The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  In 1947 Marshall had announced the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery, a move which the Soviet Union regarded as a gesture of economic warfare. In May of 1947 the Truman Doctrine was announced. The American policy was now clearly one of containment. The Soviet Union had become an adversary and the national security planners were committed to total and constant conflict. The Forrestal Diaries, which provide poignant insights into the thinking of one of the most forceful and persuasive architects of that period, are filled with references, first, to the dangers and vulnerability of the American public and the American press to Communist propaganda, and second, to the old post-Munich fear of the democracies of competition with a totalitarian dictator (in October 1947, during a lunch with Robert Lovett, Walter Bedell Smith, Robert Murphy and General Lucius Clay, Forrestal asked Smith, our ambassador to the USSR, if the Russians wanted war. Smith answered by quoting Stalin as saying the Russians did not want war, “but the Americans want it even less than we do and that makes our position stronger”). It would be this fear that the American public might be soft plus the parallel need to make decisions for it in this most difficult and complex struggle, which would become a basic tenet of faith for national security planning in this era; a belief that by its nature the competition was simply unfair. There was a certain irony here; it was as if the national security people in 1947 under Forrestal and Acheson had worked so hard to gear up a campaign of anti-Communism that some eighteen years later their lineal descendants could not escape the rhythms they helped create; having once mounted the tiger’s back, they found it difficult to descend.

  But they were worried less about descending than about motivating this country to the threat they perceived. These men were all from the big investment and banking houses, or lawyers for them; they and their class had long harbored an abiding suspicion not so much of Russia as of Communism. Their tendency was to see the growing American-Soviet conflict in their terms and definitions, fulfilling their long suspicions. To them it was an ism, not just two new great powers struggling to find their balance. Thus the men who defined postwar American policy defined it in ideological, not national terms. Forrestal, who was particularly suspicious of Communist designs, was delighted to find a brilliant young diplomat-intellectual named George F. Kennan at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and Kennan’s warnings about Soviet intentions were immediately seized upon by Forrestal as intellectual and historical evidence of the great struggle ahead. Forrestal made the Kennan reports available to friends throughout Washington, and Kennan’s career took off overnight. His reporting was eventually published both in Foreign Affairs (under the byline X) and as a book which became the primer of postwar American diplomacy and was read by almost every college student at every great university, one of the most influential books of an entire generation. Kennan became known as the author of the containment policy, but he had been talking more about Russia than about Communists. He would eventually find his ideas being exploited, as it were, by his superiors, used as a justification for an increasing militarization of American foreign policy. He eventually broke with the other foreign policy architects because he thought they were too ideological and too military-oriented in their policies. He felt that the Communist world was much more nationalist in its origins than it was monolithic, and that we were creating our own demonology. His opinions in the early fifties represented the first truly major dissent within a largely consensus view of a nonconsensus world.

  The Kennan experience was not to be the last time that the national security principals would take the intelligence reporting of their own experts and exploit it out of context, de-emphasizing the issue of nationalism and exploiting the issue of Communism. The same thing happened during the Korean War, when the China experts predicted accurately what China would do, not based on Communist intentions but on Chinese history, and the last time would be during the Vietnam war, when again the experts predicted accurately Hanoi’s responses to American escalation. But these were distinctions few were interested in twenty years ago; what was needed was a unity of national purpose against the Communists. Nothing else would suffice.

  It was an ideological and bipartisan movement; it enjoyed the support of the press, of the churches, of Hollywood. There was stunningly little debate or sophistication of the levels of anti-Communism. It was totally centrist and politically very safe; anything else was politically dangerous. Acheson would note that in 1947, when Truman was discussing his proposals for American aid to Greece and Turkey with congressional leaders,

  he stressed that these attacks and pressures upon these countries were not, as surface appearances might suggest, merely due to border rows originating with their neighbors, but were part of a series of Soviet moves, which included stepped-up Communist party activity in Italy, France and Germany. I can see Senator Vandenberg now, suddenly leaning forward on the sofa in the President’s office and saying, “If you will say that to the whole country, I will support you.” The presentation was put in this way, to the surprise and disapproval of some commentators.

  Among those who were surprised was Acheson’s boss, George Marshall, who thought the statement a little rash and too broad. He misunderstood the coming need to overlook certain subtleties as the Cold War developed. Thus were Greece and Turkey the first dominoes, and thus did a Democratic Administration offer up as justification for its foreign policies something far closer to what the Republican minority wanted, which reflected the interests and prejudices of the most influential bankers and lawyers. In order to get the job done, the Administration was willing to see the conflict in ideological rather than nationalist terms. The Democrats, feeling themselves vulnerable on this question (liberals often associated with reform causes which were tainted with domestic Communism), were increasingly willing to trim their own sails and accept the assumptions of their more conservative domestic adversaries.

  There were the first stirrings of domestic anti-Communism as an issue. Senators elected in 1946 were markedly both more conservative and anti-Communist as a group than the men defeated. In 1946 Richard Nixon had won a California house seat by comparing the voting record of his opponent to that of Vito Marcantonio, the left-wing New York congressman. The smell was in the air. In 1947, even as he was pronouncing the Truman Doctrine in foreign affairs, the President issued an executive order creating a Loyalty Security program which became the opening wedge for the security cases of the following years. Under the Truman decree the Attorney General drew up lists of subversive and front organizations; when questioned by friends who were uneasy about the direction and about this order, Truman replied that he had done it to take the play away from J. Parnell Thomas, who headed the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Truman’s friend Clifford Durr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, asked the President about it, Truman replied that if there were injustices he could modify the order or repeal it.

  Rather than combating the irrationality of charges of softness on Communism and subversion, the Truman Administration, sure that it was the lesser of two evils, moved to expropriate the issue, as in a more subtle way it was already doing in foreign affairs. So the issue was legitimized; rather than being the property of the far right, which the centrist Republicans tolerated for obvious political benefits, it had even been picked up by the incumbent Democratic party. The first of the China security cases, that of John Stewart Service, took place in the Truman years. Yet in comparison to what was to come, this was all still quite mild.

  In 1948, normal domestic issues dominated the presidential campaign. Foreign policy did not become a major point because the Republicans did not choose to make it one, for a very good reason. They were very much a part of the existing policies, and more important, they did not think they needed the issue. Out of power for sixteen years, they were now confident, indeed overconfident, of victory; they felt themselves rich in Democratic scandals, and they overestimated the degree of unhappiness in the country. They also underestimated Truman as a politi
cal figure. He was so different from the graceful, attractive Roosevelt, patrician, the perfect voice for the radio age, generating through the airwaves a marvelous self-assurance that was politically contagious, his confidence becoming the nation’s confidence. After four defeats by Roosevelt, the Republicans were glad of the difference. In underestimating the political attractiveness of Truman, jaunty, unpretentious, decisive, his faults so obvious, they failed to realize that these were the faults of the common man and that the voter identified every bit as much with Truman’s faults as with his virtues. It was a campaign where the common man versus big-business interests was still a credible one, and Truman was a marvelous symbol of the average American, the little man. Every bit the consummate politician, he made the issue of anti-Communism partly his own, and shrewdly seized the liberal center, isolating both Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats. The Republicans mounted a frail campaign, in substance a me-too campaign, and they lost. They would learn their lesson and become less scrupulous the next time; by 1952, foreign policy and alleged softness of the State Department would be major issues.

  None of this had yet affected American policy toward Indochina, mainly because precious little policy toward it existed. What effect the rising domestic issue of anti-Communism had could not be good, but it was not yet bad. Then a major event took place in 1949 which meant that a French victory in Indochina was impossible, and yet, ironically and tragically, also meant that American support of the French was inevitable and that eventual U.S. entry into the war was a real possibility. The event was the fall of China and it was, again, produced by great historical forces outside our control; Barbara Tuchman would write in her book on General Joseph Stilwell in China: “In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.”

  As World War I had taken a decaying feudal Russian regime and finally destroyed it, bringing on the Communists, so Japan’s aggression against China, the first step in what was to become World War II, did the same thing to China: a fledgling semidemocratic government was trying to emerge from a dark and feudal past and was pushed beyond the point of cohesion, the Japanese catching Chiang Kai-shek when he might have moved into the modern era and frightening him back into the past, revealing more his weaknesses than his strengths. The embryo China of Chiang came apart, and the new China would not be that of Chiang and the Western powers, but of Mao Tse-tung and the Communists, a powerful modern antifeudal force touching the peasants and the age-old resentment against foreign intrusion, liberating powerful latent feelings in that great country. American policy had been to support Chiang, to try and use him as a force against the Japanese; later, as Chiang’s forces began to collapse and the Communists became a more viable force, we tried as best we could to reconcile the irreconcilable and get them to work together. The young American foreign service officers in China warned that we had to come to terms with the failure of Chiang’s order. It was a story which would repeat itself in Vietnam: of Chiang, as would later be true for many years of Diem, it would be said that he was too weak to rule and too strong to be overthrown. His forces were corrupt, his generals held title on the basis of nepotism and loyalty, his best troops never fought; faced by mounting terrible pressures, he turned inward to listen to the gentle words of trusted family and sycophants. It was the sign of a dying order.

  If the decay and erosion of Chiang’s forces were a historical force, so too was the rise of the new China. Produced in reaction to all the political sickness around, it reflected a new and harsh attempt to harness the resources of that huge and unharnessed land. The Communists were rising from the ashes of the old China, and they were in stark contrast to what had existed before. They were powerfully motivated, almost prim and puritan in their attitudes to the world, their view of corruption. On the mainland itself a brilliant group of young State Department officers were reporting the events with great insight, warning of the coming collapse of Chiang. The word “courageous” comes to mind to describe their reporting; but it was not applicable at the time. They were simply doing their job, reporting and forecasting as accurately as they could, which was very accurately indeed.

  By late 1944 and early 1945 it had become clear to some people high in the government and a few people in China that a major struggle was going to take place. Theodore H. White, then a young Time reporter, experienced both in American politics and Chinese affairs, had a dark and foreboding sense of the future (as well he might; his own excellent reporting on China would drive him from the Luce publications; White might have his China, but Mr. Luce had his China and he was not going to accept White’s version). By 1945 White knew that real civil war was inevitable, and when it came, Chiang would collapse and the Communists would win. White realized that this might affect the careers of some of his far-sighted friends in the foreign service when they reported developments as they saw them. He mentioned this to Raymond Ludden, one of the ablest of the young foreign service officers (they were so outstanding that Stilwell had simply taken the best of them from the embassy and attached them to his own staff): “You know something may happen because of this—a lot of people back home aren’t going to like the way it’s going.” And Ludden answered, “The duty of a foreign service officer is to report the truth as he sees it without adjusting it to American domestic considerations.” It was, White thought at the time, a wonderful answer. The sheer honesty and integrity of it moved him, but he was also made uneasy by it; wasn’t there a touch of innocence too? (There was: Ludden spent the rest of his career regarded by his superiors as being contaminated, and was moved around from different non-Asian post to post.)

  What White had begun to foresee in 1945 very quickly came true. As the China tragedy unfolded, many foreign service officers would have their careers destroyed, but of the group, John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service were the most distinguished, and as such they would suffer the most. Younger men a rank or two below them might quietly leave the Asian bureau and go to another area, their careers damaged but not entirely destroyed, but for Davies and Service, it was the end of two brilliant careers. For the country they served it would have even darker implications because they were the best of an era, and the foreign service does not produce that many men of rare excellence. They were the Asian counterparts of George Kennan, Chip Bohlen and Llewellyn Thompson; under normal conditions they might have stayed in, and by the time the Kennedy Administration arrived, become senior State Department officials, perhaps Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. They might have been able to provide that rarest of contributions in government: real expertise at a high operational level.

  By 1945 and 1946 it was clear that China would become something of a domestic political problem; the first glimmerings of a right-wing pro-Chiang force began to surface as a domestic political threat. The China officers were particularly vulnerable because of charges by Patrick Hurley, who had resigned as ambassador, that they had consciously and deliberately undermined him and that their sympathies were with the Communists. Hurley, unable to come to terms with the failure of his mission, the inability to reconcile the irreconcilable, had turned on his own staff—he was of course extremely influential with the Republican right, and now it seemed as if there were expert testimony against the State Department officials. In particular, the pressure against some of the younger officials increased, motivated by the belief of one faction of the military that it could all be done on the cheap, China might have been saved with air power, without the Americans having to pay any real price (again the divisions would be remarkably similar to those which later followed in Vietnam). The case for air power had always been made by General Claire Chennault, and his side was prosecuted with considerable skill in the inner chambers of the Administration by a young staff officer named Joseph Alsop, well connected in Washington with Harry Hopkins, and a distant cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt. Captain Alsop was intoxicated both by China and his own role in it, and he had turned out to be a very shrewd and forceful bureaucratic politic
ian, playing a crucial role in the decision to recall Stilwell in 1944. (Service remembered years later that Alsop used to show up at the embassy in Chungking and say of Stilwell, “He should be drawn and quartered and flogged.” It was amazing, Service mused, when you consider that Stilwell was a four-star general and Alsop a captain, and although Stilwell had the embassy staff working for him, Alsop still outmaneuvered him.) Stilwell was replaced by General Albert Wedemeyer, who with Chennault formed the pro-Chiang group in Asia which had powerful ties with Republicans in this country. Stilwell was called back because he was blunt and open about Chiang’s failures; Wedemeyer made it a policy to get along with Chiang, which was fine except that it meant nothing, nothing moved, nothing happened. It was a good relationship, which went only one way, and soon Wedemeyer too began to complain to Marshall about the lack of co-operation he received from the Chinese.

  By 1947 the pressure on China began to mount. Giving in to the increasing opposition, Secretary of State Marshall lifted the embargo on shipment of munitions to China in May. When the U.S. Marines withdrew from China at the same time, they turned over their ammunition to the Nationalists. In July, General Wedemeyer was sent on a fact-finding mission, a small gesture to the opposition. In September, John Carter Vincent was relieved as Chief of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, to appease the Republicans and to protect him from the rising wave of Republican criticism. The contamination was reaching higher and higher; Vincent had been the foremost bureaucratic protector of the China and Asian experts, and the highest-level advocate at State of the colonized, pleading their case with fervor. (When he sat down to a dinner sometime in the late forties, he found himself introduced by the wife of the Dutch ambassador as “Mr. Vincent—you know, darling, the man who lost Indonesia for us.”) Vincent, though a senior State Department official, was sent overseas, but not as an ambassador, because that would require Senate approval. He was replaced by W. Walton Butterworth, a man specifically selected because he had no ties with Asia. He had handled U.S. economic interests in the Iberian Peninsula during the war and thus had unusually good credentials for handling a delicate political issue. Marshall trusted him as a steady and responsible man and seemingly immune from attacks from the right, since his Iberian work had made him a target for considerable abuse from the left, for having worked with those Fascist nations. Butterworth was clean and he intended to stay that way; he knew his orders from Marshall, which were that the United States was not to be dragged into a war in China. “Butterworth,” Marshall said to him, “we must not get sucked in. I would need five hundred thousand men to begin with, and it would be just the beginning.” Butterworth later remembered Marshall, the set of the face, like the M-G-M lion, adding, “And how would I extricate them?”