their soldiers home as soon as possible. FDR’s bitterest wartime argument with Churchill was over Britain’s plan to have the United States stay to take control of France, Belgium, Italy, and the Balkans; the American President refused. For thousands of years armed hordes had fought for the possession of these beautiful lands, but the United States regarded them as an unacceptable burden; let Britain deal with them, said Roosevelt.
So while Rome’s growth from a small republic to a world empire was a tale of triumph, America’s was not: becoming a global superpower was a kind of defeat, for it was not what the country wanted. The United States asked to be left alone in the Western Hemisphere. Its goal was to not be bothered by the problems of the rest of the world. But by 1950 it had lost in that endeavor. Lost, too, was the freedom from government that isolation made possible and that settlers had come to the New World to find. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower all sought to demobilize the troops and slash military spending; their hopes were dashed by the militarization of the cold war.
Uniquely, America’s was the story of a world power in large part reluctant to be one. It could be told as a tale of innocence lost, but also as one of maturity gained.
THE GENERATION with which this book has been concerned, and which in the end made the critical decision to turn its back on isolationism, was formed intellectually, in its youth, by the dialogue between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—and while retaining some of Roosevelt’s realism, was won over by the moral vision of Wilson. It was Wilson who made it possible for idealistic young Americans to abandon their innate isolationism: who showed them how they could retain their fundamental belief in the unique historical mission of the United States even while advocating participation by America in the sordidness of world politics.
Wilson’s doctrine was that America could engage in international relations and still remain true to herself if she crossed the oceans only for the purpose of purifying what she found on the far side of them. Under Wilson the United States went to war to end war, and entered politics to abolish politics. America would become part of the world only to change it: to remake it in her image.
Anyone who fails to recognize their belief that they were in world politics only to achieve a moral purpose misunderstands Truman, Eisenhower, Acheson, Dulles, and their contemporaries. At times they may have been deluding themselves about the purity of their motives, for self-awareness was not one of their strengths, but so far as we know, in their own minds their object was to put things right: to change the world into a civilized and law-abiding community of constitutional democracies. It may be true that in justifying the means by the ends, they ignored the moral ambiguities inherent in stooping to fight the enemy on his own low level; but they clung to Jay Gatsby’s American faith that the dream can remain uncorrupted even if the dreamer does not.
At Bretton Woods and afterward, American officials went about trying to construct a postwar economic system that would be as open and global as possible. They believed this would benefit the United States and all other countries as well. In the interwar years they had seen the crippling effect of trade barriers, autocratic policies, and beggar-thy-neighbor practices; learning from that experience, they crusaded for an open world economy.
In tones ranging from gentle teasing to ungentle derision, critics have pointed out that the United States fostered policies that greatly benefited American economic interests and led to their worldwide growth. On two counts this is odd criticism. In the first place, surely it is no bad thing for a government to pursue policies that benefit its country; one ought rather to criticize it for doing the reverse. In the second, the spectacular growth in the worldwide economic activity of Japan, Germany, and others proves the Americans of 1944–45 to have been right in arguing that an open world system would reward other countries as well as the United States. The achievement of a global economy, paralleled by an explosion in technology and a revolution in communications, and sparked by an unleashing of creative capitalist energies in the Pacific Rim and elsewhere around the world, has vindicated the vision of FDR’s lieutenants.
Some historians have argued that it is useful to think of the world economy the United States created as a sort of informal empire. The father of this school of thought is said to have been William Appleman Williams, a powerfully suggestive and original scholar whose challenges to conventional interpretations of American history and policy inspired generations of talented younger academics to strike out on new paths of their own. It does not derogate from the value of the stimulating views that he expressed to point out that events have not always borne them out.
Turning today, for example, to his famous work The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, one sees that he was right to say that the idea that the Soviet Union eventually “will collapse” was “at the base of our containment policy”; but that he was wrong to dismiss that idea, as he did in quoting approvingly the words of an expert on Russian affairs that to believe the Soviet Union might collapse “seems unrealistic.”
In a later work, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, Williams developed his theory that American leaders aimed at creating an informal economic world empire. Rightly, he pointed out that important groups and individuals in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed in capturing markets abroad for America’s surplus production, first of agricultural products (according to Williams) and later of manufactured goods. But then he went on to argue that American leaders in the post–Second World War era also intentionally were creating a world in which the other countries subject to American influence were made into mere captive markets and thus were integrated in the economy of the United States, rather than being allowed to have independent economies of their own.
Had Williams been right, presumably the Japanese domestic market, for example, now would be flooded with American products while the United States would be a market closed to Japanese goods; and an outstanding financial problem would be the enormous balance of payments surplus piled up year after year by the United States in its trade with its onetime Pacific enemy. Readers of the financial press need not be reminded that this is not what happened.
In the clarity of retrospect it seems that Williams, at least in this respect, got both the intentions of American policy makers and the consequences of their actions wrong. The United States has no empire, not even an economic one. Is not today’s world economy at least as much Japan’s or Germany’s “empire” as America’s? And surely Harry Truman, for example, whose thought processes can be gleaned from his diaries and conversation, was not planning to create what he thought of as an empire.
Of course, the economic planning a half-century ago was not done by the half-dozen or so people at the top who formulated America’s grand strategy. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, and the few with whom they shared the power of making foreign policy, were mostly ignorant of economics and tended to ignore economic factors. John Foster Dulles was perhaps the only one of them who consciously formulated American policy with a view to controlling markets and advancing business interests—and as has been seen, got it wrong, imagining as he did that Japanese goods could not compete in the world market.
Nor were they, to any great extent, thinking in realpolitik terms. In the course of the twentieth century, in addition to helping to free Europe’s colonies, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and their contemporaries turned back three attempts to overthrow the European balance of power: two by Germany, and one by Russia. But that is not what they said they were doing and may not even have been what they thought they were doing. They claimed that democracy was defeating fascism and communism. Their
analyses of foreign politics often were wrong, and of international relations at times close to childish; for some of them did not fully recognize the essential role of power politics in world affairs,* and cherished their Wilsonian faith that world opinion would force other governments to walk a straight line. But the point is: that is the way they talked—and thought. Surprisingly, perhaps, they seem to have meant what they said. They did not do what they did for the same reasons an international relations professor, let alone one in the 1990s, would have done it or explained it. They did it for reasons of their own. And it is their reasons that have to be investigated if an essentially biographical narrative such as this is to be a true one: if history, in other words, is to be given back to those who lived it.
WHEN THE IDEA of writing this book was proposed, a question asked by potential publishers was how it would relate to The Wise Men by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, a group biography of Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, and McCloy that sets out to show that they were a sort of band of brothers: close friends—mostly of the same social background, schools, and clubs—who shared values and outlook, and as a team helped make and/or administer American policy during and after the Second World War. It is a useful and suggestive work that performs a valuable service in drawing attention to the essential clubbishness of particular subgroups within the government. The Army and Navy departments under Stimson and Knox were an especially strong example of that. Isaacson and Thomas illuminated an important truth about a significant inner group.
The truth is just the reverse about the generation of leaders with which the preceding pages have been concerned. With its complementary thesis, this book sets out to be the mirror opposite of The Wise Men. Looking not at an inner group of friends but at members of the generation as a whole, and at its representative leaders of government and opinion, what it shows is not how much alike they were, but how startlingly diverse they were: FDR, privately tutored, touring Europe as a child, while at the age of five MacArthur was marching through hostile Apache territory; the young Eisenhower working in the creamery of a German religious order in small-town Kansas while Felix Frankfurter was escaping the attentions of Irish street fighters in the immigrant ghettos of New York City. Unlike the tale of the Wise Men, theirs was a story of people starting from vastly different backgrounds and schooling and opinions, changing their minds many times in the course of their lifetime about what America’s role ought to be in world affairs, and only at the end arriving at a more or less common point of view. During most of their lifetime, all they had in common was that they were being shaped by the same political experiences.
As a generation, their big moment—big either because it was the one they had, or because it was the one they spent the rest of their lives regretting that they had missed—came during the First World War and the Paris negotiations that followed it. It was not only for themselves; for the world, too, they saw the war and peace of that time as the most important things that had happened in history.
Their encounter with Woodrow Wilson left a decisive impression on them. Much of what FDR did or did not do was the result of his effort to avoid Wilson’s mistakes, while others like Byrnes, Truman, and Dulles were trying to live up to the principles of the President who had inspired and taught them when they were young.
Wilson’s failure hit them especially hard. The Education of Henry Adams, the autobiography that Eleanor Roosevelt gave to Franklin as a gift, reminded readers when it was published in 1918 that a life is an education; but it was disorienting to discover that education, too, can mislead.
They had been brought up as isolationists. Nonetheless, they had come over to Wilson’s faith in idealistic internationalism, and then they had seen themselves proven wrong about that—and indeed mocked, by the cynicism with which the Allied leaders exploited the 1918 victory for selfish and imperialist purposes. So that it was a sort of double distilled isolationism they felt in the interwar years. It was a belief to which they were born and bred, and to which they had returned after having strayed and been taught a hard lesson. Overwhelmingly, Americans in 1937 did not want to be involved in a new European war; but what is more significant is that 71 percent of them thought it a mistake to have participated in the last one.
That is what made it high drama when, after the fall of France, America’s leaders recognized that the war to save civilization was their fight, too. It was late in the day; only a dwindling band of English aviators stood between the Hitler-Stalin-Mussolini-Tojo combine and mastery of the world. FDR, whose habit in politics was to put things off, had let it go until about one second before midnight.
SOME OF THESE MEN gave the others a bad press. William Bullitt, one of the first of his generation to rush into print, made himself the hero of stories in which former patrons and allies came off badly. In almost constant pain from lymphatic leukemia, back injuries, and leg injuries resulting from a wartime traffic accident, and embittered by being left out in the cold in American politics,† he began publishing his inside account of American foreign policy. His articles started to appear in the mid-1940s in such popular magazines as Life and Look. Taking his revenge on FDR, he told tales of a younger Roosevelt sometimes smart enough to take his cue from Bullitt, and an old, sick, foolish Roosevelt duped by Stalin during the war. Later he impugned the loyalty of State Department officers, turned on Marshall for the “loss” of China, scolded President Eisenhower by accusing him of following an appeasement policy, and told President de Gaulle that he was a salaud—a piece of filth.
Bullitt reserved his greatest hatred for the President he believed had betrayed him when he was young: Wilson had left his mark on all that generation, but on Bullitt he left a wound that would never heal. For decades Bullitt nurtured his plan for revenge. Among his papers, in manuscript form, was the poisonous biography of Wilson that Sigmund Freud in some fashion had collaborated with him in producing. After Mrs. Wilson died in 1961, Bullitt felt free to publish it. It was printed and distributed in December 1966 with a publication date of 1967 on its title page.
In January and February 1967 Bullitt lay on his deathbed. His book was widely reviewed and universally condemned. The Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles called it “a mischievous and preposterous joke, a sort of caricature … or else an awful and unrelenting slander.” The English historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote: “The book is a disgrace … and … contributes nothing to historical understanding.”
But of all of this, Bullitt remained unaware. At his bedside his brother and sister-in-law, his cousin, his daughter, and the ever-loyal Carmel Offie‡ stood guard, shielding him from knowledge of the reviews. He died February 15. He may well have passed away believing happily that finally he had taken his revenge on Wilson.
BULLITT’S CRITICISM OF FDR and other contemporaries was unjustified; they had recognized the danger posed by Stalin, as they did the threat posed by Hitler, slowly but still in time. By exhausting all possibilities of legitimate accommodation with such regimes, they demonstrated that the blame for America’s quarrel lay with the other side: an achievement of some value to a democratic government that wishes to mobilize the enthusiastic support of its own population as well as to appeal to public opinion abroad.
They were wrong about one major foreign power, but Bullitt was, too. That was England. Their persistent mistake was to overestimate Great Britain: what they regarded as her wealth, her power, her cunning, her bad faith, her imperial acquisitiveness, and her animus against liberal democracy.
In the early 1920s they were alarmed about Britain’s rearmament when they should have been worrying about Germany’s—and about British disarmament. They missed all the signs of Britain’s industrial and imperial decline. In 1939 they assumed that the Allies, on their own, would defeat Germany. They thought of Churchill as an aristocrat and a reactionary. In 1940 FDR refused to believe that Britain’s survival hung by a thread: he spoke as though Britons were malingering. He never really understood that Britain had run out of mo
ney and could not afford to pay for the war. He thought that after the war she would dominate all those parts of Europe that Russia did not. He and Hull believed that she planned to suppress democracies in Europe and restore monarchies. The American government pictured the British empire as an entity that would expand everywhere unless stopped—a description more suited to the Soviet Union. Churchill knew that he needed America on his side to balance the weight of Russia in the post-1945 world, but both FDR and Truman believed otherwise, picturing Britain and Russia as even in strength, and America’s role as playing umpire between them.
FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower all tended to trust the Soviet Union as a function of distrusting imperial Britain. They were confused because Churchill spoke in favor of imperialism, and Stalin against it, even though at the time Britain was liberating neighboring countries and Russia was enslaving them. Though the Truman Doctrine called upon the United States to defend Greece and Turkey against communist aggression and subversion, even the most right-wing of senators initially reacted against it because they feared it might serve the interests of the British empire.
By 1961 the survivors of the FDR-Truman-Eisenhower generation had come to agree, however reluctantly, on what the main lines of U.S. world policy ought to be. However, they still did not see—not even then—that once Britain had shed the remains of her empire, her interests—as well as her political and cultural values—had become so close to being identical to America’s that some sort of global partnership, such as Churchill advocated, had become feasible. It remains an attractive possibility today, for all the obstacles that remain as well.
In the Time of the Americans Page 71
