The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  Lippmann also disputed Kennan’s call for containment of all alleged Soviet efforts at expansion. The cost to the United States of stopping Soviet advance everywhere would be incalculable, and ultimately destructive to U.S. interests. Instead, Washington would do better to reach a settlement with Moscow in Europe, where American security was directly involved. Lippmann chided Kennan for failing to propose a diplomatic solution to current Soviet-American differences through an agreement to protect Moscow from German military revival, and encourage Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe.

  Kennan later described himself as mortified by the “egregious” errors that led Lippmann to challenge the assertions in his article. Like Lippmann, he later made clear that he had no sympathy with a strictly military containment of the Soviet Union. To the contrary, he saw Lippmann as espousing “a concept of American policy so similar to that which I was to hold and to advance in coming years that one could only assume I was subconsciously inspired by that statement of it…. He [Lippmann] urged a concentration on the vital countries of Europe; he urged a policy directed toward a mutual withdrawal of Soviet and American (also British) forces from Europe; he pointed with farsighted penetration to the dangers involved in any attempt to make of a truncated West Germany an ally in an anti-Soviet coalition. All these points would figure prominently in my own later writings.”

  Yet Kennan did not issue any corrective at the time, he said, “because of my official position.” But his excuse seems unconvincing. His article was all too clearly an expression of current thinking by the country’s foreign policy establishment. In May, when Robert Lovett, who was about to become Marshall’s undersecretary of state, conferred with foreign policy experts at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, they unanimously urged opposition to Soviet expansionism everywhere. “Clear priorities,” they advised Lovett, “included the Western Hemisphere, Greenland, Iceland, the United Kingdom, the West European rim land, and Japan. But notwithstanding these priorities, initiatives everywhere, except perhaps Korea, had to be contemplated.” These establishment experts on international relations saw a bleak future for the United States unless its governing authorities accepted “that there would be a severe and persistent competition of ideologies.”

  Kennan’s failure to express any regrets about the “errors” (his word) Lippmann had criticized in the X article was not the result of a misjudgment at the time but of a conviction that the article’s conclusions were more in line with U.S. national interests than Lippmann’s assertions.

  In the summer of 1947, following the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, which made economic aid the vehicle for combating Communist advance, the emphasis in the U.S. government had shifted to America’s military capacity to meet the Soviet challenge. For Kennan or any high government official to have made the case at this point for diplomacy would have provoked complaints of naiveté comparable to Henry Wallace’s soft view of Moscow’s intentions.

  As Kennan warned in his article, the Soviets were capable of temporary agreements that gave the appearance of long-term accommodation, but their “duplicity” and “unfriendliness of purpose” were immutable, or at least “there to stay for the foreseeable future.” When Moscow showed a friendly side, “there will always be Americans who will leap forward with gleeful announcements that ‘the Russians have changed,’” Kennan said, “… but we should not be misled by tactical maneuvers. These characteristics of Soviet policy, like the postulate from which they flow, are basic to the internal nature of Soviet power, and will be with us, whether in the foreground or the background, until the internal nature of Soviet power is changed.”

  In the meantime, U.S. officials believed that they had no choice but to develop a national security apparatus that would discourage Moscow’s reach for greater power and prepare the United States for a war if economic and political containment didn’t work. A pervasive sense of Soviet Russia as the heir to Hitler’s global ambitions now became the conventional wisdom in the highest reaches of the American government as well as in all circles of informed opinion. They thought communism was like a virus spreading around the globe, threatening to infect not only poor nations but millions of well-off men and women in advanced industrial societies naive enough to believe that Moscow was a sincere advocate of social justice and peace.

  The two world wars had stimulated discussions in the United States about the need for a more coherent defense establishment than the War and Navy departments, which were traditional rivals for military appropriations. As early as 1943, General Marshall had suggested that the existing departments be brought under a civilian cabinet secretary of the armed forces who would preside over army, navy, and air force branches. The navy’s resistance to giving up its separate identity frustrated the plan until Truman persuaded Congress to enact a National Security Act in July 1947: the law created a secretary of defense responsible for the “National Military Establishment.” The new defense arrangement provided for Army, Navy, and Air Force departments, a National Security Council (NSC), which was to act as an advisory body to the president, and a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was to gather and evaluate information about foreign dangers and stand as a shield against a future Pearl Harbor or surprise attack by an adversary.

  Truman’s fear that he might be creating an American “Gestapo” or secret police that would foster a “military dictatorship” reflected the long-standing national reluctance to have anything resembling the powerful military establishments that existed in European and Latin American countries. But the fear generated by competition with a nation like the USSR, which had elevated control of every aspect of its society to a science, encouraged the belief in the United States that it desperately needed military might and counterespionage by agencies that could outdo the Soviet spymasters.

  Dean Acheson “had the gravest forebodings” about the CIA, and “warned the President that as set up neither he, nor the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.” But to resist the agency’s creation seemed close to treason. Kennan said that Russia’s “almost psychotic preoccupation … with secrecy appeared to many, not unnaturally, to place a special premium on efforts to penetrate that curtain by secretive methods of our own,” and led “to the creation here of a vast bureaucracy dedicated to this particular purpose.”

  Clark Clifford, Truman’s White House counsel, had no doubt but that “a great nation must have the capacity to defend its own interests, and this includes a first-rate intelligence service. I believed that a limited number of covert programs, tightly controlled by the President and the NSC, would be a necessary part of our foreign policy. But over the years, covert activities became so numerous and widespread that, in effect, they became a self-sustaining part of American foreign operations. The CIA became a government within a government, which could evade oversight of its activities by drawing the cloak of secrecy around itself.” As a consequence, it undermined America’s good name as a democratic republic that honored the rule of law at home and abroad. Sixty-plus years after its founding, we remain in the dark about many, if not most, of its past activities.

  In September 1947, Truman appointed Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal as the first secretary of defense. His selection was well received as an acknowledgment of current conservative thinking about America’s tensions with the Soviet Union and communism more generally.

  Although slightly built at five foot nine inches, Forrestal was a pugnacious character who had devoted himself from early in life to building his physical constitution with boxing, wrestling, tennis, and golf. A broken nose he had suffered in a boxing match, joined to his deep-set eyes and pursed lips, gave him a puglike appearance or the look of a cocky bantamweight fighter. Most people described him as fiercely competitive, combative, and tough.

  Forrestal’s background as a self-made Wall Street investment banker, head of the Navy Department during and after World War II, where he had fought num
erous bureaucratic battles with admirals and other defense chiefs, recommended him to Truman as a wise choice for the Defense Department. The sixty-five-year-old Forrestal was a conservative Democrat whose clashes with army and air force officials over the division of defense funds and programs had given him an understanding of the challenges facing a secretary charged with developing an effective military establishment—not only in knitting the competing armed services into a unified fighting force but also in overcoming congressional and public resistance to devoting large national resources to the country’s security.

  Forrestal’s credentials as an anti-Soviet, anti-Communist defender of the nation’s security were common knowledge. He was famous for his anecdote about the U.S. official who asked Stalin whether Soviet fighting men ever failed to perform their duties as ordered by commanders. No, Stalin replied; “It would take a brave man to be a coward in the Soviet Army.” Forrestal used the story to explain that if the United States were to win the Cold War, it “would also require an Army in which cowardice was more hazardous than combat duty.” Among Forrestal’s other homilies was the assertion that world peace depended upon American military strength, which he openly and repeatedly stated was essential to combat Soviet ambitions. It was Soviet Russia, he consistently declared, which posed “the most formidable threat in history to American interests.”

  During the summer and fall of 1947, publicly and privately, Moscow and Washington seemed to edge toward war. The announcement of the Marshall Plan in June and the passage of the National Security Act in July drew fire from the Soviets. An anti-American “propaganda barrage climaxing in a diatribe equating Truman with Hitler” preceded the establishment of the Cominform in September, which prodded the Communist parties of France and Italy to become more aggressive in battling their pro-American governments. In response, they unleashed labor walkouts in key industries that produced violence and forced Paris and Rome to call elections that might give the left enough power to block participation in Washington’s recovery plan.

  The Soviet objective was not a set of Communist governments in Western Europe, which might provoke U.S. military intervention, but turmoil and resistance to Marshall Plan aid that would deter Western countries from becoming models of freedom and democracy for Moscow’s East European satellites.

  At the same time, Truman and U.S. national security officials engaged in some rhetorical overkill of their own. In July, Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett described the Marshall Plan as “the last clear shot we will have at finding a [peaceful] solution to the Soviet threat in Europe.” He privately told the industrialist Henry Ford that “war could come at any time.”

  Truman used the White House bully pulpit to pressure congressmen reluctant to appropriate the billions needed for Marshall’s European Recovery Program. During a White House meeting at the end of September, he warned that “we’ll either have to provide a program of interim aid relief until the Marshall program gets going, or the governments of France and Italy will fall, Austria too, and for all practical purposes, Europe will be Communist. The Marshall Plan goes out the window, and it’s a question of how long we could stand up in such a situation. This is serious. I can’t overemphasize how serious.”

  U.S. Air Force chiefs, convinced that they alone among America’s military held the means to save the United States in a future conflict, began planning for an all-out war with Moscow. In September, General Carl Spaatz told an air policy commission that Truman had set up in July, “The low grade terror of Russia which paralyzes Italy, France, England, and Scandinavia can be kept from our own country by an ability on our part to deliver air atomic destruction. If Russia does strike the U.S., as she will if her present frame of mind continues, only a powerful air force in being can strike back fast enough, and hard enough, to prevent the utter destruction of our nation.” How Moscow, without the air power to reach the United States or the atomic bombs that could destroy American cities, was to fulfill Spaatz’s prediction formed no part of the discussion.

  George Marshall was skeptical of the rush to consider military solutions against the Soviets. “Gentlemen,” he told his State Department colleagues, “let us not discuss this as a military problem; to do so turns it into a military problem.” Instead, Marshall asked Kennan for an overview of Soviet-American relations, which he assumed would be more judicious than anything he heard from the military. Kennan did not disappoint him: on November 6, he advised Marshall that “the danger of war is vastly exaggerated in many quarters”; the Soviets “neither expected nor wanted war.” The political containment of communism was succeeding, as demonstrated by the diminished popularity in national elections of the French and Italian Communist parties, which had antagonized millions of their countrymen with disruptive strikes and protests. The key now, Kennan said, was to carry forward Marshall’s recovery program, but with the cooperation of the Europeans, who would need to assume a part of the financial burden and take responsibility for planning how the ERP would improve their respective economies.

  The two most pressing problems Kennan saw in future dealings with Moscow were Czechoslovakia and Germany. With the Soviets facing diminished influence across Western Europe, they would feel compelled to strengthen their hold on the eastern portion of the continent. Czechoslovakia was their biggest worry: the country enjoyed a degree of autonomy from Moscow’s control that “could too easily become a path of entry for truly democratic forces into Eastern Europe generally.” Kennan cautioned against using a Soviet decision to “clamp down completely on Czechoslovakia” to trigger a U.S. military response. The repression of Czech freedoms should not be seen as an initial act of aggression against Western Europe, but as “a purely defensive move.” Moreover, while the Soviets would be able to maintain their hold on Eastern Europe “for some time,” they would be hard pressed to assure themselves of permanent control. There were limits to how long 100 million Russians could keep 90 million more advanced Europeans, “with long experience in resistance to foreign rule,” in thrall.

  As for Germany, Kennan warned that the Soviets would use an upcoming foreign ministers’ conference in London, beginning on November 25, to work toward expanded Communist influence in all parts of the country. Sharing Kennan’s concern, Marshall intended to resist any Moscow scheme to make West as well as East Germany part of its postwar empire.

  First, however, he tried to forestall a Soviet reach for German domination by disabusing them of malign U.S. intentions. In a Chicago speech, a week before traveling to London, Marshall scolded Moscow for its “calculated campaign of vilification and distortion of American motives in foreign affairs.” There was no truth whatsoever to charges of “imperialistic design[s], aggressive purposes, and … a desire to provoke a third world war.” The United States aimed not to fill a power vacuum in Europe, as Moscow said, but to help rebuild its economy as a prelude to ending aid, which was a burden on the American people.

  Marshall had no realistic expectation of a positive Soviet response. Pravda confirmed his assumption by dismissing his defense of U.S. motives as “the clearest hypocrisy”: the Americans favored a divided Germany as a prelude to unifying the western zones and integrating them into an anti-Soviet coalition. Pravda had it right, but for the wrong reasons; in the West, it was seen as a defense against Soviet imperialism, not as a ploy for destroying communism.

  Predictably, the conference became an exercise in political posturing: Molotov rejected Marshall’s proposals for a reunited but demilitarized Germany organized along genuine democratic lines as a ploy for securing American control. Molotov instead urged a united, disarmed Germany free of occupation forces, but only if Moscow could share control over production in the industrial Ruhr and receive $10 billion in reparations from current German output. Because Molotov’s proposals would have given Russia a say in governing West Germany and would have compelled the United States to bear the cost of reparations in the years before German production would be able to pay it, Marshall rejected the Russia
n plan. Molotov then excoriated the Americans as the unacknowledged proponent of a neo-imperialism meant to “enslave” vulnerable countries. Marshall coldly called Molotov’s remarks undignified and unjustified propaganda.

  It’s conceivable that Moscow and Washington could have found common ground by showing greater flexibility. But the distrust between them was already too pronounced for any compromise to work. Neither side could convince the other that it was defending itself from aggression rather than maneuvering to conquer the world.

  After seventeen unproductive sessions over three weeks, both delegations agreed to an adjournment with no plans for future meetings. The absence of even ceremonial demonstrations of regard for one another and collapse of any ostensible hope for constructive exchanges at another conference created a mood of apprehension in the West. “There was no country on the Continent that had any confidence in the future,” British foreign secretary Bevin told Marshall the day after the conference ended. Marshall saw no recourse but to suggest consideration of a military alliance to assure Western Europe’s security.

  The collapse of the conference left both sides self-righteously proclaiming their innocence and denouncing each other’s motives and intentions. From Moscow’s perspective, its desire for a unified proSoviet Germany was nothing more than an assurance against another devastating attack on its homeland. From Washington’s vantage point, an integrated grouping of Western zones signaled not a plan to reestablish German military power to overturn Communist rule in Eastern Europe and Russia but a means of reestablishing German economic autonomy and freeing the United States from a heavy burden of aid. Ironically, Germany, which had brought Russia and the Western democracies into a temporary alliance against Hitler, now became the decisive catalyst for tearing the Allies apart.