The problem was that although all parties proclaimed their desire for an independent West Germany, it quickly became apparent that each nation had its own agenda, and one sticking point followed another. The Soviets, still suffering the effects of years of ferocious struggle against the Wehrmacht, did not want to see their old foe rearmed and had responded to the proposal for a European force—and inclusion of West German units—with dire threats. In recent months, they had begun making good on those threats, blocking the boundary between East and West Germany by slapping up barbed wire, a death strip, watchtowers, and sentries. The terror increased as some of the first attempts to cross the border were met not by arrests but by shooting. As panic set in, fugitives from East Germany began pouring into Berlin, where there were no border controls restricting movement between the sectors, making it the last escape route. What had started as a trickle of people seeking asylum was expected to swell to a hundred thousand a month by spring, and would soon overwhelm the refugee center. Faced with the possibility the influx might reach “staggering numbers,” straining West German resources beyond their limits, the nervous new high commissioner reported to Dulles that the “danger of epidemics,” as well as “riots and disturbances inspired either by general discontent or Communists” could not be discounted.
The future of Germany was one of Eisenhower’s most important foreign policy challenges, and Berlin, as the flash point for US-Soviet tensions, was the political and diplomatic battlefield. Conant had been instructed to make it immediately clear that the United States would stay in Berlin, come what may, and continue to protect and feed its 2.25 million citizens and burgeoning refugee population. Within a week of his arrival, he boarded the high commissioner’s private three-car train—once the plush quarters of Nazi leader Hermann Göring—and traveled through the bleak, snow-covered Soviet zone to the “outpost of freedom.” West Berlin’s mayor, Ernst Reuter, met him on the platform and drove him around the still-demolished city.
Berlin presented a “fantastic, grim picture,” mile after mile of hollow, blackened shells of buildings and barren land—a far cry from the vibrant, elegant metropolis Conant remembered. Hundreds of thousands of homes had been flattened and factories burnt to the ground. There were food shortages, and the black market flourished. They were looking at an enormous reconstruction job. In his first radio broadcast on February 18, he promised to continue to facilitate Berlin’s recovery and keep funneling the dollars needed to rebuild its decimated industry and create jobs, predicting that as the strength of the West increased, Communism would retreat, and “the frontiers of freedom would peacefully expand.” The exodus of skilled workers from the Communist regime—those refugees who were “voting with their feet”—was already imperiling East Germany’s economy, and he feared that Moscow’s policy of diverting funds to military efforts might further impoverish the area and mean “a slow death for millions of Germans.”
At his first staff meeting at the American Mission in Berlin, Conant was confronted with two pressing questions: “When will the Russians seal off their sector completely?” and “What will we do then?” They were afraid they would soon be boxed in. The new high commissioner assured them that he would not falter in his determination to protect US claims to free access, but he had no real answers. “I found a stark sense of reality shaping my thoughts as I listened to the speculation about the future course of events,” he recalled, full of foreboding as he contemplated the inevitable cycle of escalating Soviet threats and US counterthreats and where it all might lead.
In his first months on the job, Conant got a crash course in diplomacy. To his dismay, he discovered that many of the headaches of the High Commission were not dissimilar to the administration problems he had dealt with at Harvard, and had to do with balancing the complicated, and often competing, interests of the military, the Foreign Service, and the intelligence bureaucracies. He was responsible for running RIAS, the American radio station in Berlin, which was seen as a highly effective propaganda infiltration into the Soviet zone, and also facilitated the collection of intelligence data and recruitment of sources and agents. The CIA, which had a large station in Berlin, had made it abundantly clear it expected to be given a wide berth for its anti-Soviet propaganda efforts and covert operations behind the Iron Curtain. (One of the most ambitious, Operation Gold, was masterminded by Dulles’s brother, CIA head Allen Dulles, who ordered a phone-tapping tunnel dug between West and East Berlin in 1954 and operated it for about a year before the Soviets unearthed it and held a press conference exposing the American skullduggery.)
Conant, who stuck to the “need to know” rule he had operated under during the war, advised CIA officials that he wanted to learn the minimum about their espionage activities. He was skeptical about psychological warfare, especially what the State Department termed “psychological offensives” aimed at rolling back Communism rather than merely containing it. Dulles was convinced that if the United States kept the “pressure on, psychological and otherwise,” it could “force a collapse of the Kremlin regime or else transform the Soviet orbit from a union of satellites dedicated to aggression, into a coalition for defense only.” This was especially true for East Germany, where the Eisenhower administration was operating a food relief program designed to win over the population and aggravate antagonism toward the Soviets. On more than one occasion, Conant quashed dodgy CIA schemes—including a plan to drop food packages in the Eastern zone by way of balloons—that he considered reckless and that might end in bloodshed. The objective of American policy with regard to the Soviet zone, he wrote Dulles, at least as he understood it, was “to keep the pot simmering but not bring it to a boil.” Political and economic cooperation served containment and was the slow but steady way to win the cold war.
What he had not expected, however, was that even in Germany his “chief anxieties were to be the consequences of working for the federal government in the McCarthy era.” Conant had long regarded McCarthy as a ruthless demagogue who, like Hitler, used the “big lie” technique to impose his will. While at Harvard, he had the luxury of condemning McCarthy and his followers from a safe distance, but now that he was a high government official—and on a target list that already included Acheson, Marshall, and other former Cabinet officials—Conant found it more difficult to maintain his “calm aloofness.”
He had been horrified when McCarthy accused Marshall of being a Communist appeaser when he became secretary of defense, and the president-elect had said nothing to defend his wartime commander. Once Eisenhower took office, he continued to placate the powerful senator, giving him too much of a “free hand” with the State Department, and appointing his enforcer, R. W. Scott McLeod, as head of security. When McCarthy set his sights on the US Information Service (USIS), it was clear to Conant that there was going to be trouble. Dulles, eager to score points with McCarthy, and a virulent anti-Communist in his own right, immediately dismissed a number of career Foreign Service officers. Conant had hardly had a chance to get settled in Bonn when a State Department order crossed his desk requesting the resignation of a staff aide, Charles Thayer, whom McCarthy had deemed a “security risk.”
Conant was dismayed at the extent to which the campaign of vilification was affecting their conduct of foreign policy. “Something approaching a state of war existed between the McCarthy forces and the majority of the staff of the Washington office of the State Department,” he recalled. “There was spying and counterspying going on.” When he tried to probe who within the agency was working with or for the senator, he discovered “that there were not only wheels within wheels, as is usual in a complex government organization, but that some of the wheels were spinning counterclockwise.”
One way or another, McCarthy continued to make Conant’s life difficult. In March ominous cables from Washington reported that subversive books had been found in the USIS libraries in Europe, known as America Houses, and that the censored volumes would have to be removed—deshelved was the odious o
fficial term—in accordance with department policy. A team of inspectors—two McCarthy henchmen, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine—descended on Bonn, interrogated members of the embassy staff, and held an embarrassing press conference in which they made all sorts of unfounded charges. The resulting media flap did not reflect well on the new high commissioner, who missed the excitement, as he was escorting Adenauer on his first official trip to Washington to plead for $250 million for refugee relief. “If there was one subject on which the former president of Harvard should have had his mind made up, books should have been it,” scolded the Saturday Evening Post, calling the book-removal rumpus regrettable and Conant an “amateur diplomat.”
Conant had received a message warning of the impending raid as he was boarding the plane but chose not to stay and defend his patch. It was an embarrassing blunder, and another blow to staff morale, already at an all-time low because of the uncertainty caused by the security crackdown and the impending cutbacks when the occupation came to an end. Conant summed up his rocky start in his private journal on May 31, 1953: “Well, the HICOG [high commissioner of Germany] part of the job has turned out so far to be the most difficult and least pleasant. Having inherited a large organization in process of contraction without a real head for nearly a year, the personnel problem would have been bad in any case. With the ‘goings on’ in Washington, a bad situation has become so bad as to be almost funny were it not so tragic for some people.”
His failure to quarrel openly with Washington regarding the dismissal of a handful of veteran diplomats led the American reporters based in Bonn to conclude that the new Dulles-Eisenhower appointee was “too cautious and cagey.” Conant was bothered by the poor reviews but felt powerless to reverse them. Always too rigid in his interpretation of the rules, he felt he was no longer a private citizen who was free to speak his mind or get on his moral high horse when he felt like it. He was the president’s personal emissary, there to dutifully carry out the policy handed down from above. Dulles had impressed on him that in his new post he would be expected “to play ball with the administration in every way.” Conant was beginning to wish he had heeded his old friend A. A. Berle’s warning that if he took the job as high commissioner, he would be little more than a “glorified messenger.”
There was little glory in his appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee in June 1953, where he turned in an uncharacteristically timid performance. Unaware that the previous day Eisenhower had spoken out against the book purges in a speech at Dartmouth College, Conant allowed himself to be cornered and browbeaten by McCarthy into a mumbled quasi-acceptance of the “deshelving” policy, and engaged in an unedifying exchange in which he appeared to clear the senator of the charge of being a “book burner.” It was only after they broke for lunch and he learned of Eisenhower’s critique of the censorship campaign—a direct shot at McCarthy—that Conant understood that the senator had been out for revenge. Aware that the congressional investigations of subversion were filling the front pages, Conant, as a new envoy to Germany, had spent the morning trying to keep his answers as bland and uncontroversial as possible. As a result, he had unwittingly allowed McCarthy to win the first round.
By the afternoon session, assured that a robust rebuttal would not be frowned on by the White House, Conant stood his ground and repeatedly defended his information officers against charges they were Communist sympathizers. Infuriated by his witness’s firmer tone, a bullying, blustering McCarthy finally resorted to insults, calling him a “kindly old professor who isn’t doing his job very well as high commissioner.” Conant did not respond to the taunts except to give a small, tight smile. By drawing McCarthy’s fire and shielding his employees, he managed to salvage his performance and put himself back in the press’s “good graces.” Writing in the New York Herald Tribune that August, Stewart Alsop (who shared the column with his younger brother Joseph Alsop) gave the high commissioner credit for trying to do his bit to end the “reign of stupidity,” noting that “after a natural initial period of uncertainty, Conant has let it be known that he is prepared to back loyal subordinates to the hilt.”
On June 11 he presided over his final Harvard commencement and met the university’s very earnest, very Episcopalian new president, Nathan Pusey, who appeared promising enough “but with different ideas.” As Conant headed for the airport after giving the alumni address, it hit him that this was really the end of his life in Cambridge. He would not return to haunt the campus in his dotage like Lowell.
* * *
By the time he got back to Germany, the tensions that had been building all winter had erupted in East Berlin. On June 17, 1953, more than sixty thousand German workers rose up against their Soviet oppressors, venting their anger in a violent demonstration. The Russians moved quickly to suppress the rebellion before it turned into a revolutionary movement. Soviet troops, supported by tanks, crashed through the lines and fired on the workers, who were armed only with stones and cudgels. More than 125 men and women were killed in the course of riots in different cities and towns across the GDR—19 in East Berlin alone—and thousands were arrested.
When Conant finally reached Berlin, four days later, an uneasy quiet had settled on the still smoldering streets, and part of the city was under martial law. Allied officials had said nothing about the brutal Soviet assault, while Washington vetoed anything but “sympathy and asylum.” Strikes and unrest pervaded the spring, and Berliners looked to the high commissioner to do something as the representative of the occupying power, but his hands were tied: action could be taken only jointly by the three Allied high commissioners.
With no coherent policy, he found the job of maintaining American credibility, and West German confidence, maddening, to say the least. Washington’s restrained response pointed not only to the Eisenhower administration’s unwillingness to provoke a military confrontation with the Soviet Union but also to the profound disagreements between the three occupying forces in the West. Joseph Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, had done nothing to mitigate what a recent National Security Council report called the “irreconcilable hostility” between the Eastern bloc and the non-Communist world. Although Conant continued to push for the lowering of border barriers, the uprising had deepened the schism between East and West, and he was pessimistic about making any headway with the new leadership in the Kremlin.
In the September 1953 German election, Adenauer, who, as Conant put it, “had virtually run on an American ticket,” won a decisive victory at the polls, with a mandate to carry on his policy of “Westintegration” another four years. The green-and-white flag of “European unity” was unfurled beside the banner of West Germany on Schaumburg Palace, the chancellor’s official residence in Bonn. The Communists and right-wing neo-Nazi splinter groups hardly made a showing at the polls and were thoroughly discredited. Adenauer’s surprising success marked a turning point in Germany’s political future: according to a Department of State analysis, “no single party has ever before won a majority of the seats in the German lower house in a free election, and even Hitler,” in 1933, “received only 43.9 percent of the popular vote.” Dulles excitedly told Conant that the chancellor’s “personal influence” was now “enhanced to a point where it will be difficult—and perhaps undesirable—to deal with the German problem except on the basis of treating him as a full partner.” They hoped Adenauer’s landslide, which Eisenhower told French premier Joseph Laniel marked the “triumph of democracy and common sense,” would finally push the French into line on the EDC.
In January 1954 Conant helped organize the Berlin Conference, the first four-power meeting since the outbreak of the Korean War, to consider a solution to the “German problem.” Its unstated purpose was to find a way of convincing the French that rearming of the Germans was a necessity and the treaty establishing a European army must be ratified. French approval hinged on the outcome of an extremely fraught domestic political debate, and it seemed doubtful, given the widespread public anxiety that
a revitalized Germany might rise up once again and threaten Europe. But with their own military situation in Indochina worsening steadily, the French wanted Dulles’s help in securing a settlement that would include Communist China and were willing to negotiate. The rearmament issue also met with resistance within Germany, where it inspired strong opposition from those still distrustful of their own military, triggered heated debate on its constitutionality, and fueled the vociferous “Without Me” movement of young men refusing to enlist. The Russians rejected the agreement as a harbinger of permanent division.
Dulles, an EDC true believer from his first days in office, was committed to West German military and economic integration with Europe, and as a means of binding the region to America. If the EDC failed, he wrote Conant in a personal note at the suggestion of the president, “the resources which the United States in its own enlightened self-interest has been pouring into Europe will be wasted.” Conant believed there was only an “off-chance” of achieving any of the Berlin meetings’ stated goals, but he invested vast amounts of time and effort into drawing up the documents put before the four foreign ministers. The conference ran true to his predictions, and after everything was said and done, none of the major issues was resolved, making it a useless exercise.
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