by Conrad Black
World War II was over. The United States had suffered 322,000 dead and 700,000 wounded, in armed forces of about 13 million. Approximately 70 million people had died as a result of the war, about 24 million military dead, including over five million prisoners of war, and 46 million civilians. Among the principal combatants, the Soviet Union suffered 9.5 million military deaths and 14 million civilian; China 3.5 million military and 12 million civilian; Germany 5.5 million military and two million civilian; Japan 2.1 million military and 750,000 civilian; Poland 5.5 million civilian; and there were more or less 500,000 combined military and civilian deaths each in the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. The total number of wounded or victims of war-related illnesses must have been well over 100 million people. The United States emerged from the war as the possessor of half the entire economic product of the world and of a nuclear monopoly, as the founder of the United Nations, and as by far the most powerful and esteemed nationality in the world by almost any measurement. Its strategic management, combining conventional force, diplomatic ingenuity, and Wilsonian moral high-mindedness, had been almost faultless, from Roosevelt’s Quarantine speech in 1937 through Potsdam.
Truman ended Lend-Lease on August 21; $50.6 billion of assistance had been dispensed, and $7.8 billion returned. A further 50-year loan of $3.7 billion at 2 percent was granted to Great Britain, but the Soviet account, $11.1 billion advanced and $2.2 billion back in reciprocal payments, was never settled. Given the scale of Soviet combat deaths, military and civilian, and the damage the Soviet armed forces did to Germany, the United States could never be accused of making a bad bargain.137 Not only did the Russians take over 23 million dead, it is unlikely that any Western democracy could have endured losses on anything like such a scale and continued in the war. Nearly 15 percent of the entire population was killed, an even larger percentage wounded, and more than three-quarters of the populated area of the country was destroyed. The continental United States, of course, was untouched, except for the ineffectual shelling of a couple of Pacific coast lighthouses.
The year ebbed away with the heavy Stalinist tyranny bearing down ever more stiflingly on Eastern Europe. The first of the promised meetings of the Council of Ministers was held at London from September 11 to October 2, and failed to generate peace treaties with Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, largely because Molotov disputed the right of the Chinese and the French to be present. The second meeting of the Council was in Moscow from December 16 to 26. There was a wide-ranging discussion, but all decisions were deferred to a peace conference of the 21 Allied nations.
General Marshall retired from the army in December, and after only six days to enjoy his retirement, Truman telephoned him at home and asked him to become special ambassador to China to try to resolve the Chinese Civil War between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists. Marshall replaced Hoover’s war secretary, Patrick Hurley, who was one of the many Republicans Roosevelt had recruited into his government. Hurley was a blustering and belligerent old bull moose, who announced his retirement as ambassador in a speech to the National Press Club, an hour after he had told Truman that everything was fine and that he would be returning soon to China in his official capacity.
The Paris Peace Conference was held in three stages, from July to October 1946. The principal Allies agreed on the peace treaties, but the whole process broke down over the Russian objection to anything much more than an observer role for the smaller Allied countries. Finally, in New York in November and December 1946, Secretary of State Byrnes reached agreement with Molotov on the peace treaties that had long been under discussion. All the former Axis countries (Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland) paid reparations to the Soviet Union and some other countries, and Hungary, Romania, and Finland conceded some territory to Russia. Italy yielded the Dodecanese Islands to Greece, and Fiume and the Adriatic coast east of Trieste to Yugoslavia; Italy even paid reparations to Ethiopia and Albania, as well as to Russia, Greece, and Yugoslavia. Libya’s independence was recognized.
On February 9, 1946, Stalin, who gave a real public speech only once every two or three years, declared publicly that communism and capitalism were incompatible and that another world war was certain. He ordered a tripling of national defense production, and predicted another capitalist depression in the fifties and a resumption of armed conflict then. It was an astonishingly inept and ill-considered address. Even had his predictions of the travails of capitalism been correct, it is not clear what would have motivated Stalin to volunteer his militant hostility in this way. Subtle and clever though he was, he seemed not to realize how much stronger he would have been if he had succeeded in anesthetizing the United States, which wanted nothing more than to withdraw from Europe, disarm, and get back to civilian and semi-isolated existence. Byrnes said on February 28 that the United States “could not stand alone if force or the threat of force is used contrary to the purposes and principles” of the charter of the United Nations. The United States was moving deftly to line up independent world opinion behind a defensive stance opposite Soviet threats and aggression. The Soviet Union had not withdrawn from Manchuria or from northern Iran, which at this point seemed in the same category of wrongfully occupied territories as the Eastern European states whose independence, sovereignty, and free democratic elections Stalin had co-guaranteed at Yalta.
On March 6, 1946, Churchill, having been invited by Truman himself, and accompanied by him in Roosevelt’s old armored railway car, the Ferdinand Magellan, and introduced by the president, spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He wrote his speech carefully and shared it in advance with Truman and his entourage. The president approved it entirely. Churchill said that he admired the Russians and personally liked Stalin, but that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended on Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but in a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure, to control from Moscow.” He explained that the Soviets did not want war, but victory without war. There was nothing they respected so much as strength and nothing they so despised as weakness, and what was needed was a union of the Western democracies, especially the United States and the United Kingdom. Truman, sitting beside him, smiled appreciatively and frequently applauded.
The immediate reaction in the country was negative, the noted pundit Walter Lippmann calling it “an almost catastrophic blunder.” Truman then, uncharacteristically, waffled and told Henry Wallace, now the secretary of commerce (a post for which he had no qualifications and from which Truman shortly fired him, for his pro-Soviet views, as he had fired long-serving interior secretary and one of the leading figures of the New Deal Harold Ickes for impugning his integrity and Treasury secretary Morgenthau for debating his decisions), that Churchill had “put me on the spot.” He told the press he had “no comment” on the speech and wrote Stalin offering to send the battleship Missouri to pick him up and bring him to America and accompany him to the same campus to speak his mind. Stalin declined. This was not the Truman known to history and the persona he cultivated as fearless, pugnacious, and courageous, generally a fair description. Churchill, as in warning the world about Hitler 10 years before, was unerringly accurate. The phrase “iron curtain” entered into the language and into history. He was strongly supported from the start by Harriman, Leahy, Acheson, and Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal. These people all regarded Byrnes as too accommodating of the Russians.
In February, George F. Kennan wrote what became known as “the long telegram” from the embassy in Moscow, 8,000 words on the irreconcilability of the U.S. and the USSR, stating that the Russians were neurotically suffused with feelings of inferiority, and were, under the Communists, “committed fanatically” to the impossibility of “peaceful coexistence,” and
to a desire to disrupt the domestic tranquility and destroy the international standing and credibility of the United States. He believed that the Communists were just the latest of a long line of Russian regimes that would force the country to pay for an immense military power beyond the means of Russia to support, to provide security for their “internally weak regimes.”
In May 1946, Truman had to deal with a revolt by the labor leadership that had long been a pillar of the Democratic Party, when strikes in the railway and coal industries broke out. Truman tried hard to broker agreements, but eventually moved to draft the rail workers into the army, whereupon the two-day-old strike collapsed, and two days later the coal miners and management settled. The Republicans gained control of the Congress for the first time since 1928, in November 1946, as the country was having trouble adjusting to the change from the magnificently confident and mellifluous Roosevelt to the unpretentious and direct but slightly underwhelming Truman. (Among the congressmen elected for the first time in 1946 were future presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford.)
Byrnes, feeling out of step with the increasing hard line of the administration, resigned, and was replaced on January 21, 1947, by General George C. Marshall, a man of such prestige that his appointment restored some of the diminished standing of the administration. Marshall asked Acheson to remain as his under secretary of state, which Acheson did, and the two made one of the greatest combinations in the history of American foreign policy.
Marshall’s mission to China had not been a success. The Communists were steadily gaining strength, the Nationalist government was inept and incompetent, and Marshall’s brokering of a cease-fire and a brief coalition government was unwittingly modestly helpful to the Communists. It was difficult to warm to the Communists, who were full of anti-American venom, yet it was impossible to have any faith in Chiang Kai-shek, who was, as Stilwell had described him at Quebec and Cairo in 1943, a treacherous, cowardly, double-dealing scoundrel, trying to play the Japanese, Americans, and Communists off against each other.
On February 21, 1947, Prime Minister Attlee sent Washington a message that Britain could no longer afford to maintain the defense of Greece, and that the following month it would withdraw the 40,000 troops that had been deployed to prevent a communist victory in the civil war that Stalin had pledged, in the meeting with Churchill in October 1944, to avoid by conceding Britain 90 percent of the influence in that country. On March 12, Truman addressed an emergency session of Congress and asked for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, and warned that failure to act decisively and at once would imperil Europe, the Middle East, and all of Asia. He enunciated what became known as the Truman Doctrine, of containing Soviet expansion by assisting countries that were resisting its aggression, whether overt or by subversion.
On April 9, with the assistance of prominent Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, David E. Lilienthal was confirmed as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, despite claims from Republican leaders, including Robert A. Taft and John Bricker, that Lilienthal was a communist, an unfounded allegation. And on April 22 and May 9 the Senate and the House of Representatives passed overwhelmingly the bills for assistance to Greece and Turkey. Truman had persuaded America to begin the preemptive rescue of Europe from the menace of Soviet Communism.
In response to the temper of the times and the Red Scare that was being whipped up by the Republicans, egged on by J. Edgar Hoover, now completing his first quarter-century as director of the FBI, Truman approved (reluctantly) a screening of federal employees. The Civil Service Commission examined the files, over the next four years, of three million government employees, and the FBI investigated 14,000. A total of 212 were dismissed as being of questionable loyalty. No espionage was uncovered and no one was indicted. It was, as Truman famously said, a “red herring,” but it was an integral part of rousing America from its customary political torpor and focusing public opinion on the Soviet threat, which was a fiction within America except for some scientific espionage, but very real almost everywhere else. (One of the reasons Truman had moved Stettinius out as secretary of state so quickly was that he had returned unexamined a Soviet code book that detailed that country’s espionage activities in the U.S.)
5. SAVING WESTERN EUROPE
At the Moscow foreign ministers’ conference in March and April 1947, Marshall and Bevin failed to make any progress with Molotov over Germany, as the Soviets wanted a centralized, jointly managed Germany from which the Soviet Union would extract $10 billion in reparations. Beyond that, Marshall concluded, they wanted as much chaos and misery as possible in Western Europe, in the hope of the victory of local Communist parties. Molotov, i.e., Stalin, particularly wished to encourage a prolonged state of poverty and dislocation in Germany. Marshall decided in the light of his visit with Stalin and his weeks of fruitless discussion with Molotov, whom he knew to be acting under Stalin’s strict orders, that he had been mistaken in his view, developed at Tehran and Yalta and Potsdam, that Stalin could be negotiated with successfully. Marshall had received as he left Washington a State Department memo warning that economic conditions in Europe were much worse than he had feared. Stops at Berlin and Paris on the way home shocked him, both visually and from descriptions he received from resident American experts. He spoke to the nation on April 28, and said, “The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate.” He told Kennan to assemble a meeting of State Department specialists at once, and prepare a report.
Truman had been considering economic assistance for some time and on June 5, Marshall, having cleared it with Truman first, delivered a convocation address at Harvard University, which had largely been written by Bohlen, based on Kennan’s report. Marshall was careful to avoid any polemics, and said, “Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” He declined any ambition “to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. That is the business of the Europeans.” Marshall was calling on the Europeans to work out their own needs with U.S. assistance, and he was implicitly leaving it open for the Soviets to accept such aid, on their own behalf and for their satellites. Marshall said that “the whole world’s future hangs on proper judgment, hangs on the realization by the American people of what can best be done, or what must be done.”
Immense controversy arose in the United States and corresponding hopefulness in Europe; Truman started a challenging selling job in the Congress, and a conference was swiftly organized in Paris with the prospective recipients. Stalin had told Molotov to object to any pooling of capital that implied Russian resources being spent in Western Europe, and also to object to the American requirement for a detailed accounting of how American taxpayers’ money was being spent. On this unhopeful note, Molotov stormed out of the conference, denouncing what was officially called the European Recovery Program as a “vicious American scheme for using dollars to buy” influence in Europe. Under pressure from Moscow, all the satellite countries would decline to participate, including Czechoslovakia, which, having not been covered by any of the wartime or postwar conferences, had fallen under a communist-dominated coalition. It remains a mystery that normally loquacious memoirists among the Western leaders, including Churchill, Eisenhower, and Truman, skirted around without touching how the Czechs, at least, fell between the cracks. (Slovakia was certain to be occupied by the Red Army.)
This was another disastrous blunder by Stalin; in pulling out and attacking the U.S. plan, he assured its passage by the Republican-led Congress and painted Soviet Communism as a retrograde, dictatorial empire of brute force and economic stagnation, against the American-led forces of democracy and economic growth. When the international political game evolved from hurling millions of soldiers westward while pursuing chicanery in international conferences
and subversion, to the rights and welfare of the war-weary masses of the world, Stalin’s heavy-handed treachery and authoritarianism were exposed and uncompetitive, especially against the collective efforts of the brilliant strategic team that Roosevelt had assembled and that flowered under an equally courageous but less suave and domineering president. The Marshall Plan (Truman typically refused to take the credit for it), as it was soon known, was as brilliant and imaginative a policy as Lend-Lease had been.
It was indicative of the times that the Congress overrode Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, which banned the closed shop and political contributions from unions, required audits of unions and anti-communist loyalty oaths from union leaders, and made unions liable for breaches of contract. On July 25, 1947, the Congress did pass Truman’s comprehensive National Security Act, setting up the Air Force as an independent service, uniting the War and Navy Departments into the Department of Defense, setting up the National Security Council, and enhancing the status of the Central Intelligence Agency. (Navy secretary James V. Forrestal was the first secretary of defense.)