Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  This crux, or something very like it, must have been in General Gracey’s mind as, with Indian troops, he oversaw South Vietnam between September 1945 and March 1946. He may have sensed that, with Roosevelt gone, American “anticolonialism” would slacken. If he did, he would have been matching the sentiments of that great anti-imperialist Major General Patrick Hurley, whom we met in the tussle with Churchill over Iran in 1944 and who, oil company representative though he may have been, could still pen an excellent memo. As he had written to Truman:

  I had been definitely directed verbally by President Roosevelt in regard to his policy in Indo-China . . . Lord Louis Mountbatten is using American Lend-Lease supplies and our American resources to invade Indo-China to defeat what we believe to be the American policy and to re-establish French Imperialism. . . . The move of the Imperialistic powers to use American resources and enable them to move with force into Indo-China is not for the main purpose of participating in the war against Japan.

  Hurley here employed precisely the same objection—to the use by Britain of Lend-Lease material for political ends—as he had in Iran. He also made the same bold use of the term “imperialism.” Truman’s response was more guarded than Roosevelt’s. It was in 1945, in fact, that the idea of an informal partition of Vietnam was beginning to suggest itself. (This drew on the long-meditated British reaction to any colonial problem.) The ironic aspect of this partition, in the light of future events, was that it gave North Vietnam to China—at least to China in the person of Chiang Kai-shek.

  If it had been a matter of parceling out Indochina in the wake of a Japanese surrender, there might conceivably have been something for everybody. But the Vietminh forces, who had actually borne the heat and burden of the day against the Japanese and who had been pained witnesses to Vichy French collaboration with the “Co-Prosperity Sphere,” wished to take a hand in their own country’s affairs. This was the ingredient in which Roosevelt had, no doubt for his own reasons, believed. To General Gracey, it occurred as more in the nature of a law and order problem; so much so that he rearmed Japanese POWs to combat the Vietminh and other independence forces.

  An Englishman reading the record of that time has occasion to feel the sudden lurch that an ancient spectator of Euripides might experience. In December 1945, communiqués report British and Indian forces “patrolling against harassing opposition” in Bien Hoa and Thu Dan Mot. One of their commanders, Brigadier C. H. B. (“Roddy”) Rodham, directed: “It is therefore perfectly legitimate to look upon all locals anywhere near where a shot has been fired as enemies, and treacherous ones at that, and treat them accordingly.” This last stand of the fighting Raj is the thread of Ariadne: the connecting line between the British debacle in India and the American catastrophe in Vietnam. “We have done our best for the French,” General Gracey said to the U.S. journalist Harold Isaacs. “It is up to them to carry on.” Up to a point, he might well have added if he had possessed Euripides’ advantages.

  “Anticolonial” protest was of two kinds, especially when it became known that, as Harold Isaacs reported of the Japanese POWs deployed by Gracey, “the British were delighted with the discipline shown by their late enemy and were often warmly admiring, in the best playing-field tradition, of their fine military qualities. It was all very comradely.” The first reaction came from Pandit Nehru during his 1946 visit to the United States, where he told The New York Times:

  We have Watched British intervention there with growing anger, shame and helplessness, that Indian troops should be used for doing Britain’s dirty work against our friends who are fighting the same fight as we.

  The second came from General Douglas MacArthur, who was in one sense Mountbatten’s and Gracey’s commanding officer:

  If there is anything that makes my blood boil, it is to see our allies in Indo-China deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little people we promised to liberate. It is the most ignoble kind of betrayal.

  By then, General Gracey had allowed the French colons to mount a coup in Saigon—the notorious putsch of September 23, 1945—and to take more or less unrestricted vengeance on the Vietminh. He also permitted the return of the French High Commissioner, Vice Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, a former Carmelite monk dedicated to the dream of the mission civilisatrice and said by one of his aides to possess “the most brilliant mind of the twelfth century.” Not since Professor Jean Izoulet praised Admiral Mahan and wrote of “l’expropriation des ‘races incompétentes’ ” had French mysticism and British phlegm been brought into such improbable alignment. The most sturdy defense of General Gracey’s actions was written by Dennis Duncanson, an English academic and member of the British Advisory Mission to Vietnam, who said that the objectives of the occupation were to “ensure public order temporarily against the consequences of war until the surrendering enemy forces were out of the way and the power recognised by the Allies as sovereign, namely France, was in a position to resume its administrative responsibilities.” In these euphemistic, colonial phrases one can detect the logic and the illogic which was soon to become the code of the Quiet American. When United States ground troops were at their most committed two decades later, Duncanson emerged as one of their most vocal “special relationship” defenders in England. Vietnam was an element in the “receivership” that not even Burnham had bargained for.

  Contrast this with the genesis of the Truman Doctrine, almost a demonstration case of what James Burnham had been intending. On the morning of February 24, 1947, the British chargé d’affaires in Washington gave the formal quietus to Britain’s ambition, upheld with such guile and tenacity in the face of American protests (see pages 235-37), to retain a “sphere of influence” in the Balkans. He did this by the simple expedient of being driven to the State Department and telling Secretary George Marshall that His Majesty’s government could no longer make good on its commitments to Greece and Turkey. Directly implied in this confession of political and economic exhaustion was the idea that the United States should take up the burden. Under Secretary Dean Acheson lost no time in composing a memorandum which argued that “the British are wholly sincere in this matter and . . . the situation is as critical as they state.”

  Later on the same day, a Special Committee to Study Assistance to Greece and Turkey was convened at the State Department. In the chair was Loy Henderson, who was later to distinguish himself in Anglo-American operations in Iran. Reviewing the British note, and perhaps considering the oblique question about British sincerity and British consistency that was buried in Acheson’s wording, he expressed the view that it “appeared to be in line with recent British moves in getting out of Burma, India and Palestine,” adding that “the British government seemed to feel itself unable to maintain its imperial structure on the same scale as in the past.” Acting with extreme speed, President Truman gave a joint address to Congress on March 12, 1947, proclaiming the doctrine that bears his name and inscribing the post-Fulton promise that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” His accompanying request for millions of dollars in aid to both the Greek and Turkish governments was swiftly approved. By July, the United States embassy in Athens was roundly criticizing those whose concerns, about the restoration of the Greek monarchy, it had itself been putting forward only three years previously. After Fulton, too, they had a new rhetoric to deploy. Those who doubted the wisdom of the policy, said the embassy, were guilty of making “appeasement appeals.” This was a deft reversal of the anti-Churchillian policy followed by American diplomats in Greece until that time.

  The week of Truman’s address to Congress happened to be the week that James Burnham published The Struggle for the World, and Life magazine alone devoted thirteen pages to the coincidence. Time promoted discussion of the book to its “International” section. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Century was among the few skeptics, saying of Burnham’s global argument: “It fits the ‘Stop R
ussia’ policy of the Truman Doctrine so exactly that one can hardly read it without thinking, ‘Here, whether they realize it or not, is what the Senators and Representatives who voted for the initial move under the new doctrine—the Greek-Turkish aid bill—were really approving as the foreign policy of the United States.’ “

  If it was true that Burnham had been intellectually influential, it was also true that British capitulation had been very weighty in evoking an instant response from the United States. Many former isolationist and anti-English Republicans joined the Democrats by voting, in effect, to take up where the British had stopped. “The Third World War,” ran Burnham’s opening sentence to The Struggle for the World, “began in April 1944.” His reference, which was typically hortatory and extreme, was to a Communist-led mutiny in the Greek armed forces that month. But he perfectly anticipated Truman’s language about “armed Communist gangs,” and if his sentence had read “Cold War” instead of “Third World War,” it would be hard to fault as a historical statement. (Burnham liked the second formulation so much more than the first that when he launched his National Review column he entitled it “Third World War” and thus lent a distinct tone and flavor to every conservative Cold War pronouncement from McCarthy to Goldwater and beyond.)

  The United States had been angered by Churchill’s 1944 instruction to General Scobie (the General Gracey of Athens) to conduct himself “as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.” But by the end of the 1940s, American envoys in Athens had become well used to a proconsular line and style of their own. Especially quick to see the advantages of this aspect of “receivership” was Ambassador John Peurifoy, who openly arbitrated, as if he were governor-general or viceroy, when it came to deciding which conservative statesman was in or out of favor, and who (as King Paul sourly noted) even felt able to give terse instructions to the Palace itself. With his task in Greece accomplished, Peurifoy was sent to occupy the United States embassy in Guatemala City, where he played a decisive part in the overthrow of the government of Jacobo Arbenz. He was later to lose his life in an accident while en poste in Indochina, thus becoming one of the first Americans to span three continents in a proconsular capacity—an achievement which would not have been possible had the United States not taken up or inherited so many burdens so soon.

  Attempting to put the bravest face on this rather haphazard undertaking, extending as it did from the squalor and cynicism of the Vietnam intervention to the haste and the U-turn of the British scuttle in Greece and Turkey, the conservative André Visson wrote a celebrated postwar essay called, revealingly enough, The Athenian Complex. Designed to allay and compose European misgivings about the rise of American power, it condensed European and especially English reservations as follows:

  Accustomed to judge their own civilisation not so much by its scientific and mechanical achievements as by its artistic achievements, they ask: Where are the American cathedrals? Where are the American philosophers, the American Shakespeares, Racines, Goethes and Tolstoys; the American Raphaels, Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Cézannes and van Goghs; the American Beethovens, Mozarts, Debussys and Tchaikovskys?

  They ask the same questions the Greeks of Athens were asking in the third century B.c., when the rising Roman Empire was imposing its leadership on the peoples living around the Mediterranean. Proud of their artistic monuments, of their magnificent theaters, of their great philosophers, of their perfect artistic taste and intellectual refinement, the Athenians were saying to the Romans . . . You certainly have superiority in military power and you are much wealthier than we are, but all your power and all your wealth cannot take away from us our cultural and intellectual superiority.

  Visson made a shrewd point when he observed, a little later:

  Of course if the hour for Britain to pass on her great historic mission has struck, the British would definitely prefer to have as successors their younger American relatives rather than intellectual Latins, unbalanced Germans or temperamental Slavs.

  It can be said for “receivership” that, painful though it was, it spared Britain the protracted misery endured by Belgium, Holland, France, and Portugal during the course of decolonization. Suez was a textbook case of shambles and humiliation, but at least it was brief and decisive. There was no bloody, drawn-out torture of the Algerian or Angolan variety. This was not just because, as many British commentators believe, the Empire was wound up with relative humanity and dispatch. It was because Britain, unlike her European imperial rivals, had the option of a partial merger with another empire, linked through kinship and alliance in war, (This also meant that Britain stood stupidly aloof from the formative period of Western European Union, but that cost was not to become apparent until much later.) Other European nations were to see their former possessions become drawn into the American orbit, but without the salve of a “special relationship” with the metropolis. Speaking of the Marshall Plan, the conservative Visson said that it expressed the American “willingness to take the ‘white man’s burden’ off the tired British shoulders. It is of vital importance for the British that the Americans succeed in this undertaking. And the British themselves hope that the Americans will succeed in spite of their alarming lack of experience and training.” Here again, this is Rome, not Athens, to a new Rome. As Gore Vidal puts it in “At Home in Washington, D.C.”: “At the park’s edge our entirely own and perfectly unique Henry Adams held court for decades in a house opposite to the Executive Mansion where grandfather and great-grandfather had reigned over a capital that was little more than a village down whose muddy main street ran a shallow creek that was known to some even then as—what else?—the Tiber.”

  Actually Visson was slightly too orthodox in proposing the idea of an unstrained cousinhood, where the English uncle and the American nephew keep up an affectionate correspondence and the uncle knows that his younger brother’s son married “a woman of mixed nationality and uncertain social background. Was she an Irish maid? A German seamstress? A Scandinavian farmer’s daughter? An Italian singer? Or perhaps some Slavic girl? The older English brother has never been able to find out. He knows only that this non-Anglo-Saxon mother must be chiefly responsible for the boy’s being different from his own children. But, thank Cod! there is enough English blood.” His emphasis on blood makes it tempting to say that Visson was too sanguine. Indeed, he imputed a design or a destiny to a process which was much more ambivalent than he realized or conceded, and he gave it a dignified Graeco-Roman overlay that it did not really deserve. If the British had really wanted a historic hand-over rather than a set of half-sincere concessions and adjustments, then they would or could have added Cyprus, say, to the area of American responsibility when they handed over Greece and Turkey. Instead, they clung jealously to the island as a crown colony and Middle Eastern base, and protracted an unusually complex problem into the life of succeeding generations. A good instance of the general rancor and bad faith with which receivership was conducted is the little-studied case of Guatemala in 1954.

  In June 1954, the Eisenhower administration was in the middle of its concerted military, economic, and political campaign to remove the government of Guatemala. American airplanes were bombing the country, regional boycotts of Guatemalan products were being coordinated, and Jacobo Arbenz and his Cabinet were being arraigned as surrogates of Moscow in the hemisphere. The blockade of Guatemala, which had impertinently proposed to nationalize certain properties controlled by the United Fruit Company, was enforced by a rather questionable policy of “stop and search” on the high seas. Not even the State Department was sure that such a tactic was legal. Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy, a former Roosevelt wartime aide, had enough sense of history to write, in a memo: “Our present action should give stir to the bones of Admiral von Tirpitz, and no doubt the conversation of some German naval officers will relate to our ‘good neighbor’ policy as spurlos versenkt (sunk without trace).”

  Murphy correctly surmised that the Briti
sh would not take kindly to “stop and search.” Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary and deputy to the reelected Winston Churchill, protested that his government “could not possibly acquiesce in forcible action against British ships on the high seas.” Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, riposted in the language of Fulton and “rollback.” He told Eden that “rules applicable in the past no longer meet the situation and [are] required to be reviewed or flexibly applied.” On June 18, 1954, Eden very unwillingly announced that Britain, while rejecting any U. S. right of search, would itself detain British ships suspected of conveying arms to Guatemala. He was privately bitter about this undignified concession, saying that free passage on the high seas “was a proud right which the British had never before given up even in wartime and the Americans never ever said ‘thank you.’ “ Eisenhower’s press secretary, Jim Hagerty, confided to his diary that, after all, the United States had fought the War of 1812 on the ostensible question of unmolested neutral shipping. “I don’t see how, with our traditional opposition to search and seizure, we could possibly have proposed it, and I don’t blame the British for one minute getting rough in their answers.”