The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  To be sure, Soviet behavior seemed unnecessarily provocative, stimulating fears of a Soviet Russia following the example of Hitler and the Nazis in 1939–40, when they recklessly went to war. Images of Moscow relying on force to intimidate opponents into conceding political and territorial advantages that could give Russia an upper hand in a struggle for European control understandably came to mind.

  But more than World War II memories shaped Truman’s response to the Berlin crisis. Domestic politics were also at work in his show of determination against Soviet actions. How could it be otherwise? Although presidents always deny that political considerations or anything other than strict national security calculations shape their foreign policy decisions, they are ever mindful of how any foreign affairs action will register on public opinion. And they should be. After all, a president who loses public backing for steps abroad is implementing a foreign policy that is unsustainable. An overseas action that costs the nation blood and treasure or opens the prospect of such losses may cost a president not only his office but also the national embarrassment produced by a retreat.

  Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were both mindful of how the loss of domestic political support had played havoc with Woodrow Wilson’s postwar foreign policies. The defeat of Wilson’s party in the 1918 congressional elections had resulted in the Senate’s refusal to ratify the Versailles Treaty and agree to U.S. participation in the League of Nations. By the end of World War II, a majority of Americans believed that rejection of the treaty and league had contributed to the onset of the century’s second great war. Whether this belief was accurate or not, the lesson seemed to be that domestic political support was inseparable from effective implementation of wise foreign policy. Certainly Franklin Roosevelt’s caution in leading the United States into the war had rested on an understanding that a congressional declaration of war that did not enjoy widespread and strong public backing was too great a danger to the all-out effort that would be needed to win a global conflict. Moreover, Roosevelt’s overstated hopes for postwar harmony were part of a domestic political campaign to ensure that internationalism would replace traditional isolationism at the end of the fighting.

  In 1948, Harry Truman believed that his containment policy was essential to the country’s future safety and well-being. If political rivals to his left or right defeated him in that year’s election, he thought, it would be disastrous for the nation. Political opponents urging greater accommodation to Moscow or tougher steps that could precipitate a war impressed him as offering dangerous alternatives.

  The likelihood of a Truman defeat in 1948 overshadowed these concerns. Clark Clifford, the president’s White House counsel, who had also become his principal campaign adviser, remembers that his hopes of Truman’s election “went up and down. At times I thought the president was either fooling himself or putting forward a brave front to keep our spirits up.” The truth is that few, if any, close observers thought that Harry Truman had much of a chance. After losing control of both houses of Congress in 1946, Truman seemed to be a president with little public backing. In the spring of 1948, a Gallup poll recorded only 36 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval. In the “solid Democratic South,” Truman had just a 35 percent favorable rating, with 57 percent holding negative views of him. In straw polls matching him against the Republican nominee, New York governor Thomas Dewey, Truman trailed through the summer and fall by between 6 and 12 percentage points. A late October survey had voters predicting a Dewey victory by a two-to-one margin.

  But Truman carried off the greatest election upset in presidential history. Several elements contributed to his success: an unqualified appeal to New Deal liberals, the cultivation of African American voters, a whistle-stop cross-country train trip in which the president endeared himself to voters by his plain speaking, and an uninspired Republican campaign from the lackluster Tom Dewey, whose stiff formality gave him a reputation as the only man who could strut sitting down.

  In a time of international crisis, the public wanted strong executive leadership. When the president took a firm stand on a divisive issue, it encouraged people to see him as an officeholder with integrity, who was willing to speak his mind regardless of the political consequences. Truman’s 1947–48 stand on civil rights, a highly controversial issue, was an ideal case in point. His speaking out for equal treatment under the law of all Americans, regardless of race, gender, or ethnic origin, was calculated to raise the president’s reputation for courage with voters.

  In 1947–48, Truman spoke out against civil rights abuses of blacks as no president had since the civil war. There was unquestionably some political calculation in the president’s public identification with African American demands for legislation that would end lynching, increase black access to the polls, require fair employment practices, and end discrimination in the armed services. On matters of race, Truman, a native of western Missouri, where segregation and bias against blacks was commonplace, grew up with the shared convictions of his time and place that blacks were inferior to whites.

  But anecdotes about physical attacks on returning black veterans by southern racists, who in one instance beat up and blinded a black sergeant in one eye, genuinely incensed Truman. He concluded that “the main difficulty with the South is that they are living eighty years behind the times.” Unpunished killings of blacks in Deep South states convinced him that the “country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint.” To remedy these abuses, in February 1948 Truman asked Congress to pass a civil rights law that enforced the equal treatment clauses of the Constitution, but control of key committees by southern congressmen and senators blocked passage of such legislation.

  Stalin, Soviet actions, and alleged Communist subversion served Truman’s political appeal as well. The president’s firm response to the Czech crisis and the Berlin blockade, tied to his successful bipartisan appeal in 1947 for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, gave him standing as an effective leader intent on containing communism by economic and political means rather than by war. And though Americans were not happy with Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the Communist insurgency that threatened to topple the pro-American Nationalists in China, they were content with the rescue of Greece, Turkey, Western Europe, and West Berlin from Soviet domination without resorting to the horrors that an atomic conflict would bring.

  Truman’s attentiveness to national anxiety about Communist subversion also struck resonant chords with voters. The Communist takeover in Prague without overt Soviet intervention, as well as accusations in August 1948 by Whittaker Chambers that Alger Hiss, a former colleague in the Roosevelt-Truman State Department, had passed secret documents to the Russians, made Communist spying a campaign issue. In his March speeches about the Czech coup, Truman had denounced Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party, which were running against him, saying that he “did not want the support of ‘Henry Wallace and his Communists.’”

  Something more seemed to be needed, however, after the president said during a campaign talk in June, “I like old Joe,” explaining that Stalin “is a decent fellow [who] is a prisoner of the Politburo.” Truman’s remarks caused an embarrassing uproar over his naivete in believing that the Politburo rather than Stalin dictated Soviet policy. Truman privately acknowledged his error, telling aides, “Well, I guess I goofed.”

  He found himself in political hot water again when he dismissed as “a red herring” the spy scare on Capitol Hill that followed Chambers’s testimony. When one of Clark Clifford’s aides told him that domestic communism was the “Administration’s most vulnerable point,” the White House felt compelled to hit back at Republican charges of being soft on the Communist threat.

  Clifford was a hard-nosed political operator who had few qualms about cutting political corners to win an election. Like de Gaulle, Clifford’s physical appearance gave him an instant advantage over almost everyone he dealt with. At six feet, with broad shoulders, a full head of blond hair that ga
ve him a boyish appearance, and a soft voice, he was as glamorous as a movie actor. His appearance discouraged some people from taking him seriously. But he was exceptionally shrewd and effectively manipulative: anyone approaching him with a request would have to work the levers of influence to gain access. On being ushered into his office, a visitor would find him hunched over his desk, pretending to study some document, while he waited until he acknowledged their presence. It was a trick he used to establish control of a meeting and the conversation.

  Clifford counseled Truman to counter charges of being soft on communism by giving a national radio speech in September that pilloried the Republicans for diverting attention from the “real danger” of Soviet expansionism to bogus warnings about Communist espionage. But it was not the complaint about false warnings that registered on voters as much as Truman’s assertion that “the Democratic party has been leading the fight to make democracy effective and wipe out communism in the United States,” essentially acknowledging the greatly exaggerated threat of Communist subversion. The real enemies of domestic security, Truman said, were the Republicans and the Wallace progressives: the latter hoped that they could win enough votes to ensure a Dewey victory, which would then result in “reactionary policies” that could foster “confusion and strife on which communism thrives…. There is nothing that the communists would like better than to weaken the liberal program that are our shield against communism.”

  Truman’s response was calculated less to argue against overblown fears of Communist spying than to suggest that Wallace and his supporters were wittingly or unwittingly serving the Communist cause. In Truman’s formulation, unwise Republican policies would create a similar result: implementing their reactionary ideas would make the country more vulnerable to domestic agitation from discontented radicals who sympathized with the Communists. However much Truman despised the unrealistic attacks against anyone even faintly vulnerable to charges of fellow traveling, his counters to their smears gave their false warnings a measure of credibility that would continue to promote a Red scare among millions of gullible Americans.

  No foreign policy issue more directly influenced the election than Truman’s decision to give prompt recognition to the state of Israel in May 1948. It is true that significant political considerations entered into the president’s decision, and they so angered Secretary of State Marshall—who, like others in the State Department, believed that less overt backing for Israel was in America’s best interest—that he never spoke again to Clark Clifford, who pushed recognition as essential to the president’s election.

  For Truman, who accepted the political necessity of overtly supporting the new Jewish state, there was nothing untoward about doing so: not only would it help him politically, but he believed it was the right and realistic policy. He fully accepted the moral claims for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and Clifford convinced him that Israel would come into existence with or without America’s immediate backing.

  When he won election in November, Truman believed that he had both made a smart political decision on Israel and acted in concert with larger moral and historical forces. Israel’s successful resistance to the Arab League armies in 1948 vindicated Clifford’s prediction that an Israeli state would come into being regardless of initial outside reactions. When the chief rabbi of Israel told Truman during a visit to the White House, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years,” Truman started to cry. Such are the fictions by which men sometimes take comfort from their actions. Neither the rabbi nor the president reflected on the potential for continuing violence created by the irreconcilable differences between Israelis and Palestinians over land and survival in the Holy Land.

  9

  THE MILITARY SOLUTION

  War is Peace.

  —George Orwell, 1984, (1949)

  At the start of 1949, as President Truman began his full term, he understood that heightened tensions with the Soviet Union following the Czech coup and Berlin blockade made foreign affairs his foremost concern. Compounding his worries was the need to replace George Marshall, who at sixty-nine was in declining health as a result of surgery to remove a kidney with a benign cyst. Although he would live for another ten years and would perform one last tour of duty as secretary of defense between 1950 and 1951, Marshall urged the president to replace him with a younger, more vigorous man who could deal with the urgent challenges of the next four years. Truman, who viewed Marshall as one of the greatest public servants in the country’s history, reluctantly let him go, appreciating that the general had given more of himself to the nation than anyone in his generation.

  In choosing a new secretary, Truman recalled his personal tensions with James Byrnes and the satisfaction he had from the mutual regard he and Marshall had shown each other. Where differences with Byrnes had been over his failure to show proper deference to the president’s authority, the Truman-Marshall conflicts had been strictly over policy, particularly toward the emerging state of Israel. Truman wanted a new secretary who not only had the expertise to provide wise counsel on foreign affairs but would also accept that the president had the final say on all major policy matters without being a cipher. Truman, whose popular approval stood at 69 percent at the start of his new term, was free to choose almost anyone he liked. But the decision was comparatively easy.

  Dean Acheson was the president’s first choice. He had a long history of government service, beginning with Roosevelt’s Treasury Department in 1933. His work for Truman as undersecretary of state and acting secretary during Marshall’s absences abroad included major contributions to the president’s doctrine for Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan.

  But, as two people from greatly different backgrounds, would they be able to work comfortably together? Truman, the Missouri farmer and Democratic Party wheelhorse, had little in common with the northeastern elite Acheson represented. The son of the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, schooled at Groton, FDR’s prep school, Yale, and Harvard Law School, Acheson was known for his brilliance and sense of superiority. Everything from his erect posture and mustache to his pinstripe suit and homburg hat bespoke self-confidence and authority; this was someone who expected others to defer to him.

  Although Acheson and Roosevelt shared a class identity and privileged schooling, the president expected the thirty-nine-year-old Acheson to show a proper regard for his higher station and demonstrate unquestioned loyalty as undersecretary of the treasury. Acheson, however, resented what he saw as FDR’s patronizing behavior toward subordinates, especially himself. It was “not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return,” Acheson recalled.

  When he and the president differed on a currency issue—no small matter in the midst of the Great Depression—Acheson stubbornly held his ground. During a heated argument in the Oval Office, Roosevelt imperiously told him: “That will do!” When the president suspected that Acheson continued to defy him by offering surreptitious critical comments to the press, Roosevelt demanded his resignation. Acheson complied by writing a respectful letter saying he understood the president’s need to have “complete freedom of choice as to whom you will place in charge at the Treasury.” It was a belated expression of recognition that the president was the boss, despite Acheson’s undiminished personal annoyance at Roosevelt’s imperious manner. Appreciating Acheson’s willingness to resign like a “gentleman,” Roosevelt told him: “I have been awfully angry at you. But you are a real sportsman. You will get a good letter from me in answer to yours.” Roosevelt never followed through on his promise.

  Acheson learned a valuable lesson from his conflict with Roosevelt. He later concluded that he had shown “stubbornness and lack of imaginative understanding of my own proper role and of the President’s perplexities and needs.” He belatedly understood that he should have put aside personal considerations for the sake of larger public
ones.

  He did not make the same mistake with Truman. From the first, he thought of Roosevelt’s successor as “straight-forward, decisive, simple, entirely honest.” Moreover, he believed it “a blessing that he is the President and not Henry Wallace,” who would have plunged the country into “bitter partisan rowing.” It may be that unlike Roosevelt’s treatment of him—demands for the sort of courtier’s deference Acheson resisted giving—Truman’s respectful regard made Acheson partial to him. But whatever Acheson’s motives, he had genuine respect for Truman as a man of intelligence and integrity who was devoted to serving the country as best he could.

  Although Truman never insisted on the sort of deference Roosevelt demanded, he was no less sensitive to demonstrations of personal regard. In 1946, after the Democrats had lost control of the Congress in the November elections and Truman’s prospects of winning in 1948 seemed bleak, the president, who had been in Missouri to vote, returned by train to Washington, where the only government official on the platform at Union Station was Undersecretary of State Acheson. “It had for years been a Cabinet custom to meet President Roosevelt’s private car on his return from happier elections and escort him to the White House,” Acheson recalled. “It never occurred to me that after defeat the President would be left to creep unnoticed back to the capital.” Truman never forgot the gesture, and on that occasion, he invited Acheson to join him for a drink at the White House.

  In choosing Acheson, Truman risked congressional defiance. While the president had Democratic majorities in both houses in 1949, the fear of Communist subversion cast a shadow over Acheson’s Senate confirmation hearings. The Whittaker Chambers–Alger Hiss controversy in the summer of 1948 had embarrassed Acheson. Hiss, who Chambers had fingered as a Soviet agent, was described as an Acheson State Department assistant.