In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  ACCLAIM FOR David Fromkin’s

  In the Time of the Americans

  “The story of a generation, a hugely ambitious effort to chronicle the United States’ emergence from isolationism.… [Fromkin] succeeds admirably.… He makes it vividly understandable how two world wars could be fought in 30 years.… He follows the story relentlessly, enriching it with the foibles and conflicts of a generation blessed with extraordinary characters.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A fascinating narrative history … of the generation that was born at the end of the Indian wars and forged World War I.… [Fromkin] sets out to write a popular history for the general audience, and succeeds brilliantly.… [It] rings with authority and impresses with its intellectual sweep.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Fromkin possesses a fine sensibility … for storytelling and the individual human drama embedded in large world events … and he does so with grace and genuine insight.… It is all very noisy and lots of fun to read.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “[Fromkin has] a gift for explaining complex ideas and events in accessible prose, and a palpable passion for his subject.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Fromkin is … a deft, evocative writer … [retelling] the grand tale of America’s emergence as a world power with verve and a narrative drive that keeps the reader engaged.”

  —Newsday

  “[In the Time of the Americans] succeeds in making one whole story out of the manifold events of a half-century. It will be valuable in many a course in American history.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  David Fromkin

  In the Time of the Americans

  David Fromkin is Professor of International Relations, History, and Law at Boston University, where he also serves as chairman of the International Relations Department and director of the Center for International Relations. His A Peace to End All Peace, a bestseller in paperback, was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the thirteen best books of 1989.

  ALSO BY David Fromkin

  The Question of Government

  The Independence of Nations

  A Peace to End All Peace

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1996

  Copyright © 1995 by David Fromkin

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published and unpublished material:

  Houghton Mifflin Company: Excerpts from Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann, edited by John Morton Blum, copyright © 1985 by John Morton Blum; excerpts from Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904–1945, by Joseph C. Grew, edited by Walter Johnson, copyright © 1952 by Joseph C. Grew, copyright renewed 1980 by Elizabeth Lyon, Anita J. English, and Lilla Levitt. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

  Yale University Library: Diary entries for Sept. 29, 1917, Oct. 13, 1917, Dec. 18, 1917, Dec. 30, 1917, Jan. 3, 1918. Edward M. House Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Fromkin, David.

  In the time of the Americans: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur—

  the generation that changed America’s role in the world / by David Fromkin.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76606-9

  1. United States—Foreign relations—20th century.

  I. Title.

  E744.F865 1995

  327.73—dc20 94-30100

  Random House Web address:

  http://www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  To John and Martha Watts—

  who make it all worthwhile

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note to the Reader

  Prologue

  PART ONE: GROWING UP

  CHAPTER 1 The Middle of the Journey

  CHAPTER 2 Europe and Us

  CHAPTER 3 The Energies of TR

  CHAPTER 4 American Lives

  PART TWO: THE SUMMONS TO GREATNESS

  CHAPTER 5 Franklin Roosevelt Comes to Town

  CHAPTER 6 The Outbreak of the Great War

  CHAPTER 7 “… I Was Going to Stop the War”

  CHAPTER 8 America Quarrels with Both Sides

  CHAPTER 9 America Prepares—But for What?

  CHAPTER 10 Berlin Decides

  CHAPTER 11 America Finds a Foreign Policy

  PART THREE: A CALLING HIGHER THAN SOLDIERING

  CHAPTER 12 A Missed Rendezvous

  CHAPTER 13 Focusing on the Peace

  PART FOUR: A SEPARATE WAR

  CHAPTER 14 A War of Our Own

  CHAPTER 15 The AEF Is Too Late

  CHAPTER 16 The Battle of Ideas

  CHAPTER 17 Wilson Versus Lenin

  CHAPTER 18 How to Fight the War

  CHAPTER 19 The AEF Makes Its Move

  CHAPTER 20 An Army of Tourists

  CHAPTER 21 Disillusion Before Versailles

  CHAPTER 22 A Stab in the Back

  PART FIVE: A SEPARATE PEACE

  CHAPTER 23 The George Washington Goes to Europe

  CHAPTER 24 Deciding the Fate of the World

  CHAPTER 25 Paris in the Plague Year

  CHAPTER 26 A Who’s Who of Americans in Paris

  CHAPTER 27 A Clash by Night

  CHAPTER 28 War or Peace with Communism?

  CHAPTER 29 Wilson Collapses

  CHAPTER 30 Blood Money

  CHAPTER 31 Closing Up Shop at the Peace Talks

  CHAPTER 32 The Idols Fall

  CHAPTER 33 The United States Signs Its Separate Peace

  CHAPTER 34 The Education of the Roosevelt Generation: First Lessons

  CHAPTER 35 Going on the Biggest Spree in History

  PART SIX: AMERICA GOES IT ALONE

  CHAPTER 36 The Age of the Dictators

  CHAPTER 37 Rumors of Wars

  CHAPTER 38 The Emergence of FDR

  CHAPTER 39 A Foreign Policy at Minimum Cost

  CHAPTER 40 Unpreparedness as a National Policy

  PART SEVEN: THE LAST, BEST HOPE

  CHAPTER 41 Curbing the President’s Powers

  CHAPTER 42 Staying Out of It

  CHAPTER 43 The March Toward War

  CHAPTER 44 The Bell Tolls

  PART EIGHT: WILL AMERICA GET INTO IT AGAIN?

  CHAPTER 45 Replay

  CHAPTER 46 FDR’s New World Strategy

  CHAPTER 47 FDR’s New Team and New Term

  CHAPTER 48 Making Churchill a Partner

  CHAPTER 49 A Second Summons to Greatness

  CODA: A BRIEF TOUR OF THE AMERICAN AGE

  CHAPTER 50 The Magnificent Country

  CHAPTER 51 America Against the Allies

  CHAPTER 52 The Origins of the Cold War

  CHAPTER 53 Wilson’s Way

  CHAPTER 54 Handing Over Command

  CHAPTER 55 One World—Or Two?

  CHAPTER 56 TR’s Way

  CHAPTER 57 Breaking with the Past—And Paying the Price for It

  CHAPTER 58 Forging a Consensus

  CHAPTER 59 America’s Triumph

  Epilogue: Tales of the American Age
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  Postscript

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  THIS IS THE STORY of the American leaders who defined America’s role in the international politics of the twentieth century: Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur, and their contemporaries. I see them as forming a coherent generation, shaped by shared experiences that brought them to see events from a common point of view. Historians often say that it is unscientific to think in terms of generations; but I think that in this case it helps to do so.

  Born in the 1880s, FDR and his peers were old enough to fight in the First World War and to command in the Second. They changed their political enthusiasms and allegiances often as they rode the roller coaster that was at the same time the history of the twentieth century and their education.

  They were offered a rare opportunity. Only a few times before in the history of the human race had a people been privileged to hold sway over much of the surrounding world. The handful of others mostly pursued traditional goals of gold and glory; but the Americans made use of the chance that came their way to try to change the political ways of the world. We will look into the upbringing that made them conceive that to be their mission, and we will ask what made them think that it was something that could be done.

  This is not a full-scale history of the period. Nor is it a rounded generational history, describing in detail what FDR and his contemporaries wore and ate and drank and read and thought. It is focused uniquely—and in that sense narrowly—on their changing views about what America’s role in the world ought to be.

  The book is written for the general reader. It is not, for the most part, based on primary sources. It is a work of storytelling and of interpretation. I have undertaken original research only in the few instances, such as the drafting history of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, where I could not make sense of the existing accounts.

  I have studied a respectable amount of the secondary literature, but nowhere near all or even most of it: it is too vast. I have had to be selective. Whenever forced to make choices, I have gone to the most recent sources based on the latest scholarship.

  In trying to keep to a narrative path through the luxuriant overgrowth of information about America’s twentieth century, I have followed and kept in sight several torchbearers to light up the way: characters who appear at times in the pages that follow, mostly to show where their generation was going. William Bullitt, in particular, has much more space devoted to him than his intrinsic historical importance would justify. He is here so often because when important things were happening, he so often was there.

  Then, too, Bullitt was emblematic. His twists and turns were typical of liberal Americans in his generation, or at least of those who took a keen interest in world affairs. He was pro-Wilson and then anti-Wilson; he ran the gamut of opinions about communist Russia; and he was a stubborn isolationist and a passionate interventionist.

  I wanted this to be a shorter book, but couldn’t manage it: there was too much ground to cover. Americans of FDR’s generation witnessed much of the world history of the twentieth century—wars, revolutions, market crashes, the collapse of empires—and took part in most of it. They had far more than their share of being where the action was.

  Events were on an epic scale. So were men. Their life span in politics was unusually long because they began when they were so young. Douglas MacArthur already was an American general in the First World War. Franklin Roosevelt entered politics the same year that Woodrow Wilson did. William Bullitt was a key presidential foreign policy adviser only three years out of college.

  Arriving early, they stayed late. Only death kept FDR from serving out his presidency through its sixteenth year; only the Constitution kept Eisenhower from being elected to a third term at the age of seventy—and perhaps a fourth one when he was seventy-four. Theirs was a long day in the sun.

  A consistent theme in their politics, coming out of their July Fourth heritage, was their opposition to colonialism. Five centuries earlier, the countries of Europe had begun one of history’s greatest adventures: the conquest or settlement of all the rest of the world. A previous book, A Peace to End All Peace, ended with the final achievement of European imperialism: the occupation by Britain, France, and the Soviet Union of the Middle East, the last place left. That was its high point, and what is about to come is its low. What follows is the story of how FDR’s generation of Americans opposed all of Europe’s imperialisms—and played a role in destroying them all.

  The history that follows is done for the interest and pleasure of it, but is not without contemporary relevance. For example, the Europe-first agenda upon which the members of Roosevelt’s generation finally agreed was in sharp contrast to that espoused by their successors, junior officers in the Second World War who held the presidency in a line that began with John F. Kennedy and ended with George Bush, and who placed their emphasis on the politics of the Third World and found themselves mired in them. It might well be asked today whether that was—or is—the wisest course to pursue.

  Then, too, the ethnic feuds and nationalist rivalries in the Balkans and central and eastern Europe that formed so conspicuous a feature of the political landscape of the world before the First World War, by resurfacing in the 1990s have made some of the concerns of young FDR’s contemporaries into our headline news. It will be seen once again that the past is not dead when we turn in the next few pages to what Thomas Mann, in his foreword to The Magic Mountain, called “the old days, the days of the world before the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning.”

  New York City

  August 27, 1994

  PROLOGUE

  WASHINGTON, D.C., FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 1961. At 6:15 a.m. Dwight David Eisenhower awakened in the White House for the last time. He was to remain in office only until noon; thereafter nobody born in the nineteenth century would ever again be President of the United States.

  Change was in the air that day. Its winds swirled through the streets of the capital. At dawn the freak snowfall finally stopped, and the sun rose in a sky that was to become deceptively cloudless; but the thermometer stood at a cutting twenty-two degrees and the bitterness of the winds matched the bleakness of the President’s mood.

  He had dreaded the coming of this day. Earlier in the week, watching the reviewing stands being constructed outside for the inaugural, he had remarked to a visitor that “it’s like being in the death cell and watching them put up the scaffold.”

  Even though his last term of office had been less than successful—there had been the U-2 incident and the rise of Castro and the humbling of America by Russia’s launching of Sputnik—Eisenhower was loath to let go. It was not that he disliked the Democrat who had won the 1960 election or especially liked the Republican who had lost it. But, as his personal secretary noted the day after the election, “The President kept saying this was a ‘repudiation’ of everything he had done for eight years.” If he himself had been allowed to fight the election—if the Constitution had not barred him from seeking a third term—he might well have won it.

  Now, instead, there were the ceremonies of departure to be gone through. There was the White House staff to be seen to; like leftovers from yesterday that had been stored in the refrigerator, some thirty of its members emerged from underground that morning into the light of day. Trapped by the snowstorm, they had been obliged to spend the night in the White House bomb shelter, where they had thrown an impromptu party that ushered out an era. Later in the morning they lined up to say their good-byes to the President and his family.

  The Eisenhowers’ personal possessions already had been packed and shipped. The night before, Lieutenant Colonel John S. D. Eisenhower, the President’s son and aide, had emptied the last eight safes of all remaining documents. At 7:15 a.m. the President went to his office in the West Wing to dictate and sign a few papers. Suddenly th
ere was nothing left to do. To John Eisenhower, it seemed that “the atmosphere in the West Wing of the White House was eerie. With no papers to sign or examine, we simply idled away the time.” The President spent most of the morning leaning on an empty safe and reminiscing.

  At 11:04 a.m. the long, black, bubble-top presidential limousine that had been dispatched to call for the President-elect and his party arrived at the White House—early, at Eisenhower’s suggestion, so that his successors would have time to come in for a cup of hot coffee to brace themselves against the cold. While the Eisenhowers entertained the John F. Kennedys and their companions, painters moved in to start work redoing the Oval Office and the staff offices for their new occupants.

  At about 11:30 a.m., Eisenhower and Kennedy emerged together from the White House and went out to their waiting car in the silk top hats Kennedy had prescribed for the inaugural—though Kennedy, not used to wearing a hat, quickly took his off. Eisenhower, still President, occupied the seat of honor at the right of the limousine.

  Three thousand men using 700 plows and trucks had worked through the night to clear the principal Washington streets of their 7.7 inches of snow; so the presidential limousine moved smoothly along the mile-and-a-half route from the White House to the Capitol, where the inaugural platform had been erected.

  At precisely twelve noon the presidency passed automatically, by the terms of the Constitution, from Eisenhower to Kennedy. But it was not until 12:20 that Kennedy appeared on the inaugural platform, and not until 12:51 that he rose to take the oath of office with a gesture that was to forever fix the image of that moment in the world’s memory: he threw off his coat. Standing coatless and hatless on the windswept platform, he appeared even younger than usual—in contrast to Eisenhower, bundled up in coat and muffler and looking especially old.