In March and April of 1945, Roosevelt backed away from his support of independence when de Gaulle warned that U.S. policy threatened France with falling “under the Russian aegis…. When Germany falls they will be upon us,” de Gaulle told the U.S. ambassador in Paris. “If the public here [in France] comes to realize that you are against us in Indochina there will be terrific disappointment and nobody knows to what that will lead. We do not want to become Communist; we do not want to fall into the Russian orbit, but I hope that you do not push us into it.”
De Gaulle’s determination to reestablish French rule in Southeast Asia was a monumental blunder. It is understandable that he saw the re-creation of France’s colonial empire as essential to the country’s amour propre, but he was blind to the terrible price France and ultimately the United States would pay in blood, treasure, and prestige. De Gaulle’s fixation on reestablishing France’s colonial rule is a testimony to how shortsighted even the most astute of political leaders can be. His ability to restore a measure of French power after defeat in World War II was a testimony to his political effectiveness. His determination to re-create France’s colonial empire was a study in imperial overreach.
Within days after Roosevelt’s death, Truman’s State Department assured the French that they had no intention of interfering with their sovereignty in Indochina. Focused on mustering U.S. forces for an invasion of Japan’s home islands rather than diverting them to Southeast Asia and eager to shore up France in Western Europe against any Soviet reach for control, Truman was ready to support France’s wish to reestablish its colonial rule in Indochina. At Potsdam, he and Churchill had agreed to Indochina’s occupation by Chinese troops north of the sixteenth parallel and British troops south of the dividing line. De Gaulle and the French assumed that this was a temporary arrangement that would precede the reestablishment of French control. Truman assumed the same, and the replacement of the British and Chinese forces in Indochina by French troops was welcomed in Washington.
It was, however, a bitter disappointment to Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist leader who had been collaborating with America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) against the Japanese and was pressing Washington to support Vietnam’s self-determination. A symbol or bellwether of the emerging anticolonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Ho’s campaign for independence dated back to 1919, when he had presented a petition to the American delegation in Paris that echoed America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence.
Ignored by the Americans (not until the 1960s would the gaunt, slight Vietnamese with a goatee become a familiar figure in the United States), Ho spent the 1920s and ‘30s schooling himself in Western and Soviet politics and culture. Beginning in 1911, at the age of twenty-one, and already an avowed nationalist, he had moved to Paris and spent the next thirty years living in France, the United States, and Britain, where he worked in various hotel restaurant jobs, and in Soviet Russia and southern China, where he held positions with the Russian and Chinese Communist Parties.
In 1941, following the Japanese takeover of Indochina, Ho established a Vietnamese independence movement and organized guerrilla opposition to Vietnam’s Vichy French and Japanese rulers. On September 2, 1945, after Japan’s surrender, he announced the establishment of a Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi. Washington was too distracted by European and other Asian concerns and too worried about antagonizing the French to fulfill U.S. anticolonial promises, specifically for Indo-Chinese independence under an avowed Marxist. Neither Ho nor Americans in general, who had hoped for a revolutionary turn against empires at the close of the war, nor those in particular who sympathized with Vietnamese hopes for self-determination were pleased with Washington’s indifference to Vietnamese nationalist aspirations. But compared with European, Japanese, and Chinese affairs, Indochina was barely a blip on American consciousness in the summer of 1945.
China was another matter entirely. It was central to American hopes for postwar peace and democracy in Asia. To preserve a semblance of America’s grand vision about a China that could be allied with the United States in advancing Asia toward a stable postwar future, Roosevelt had agreed to Soviet demands for economic and territorial concessions in China. In return, Moscow was to pressure Mao’s Communists into a coalition government with the Nationalists and recognize Chiang as the country’s principal ruling authority.
Truman had no quarrel with Roosevelt’s hopes for a peaceful Asia led by a stable China. But, as FDR would have, Truman found himself trapped by uncontrollable conflicts between American, Soviet, Nationalist, and Communist goals. Truman wished to fulfill the Yalta plan for Soviet concessions in China in return for support of a Chiang government including Communist Party representatives.
As the war ended in August and September, however, impediments to Washington’s aims in China became evident. In August, Stalin signed a pact with Chiang’s government, and Mao, under prodding from Moscow, traveled to Chungking for talks with the Nationalists. But the discussions were largely shadow boxing: neither the fifty-nine-year-old “indomitable and uninstructable” Chiang nor Mao, who “claimed the Mandate of History, if not of Heaven,” could imagine working together. They entered into a competition for control of territories occupied by Japanese troops. It was a reflection of their basic differences.
Chiang’s government was notorious for its corruption and unpopularity among China’s vast peasant population, which saw a bleak future for itself under Nationalist rule. The journalist Theodore White, reporting from China, described the Kuomintang as a “corrupt political clique that combines some of the worst features of Tammany Hall and the Spanish Inquisition.” By contrast, Mao’s Communists had built a substantial appeal to the peasant masses with promises of reform that would end political corruption and raise the country’s standard of living. A long history of antagonistic ideologies and mutual distrust made a coalition all but impossible.
A State Department economist whom Truman had made an adviser to the Nationalist government warned the president that China was heading for a civil war that would be a disaster for U.S. policy. It would further undermine a weak economy plagued by periodic famines, compel the Soviets to back the Communists, and force the U.S. to support the undemocratic and unpopular Nationalists, whose unreliable military forces would be defeated. Truman was urged to send a prominent presidential envoy to pressure both sides into a political compromise.
The difficulty in taking up such a suggestion was America’s transparent partiality toward the Nationalists, as evidenced by U.S. help in transporting Chiang’s troops to areas under Japanese control before Mao’s forces filled the vacuum. The conviction that Mao was a stalking horse for Soviet control in China was on the rise not only among Chiang’s conservative American backers but also at Truman’s White House. Like FDR, who had ignored a proposal from Mao in January 1945 to visit him in Washington, Truman could not countenance conversations with the Communists that might undermine Chiang. He saw them as revolutionaries tied to a worldwide Communist movement committed to ousting the Nationalists and expanding Soviet influence in East Asia. Besides, Chiang had influential American backers ready to assault the president for betraying a wartime ally, who promised to be a more reliable postwar partner than a radical tied to Kremlin Communists.
Nevertheless, by the summer of 1944, the American press and Foreign Service officers in China were “beginning to doubt whether China will be a friendly democracy, protecting American interests in the Pacific.” The British ambassador in Washington told the Foreign Office in August, “An ironical attitude to the claims of China to be a first-class power is only too observable…. The slump in general Chinese stock is an accomplished fact and appears to be increasing.” Despite this recognition that Chiang was no democrat but a self-serving dictator who put personal power ahead of his people’s well-being, his supporters saw him as a useful foil to Communist ambitions. Time publisher Henry Luce, their leading spokesman in 1945, featured Chiang on the cover of
his magazine.
Chiang’s principal advocate in the administration was U.S. ambassador to China Patrick Hurley. An Oklahoma oil man who had been Herbert Hoover’s secretary of war, the conservative Republican Hurley was made ambassador in 1944 as cover for FDR’s White House if Chiang’s government collapsed under pressure from Hurley acting on Washington’s instructions to form a coalition with the Communists.
Hurley had little knowledge of China, or of how to communicate with his hosts: he initially addressed the Chiangs as Mr. and Mrs. “Shek,” and during a visit to Yenan, Mao’s headquarters, treated bewildered Communist leaders to imitations of Indian war cries. He privately belittled Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, calling them “Moose Dung and Joe N. Lie.” He initially believed that a coalition was Chiang’s best hope for survival, but after Chiang convinced him otherwise, he became a forceful advocate of preserving Chiang’s rule on Chiang’s terms. In 1945, when Hurley’s embassy subordinates urged the need for a coalition if the Communists were not to take over China after a civil war, Hurley denounced them as “disloyal to him and to the U.S.” The majority of America’s conservative China watchers could accept only a China governed by Nationalists friendly to the United States.
After Potsdam, a few Americans maintained hope for a reformed world led by America, China, and Russia. Nations so sobered by two world wars in thirty years, they thought, would turn away from domestic and foreign conflicts and toward democratic governance at home and abroad. The majority, however, despite insistent demands for the reduction of America’s armed forces—“Bring the boys home” was a popular postwar cry—was skeptical about a universal shift toward friendly dealings, believing that individual nations, above all the Soviet Union, remained eager “to dominate or run the world.”
To guard against foreign dangers, three-quarters of Americans wanted the United States to maintain exclusive control of the atomic bomb. Only between 14 and 17 percent of opinion surveys supported transferring this power to the United Nations. However much German and Japanese defeat and the advent of nuclear weapons had altered power relations in Europe and Asia, nations’ reliance on military might to assure their survival and selfish interests had not changed in the least.
5
IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICTS?
There are now two great nations in the world which, starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans…. Each seems called by some secret desire of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
In late August 1945, Charles de Gaulle visited Truman in Washington. To his satisfaction, he found that France was now “considered as a great ally, wounded but victorious, and above all, needed” in the emerging conflict with Moscow. De Gaulle perfectly described the mood in the United States, which, as in Britain, was turning from matters of war and peace to domestic affairs. “Once the war was over,” he recalled, “public opinion and policy alike cast off the psychology of union, energy and sacrifice and turned once more to interest, prejudice and antagonism.” Where only 7 percent of Americans saw making peace as the most important problem facing the country, and only 2 percent cited the atomic bomb, 74 percent named jobs and strikes.
Truman impressed de Gaulle as having “abandoned the plan of a world harmony and admitted that the rivalry between the free world and the Soviet bloc now dominated every other international consideration.” The president shared de Gaulle’s belief that “it was … essential to avoid dissension and revolutionary upheaval, so that states not yet Communist would not be led to become so,” meaning that America needed to mute differences with France and to support its reconstruction.
Yet de Gaulle concluded that Truman’s turn toward realism and away from dreams of American-led universal agreement did not reflect majority sentiment: Americans clung to illusions of omnipotence and the power to shape world affairs unilaterally. Victory without homeland devastation had sparked “overpowering activity and an intense optimism,” de Gaulle said. America’s economy was booming: the pent-up desire for housing, cars, and everything from meat to electric appliances that had been in short supply during the war was fueling an economic boom and rising prices.
Armed with atomic bombs, its power unsurpassed, America had become a world colossus and a model for what every nation everywhere aspired to—or at least, so Americans assumed. De Gaulle described it as the new American evangelism: “For a nation to be happy, it need only institute a democracy like that of the New World…. Confronted with its present danger, the free world could do nothing better, and nothing else, than adopt the ‘leadership’ of Washington.”
De Gaulle’s observations partly reflected his wounded national pride: France, humiliated by defeat and relegation to the status of a second-class power, was beholden to American largesse, which de Gaulle resented but in fact needed.
De Gaulle took satisfaction, however, from the awareness that the realities of power politics were compelling the Americans to cultivate allies. De Gaulle noted the emerging contradiction between, on one hand, American eagerness to see its success as an irresistible model that would convert friends and foes alike and, on the other, forebodings about postwar tensions that were forcing the United States into a sustained preoccupation with national defense and a reliance on the cooperation of other countries for its safety. A widespread preference for either of two generals, MacArthur or Eisenhower, as the country’s next president in 1948 reflected underlying or muted concerns with foreign dangers as opposed to domestic problems.
In the fall of 1945, however, addressing external threats was not yet the country’s or the administration’s highest priority; external dangers could not be ignored, but more immediate domestic troubles—inflation, strikes, and consumer shortages—pushed foreign affairs into the background. “The Congress is balking; labor has gone crazy; management is not far from insane in selfishness,” Truman recorded in an October diary entry.
A reversion to isolationism, however appealing in the midst of domestic difficulties, was out of the question, but clarity about external policy was put out of reach by inclinations to deny its importance and uncertainty about what to do: the Army, Navy, and State Department conferred on what might be necessary to meet overseas economic, political, and military challenges, but no one was prepared to say just what these might be. When Truman rejected the suggestions of a presidential working group that would focus on national security, neither administration officials nor the press objected that he was being too casual about the country’s future defense. After the all-consuming demands of the war, Americans wanted a respite from foreign troubles.
Moreover, foreign affairs became a central element in domestic political divisions. Foreign policy had never been entirely divorced from partisan political conflicts in the United States. Challenging popular sentiment on overseas involvements that could cost Americans lives and money had always been a part of the national debate. U.S. importance in world affairs after World War II made arguments about how to meet foreign challenges more central to national political discussions than ever before, but it did not make for greater rationality about foreign policy. To the contrary, allegations of missteps overseas became a major weapon in the political campaigns of the outs against the ins.
After Potsdam, reflecting the current national preoccupation with domestic concerns, Truman was content to let his secretary of state manage day-to-day decisions on foreign policy. Jimmy Byrnes, who had resented FDR’s decision to choose Truman instead for the vice presidency, was pleased to take responsibility from the president for what he believed should have been his job anyway. He quickly made his mark on the country’s external relations. Drawing on his background in politics, where he had a reputation as a “conciliator and mediator,” he advocated compromise with the Soviets as the surest route to postwar peace. In June 1945 Byrnes asked Joseph E. Davies, the former ambassador to Moscow and an outspoken Russophile, to
become ambassador to London as a signal that Washington would resist Churchill’s efforts to have the United States join Britain in “ganging up” on the Soviet Union. At the close of the Potsdam conference, Stalin had praised Byrnes’s efforts to overcome differences, jokingly describing him as “the most honest horse thief he had ever met.”
By contrast, Truman was seen by journalists and members of his government as erratic and indecisive in managing foreign affairs. He expressed his uncertainty in a comment to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau: “You don’t know how difficult the thing has been for me. Everyone around here that should know something about foreign affairs is out.” His doubts produced complaints that on matters of military and diplomatic planning, administration “disarray” was “glaring.”
Truman tried to reassure critics that he was personally managing the most important national security issue, control of atomic power. On October 3, he informed Congress that he favored international discussions but would keep expertise on the bomb strictly in American hands. At the end of the month, he used the occasion of Navy Day to speak publicly on his determination to pursue a principled foreign policy favoring self-determination for all nations and reiterated that U.S. control of the new weapon was “a sacred trust.”
Stalin was never as conflicted as Truman and his administration about his foreign policy intentions: at the close of the war, “what Stalin was really after,” George Kennan advised Washington, “was the expulsion of American influence from the Eurasian land mass generally, and its replacement by that of his own regime.” Yet, as in the West, unforeseen circumstances and Stalin’s personal limitations obscured and frustrated his ambitions.
In October, after he returned from Potsdam, Stalin suffered a heart attack. The war years and his profligacy with food and alcohol at all-night bacchanals had taken a toll on his health. Sixty-seven in 1945, he was suffering from arteriosclerosis that made him more petulant, unpredictable, and explosive. “He was very jittery,” Molotov said. “His last years were the most dangerous. He swung to extremes.” After one of these all-night orgies of drinking and eating, Stalin released his subordinates at 5:00 a.m. “On the way home, [Nikita] Khrushchev and [Mikhail] Bulganin, lay back [in their chauffered car], relieved to have survived: ‘One never knows,’ whispered Bulganin, ‘if one’s going home or to prison.’”
The Lost Peace Page 16