The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  The young Acheson was an offbeat Democrat, and a somewhat unlikely one. He was excited by Teddy Roosevelt and bored by Taft, and was finally brought into the Democratic party by Woodrow Wilson, a figure of austere, almost harsh moralism, with the same bent toward both the Atlantic countries and internationalism. Acheson was a conservative and proper young man, capable at his tenth Yale reunion in 1925 of giving a speech which dealt with regaining control over a burgeoning government and criticized the government for interfering too much in human affairs. He was almost classically a man of the Establishment—the right backgrounds, the right schools, the right clubs, the right connections. Indeed, in 1933 he entered the Roosevelt Administration in the best Establishment tradition of the old-boy network (“In May 1933 two old friends, Arthur Ballantine, the Republican holdover Under Secretary of the Treasury, and James Douglas, Assistant Secretary, also awaiting relief, asked me to lunch with them. The new Secretary, Will Woodin, was, they said, a man after our own hearts who would need congenial friends. Would I come to meet him at lunch. The lunch was gay and uninhibited . . . I was hardly back in my office before the operator announced Secretary Woodin calling. Would I become Under Secretary of the Treasury?”).

  The first tour with Roosevelt did not work out well: Acheson was more conservative than the Administration on fiscal policies, and ill at ease with Roosevelt’s loose, disorganized personal style, which he considered “patronizing and humiliating. To accord the President the greatest deference and respect should be a gratification to any citizen. It is not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return.” He eventually resigned and only returned before the beginning of the war because his own fierce interventionism coincided with Roosevelt’s needs; in 1941 he was made an Assistant Secretary of State.

  While he never felt comfortable with Roosevelt, personally or politically, he was later very much at ease with Truman, a feeling which most members of the Establishment came to share. Roosevelt was too political a figure and thus too capricious, and Truman had more reverence for the wisdom of the Establishment (one of the differences was that Roosevelt, having come from that particular class, was a good deal less in awe of it, be it in foreign affairs or anything else. He knew too much about them; he was broader than they. Acheson, and men like him, would come to be admirers of Truman, in part because he gave them a very free hand and took them at face value, but there was a certain condescension at first toward him: John Carter Vincent would recall Acheson saying at the beginning, “John Carter, that little fellow across the street has more to him than you think”). Joseph Alsop, a journalistic extension of Acheson, would tell a reporter, “Stewart [his brother] and I were still patronizing toward Truman then because we thought the big successes of his Administration were owing to the big men in the Cabinet—Marshall, Forrestal, and the others. But it is a rule that a President must always be given final credit for all his Administration’s successes and the final blame for all its failures . . . We admitted in our column several times that we had underestimated Truman, and several years ago we wrote him a letter of apology. Dean said it would make the old man happy and I believe it did . . .”

  The big man. Acheson was of course the big man of the Truman years. Marshall was beginning to age; the China mission after the war had taken a good deal out of him and had not gone well, and when he eventually served as Secretary of Defense he never seemed to catch hold, as if something had gone out of him. The Defense Department, preoccupied with its own problems and reorganizations, was not as influential as State in the late forties. In the late forties and early fifties, Acheson was a rising figure there, both as Undersecretary, from 1945 to 1947, and then as Secretary from 1949 to 1953. Not by chance would he call his memoirs Present at the Creation.

  In 1947, when congressional support for aid to Greece and Turkey was wavering, when the British, clearly bled white by two world wars, could no longer function as the dominant Western power, the torch was passed to the United States, and it was Acheson who assisted in relaying the torch of Anglo-Saxon sanity and order. The British said they could not bail out the Greek economic situation, which was near collapse, nor could they underwrite the modernization of the Turkish army. Reading the cables at the time, Loy Henderson, then director of the office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, thought “that Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership with all its burdens and all its glory to the United States.”

  With congressional leadership dubious, it was Acheson who rallied everyone; he painted a picture of a world slowly being infected by Communism, country by country, one rotten apple contaminating the barrel. Only the United States stood between freedom and this latest totalitarian threat of all Western civilization. The dark ages were the alternative: the Russians would get control of the Mediterranean, then Africa, then Asia. In Europe our friends would feel the impact. He said it forcefully and with passion; these were not sham views. Fine, said Senator Arthur Vandenberg, but “if Truman wants it he will have to go and scare hell out of the country.”

  This became the origin of the Truman Doctrine. Truman, charged with scaring hell out of the country, did exactly that, to such a degree that when the message for the Doctrine went before Congress it surprised Secretary Marshall, then flying to Moscow. Uneasy with the extent to which the anti-Communist element was stressed, Marshall sent a cable to Truman questioning the wisdom of this presentation, saying he thought Truman was overstating the case. Truman replied that after talking with Senate leaders, he felt sure that this was the only way to get the message through. So it was that Acheson, even more than Marshall, was the architect of containment, the architect of an attitude of universality toward Communism (one could not struggle with them in Europe and acquiesce to a different form of them in Asia. It was not a time for subtleties. Subtleties blew up in your face).

  But he was not a man concerned or interested in Asia; he was a man of Europe, which was the serious world, with values that were Western, Christian, democratic-elitist. It was not really Europe as a whole that shared his values, but specifically Anglo-Saxon Europe; as one went farther south and the people became darker and more Mediterranean, they tended to be less worthy and dependable (with the exception of Portugal’s Salazar). But Europe was the world: the Russians to be stopped there, the British held together and given a rest period, the French encouraged to be more worthy of us and their own past, the Germans to be re-created in our image. The French were perhaps the most troublesome, surprisingly unstable for a major European power, insisting always on being French. The underdeveloped world was not a serious place. Though Acheson presided as head of State at a time of great restlessness and changes in the colonial world, with its deep longing for a new order, there is little evidence of it in his memoirs other than a certain irritation with Nehru for his lack of appreciation for Acheson’s grace and wit as a host. Instead, his is an Anglo-Saxon book, dealing mainly with the passing of the torch.

  It was this basic disinterest in the underdeveloped world, a belief that it was not only less important but somehow less worthy, and above all the unwillingness to rock any European boat, which came back to haunt, if not him, then his country and his party on Indochina. In October 1949 Acheson, now Secretary of State, talked about Indochina with Nehru, who was extremely pessimistic about the French experiment there (“the Bao Dai alternative,” as it was known). He outlined the failings of the prince and said that the French would never give Bao Dai the freedom necessary to hold the hopes and passions of his people. Acheson told Nehru he was inclined to agree, but that he saw no real alternative. This was an odd answer, since he was in effect saying that we were committed to a dead policy. Nehru, who like other newly independent Asian leaders refused to recognize Bao Dai, told Acheson that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, albeit a Communist. Nehru argued that European judgments on the failures of popular fronts were specious in an Asian context, and Acheson replied by talking abo
ut France and Italy. But at that early date, Acheson knew the French cause was both wrong and hopeless.

  Even that attitude would shift in the waning days of 1949 and the first days of 1950. It was not that events in Indochina were different, but that domestic perceptions in the United States, pushed by developments in China, were changing. No longer would the Americans be so even-handed, if that is the word, in their policy toward Indochina. Up until that point Walton Butterworth, still Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East, was fighting valiantly against all the French attempts to involve us in the war with aid and arms, but things were fast moving out of his control. Among other things, the fall of China to the Communists had released a vast amount of money which had been ticketed for Chiang Kai-shek, and there was now talk of giving some of it to the French in Indochina. Philip Jessup, the ambassador-at-large for the Administration, was to go on a special mission in which part of his assignment was to bestow official recognition upon the Bao Dai government (which we had previously thought worthless). After the recognition, the Bao Dai government might receive some leftover China aid. Jessup was to be accompanied by Ray Fosdick and Everett Case. Of course the American options were steadily narrowing; the most hopeful possibility by this time was Bao Dai, since the Ho Chi Minh alternative was now long gone. If we could not support him up to 1949, when there was no domestic pressure, it was impossible now. Bao Dai represented a frail, non-Communist, nationalist alternative, even if the French were co-operative, which they were not likely to be.

  Jessup carried with him a letter from Acheson to Bao Dai saying that the Americans were delighted that he had been chosen to lead Vietnam. Jessup, an authority on international law, considered this a letter of recognition. After the visit he went to Singapore, where he held a press conference praising his own visit and saying that the United States was extremely pleased that the French had granted the Vietnamese independence. There was an immediate uproar in Paris, and Jessup was ordered by Washington to give a second press conference, in which he very carefully stated that he had referred to Vietnamese independence within the French union. Once more we had caved in to the French; even within the already limited and probably futile framework of working with Bao Dai, the United States was accepting further limitations. Rather than being the high-water mark of the U.S. commitment to Vietnamese nationalism, it was a reflection of one more concession to the European ally. All in all, it was not a happy trip; on his way back to the United States, Jessup learned that he would have to answer McCarthy’s charges that he had an “affinity for Communism.”

  Thus even the recognition of Bao Dai was neutralized, but the American aid to the French cause would come and come quickly. A follow-up mission was appointed by Acheson, headed by a California publisher named Robert Allen Griffin. Its purpose was to determine whether or not to send arms and other military equipment to the French. In Washington, Butterworth, who had consistently fought this kind of thinking, sensed that this was Acheson’s way of signaling an end to an unwanted policy. It was, he thought, an old Department way of switching policies while the same men were still there—send an independent commission, with the advance knowledge that the result would be a new line. A separate survey. A new position. Butterworth was finishing up his tour, anyway. He who had come in so clean and fresh because John Carter Vincent had taken too much heat had now taken too much heat himself. Just as there had been trouble getting Vincent an ambassadorial post which required Senate confirmation, Butterworth would have the same problem: when the Department wanted to send him to Sweden as ambassador, it had to cancel this for a lesser position because of Senate pressures.

  Not surprisingly, the Griffin mission found that the Communist threat to Indochina was so acute that it advised the State Department to concentrate on short-range assistance in order to help the French achieve immediate political and military stability. It was not surprising because the reasoning was different: the given was not whether it was wise to aid the French, whether this was the right side or not, but whether the French needed the aid. Of course the French said they needed the aid. Thus began a major new policy of aid to the French in this colonial war, a policy by which the United States would eventually almost completely underwrite the costs, $2 billion worth, and would by 1954 be more eager to have the French continue fighting than Paris was.

  There was, however, still one small detail to be taken care of, the question of whether the military equipment and economic aid would be channeled through the French or through the Bao Dai government. The French had been suspicious of American intentions from the start, believing that the Americans were eager to replace them in Saigon. Paris was filled with rumors to this effect. Would the Griffin mission mean that? In March 1950, while the Griffin mission was on its way home, Lieutenant General Marcel Le Carpentier, the French commander in Indochina, said in a statement filled with the feeling of the time (and with a good deal of insight into why the French lost): “I will never agree to equipment being given directly to the Vietnamese. If this is done I would resign within twenty-four hours. The Vietnamese have no generals, no colonels, no military organization that could effectively utilize the equipment. It would all be wasted, and in China the United States has had enough of that.” (The French of course needed the aid because they were being beaten by Vietnamese.)

  Le Carpentier would have no problem; as it always did in conflicts between its anticolonialism and its anti-Communism, the United States backed down completely. The equipment arrived, through the auspices of the French; the Vietnamese were on the sidelines, a simple people, not capable of producing colonels and generals. So Griffin recommended that we give military aid; the only question now was, With what kind of leverage? Acheson had already talked with the Philippine statesman Carlos Romulo, one of the few Asians who was considered respectable both in Washington and in Asia, and Romulo warned him that the trouble with giving the French aid was that the moment it was done, you lost all leverage and influence.

  In May 1950 Acheson made his decision; again it was not based upon what was good for the Vietnamese or what the needs were on the scene. It was a dual decision; it reflected, first, the general intensifying of the Cold War, and the consequent greater inability to make a distinction between any two parts of the Communist world; second, and perhaps more important in the case of Acheson, it was, like the original Potsdam agreement, a reflection of Indochina as a peripheral area, unimportant in terms of the real world and relationships with European allies. At this time the Americans, who wanted to stabilize Europe with a new and powerful pro-Western and anti-Communist anchor on the Continent, were pushing to revive the West German economy. The British were uneasy about American intentions, and the French were openly recalcitrant, fearing, as they had good reason to, the specter of German economic might and muscle, followed inevitably by German political might and muscle, and fearing this at least as much as they did the specter of international Communism. Then Robert Schuman, one of the great Europeanists of the French government, came up with a plan which would regulate European production of coal and steel under an ultranational regulatory body, and which would let the Germans have far greater coal and steel production. Thus the French had come around to the American demands for European protection and a rebuilding of the West German economy. But there was to be a sweetener. The French economy was troubled, the defense bill for the prolonged and distant war was mounting all the time; they could no longer afford it, and they needed American help for Indochina. On May 7, 1950, the day when Acheson learned of the Schuman Plan, he also agreed to give military aid for the war. It was a quid pro quo decision, though it was not announced as such (later Acheson admitted privately to friends that it was). The desire to strengthen Western Europe against the Communists would see us strengthening a Western nation in a colonial war.

  The next day it was announced that the United States would give aid; it was a turning point in the postwar history of American policy; we would begin to finance a colonial war. But if the
war was to be financed, then it could no longer be known as a colonial war, but as a war of freedom against Communists. Freedom of speech for the Vietnamese suddenly became an issue. In the past the State Department’s statements on Indochina had carefully abstained from defining the war as the French defined it; now, that too would change. On May 8, after making his deal with Schuman, Acheson announced: “The United States Government, convinced that neither national independence nor democratic evolution exists in any area dominated by Soviet imperialism, considers the situation to be such as to warrant its according economic aid and military equipment to the Associated States of Indochina and France in order to assist them in restoring stability and permitting these states to pursue their peaceful and democratic development.”

  Stability, that was the key word, to bring stability to that land, though stability as we defined it was colonialism as the Vietnamese defined it. Freedom to them was instability and revolution. Just as the policy had gotten turned around, so too had the words; as our policy had become an aberration, so too, and this was to continue for the next twenty years, our language. Yet the Acheson decision did not stand out as something terrible, an obvious turning point; rather, it was clearly part of the times and part of an era, the fifties were not a time for subtleties and distinctions. The day after the decision was announced, the New York Times commented editorially: “We cannot ask France to sacrifice for Indochina, merely then to give it up. Neither can we dictate terms to France, because we are not prepared to step in. Indochina is critical—if it falls, all of Southeast Asia will be in mortal peril.” All of this, of course, was before Korea.