by Roy Jenkins
Acheson replaced Marshall as Secretary of State because of the latter’s kidney complaint on January 7th, two weeks before the Inauguration. For all his fine creative qualities of mind, and total ability to defend himself in any forum, Acheson’s return probably exacerbated rather than calmed the incipient political conflict. His coruscating confidence was sometimes a liability with the Congress. It in no way prevented his getting on with Truman (of whose presidential prerogatives he was always very respectful) or with his most important foreign colleague, Ernest Bevin (although Bevin and Truman could not get on with each other). But it seemed too much of an arrogantly carried emblem of the liberal Eastern foreign policy establishment to endear him to many members of the Senate or the House.
As the second term wore on and as McCarthyite populism achieved its formidable if short-lived wave of success, Acheson became a red rag to the red-baiters. But his provocation was splendidly done. It began with his examination for confirmation before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When asked about his relationship with Hiss, which in fact was not particularly close—it was so with Hiss’s brother—he replied that his ‘friendship was not easily given nor easily withdrawn’. Nor was he then going ‘to abandon (Hiss) and throw rocks when he was in trouble’. This created some consternation, but Vandenberg was still there to find a way round. Acheson agreed to balance it with the publication of a statement (in fact drafted by Vandenberg) saying that he abhorred Communism—and no doubt sin too. That for the moment was enough to get him a unanimous favourable recommendation from the committee, and confirmation by the whole Senate on a vote of 83 to 6. But Vandenberg was not going to be there for long, and the 6 (all Republicans) were a cloud bigger than a man’s hand, particularly as they voted adversely mainly because of China, about which Acheson was most vulnerable and knew least.
The inauguration was a more spirited affair than the one at which Truman had previously been sworn in. Roosevelt endured a tired acceptance of his fourth mandate on a sodden White House lawn in 1945. Truman was not tired. Indeed he began the day with a seven o’clock breakfast with 98 surviving members of Battery D and their wives. Nor was he blasé about the proceedings. 1945 was Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration. 1949 was Truman’s first, and he already had a pretty clear idea in his own mind that it would be his last as well. Furthermore there was quite a lot of money to spend. The 80th and Republican House of Representatives had felt little doubt that Dewey would be elected. They had generously voted an exceptionally large sum for his inauguration. Liberation from 16 years of Democratic rule would have been worth celebrating. They had also put up the President’s salary from $50,000 to $100,000 and added $50,000 of tax-free expenses.
Truman was the beneficiary of these premature Republican eleemosynary acts. The $150,000 of income (equivalent to about $¾ million today) enabled him to live more easily than ever before. The $80,000 voted for the inauguration enabled him to mount a procession alleged to be seven miles long. ‘The weather … was perfect,’ Margaret Truman recorded, ‘very cold, but with bright winter sunlight pouring down from a clear blue sky.’1 The White House was closed and the post oath-taking reception had therefore to be held in Mellon’s National Gallery. To compensate for this there was no hated rival with whom Truman had to do an uncomfortable 1½ mile drive along Pennsylvania Avenue. There was only old Alben Barkley. But they both put on their theatrical costumiers top hats and cutaway coats as though they were Harvard Overseers on Commencement Day rather than Missouri and Kentucky politicians.
At the Capitol Truman delivered an address of little oratorical distinction but considerable substance. He laid down the four cardinal points of American foreign policy. The first was support for the United Nations; the second was the use of Marshall Aid to achieve the recovery of Western Europe; the third was the provision of military assistance to sustain ‘freedom-loving nations’ against the threat of Soviet aggression; and the fourth, the surprise one, announced a new programme for assistance to the underdeveloped world. This was christened Point Four (by the press, not by Truman) and was the beginning of Third World Aid. The inaugural speech was almost entirely devoted to international issues. National ones had been dealt with in the State of the Union message on January 5th.
Then he had provided his own label, having himself written a commitment to a ‘Fair Deal’ into the draft speech. The domestic programme he outlined put more emphasis on social measures, as opposed to those for economic recovery, than Roosevelt’s New Deal had done. The post-war economy was in good shape and could largely be left to look after itself. By dint of heavy military cutbacks behind the shield of the solitary possession of the atomic bomb, Truman’s first term had been broadly one of balanced budgets. This financial probity, which was sensible enough when the economy called for no deficit stimulus, he hoped to continue and even intensify in the second term, in spite of proposals for Federal health insurance, increased Federal aid to education and a major public housing programme. There were also proposals with no spending implications. The Taft-Hartley Act was to be replaced and civil rights legislated upon.
Remarkably little of this programme was to be achieved. The budget balance was to be undermined, first by the end of the United States nuclear monopoly, and then, more powerfully in the short-term, by the Korean War. And the 81st Congress was too dependent for its Democratic majority upon conservative Southerners, many of whom held committee chairmanships, for it to show much appetite for liberal legislation. By November 1949, Truman was complaining to his diary: ‘Trying to make the 81st Congress perform is and has been worse than cussing the 80th.’2
Domestic blockage mattered less to the world, and probably to Truman himself, than foreign policy blockage would have done at the time. Internationally, in spite of the China fissure, McCarthy’s antics and MacArthur’s insubordination, the President was able to command policy for most of the second term. The first six months were particularly productive. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in April and the Berlin blockade came to an end in May.
The latter event was a major victory for Western patience and non-provocative firmness. It was the first turning of a tide which, in spite of the presumed power of nuclear supremacy, had flowed relentlessly in favour of the Soviet Union throughout 1947 and 1948. It created a special bond between the United States and the emerging Federal Republic of Germany, popular as well as official, which was to be an unvarying factor in world politics for the next 25 years (but no longer). It also presaged a new, unacknowledged, but real stability in East-West relations on the central front which was to persist until the renewal of Soviet probings, first in Berlin again, and then in Cuba, in the early 1960s. The brinkmanship of the Dulles era was around the periphery, not in the more dangerous centre.
The creation of NATO was essential to this new stability in Europe. Looked at from any perspective it was one of the most remarkable feats of international political engineering of modern history. It was all put together in little more than a year, and that year was bisected by the election of November 1948, which the incumbent President, as we have seen, was almost unanimously expected to lose. Twelve founder members signed. But the United States was not just one of a dozen. In the late 1940s and for most of the next two decades, but not in the 1970s, its power was not merely pre-eminent: it was qualitatively different and overwhelming. And the United States, from this solar position, had to make by far the greatest contribution in terms both of resources and of sacrifice of tradition.
The fact that a major political act, which is normally slow and messy, was performed with the speed and precision of a surgeon is a tribute to the leadership which the Western world then enjoyed. Bevin was the impresario, but Truman had to provide the commitment, and he did so with an unfussy resolution which practically no other president could have rivalled.
Although twelve countries signed the treaty (another four have since joined), it was effectively made by five: the United States, Britain, Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands. Fra
nce had not then developed Gaullist detachment, but was more interested in immediate American military supplies than in wider or longer-term aims. The French Government did however perform the considerable service of insisting on having Italy in. There had been considerable doubts about this. The objection was not that she was an ex-enemy but that she was Mediterranean rather than Atlantic. These doubts had been seriously felt by Truman himself. However the French convinced Acheson, and Acheson convinced Truman. Exclusion would have been a disaster for Italy and a major misfortune for the Alliance.
The Treaty was signed in Washington on April 4th, 1949. The celebratory dinner had to be held in the Carlton Hotel. The White House was still closed, and Blair House was not big enough. But the value of the Treaty was not diminished by the substitute nature of the surroundings. It contained the Soviet threat to Western Europe. The position never again looked as menacing as it had done in 1947-8 when Berlin was beleaguered and the Communist parties in France and Italy seemed poised for a takeover. It maintained peace for a generation on the central front, which was the most dangerous for it was there that the armies and influence of the super-powers were in immediate juxtaposition. If Truman had created nothing else in his second term, NATO would have justified his re-election.
It can of course be argued that with Dewey we would have got just as effective a NATO, and a less sour Republican Party, because they were not completing twenty years of exclusion from office, and consequently a greater immunity to McCarthyism. Maybe. Maybe Seward would have waged the Civil War more effectively than Lincoln. Maybe if Roosevelt had not broken convention and gone for a third term and James A. Farley or one of the other aspirants had seized the crown, the war would have been at least as quickly won and the alternative president would have been more skilled and less tired in dealing with Stalin at Yalta. Maybe if Halifax had become Prime Minister instead of Churchill in 1940 (as he so nearly did) Hitler would have been still more resolutely opposed and Britain’s resources less exhausted at the end. No hypothesis which was not put to the test can be retrospectively proved to be wrong. They do not however carry great plausibility. Perhaps the Dewey one has a little more than the others. But the fact remains that under Truman’s presidency NATO was created with remarkable speed, vision and determination, and that he deserves full credit for it.
The Senate ratified the Treaty by 82 votes to 13 (with Taft at the head of the minority) in July. Together with the ending of the Berlin blockade on May 12th and the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany (the Basic Law was passed on May 8th and the first elections were held in August) and satisfactory progress within OEEC for the implementation of the Marshall Plan, it was a summer of considerable achievement in Europe. On the other side of the world United States troops, apart from a few advisory specialists, were withdrawn in late June and without much attention from the southern part of the little-known Korean peninsula. At Potsdam this protuberance had been rather casually and arbitrarily divided for post-Japanese occupation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Russian troops, surprisingly, had gone earlier.
These assuagements were soon to be balanced by less favourable developments. On August 5th the State Department published a long and unsuccessfully defensive ‘China White Paper’, setting out over a thousand pages its own perfectly reasonable account of events since 1944. It was badly received by, for example, Senator Vandenberg, John Foster Dulles and the New York Times. It failed to create a climate of calm resignation in America for the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1st.
Even the most persuasive document in the world might however have failed to achieve this in view of the superimposition of the proclamation, at an interval of only a week, on the news that the Soviet Union had achieved an atomic bomb. The device had in fact been exploded in late August. It was similar to the bomb which the Americans had exploded at Alamogordo four years and one month previously. The monopoly had been short-lived. The Russian bomb was between three and six years in advance of Washington intelligence expectations. Its early arrival aroused public suspicion that it had been assisted by Soviet spying penetration of United States establishments. The suspicion was to some extent well-founded, though it was in fact the British defector Fuchs who had done most to help the Russians. It created a more fertile soil for the start of McCarthy’s campaign five months later.
It also created strong pressure for the stepping up both of America’s nuclear armament and of its conventional defence. In the former case the result was an immediate decision to increase the stockpile of atomic bombs, followed by Truman’s more reluctant decision, taken in the following January, to begin work on the thermo-nuclear or hydrogen bomb. He had a three to two recommendation against from his Atomic Energy Commissioners. The majority of three believed that the destructive qualities of the new bomb—perhaps a hundred times those of the A-bomb—would be too great to make its possession, let alone its use, acceptable. But a special committee of the National Security Council, composed of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and Lilienthal, reported by a slightly less clear two to one in favour of going ahead. Truman was finally persuaded to give his approval by the argument that the Russians could and would make their own H-bomb. The Americans had their bomb by 1952. The Russians had theirs in 1955. So the nuclear race was firmly launched.
The end of the American nuclear monopoly also meant the end of four years of a relatively relaxed approach to conventional military strength in the United States. This change came at an unfortunate time for Truman. Major politico-military decisions he made with firmness and even wisdom. But with the internal organization of defence he never had a felicitous touch. ‘The disorder in military policy,’ Robert Donovan has written harshly but not without justification, ‘had its origins in Truman’s first term, and reached a climax in the second.’3 This was mainly because of unfortunate Cabinet dispositions, which accentuated what would in any event have been a bitter Navy rearguard action against what it regarded as the depredations of the Air Force, part of the Army until the National Security Act of 1947, but from that date a fully-fledged service. This was a botched act. It was supposed to unify the services, and did indeed create the office of Secretary of Defense. But it did so in such an attenuated form as to make unity almost meaningless. The Secretaries of the individual services (their number paradoxically swollen from two to three by the establishment of an independent air force) retained their existence and most of their prerogatives, while the new Secretary of Defense was given neither adequate staff nor effective power.
James Forrestal was largely responsible for this. He came late into Roosevelt’s Cabinet, but was its only member to survive deep into the Truman administration. A former head of the Wall Street firm of Dillon, Read, he was a tense, able man. From 1944 to 1947 he was Secretary of the Navy. As such he effectively resisted a National Security Bill in a form which would have given real power to the head of the Pentagon. Having made a shell of the office of Secretary of Defense he was then appointed to occupy it. The result, not unnaturally, was that he became more tense and increasingly frustrated. He ostensibly stood back from Truman’s 1948 campaign and made it dangerously clear that he believed in a Dewey victory. On March 3rd, 1949, Truman sacked him, partly because General Vaughan, the White House joker who occasionally indulged in more serious pursuits, harped on his disloyalty, and partly because his behaviour was becoming increasingly irrational. Ten weeks later Forrestal committed suicide.
In his place Truman appointed Louis Johnson, who had a claim on his loyalty as the 1948 chairman of the Democratic Finance Committee. He had not raised many dollars before the result, but he had at least tried. He was a lawyer from Clarksburg, West Virginia, who had first made a political impact as national commander of the American Legion in 1932-3. He became Assistant Secretary of War in 1937, but flounced out in 1940 when Roosevelt failed to promote him and brought in the Republican Stimson as Secretary. Johnson was a committed Democrat but a very conserva
tive one. However his greatest commitment was to his own political advancement. He quickly made it clear that his principal intent was to use the Department of Defense as a stepping stone to the Democratic nomination in 1952. As Truman’s own intentions for that year were unannounced this was not the best way of underpinning his relations with the President and his staff. He also began a running feud with Dean Acheson, confident that on most aspects of foreign policy he knew more than did the Secretary of State. By dismissing Forrestal and appointing Johnson Truman had replaced a neuropath with a megalomaniac.
Johnson’s entry into his demesne of the Pentagon was conducted with more bombast than finesse. He evicted generals from their offices, had a great new room created for himself, commandeered General Pershing’s old desk and barked orders across it in a determination to show that he was in charge in a way that Forrestal had never done. Generals were shouted at, but it was the Navy above all that was to be brought to heel. One of the last results of Forrestal’s stewardship had been the laying of the keel of a vast new aircraft carrier, the United States, at Norfolk, Virginia. This was not just a very big ship. It was a symbol of the Navy’s future as an airstrike service. The naval staff had abandoned plans for the construction of thirteen smaller vessels in order to concentrate funds upon this flagship.
