The celebrating tapered off with a few more parties and receptions in the next few days, and then the Truman cousins trekked back to Missouri, and the Washington Trumans settled into Blair House and went to work. Dad had a Democratic Congress, but there was still the old tendency of Southern and Western conservatives to vote Republican on a dismaying number of issues. The world was still seething volcanically in various places, and there were several major changes to be made in the Cabinet. The most important was the retirement of Secretary of State General George C. Marshall, after a serious kidney operation, and his replacement by Dean Acheson.
I was very sorry to see General Marshall leave our official family. I shared Dad’s enormous admiration for him. Among my fondest memories are the Sunday visits we made to the General and Mrs. Marshall, in their lovely house in Leesburg, Virginia. I usually did the driving. Dad was inclined to drive with his mind on affairs of state. When there were problems to discuss, the President and the General would retire to his study, while I visited with Mrs. Marshall. Sometimes, however, the visit was purely social.
The General’s farm was on the site of the battle of Ball’s Bluff, one of the first serious engagements between the North and South in the Civil War. One day Dad and General Marshall roamed the rather rough terrain discussing the battle, in which Senator Edward Baker of Oregon, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, was killed leading the Union forces. They found a little cemetery, about 40 by 20, with twenty-one unknown dead buried in it. Rambling farther into the woods, they found a little stone marker which said, “Colonel Edward Dickenson Baker was killed here.” Both Dad and General Marshall were so intrigued, they persuaded Wayne Morse of Oregon to find out where Senator Baker was buried. Was it on the battlefield? No, he turned out to be interred in San Francisco, in a cemetery which he owned, and had promoted into a handsome fortune. The oddities of history are almost endless.
Dean Acheson, the new Secretary of State, was tall and aristocratic, the quintessence of the so-called Eastern Establishment. Yet he shared with George Marshall and Harry Truman an uncompromising honesty and a total dedication to the goals and best interests of the United States of America. When you think of how different these two Secretaries were, it becomes one more tribute to Dad’s ability to work harmoniously with men of almost opposite temperaments and background. I responded to these two men in very different ways. With General Marshall, my affection was tinged with awe. With Acheson, a very definite attraction had just a touch of acid in it, for reasons we shall soon see.
It was Acheson who assumed the greatest and most important legacy of Secretary of State Marshall’s tenure, that logical but crucial - and angrily debated - step beyond the Marshall Plan, known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The historic pact - America’s first peacetime military alliance - was signed on April 4, 1949, by the foreign ministers of twelve nations. But my father had been working on the problem of winning Senate approval for this major innovation in American foreign policy for over a year. On March 17, 1948, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg had signed a fifty-year political, economic, and military alliance in Brussels. In his address to Congress on the same day, urging the swift passage of the Marshall Plan, Dad had praised this significant step toward European unity, and declared that “the determination of the free countries of Europe to protect themselves will be matched by an equal determination on our part to help them to protect themselves.”
Throughout the spring of 1948, Dad and Under Secretary of State Robert M. Lovett spent long hours working with Senator Arthur Vandenberg on the problem of persuading Congress. It was formidable. There was a deep prejudice, buttressed by the warning in Washington’s Farewell Address against “entangling alliances.” But Dad had labored since he took office to persuade Americans this prejudice no longer made sense, because the world had simply grown too small for any country, even one as protected by ocean barriers as America, to remain isolated. So, slowly and carefully, a resolution took shape, which Dad wanted Senator Vandenberg to propose to the Senate.
Arthur Vandenberg was a great senator and a great American. But he was something of a prima donna, who required very special handling. Dad understood this, of course. He had an amazing ability to read the character of almost every man in the Senate. Bob Lovett, another outstanding American, who made a great contribution wherever he served, from Under Secretary of State to Secretary of Defense, had won the senator’s friendship and confidence. With extraordinary patience, he worked through draft after draft of what eventually became the Vandenberg Resolution. Introduced as Senate Resolution 239 on June 11, 1948, it declared the “sense of the Senate” supported “regional and other collective arrangements for individual and collective self-defense” and the “association of the United States by constitutional process” with these regional defense organizations. It was, in essence, the application of the concept developed by Dad and General Marshall for the Americas -the treaty we went to Brazil to sign - to the rest of the world. Equally important to Dad, the resolution carefully pointed out that the right of individual or collective self-defense was affirmed under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The Vandenberg Resolution was approved by a resounding sixty-four-to-four vote. Thus, the Senate - a Republican Senate at that - was on record as supporting the general principles on which NATO was based.
But even with the support of the Vandenberg Resolution, NATO did not sail smoothly through the Senate. It was violently attacked by Robert Taft because he was opposed to the idea of giving military assistance to our allies. Other senators, notably Forrest Donnell of Missouri, denounced it because it might involve us in a war we did not want. As if we ever wanted one. Dean Acheson did a magnificent job of defending the treaty against these and other attacks. He was well supported by Senator Vandenberg, who rightly called the treaty “the most important step in American foreign policy since the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine.”
Equally crucial was the support that came from Dad. He sent the Secretary of State a telegram from Key West, lavishly praising his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and authorized him to publish it. When the treaty was signed, Dad insisted Acheson was the one who should do it. Dad and Vice President Barkley stood on either side of him, but my father wanted the man who had done the most work to have his name on the historic document.
The impact of the treaty in Europe was what counted. The Senate’s advice and consent to it by an eighty-two to thirteen vote made it clear to our friends and our enemies we were determined to defend the free nations of Western Europe against the kind of aggression that had swallowed Czechoslovakia.
At the Paris foreign ministers conference in June 1949, the Russians were on the defensive for the first time. Andrei Vishinsky, their chief spokesman, was an almost pathetic figure, afraid to agree even on a statement about the weather without discussing it with an angry, sullen Stalin in Moscow.
Now, a revived and powerful Western Europe is accepted as a matter of course. The history of the world would have changed if Western Europe, with its enormous industrial and scientific potential, had become part of the Communist empire.
But NATO was more than a dam to hold back the threatening Communist flood. In Dad’s view, it was another step toward achieving the necessary economic and military strength to negotiate with the Russians as equals. Experience had taught him that force - equality or superiority of force - was the only thing the Russians understood. Even before he was reelected, he had begun the fight to restore our depleted military strength. On May 7, 1948, for instance, he made the following memorandum:
Had a most important conference with Marshall, Forrestal, Snyder, Jim Webb of Budget and Forrestal’s budget man.
We are faced with a defense problem. I have wanted a universal training program, a balanced regular setup, ground, air, water, and a reserve to back up the regular skeleton training force.
The Congress can’t bring itself to do the right thing - becaus
e of votes. The air boys are for glamour and the navy as always is the greatest of propaganda machines.
I want a balanced sensible defense for which the country can pay. If the glamour boys win we’ll have another 1920 or another 1941. God keep us from that! And it is so sensible and easy to keep from it - but -
Marshall is a tower of strength and common sense. So is Snyder and Webb. Forrestal can’t take it. He wants to compromise with the opposition!
My father’s critical comment on Forrestal should not be construed as his final judgment on the man. He was a dedicated American, who literally wore himself out in the service of his country. He had done a tremendous job in the struggle to unify the armed services, and Dad had made him the first Secretary of Defense. Forrestal was equally dedicated to Dad. In a letter to a fellow Cabinet member, he called him “the best boss I have ever known.” After the armed services unification bill was fought through Congress, he wrote him the following letter:
28 July 1947
My dear Mr. President:
The fact that we have a bill, which, as you have expressed it, gives us the beginnings of a national military policy for the first time since 1798, is due first and last to your own patience, tact and knowledge of legislative procedures. With the exception of Clark Clifford, I know probably more than anyone else, how much restraint you had to exercise under trying and sometimes provoking circumstances. I believe the result will justify your forbearance.
As I told you Saturday, I will do my best to live up to the confidence you have reposed in me. If I fail, I know it will not be because of lack of support from you.
Respectfully yours,
James Forrestal
The indecision which Forrestal displayed on rearming and in the Berlin crisis may well have been the first symptoms of the tragic mental breakdown he suffered after he left the Cabinet early in 1949 - a breakdown that culminated in his suicide in May of that year.
Trying to persuade Congress to give the country the balanced defense force he wanted was a terribly frustrating job, as Dad’s memo makes clear. The services themselves were uncooperative, each lobbying fiercely for the biggest possible slice of the pie. Complicating the struggle was the problem of rearming Western Europe - the next logical step beyond the NATO treaty. The Soviet Union had thirty divisions in Eastern Europe, all armed with the latest weapons. We had three and a half, plus two and a half British divisions. The French and other nations could field perhaps a dozen divisions, but they were equipped with antiquated guns, obsolete tanks, and inferior air support. To give you an idea of how weak we were at this time, for a reserve force we had in the United States only a pitiful two and one-third divisions. The logical and obvious step was to rearm our friends in Europe as swiftly as possible. So, on July 25, 1949, Dad sent to Congress a request for $1,400,000,000 for this purpose.
The reaction of the Congress was almost unbelievable. You would think they had never even heard of the North Atlantic Treaty. Senator Vandenberg deserted his bipartisan role to make a wild attack on the bill, and he was joined by Walter George, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Fulbright. In the House of Representatives, desperate pleas by Speaker Sam Rayburn were ignored, and there was a reckless vote to cut the appropriation in half. My father had to pull out all the stops in a speech to the Golden Jubilee Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, on August 22, 1949, to turn the situation around: “The cost of such a program is considerable, but it represents an investment in security that will be worth many times its cost. It is part of the price of peace. Which is better, to make expenditures to save the peace, or to risk all our resources and assets in another war?”
There was a reason for the collapse of bipartisan support in the Congress for Dad’s foreign policy - a reason that had nothing to do with the Russian threat in Europe or the wisdom of helping free nations resist it. In the spring of 1949, the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek began to fall apart, and the Generalissimo prepared to flee to Formosa with the remnant of his followers and China’s monetary reserves. Communist Chinese armies soon controlled all parts of the vast country. Almost immediately, Republicans in Congress began preaching the doctrine that Harry S. Truman’s foreign policy had “lost” China. Most of these critics were the same people who savagely attacked the Marshall Plan and voted against aid to Greece and Turkey. They were the roadblocks to all the creative foreign policy innovations which my father and his administration struggled to extract from a reluctant Congress. What would they have said if the Democratic President had simultaneously proposed a massive program to rescue Chiang Kai-shek? Not only would the cost have been in the billions - the rescue would have necessarily required a 2-or 3-million-man American army. This from a nation that had only two and one-third divisions in reserve.
No American President can make decisions in foreign policy, involving the lives and fortunes of millions of Americans, without the support of Congress and the people. Sometimes, as in the case of Korea, these decisions must be made in an excruciatingly short space of time, and the President must use all the political expertise he possesses to sell his foreign policy to the Congress and the American people. When he fails in this crucial task, the country suffers the kind of instability we experienced after 1965. I think it is evident by now that Harry S. Truman was a master of this aspect of the presidency. It is also evident that Dad was a skillful politician, who kept in contact with the American people. My father knew neither he nor any other man could have sold the American people the idea that their sons, barely returned from the greatest war in history, should abandon their careers and their educations once more, to fight for Chiang Kai-shek.
Thoughtful Republicans knew the truth about China. Senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote in his diary: “If we made ourselves responsible for the army of the Nationalist government, we would be in the China war for keeps and the responsibility would be ours instead of hers. I am sure this would jeopardize our own national security beyond any possibility of justification.” Vandenberg wrote to Senator William F. Knowland of California: “The vital importance of saving China cannot be exaggerated. But there are limits to our resources and boundaries to our miracles. . . .”
The shortest answer to the accusation that we “lost China” is to point out we never owned or possessed it. At the same time, any fair-minded examination of our attempts to save Chiang Kai-shek from losing it will show a President doing everything in his power to prevent this catastrophe. As we have already seen, my father sent the Generalissimo the greatest American soldier of the era, George C. Marshall. When General Marshall saw some of the appalling deficiencies of the Chinese Nationalist army (described in vivid detail in Stilwell and the American Experience in China by Barbara Tuchman), it convinced him the Nationalist government’s only hope was a truce and a coalition government with the Communists, who controlled much of North China. This solution might have given Chiang time to pull his spiritless, undisciplined army together, so that he might have survived a test of strength with the Communists at some later date. If he chose to fight, General Marshall advised him to concentrate his forces - a primary military doctrine - and achieve genuine control of southern China before he ventured into North China and Manchuria.
But Chiang arrogantly declined to take any advice from the man whose military genius had helped win World War II. Instead, Chiang launched an ambitious, aggressive attempt to smash the Communists and simultaneously seize control of all China. As a result, he spread his armies disastrously thin, and they lost control of the countryside. Meanwhile, we continued to supply his government with both military and economic aid, to the tune of $2 billion.
My father remained in close touch with the situation, even after General Marshall came home in January 1947, to become Secretary of State. In July of that year, Dad sent Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer to the troubled nation for another personal report. General Wedemeyer, who had commanded American forces in China, saw practically no chance of rescuing the situation. He placed his
finger on the central problem of Chiang’s government: “To gain and maintain the confidence of the people, the Central Government will have to effect immediately drastic, far-reaching political and economic reforms. Promises will no longer suffice. Performance is absolutely necessary. It should be accepted that military force in itself will not eliminate Communism.”
By the fall of 1948, the situation was almost beyond hope. Chiang was not only losing the support of the people, he was losing control of his soldiers, too. Whole divisions, with all their American equipment, went over to the Communists. On November 9, 1948, Chiang sent my father a frantic appeal for help.
Around the same time, General David Barr, who was the commanding officer of the U.S. Military Advisory Group in China, sent the following report to the White House: “I am convinced that the military situation has deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of United States troops could effect a remedy. No battle has been lost since my arrival for lack of ammunition or equipment. Their military debacles, in my opinion, can all be attributed to the world’s worst leadership and many other morale destroying factors that led to a complete loss of will to fight.”
A letter to Arthur Vandenberg, written the following year, shows Dad’s thinking on China is clearly rooted in disenchantment with the Nationalist government: “The Far Eastern situation has been a peculiar one, as is often the case in a horse race - we picked a bad horse. That was the development of the situation in China. It turned out that the Nationalist Chinese Government was one of the most corrupt and inefficient that ever made an attempt to govern a country and when I found that out, we stopped furnishing them with materiel. Most of the Communists’ materiel was materiel which was surrendered by the Chinese Nationalist Government for a consideration. If Chiang Kai-shek had been willing to listen to General Marshall, General Wedemeyer and General Dean he never would have found himself in the condition he is in now. After the surrender of Peiping where ammunition, trucks, and artillery materiel we had furnished was turned over to the Communists I cut off everything to the Chinese Government. It had to be done gradually, however, because Nationalists were still holding the line of the Yangtze River and I didn’t want to pull the rug from under Chiang Kai-shek at that time.”
Harry Truman Page 47
