by Benn Steil
Truman’s speech changed little in this regard. In early 1948, Stalin would once again scold Yugoslav diplomats for their country’s continued assistance to the Greek guerrillas. The conflict “had no chance of success at all,” he told them. “What, do you think, that . . . the United States, the most powerful state in the world, will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense!”132 By the summer of 1949 the communist insurgency would be defeated.
As for Turkey, Stalin had been chastened by Truman’s tough response to his threats the previous summer. “It was good that we backed down in time,” Molotov later reflected. “Otherwise it would have led to a joint [British-American] aggression against us.”133
But if the State Department was over-alarmist about Greece and Turkey, it underestimated Stalin’s willingness to challenge British and American prerogatives elsewhere in Europe. It failed to see that the counterpart to Soviet forbearance in the Mediterranean was a dogmatic insistence on its political and economic rights in Germany and nations further east. Thus the State Department’s analysis was off the mark not so much in its emphasis on an irreconcilability of American and Soviet interests as in its understanding of where those interests actually lay.
ON CAPITOL HILL, TRUMAN WAS unable to bask in applause for long. Resistance to the new Truman Doctrine emerged from both sides of the aisle.
The criticisms were numerous and weighty. The Greek government was corrupt. The Turks failed to fight on our side during the war. Economic aid might be fine, but military aid was dangerous. It would end hopes of rapprochement with the Russians. It was bailing out the British empire. The cost was exorbitant. It was warlike. It was power politics. It committed America to supporting reactionary governments. And if Greece, why not China? Where would it end? Former FDR vice president Henry Wallace was relentless in opposition. Truman, he said, was plunging the country into a “reckless adventure.” He was “betraying the great tradition of America” by committing it to a policy of “ruthless imperialism.”134
Perhaps the one focus of opposition to the speech that caught the White House genuinely by surprise was the president’s bypassing of the new United Nations. Opinion polls a week after the speech found that the public preferred, by a margin of more than two to one, to see the Greek problem handed over to the U.N. The U.N. thereby became a rallying cry for both the pro-Soviet left and the isolationist right.
Vandenberg was now on the defensive. Though he stressed that the U.N. had neither the funds for relief nor the authority to provide military assistance, he threw out some banal proposals for the U.N. to investigate violations of Greek sovereignty and to conclude military-support agreements with member states. He later called it “a colossal blunder” of the administration to ignore the U.N.135
Columnist and author Walter Lippmann, a virtual “minister without portfolio” in Washington,136 thought the U.N. kerfuffle only part of a wider error the administration had made in talking only with the British government before announcing its proposed action; it should have brought in “the French, the Chinese, and the Russians” themselves. In any case, it needed now to explain its intentions before the Security Council, “not waiting until Gromyko attacks them”—referring to the Soviet U.N. ambassador. What would happen, Lippmann asked, if a Communist-led government came to power somewhere by elections and called upon Moscow for aid? “What under the ‘Truman Doctrine’ do we do if the Soviet government says there is an emergency, that it has been invited to intervene, [and] that the UN is not in a position to extend the kind of help required?”137 The president needed to preempt such action by involving the U.N., not simply declaring its impotence and thereby inviting the Soviets to do the same.
Acheson accused Lippmann of “sabotaging” U.S. foreign policy. But he acknowledged privately that he should have advised Truman first to seek U.N. protection for Greece and Turkey. The inevitable Soviet veto would have given the administration helpful political cover. The damage done, however, he and Vandenberg hammered out an amendment to the Greece-Turkey aid bill that situated the U.S. initiative in the context of U.N. purposes and actions, and laid out conditions under which U.S. assistance would be subsumed by the body. To flatter the senator into supporting the bill, the administration named it the “Vandenberg Amendment.” Acheson, who knew the Soviets would never allow the U.N. to take charge, considered it “a cheap price to pay for Vandenberg’s patronage.”138
U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Warren Austin went before the body on March 28, 1947, to explain American actions in Greece and their complementarity with U.N. initiatives under way. Gromyko, not surprisingly, blasted U.S. preemption of the Security Council and interference in Greek and Turkish internal affairs.
His challenge didn’t hurt matters; quite the opposite. Though both Republicans and liberal Democrats had grave reservations about Truman’s initiative, the political consequences of appearing soft on communism overwhelmed most congressmen. Even Lippmann came out in favor of the $400 million aid bill, which was approved by a vote of 67 to 23 in the Senate on April 22 and by a similar margin of 287 to 107 in the House on May 9.139 The president signed it into law on May 22.
WILLIAM LOCKHART CLAYTON WAS AN unlikely strategic collaborator for professional intellectuals such as Dean Acheson and George Kennan. His formal education in the South was minimal. He left school at age fifteen to work as a secretary to a St. Louis cotton merchant. A boy of great raw intellect and stubborn independence, he took the hardscrabble road to creating the largest cotton brokerage in the world. A 1936 Time magazine cover article gave him the sobriquet “King Cotton.”
A tall, direct but mannerly, angularly good-looking teetotaler, “a polished cowboy [with] bushy white sideburns,”140 Clayton was drawn into politics after the market crash of 1929, determined to help halt the country’s slide toward protectionism. He blasted the 1930 Republican Smoot-Hawley tariffs as “the greatest crime of the century.” Having no party affinity, let alone affiliation, he only warmed to the new FDR administration after the president named his close friend, and passionate free trader, Cordell Hull as secretary of state in 1933. He considered Roosevelt’s interventionist domestic economic policies radical and misguided, yet acceded when the president asked him to run raw materials purchasing through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1940. Though his wife, Sue, a passionate New Dealer, had pushed him into government, she would thereafter work diligently to get him back out. Despite never being accepted by the left of the Democratic Party, and despite offering to resign five times, Clayton advanced through a series of posts focused on procurement, finance, and foreign economic policy before becoming Truman’s under secretary of state for economic affairs in 1946.141
Now, ill and secluded at his ranch near Tucson, the sixty-seven-year-old Clayton crystallized his thoughts on the growing European crisis. The result was a memorandum dated March 5 that further galvanized Acheson.
The memo’s coverage was sweeping, its prose unadorned, its tone grave. The fall of Britain, the rise of Russia, the collapse of Greece—all these imminent threats, Clayton wrote, had worrisome implications for the Middle East, France, Africa, and American hopes of preventing a “third world war.”
Clayton, like Acheson, was concerned by the uncontrolled collapse of the British empire. “The reins of world leadership,” Clayton wrote, “will be picked up either by the United States or by Russia. If by Russia,” he warned, “there will almost certainly be war in the next decade or so, with the odds against us.” Russia, he said, was “boring from within” to undermine weak governments in Europe and beyond. The United States needed urgently to bolster them, but lacked the capacity to take the necessary sustained action because the war-weary American public simply did not fathom the grave danger posed by an unchecked Russia. Marshall’s imminent trip to Moscow, Clayton predicted, would yield nothing: “The odds are heavily against any constructive results there.”
What was needed, Clayton said, was that the president himse
lf “shock” the American people with “the truth and the whole truth.” The “integrity and independence” of many nations, vital to long-term American security interests, was under assault. The new United Nations was ill-equipped to deal with this threat, as it came not in the form of traditional external military aggression but a much less visible, though equally insidious, undermining of legitimate national political institutions from the inside.
Though the United States did “not wish to interfere in the domestic affairs of any country,” Clayton insisted, it had no choice but to tie financial aid to reforms that would ensure it was “permanently beneficial.” The new IBRD had ostensibly been created to provide aid to war-torn nations but, like the United Nations, it was unsuited to the current challenge. The fundamentally political character of the crises made intervention by international bodies untenable.
Clayton would have no patience with objections that would be raised against U.S. aid—that it was unaffordable and would lead to renewed military conflict. He insisted that “World War III” was inevitable if the United States failed to involve itself “in the affairs of foreign countries” at this critical moment, and that anchoring today’s fragile peace would be far less costly than fighting such a war.142
On the same day, Acheson delivered a short memo to Secretary of War Patterson on “the Greek and Turkish problem,” stressing that it was only “part of a much larger problem growing out of the change in Great Britain’s strength”—a delicate way of referring to the global political vacuum created by the collapse of the British empire. The president, Acheson noted, had on February 26 approved in principle Patterson’s call for immediate aid to Greece and Turkey. Acheson now wanted to go further, urging a study of “situations elsewhere in the world which may require analogous financial, technical, and military aid on our part.”143
With Clayton’s and Acheson’s memos, the stage was being set for a muscular diplomatic offensive to prevent the Kremlin from expanding its influence beyond the parts of eastern and central Europe it currently occupied. Simultaneously, however, the secretary of state would be flying to Moscow with the aim of salvaging cooperation in the country of greatest strategic significance to both the United States and the Soviet Union: Germany.
Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in Moscow, March 1947. From left: British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, and French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault.
* * *
THREE
* * *
RUPTURE
MARCH 9, 1947: MARSHALL’S C-54 arrived in Moscow from Berlin on a brisk, snowy afternoon. In preparation for the secretary’s motorcade, the Soviets had decked out the area around the embassy, creating “a virtual Potemkin village” to showcase the nation’s heroic economic recovery. The avenues gleamed, the garbage having been shunted into nearby alleys. The decision for Marshall to stay at Spaso House, the embassy residence, was wise, or fortunate; the refurbished Moskva Hotel, where his staff stayed, was bugged.1
George Catlett Marshall was the first American general given the five-star rank, and the first career soldier appointed secretary of state. Formal to the point of brusqueness, he called all colleagues by their last name and expected all to do likewise with him. “Only my wife calls me George,” he corrected Truman. He treated interlocutors with decorum, and demanded the same of them, including the man he had flown to Moscow to see. When at a boozy dinner Molotov asked whether soldiers turning statesmen in America meant that “the troops [were] goose-stepping,” Marshall looked away. “Please tell Mr. Molotov that I’m not sure I understand the purport of his remark,” he told his translator, Bohlen, “but if it is what I think it is please tell him I do not like it.”
Appointed Army chief of staff in 1939, Marshall had his maiden diplomatic encounter with the Soviet foreign minister. Molotov had come to Washington in May 1942 demanding more Lend-Lease aid and an immediate second front in the European war. Roosevelt brought in Marshall, his chief military strategist, to set out the terms under which it could be launched. Marshall was characteristically direct. Given the rate of ship loss inflicted by German bombers, he explained, the United States did not have the naval capacity to send supplies through Murmansk and to invade western Europe. So “what do you want,” he asked in summation, “the second front or Murmansk? It isn’t possible to provide both.” He then berated the translator for abbreviating his remarks.
Though Stalin typically punished such impertinence from his own officials, he was, it later emerged, impressed with the general’s straightforward manner. Marshall was also direct with his own president, who was anxious to assure Molotov of an August start date for the main Anglo-American invasion. Marshall warned against it, rightly predicting that the British would not be ready.2 The invasion would not come for another two years.
At the war’s end, Marshall was serving a new Democratic president, one who was stumbling to shape relations with the two new great powers: the Soviet Union and China. Marshall’s retirement on November 26, 1945, lasted all of six days before Truman was on the phone asking him to go to China to broker peace between Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt Kuomintang Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s brutal, anti-American Communists. He accepted, turning down as much as half a million dollars to write his memoirs.3 In China Marshall got his first bitter taste of diplomacy between irreconcilable rivals.4 In parallel, over in Europe, Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes was getting nowhere in discussions with Molotov over peace treaties with the defeated Axis nations. Citing health issues, but laboring under strained relations with the president, Byrnes agreed to stay on only until the end of the year. Truman, through General Eisenhower, told Marshall he wished him to take Byrnes’ place.
“My answer is in the affirmative,” Marshall responded, military style, “if that continues to be [the president’s] desire. My personal reaction is something else.”5
Despite his failure to buttress the “liberals” in each of the warring Chinese camps, and to achieve any breakthrough in the negotiations, Marshall remained a hero at home. On January 8, 1947, the GOP-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmed him unanimously. The Senate did the same. The whole process took under an hour. The media pressed the new secretary of state on his presidential ambitions. Marshall insisted, truthfully, that he would never run for office.6
Though he considered himself a failed diplomat at that point—“I tried to please everyone, [so] that by the time I left [China] nobody trusted me”7—Marshall had learned a lesson abroad. His biggest failure was not one of persuasion, which was never likely to succeed, but neglecting to set out an alternative strategy. He would not repeat this mistake with Molotov.
Vyacheslav Skryabin derived his revolutionary name from the Russian word molot, or hammer. As a communist, Molotov was, from a young age, a true believer. He embraced the tenets of Marxist theory, from its characterization of history as a series of struggles between the proletariat and its exploiters to its promise of revolutionary victory over the forces of global capitalism. He first met Stalin, ten years his senior, when he was twenty-two, in 1912; both were at the time working to create the new party newspaper, Pravda. After the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas in March 1917, Stalin supported collaboration with the democratic provisional government; Molotov, more doctrinaire, did not. But both rallied around Lenin in the run-up to the Bolshevik coup in November. The Russian civil war that followed, in which millions were killed or starved to death, was a defining event for all three men. Persuasion as a tactic was of little use in such a conflict; physical and psychological coercion became the methods of choice. The three became vessels of “conspiracy, self-righteousness, cruelty, single-mindedness, and contempt for written rules and compromises.”8
All future conflicts, both internal and external, would be seen through the lens of deadly struggle. Ends would get blurred along the way; global communism would remain the ultimate end, but more proximate ones, notabl
y physical and political survival, would command their energies. Ideology nonetheless remained the basis for confidence that capitalism needed merely to be outlasted. Internal contradictions assured its collapse.
In 1921, at Lenin’s suggestion, Molotov became the Party Central Committee’s secretary, a position in which he established his permanent professional persona. Though known to be an affectionate family man, in affairs of state he was ruthlessly efficient—and efficiently ruthless. Severe with staff, he carried out tasks in any way necessary. Obsequious toward those in charge, he threatened no one above him. Lenin supposedly called him the “best filing clerk in Russia”; Trotsky called him “mediocrity incarnate.” When Stalin was appointed party general secretary in 1922, Molotov became his loyal subordinate. He would continue to play this role in different posts through to his present one, to which he ascended in 1939 when Stalin removed the Jewish Litvinov to smooth transactions with Hitler.
That Molotov, though well-educated, spoke only Russian and knew little of the world were of no consequence.9 He followed his vozhd, his leader, unquestioningly, authorizing the political murder of thousands with icy insouciance. “Haste ruled the day,” he later reflected on the process. “Could one go into all the details?”10 Within the party he was known as “Iron Ass,” a reference to his ability to master even petty details, as well as to outlast opponents through boundless stubbornness and stamina. Foreign counterparts came to know these skills, and to hate as well as admire his performances. Byrnes called him a “lineal descendant” of Job, a man of “unlimited patience.” In any negotiation, he “will win your reluctant admiration for the resourcefulness he exhibits in his delaying tactics. He will sit through it all imperturbably, stroking his mustache or spinning his pince-nez glasses as he waits for a translation and smoking Russian cigarettes in what seems to be an endless chain.”11 “Observing in action all the great world statesmen of our century,” remarked John Foster Dulles, representing the Republican majority in Marshall’s delegation, “I never came across diplomatic skills at as high a level as those of Molotov.”12 French foreign minister Georges Bidault spoke of Molotov’s “untiring capacity for repeating himself.”13 Churchill remarked that he had “never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.” Yet “in the conduct of foreign affairs, Sully, Talleyrand, and Metternich,” the greatest diplomats of all time, “would welcome him to their company.”14
