Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Truman allowed the problem to fester, and insisted on collegially involving the sorcery of a lot of tinkering aides, to the point that when he finally cut the painter, these two great men destroyed each other’s public lives ignominiously and prematurely, and took Marshall and Bradley and Acheson into permanent retirement with them. Of that whole brilliant echelon of Roosevelt’s top strategic team, only Eisenhower, in Paris setting up NATO, survived intact politically, and he inherited the full distinguished legacy of the Roosevelt-Truman decades (although he would to some degree technically run in opposition to it).

  Truman eventually claimed to have written a letter to himself on April 9, 1950, upholding the tradition of two presidential terms, which only Franklin D. Roosevelt had departed from, and which was now enforced by constitutional amendment, though Truman was specifically exempted. He may have written the letter, and his word should not be lightly challenged, but whether he had intended to retire or not, he certainly did not intend to retire as a result of acute, if unjust, unpopularity. That was what he now faced, and MacArthur toured the country for months attacking Truman in very destructive terms. The creation of such a political debacle cannot be seen as anything but a regrettable swan song for a great general and a distinguished president. As for MacArthur, General Charles de Gaulle, a military admirer but not an acquaintance of MacArthur’s, and a cordial postwar colleague of Truman’s, correctly described MacArthur in a speech of April 15, 1951, as “a general whose boldness was feared after full advantage had been taken of it.”148

  The Korean War settled down very close to the 38th parallel from July 1951 until six months after the inauguration of Truman’s successor, during which time there were fairly continuous negotiations and fierce fire-fighting along the line. Many of the Chinese and North Koreans did not wish to be repatriated, which snarled discussions beyond even the unimaginable intractability of the Chinese and North Korean Communists. The MacArthur fervor subsided, but he continued to be more popular than Truman or Marshall. As the war in Korea dragged on, the Truman-Acheson-Marshall-Bradley policy appeared less successful. It did prevail over MacArthur’s “no substitute for victory” policy, and it left an Achilles’ heel for future open-ended involvement in Asiatic military quagmires by unwary American civilian and military leaders.

  At the rise of the national state in the sixteenth century, there had been four Great Powers in the West—England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Turkey. A hundred years after that, the Empire had broken in two, Spain and Austria, and Russia had joined the group. In the eighteenth century, Spain and Turkey fell away, but Prussia emerged. And in the nineteenth century, Prussia became Germany, and Italy, Japan, and the United States joined the ranks of the Great Powers. World War I eliminated Austria, and World War II elevated the U.S.A. and the USSR, and the British, French, Japanese, and Italians, and later the Germans, were effectively client states of the United States, though not without influence in that role, especially Britain and France.

  Two long lifetimes after Yorktown (162 years), and one after Appomattox (80 years), America dominated most of the world, challenged only by a large, strange country perversely and militantly advocating the antithesis of America’s message. The dialectical confrontation of Hegel and Marx was at hand: against America’s exceptionalism, individualism, free enterprise, and invocation of a benign Providence was the totalitarianism, atheism, and command economy of Russia and its puppet states. The Americans blinked almost in disbelief that they could be affronted so forcefully by such heresies, but they rose quickly to the challenge of delivering the world from a new dark age. They would contain the threat, until the threat relented, gave way, and collapsed.

  Mobilizing a worldwide containment effort on the recently isolationist Americans would require infusing the country with anxious determination, creating atomic bomb shelters, maintaining conscription, and deploying forces all over the world. The Communist takeover of China and penetration of many intellectual circles, and America’s nuclear saber-rattling and official encouragement of some level of domestic paranoia, all made it seem a closer contest that it really was. The ideologically confused, bloodstained regime in the Kremlin was now all that stood in the path of America’s unchallenged, rather gently asserted supremacy in the whole world. America was entering the last lap of the quarter-millennium progression from threatened colony to junior partner in the British Empire, to fragile new republic, regional power, Great Power, Greatest Power, co–Superpower, Supreme Power. To the founders and greatest renovators of the American project, not much of this brilliant, almost vertical, trajectory would have been a surprise.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Red Scare and the Free World, 1951–1957

  1. THE REPUBLICAN RENAISSANCE AT LAST

  The balance of Truman’s presidency was an anti-climax, and the principal feature of it was the worst of the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, though Truman deserves no discredit for either. The senator from Wisconsin, on June 14, 1951, in an eight-hour address in the Senate, the last couple of hours to an almost empty chamber, directed the most outrageous allegations that had probably ever been heard there, against General Marshall in particular, accusing him of causing, by his treachery and incompetence, every Communist success since the Bolshevik Revolution. His universally respected conduct as army chief of staff and chairman of the Combined Allied Military Chiefs in World War II (setting him officially at the head of the 25 million soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the United States and British Commonwealth) was reviled as a series of failures culminating in the gift of Eastern Europe to Stalin. His service as Truman’s emissary in China was held responsible for the Communist victory there, and his time as secretary of state and of defense was deemed responsible for other failures, including Communist victories in Czechoslovakia and North Korea. It was, said McCarthy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man ... so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”149 It was fantastic that a sophisticated democracy could indulge such heinous calumnies in its legislature without the accuser being subjected to compulsory mental examination. And it was only made possible because of the terrible schism between the followers of Truman and those of MacArthur. The McCarran Act in September 1951, passed over Truman’s veto, required registration of communists and communist-front organizations, the internment of communists during national emergencies, the prohibition of their employment in any national defense industries, and the ineligibility for entry into the United States of anyone who had ever been a member of a totalitarian organization. (Of course, the problems of definition made the whole statute absurd.)

  After these rending events and with a state of emergency and a foreign war dragging on, it was unlikely that the Democrats could win a sixth straight election, something that had happened only once before in the U.S. in an era of competing political parties (Lincoln, Grant, Hayes and Garfield, riding victory in the Civil War, and the last two elections were effectively draws, Chapters 7 and 8). When Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee against Roosevelt and Truman, was elected to a third four-year term as governor of New York in November 1950, he forswore any further interest in seeking the presidency and declared his support for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had retired as army chief of staff succeeding Marshall and became president of Columbia University in May 1948.

  One month after Dewey’s announcement of his support, Truman asked Eisenhower to take over the military command of the just-founded North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Eisenhower went to extraordinary lengths to pretend complete lack of interest in the presidency and to masquerade as a draftee to the office. It should be the Republicans’ turn, Dewey was out of the race, and the favored candidate for that party’s nomination was Republican Senate leader and son of the former president and chief justice, Robert A. Taft of Ohio, an intelligent but rather colorless man, admired by colleagues but not overly acce
ssible to public enthusiasm, and generally rather isolationist.

  Eisenhower, to those who examined his career closely, was a political operator and soldier-diplomat of rare virtuosity. Having served as MacArthur’s understudy as chief of staff and in the Philippines, he returned to the United States on the outbreak of World War II and quickly attracted the just-promoted Marshall’s attention and became his chief of war plans; then commander of the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy; commander of Overlord and of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Western Europe; army chief of staff; president of Columbia; supreme commander of NATO—an astonishing career path, from Abilene, Kansas, to SACEUR in Paris, with the White House beckoning. There had been almost no setbacks and there were almost no audible enemies or serious critics. Ike, as he was always known, was well-liked by Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, de Gaulle, even Stalin (and Churchill, aged 76, had just led the British Conservatives back to office, and de Gaulle was awaiting his opportunity, which would come). Dwight Eisenhower brilliantly combined the amiable, smiling, golfing, avuncular model politician with the five-star generalissimo and victorious military commander.

  His plan for the supreme office consisted in eschewing any interest in it if Taft would promise whole-hearted support for NATO. This was a brilliant plan, because he didn’t tell Taft about it, and while Taft wished him well, he professed to be uncertain if he favored dispatching four or six American divisions to Europe. Had Eisenhower told him that with Taft’s full support, i.e., for six divisions, he, Eisenhower, would permanently withdraw from politics, Taft, though even more guileless and less opportunistic than Truman, would almost certainly have provided that support to assure himself the Republican nomination that he had twice before sought unsuccessfully. In any case, the senator’s preliminary support for the dispatch of four divisions or six to Europe was a completely implausible reason for making such a career decision, and was only revealed after Taft was dead and Eisenhower had won the prize in question. The whole story is piffle.

  Eisenhower, as in his career as a whole, was midway between his mentors, MacArthur and Marshall; he wanted political office almost as ardently as did MacArthur, but unlike his old chief, knew how to seem disinterested, and looked almost as disinterested as Marshall really was, but was as politically ambitious as MacArthur, if much more subtle. He was an amiable and fine-looking man, but lacked MacArthur’s great oratorical talents (although he was a better writer).150 In fairness, if Dewey had won in 1948, as he should have, given his advantages, and had won a second term, it is doubtful that Eisenhower would have leapt into political life at the age of 66 in 1956. He wanted the presidency, but on his own timetable.

  As the Republican nomination in 1952 approached, it became clear that it would be a close race for delegates between Taft as the candidate of the party regulars, and Eisenhower as the public favorite and choice of the lean and hungry Republicans most tired of Democratic incumbency. In the southern states, which always voted Democratic, the Republicans didn’t hold primaries and party locals chose the delegates, who naturally had the same votes at a convention as the delegates from other states that the Republicans had a real chance to win in a general election. The party elders in southern states favored Taft, but there were competing slates of Eisenhower supporters, and it would all come down to which group of delegates the convention would seat. The three-term governor of California and 1948 vice presidential candidate, Earl Warren, hoped for an even split between Taft and Eisenhower and his own victory as a compromise candidate. To this end, he stood as a favorite son and required that all California delegates be pledged to him.

  Eisenhower, despite all his coy protestations, was in intense discussion with the Dewey forces that backed him. The only player who played a more adept game of political maneuver than Eisenhower was the 39-year-old junior senator from California, Richard M. Nixon. He pledged personal, private, verbal loyalty to his leader in the Senate, Taft; signed a loyalty pledge to Warren to assure his membership in the California delegation (which would not be his ex-officio as a U.S. senator from California); but privately arranged with Dewey that if he could deliver California’s votes to seat the Eisenhower delegates at the convention from the contested southern states, Dewey would press his nomination for vice president on Eisenhower. Nixon was already a well-known and active campaigner around the country, having been the nominee of both the Republicans and the Democrats in his congressional district in 1948 and after the conviction of Alger Hiss in the perjury proceedings that Nixon’s questions had generated and his much publicized victory over Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950 for the Senate.

  Truman wrote Eisenhower in December 1951 asking his political intentions and the general wrote back from Paris on New Year’s Day, 1952, in longhand, that “You know, far better than I, that the possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activity is so remote as to be negligible.”151 Five days later, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge publicly established the Eisenhower-for-President campaign, and the day after that, Eisenhower said he would accept the nomination if chosen. He won the New Hampshire primary a few weeks later, and shortly after that his supporters held a rally of 30,000 people for him in Madison Square Garden. Dewey smoked him out in early April with a message that if he didn’t get off the fence and stop pretending he was George Washington waiting for a draft (not that Dewey used that phrase), MacArthur would be nominated—a complete fiction, but a nightmare for Eisenhower (because of the cordial but intense rivalry that had developed between them) that propelled him back from Paris.

  Nixon boarded Warren’s convention train bound from Sacramento to Chicago at Denver on July 3, and went through the train urging every delegate to move to Eisenhower on the second ballot. Taft, with five contested state delegations supporting him, was about 100 delegates ahead with a little over 100 pledged to Warren, but those were really honeycombed by Nixon. There were about 150 undecided. At the California caucus meeting on July 6, Nixon seized the microphone unannounced after the other California senator, William Knowland, had called for a divided California vote on the seating of Taft and Eisenhower delegates, to try to promote a stand-off between them. Nixon said this would be sleazy and self-defeating, and that despite his great respect for Taft, he believed the Republicans had to do the right thing: obey the people’s will. He added, incidentally, that only Eisenhower could win and that he was not interested in going down as a Republican for the sixth straight time.152

  This essentially stampeded Warren’s delegates from under him, and led to Eisenhower winning the contested delegates and the convention, even though Taft, in a final throw, let it be known that if nominated, he would select MacArthur for vice president. Had Nixon not been so effective an infiltrator, Taft would have won the nomination, MacArthur might well have put him across in the election, and, as Taft died in August 1953, MacArthur could have been president after all, at the ripe age of 73. (He lived until 1964, in excellent health until about 1961.) MacArthur was the convention keynote speaker, but gave an uncharacteristically flaccid speech.

  The young Cassius, Nixon, was playing a subtle high-stakes game among men who were already world-historic figures. Eisenhower was nominated, Dewey championed Nixon, who was invited aboard by Eisenhower, and they ran on a platform that condemned Truman’s handling of Korea and China without exactly endorsing MacArthur, advocated reduced spending, debt, and taxes, promised retention of the Taft-Hartley right-to-work and open shop law, and implied some sympathy for the McCarthyite fiction about a Democratic sell-out to Stalin, though neither candidate touched that hot iron and both stayed well clear of McCarthy himself. (Eisenhower knew what bunk the Yalta Myth was, as he showed when he reminded the Russians of their failure to honor their Yalta obligations throughout his dealings with them as president.)

  While Eisenhower was not really drafted, Adlai E. Stevenson, the governor of Illinois and Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of the navy, who had not, in fact, sought the nomination, was drafted by the Democrats. An eloquent,
liberal intellectual and grandson of Cleveland’s second vice president, he conducted a stylish and articulate campaign. The Democrats integrally supported the Roosevelt-Truman record, opposed Taft-Hartley, and retained the championship of civil rights for African Americans from Truman and Humphrey four years before, but reverted to the previous practice of nominating a segregationist southerner, Senator John J. Sparkman of Alabama, for vice president. Nixon had to endure a tense controversy over a so-called slush fund that was not, in fact, improper, and was less controversial than the personal financial arrangements of both Eisenhower and Stevenson. Eisenhower was not overly supportive, but Nixon saved his nomination with a dramatic, if rather mawkish, speech in which he referred to the gift of a dog, Checkers, to his young daughters.

  Eisenhower disappointed many by speaking in Wisconsin and excising from his text, after it had been distributed to the press, a planned defense of General Marshall in the home state of his chief accuser, McCarthy. Stevenson spoke shortly after at the University of Wisconsin and said: “Disturbing things have taken place in our land. The pillorying of the innocent has caused the wise to stammer and the timid to retreat.... The voice of the accuser stills every other voice in the land.... If General Eisenhower would publicly embrace those who slandered General Marshall, there is certainly no reason to believe that he would restrain those who would slander me.”153 It was an uncharacteristic act of outright cowardice by Eisenhower.