The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Wallace’s peace offensive was aided by two significant publications that summer. In late August, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” that did more to humanize the victims of the atomic bombings than any other contemporary English-language publication. In September, Look magazine began publishing a four-part series by Elliott Roosevelt that detailed how his father’s and Stalin’s plans for postwar peace and collaboration were derailed by Truman and Churchill. Truman would later dismiss Roosevelt’s son as the “product of a piss erection.”

  Wallace understood the urgency of the situation. He looked forward to a major address on September 12 in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Before delivering the speech, Wallace went over it with Truman, who repeatedly expressed his agreement. Truman told reporters beforehand that he had read it and concurred entirely with its sentiments. In New York, with twenty thousand in attendance, Wallace sat on stage with Paul Robeson as Claude Pepper told the crowd, “With conservative Democrats and reactionary Republicans making our foreign policy as they are today, it is all we can do to keep foolish people from having us pull a Hitler blitzkrieg and drop our atomic bombs on the Russian people.”55 When Wallace’s turn came, he delivered a powerful plea for peace:

  Tonight I want to talk about peace—and how to get peace. Never have the common people of all lands so longed for peace. Yet, never . . . have they feared war so much. . . . We cannot rest in the assurance that we invented the atom bomb. . . . He who trusts in the atom bomb will sooner or later perish by the atom bomb. . . . The British imperialistic policy in the Near East alone, combined with Russian retaliation, would lead the United States straight to war. . . . We are reckoning with a force which cannot be handled successfully by a “Get tough with Russia” policy. . . . This does not mean appeasement. We want to be met halfway. . . . And I believe that we can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor purchasing oil in the Near East with the lives of American soldiers. We cannot allow national oil rivalries to force us into war . . . we have no more business in the political affairs of eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, western Europe, and the United States. We may not like what Russia does in eastern Europe. Her type of land reform, industrial expropriation, and suppression of basic liberties offends the great majority of the people of the United States. . . . But at the same time we have to recognize that the Balkans are closer to Russia than to us—and that Russia cannot permit either England or the United States to dominate the politics of that area. . . . Russian ideas of social-economic justice are going to govern nearly a third of the world. Our ideas of free-enterprise democracy will govern much of the rest. The two ideas will endeavor to prove which can deliver the most satisfaction to the common man in their respective areas of political dominance. . . . Under friendly peaceful competition the Russian world and the American world will gradually become more alike. The Russians will be forced to grant more and more of the personal freedoms and we shall become more and more absorbed with the problems of social-economic justice. Russia must be convinced that we are not planning for war against her and we must be certain that Russia is not carrying on territorial expansion or world domination . . . the United Nations should have . . . control of the strategically located air bases with which the United States and Britain have encircled the world. And not only should individual nations be prohibited from manufacturing atomic bombs, guided missiles, and military aircraft for bombing purposes, but no nation should be allowed to spend on its military establishment more than perhaps 15 percent of its budget . . . we who look on this war-with-Russia talk as criminal foolishness must carry our message direct to the people—even though we may be called communists because we dare to speak out.56

  Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace arrives at the White House. After his call for a more conciliatory approach to dealing with the Soviet Union in his September 12, 1946, speech at Madison Square Garden, Truman fired him. Cold War hard-liners such as James Byrnes helped convince Truman that Wallace had to go.

  The speech was absolutely incendiary. Republican Senator Robert Taft accused Truman of betraying Byrnes, who was irate over being so publicly repudiated. The New York Times’ James Reston wrote that Truman was the only person in Washington who saw no difference between what Wallace advocated and what Truman and Byrnes had been proposing.57 The State Department let it be known that this was more embarrassing to Byrnes than if someone had yanked off his pants in the middle of the Paris conference. British officials were furious. Experts in the British Foreign Office said, “there is no such thing as the government of the United States” and the London press sneered that American foreign policy is still “in the hillybilly stage.”58

  Many rallied to Wallace’s defense. Eleanor Roosevelt approved Wallace’s remarks: “he tried to make clear that we neither approved of British imperialism nor of Soviet aggression. He stated that we wanted to be friendly with Russia, that we wanted to meet her half-way, but that she also had to meet us half-way.”59

  Having become an object of international derision, Truman attempted to tell reporters that he meant only to defend Wallace’s right to express his opinions, not the content of his speech. He later denied that he had read and approved the entire speech in advance.

  In the midst of the controversy, someone leaked Wallace’s July 23 memo to Truman in which he identified the “fatal defect” in the Baruch plan. Several Soviet newspapers published it in its entirety.

  That defect is the scheme . . . of arriving at international agreements by ‘easy stages,’ of requiring other nations to enter into binding commitments not to conduct research into the military uses of atomic energy and to disclose their uranium and thorium resources while the United States retains the right to withhold its technical knowledge of atomic energy until the international control and inspection system is working to our satisfaction.

  Is it any wonder that the Russians did not show any great enthusiasm for our plan? . . . I think we would react as the Russians appear to have done. We would have put up counterproposal for the record, but our real effort would go into trying to make a bomb so that our bargaining position would be equalized. . . .

  . . . Realistically, Russia has two cards which she can use in negotiating with us: (1) our lack of information on the state of her scientific and technical progress on atomic energy and (2) our ignorance of her uranium and thorium resources. These cards are nothing like as powerful as our cards—a stockpile of bombs, manufacturing plants in actual production, B-29s and B-36s, and our bases covering half the globe. Yet we are in effect asking her to reveal her only two cards immediately—telling her that after we have seen her cards we will decide whether we want to continue to play the game.60

  Truman insisted that Wallace stop talking about foreign policy while the postwar conference of the Council of Foreign Ministers was taking place. Byrnes had cabled Truman from Paris to complain that Wallace’s speech and memo had thrown the meeting into complete disarray. Byrnes and Baruch were both threatening to resign. Truman feared that Forrestal and Secretary of War Robert Patterson would do likewise. He decided to fire Wallace and wrote a scathing letter demanding his resignation. Wallace immediately phoned the president to say that the letter would not reflect well on Truman if it got out. Truman immediately sent someone over to pick it up. No copy remains. Only Truman’s diary entry that night gives some indication of what he might have written. He described Wallace as

  a pacifist one hundred percent. He wants us to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politbureau. I do not understand a “dreamer” like that. The German-American Bund under Fritz Kuhn was not half so dangerous. The Reds, phonies and “parlor pinks” seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger. I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.61

  With Wallace’s departure, the last chance to avert
the Cold War and nuclear arms race disappeared. That night, September 20, 1946, Wallace told a national radio audience:

  Winning the peace is more important than high office. It is more important than any consideration of party politics. The success or failure of our foreign policy will mean the difference between life and death for our children and our grandchildren. It will mean the difference between the life and death of our civilization. It may mean the difference between the existence and the extinction of man and of the world. It is therefore of supreme importance, and we should every one of us regard it as a holy duty, to join the fight for winning the peace. . . . I wish to make it clear again that I am against all types of imperialism and aggression, whether they are of Russian, British, or American origin. . . . The success of any policy rests ultimately upon the confidence and the will of the people. There can be no basis for such success unless the people know and understand the issues, unless they are given all the facts and unless they seize the opportunity to take part in the framing of foreign policy through full and open debate. In this debate, we must respect the rights and interests of other peoples, just as we expect them to respect ours. How we resolve this debate, as I said in my New York speech, will determine not whether we live in “one world” but whether we live at all. I intend to carry on the fight for peace.62

  Support for Wallace had poured in throughout the controversy. Albert Einstein wrote, “I cannot refrain from expressing to you my high and unconditional admiration for your letter to the President of July 23rd. There is a deep understanding concerning the factual and psychological situation and a far-reaching perception of present American foreign policy. Your courageous intervention deserves the gratitude of all of us who observe the present attitude of our government with grave concern.”63

  With Wallace gone, the United States plunged headlong into Cold War both at home and abroad. On September 24, the long-awaited report from White House counsel Clark Clifford and his assistant George Elsey arrived. The comprehensive review of Soviet actions, intentions, and capabilities was intended to show that the Soviets had regularly violated their agreements. It painted a dire picture of Soviet efforts “to weaken the position and to destroy the prestige of the United States in Europe, Asia, and South America” so they could rule the world, while sowing discord in the United States through the Communist Party. The United States needed to respond by beefing up its atomic arsenal, expanding its network of overseas bases, strengthening its military capabilities, and mobilizing its resources to “assist all democracies which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R.” They failed, however, to document Soviet perfidy in regard to treaty obligations, admitting that “it is difficult to adduce direct evidence of literal violations.”64

  In a penetrating critique of the report’s distortions, historian Melvyn Leffler wrote, “Clifford and Elsey ignored actions that might have injected hues of gray into their black-and-white characterization of Soviet foreign policy,” such as all the instances where the Soviets had honored or exceeded their agreements, withdrawn their troops, allowed free elections, and discouraged insurrectionary activity. “Double standards and self-deception repeatedly crept into the Clifford-Elsey report,” he noted, adding

  Truman’s advisors did not ask how America’s own questionable record of compliance affected Soviet behavior. They did not acknowledge that [General Lucius] Clay and other War Department officials consistently identified France, not Russia, as the principal source of U.S. problems in Germany. They suspected that any Soviet interest in German unification masked the Kremlin’s quest to gain leverage over all of Germany, but conveniently dismissed the American desire to dilute Soviet influence in the east and to orient all of Germany to the West. Likewise, Clifford and Elsey pointed to the retention of Russian troops in Iran as irrefutable proof of the Soviet desire to dominate Iran and gain control of Middle Eastern oil. They did not say (and may not have known) that, at the very time they were writing their report, State Department officials and military planners were contending that the U.S. troops must remain beyond the stipulated deadlines for their withdrawal in Iceland, the Azores, Panama, the Galapagos, and other locations in order to augment American bargaining leverage for postwar base and military transit rights.

  Leffler also accused them of presenting “a totally misleading rendition of Soviet capabilities.” Clifford later admitted that it was the kind of “black and white” analysis that Truman liked.65

  Clifford and Elsey ruled out further efforts to negotiate with the Soviets. “The language of military power,” they wrote, “is the only language” the Soviets understand. Hence, they warned ominously, “the United States must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare” against the Soviet Union.66 Truman ordered Clifford to round up all ten copies of the report and lock them up. “If this got out,” he snapped, “it would blow the roof off the White House, it would blow the roof off the Kremlin.” It would also prove that Wallace, whom Truman had fired four days earlier, had been correct in all his warnings about the hard-line, confrontational direction of U.S. policy.67

  In his response to Clifford and Elsey’s questions, Admiral Leahy provided Truman and Clifford with copies of the will of Tsar Peter the Great, in which he urged the Russians to conquer large parts of Asia and Europe and maintain a constant war footing. No one questioned the veracity of this notorious eighteenth-century forgery. Truman cited it on several occasions, drawing continuities between tsarist policies and those of the present Stalinist regime.68

  While the Soviets were imposing friendly left-wing governments in their sphere, the British were imposing right-wing governments in theirs. In Greece, the British army toppled the popular leftist National Liberation Front and restored the monarchy and right-wing dictatorship. Jailing of critics and other repressive measures soon sparked a Communist-led uprising. The Yugoslavs provided support but the Soviets did not, as Stalin abided by his wartime agreement with Churchill that placed Greece within the British sphere of influence.

  Following the severe winter of 1946–1947, financially strapped Great Britain asked the United States to take the lead in defeating the Greek insurgents and modernizing the Turkish army. One State Department official later commented, “Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership . . . to the United States.”69 But the war-weary public and the Republican-controlled Congress, which was intent upon reducing taxes and cutting back U.S. international commitments, stood in Truman’s way. The Republicans had trounced the Democrats in the November 1946 congressional elections, employing the kind of Red-baiting tactics that would become so familiar over the next decade. The Republican National Committee chairman declared the election a choice between “communism and Republicanism” and charged that “alien-minded radicals” had seized control of the Democratic Party.70

  Congress was reluctant to foot the bill for Truman’s costly Greek and Turkish initiatives. Soviet military probes in the Mediterranean had largely ceased, and tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had again abated. Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he would have to “scare the hell out of the country” if he hoped to win approval for a global anti-Communist campaign that would change foreign policy “from top to bottom.” Dean Acheson took the lead in crafting the administration’s message, framing it as a struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. Only a few months earlier, he had complained about supporting the “reactionary regime” in Greece. But the Turkish crisis had convinced him otherwise.71 The son of a clergyman, Acheson believed that life was a “pilgrimage from birth to death through a battleground between good and evil.”72 He told a group of congressional leaders, “Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and then all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe.” He called it an “Armageddon.”73
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  Truman addresses a joint session of Congress in March 1947. The president asked for $400 million to finance efforts in Greece and Turkey and, in what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, declared that the United States must support “free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure.”

  George Kennan, who was head of the State Department policy planning staff, and others, including George C. Marshall, whom Truman had picked to replace Byrnes as secretary of state, George Elsey, and Soviet expert Chip Bohlen, found this farfetched. Truman sided with Acheson against those who advised him to tone down the rhetoric. Addressing both houses of Congress, Truman appealed for $400 million to finance efforts in Greece and Turkey and declared that the United States must support “free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure,”74 thence to be known as the Truman Doctrine.

  After a heated debate, Congress fell into line. Many members, however, were troubled by Truman’s call to arms and support for blatantly undemocratic and unpopular governments. Bernard Baruch described the speech as “tantamount to a declaration of . . . ideological or religious war.”75 Marshall criticized Truman’s exaggerations. Walter Lippmann was so upset with the Truman Doctrine’s overblown rhetoric and apparently open-ended commitment to intervention that he and Acheson almost came to blows at a Washington dinner party. Some, including Kennan, rejected Truman’s justification for aiding Turkey, which faced no overt Soviet threat, and feared that Stalin would respond the way Truman would if the Soviets sent military aid to Mexico.