In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Byrnes became aware of these currents of opinion, and moved to take a harder line against Russia. He shored up his position, but in doing so gave up his chance—if he ever had one—of bridging the gulf between the reality of Yalta and the misleading presentation of it he had made at the time.

  In the spring of 1946 Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson handed his letter of resignation to Byrnes. “You’re smarter than I thought,” Byrnes said, preempting his aide by writing out a similar letter of his own. “You didn’t have a copyright on that idea, you know,” Byrnes told Acheson. But for the time being the President kept Byrnes in office, and Byrnes kept Acheson in office.

  FEW PERIODS can have been more closely scrutinized by historians than that of the first Truman administration, the years in which the duel between the wartime allies began to take shape. Until and unless new revelations emerge from the Soviet archives, the most illuminating explanation of what happened from Moscow’s point of view may well be that provided in 1946 by Maksim Litvinov, the out-of-favor former Soviet foreign minister who had given up hope for himself and the world and who spoke freely to the U.S. ambassador (and later to a CBS correspondent, newly arrived in Moscow). What he said was reported to Washington by cable, and the quotes that follow are from the cable.

  The root cause of the quarrel between the Soviet Union and the West was, according to Litvinov, the “ideological conception prevailing here of inevitability of conflict between Communist and capitalist worlds.” Only a few months earlier, on February 9, Stalin, in his first major postwar address, announced that heavy industry (which Western observers took to mean rearmament) would be his government’s chief priority; fulfillment of consumer needs would have to be postponed. Reminding his listeners that dangers might arise in the future, he said that “no peaceful international order is possible” between the communist bloc and the camp of capitalism and imperialism. At the time, George Kennan had cabled the State Department from Moscow: “As Department is aware, there has been pronounced re-emphasis upon Marxist-Leninist doctrine here during and since final stage of war in Europe.”

  Litvinov did not blame the Soviet regime for not wanting to cooperate in the work of the United Nations and other international institutions, for, he said, it was “not unreasonable for USSR to be suspicious of any forum in which she would constantly be outvoted.” But he was critical of his country’s return to an “outmoded” concept of “geographical security.”

  He rightly saw that “each side wants unified Germany under its control,” and he called the German issue the greatest single problem in the world.

  Could America reach a friendly settlement with Moscow by recognizing Russia’s right to govern the countries she had taken over in the war as she saw fit? Would the Soviet Union then be satisfied with what it had? It was on this point that Litvinov was especially interesting. Asked what would happen if the West gave in to all of the Soviet demands, “he said it would lead to West being faced after period of time with next series of demands.” So the inevitable conflict was a self-fulfilling prophecy; animated by a belief in it, the Soviet Union would refuse to be reconciled on any basis, and would stalk the Western countries until an opportune time and place for a showdown appeared.

  Litvinov’s view was bleak: “I now feel,” he said, “that the best that can be hoped for is a prolonged armed truce.”

  RUSSIA ALWAYS had been expansionist. It has been calculated that at the time of the Russian revolutions, the tsars had been conquering and occupying neighboring territories at the rate of fifty square miles a day for 400 years. It was a cautious and continuing expansion, and it was special in that it seemed to be motivated not by ambition, but by fear. Russians never could feel secure; they were driven to protect themselves by seizing whatever lay on the other side of their frontiers.

  Historians have noted that whereas imperial Britain employed a strategy of propping up buffer states to keep harm at bay, the Russians always preferred partitions: as lands entered into their political orbit, they felt comfortable only in taking physical possession of them.

  Theirs had always been an authoritarian government and a closed society. Russia was a domain of secrets and conspiracies, of plots and assassinations, whose people were distrustful of one another and deeply mistrustful of foreigners.

  So at the end of the Second World War, Stalin was acting as a tsar would have acted. But Marxism, which is open to many interpretations, was able to provide him with a more flattering explanation of what he was doing. In consolidating Russia’s hold on eastern Europe, in maintaining a closed economy and society cut off from the West, and in remaining implacably hostile to Western efforts to bring the Soviet Union into partnership with Britain and America, he could believe he was pursuing a fated conflict between the representatives of the working classes and their enemies that only a superficial thinker—a non-Marxist like Truman—would imagine could be worked out peacefully: compromised or patched up.

  In 1946 leaders of the American government decided that the Soviet Union was irreconcilably hostile, and also that it would expand if it were unopposed. The amoeba was not mentioned, but in the inner circles of the Truman administration in 1946, the interpretation of Soviet thinking and behavior was similar to Bullitt’s in 1943. It was no coincidence. The driving force in creating an American doctrine regarding Soviet relations was James Forrestal, the navy secretary who had come under Bullitt’s influence three years before.

  Forrestal had been searching for an authoritative statement of the sources of Soviet behavior—in simple American slang, of what made them tick. Unexpectedly, George Kennan supplied it to him. For years Kennan had been frustrated by his inability to get Washington to listen to his views. Kennan was in acting charge of the Moscow embassy while Harriman was in America; and when a routine inquiry arrived from the Treasury asking about difficulties with the Soviet Union, Kennan seized the opportunity to reply—at length.

  So wordy was this cable of February 22, 1946, that it has been known ever since as the “Long Telegram.” Harriman, struck by it, showed it to Forrestal. It was exactly what the secretary wanted, and appeared at the very moment he wanted it.

  Forrestal circulated the Long Telegram within the Truman administration and ordered several thousand top-ranking military officers to read it. He became Kennan’s political patron, and brought him back to Washington.

  Like Bullitt, his former chief, Kennan claimed that it was in the nature of Soviet Russia to push against her frontiers. If the door she pushed against was closed, she would stop pushing for the time being; but if it were open, she would go on through it. The role of America and her allies was to counter Russia’s push to expand. Confined to her own frontiers for a long period of time, the USSR might collapse from internal tensions, or might evolve in ways that the United States would welcome. That, in rough and brief terms, was the doctrine that the Truman administration eventually adopted under the patronage of Forrestal and under the name of “containment,” although as it transpired, different people were to interpret containment in vastly different ways.

  The month after the Long Telegram arrived, Winston Churchill, encouraged by Truman to speak at an educational institution in Truman’s home state, went to Missouri. American hospitality failed to rise to the occasion: once arrived in Fulton, where Westminster College was located, the thirsty British leader discovered that the town was “dry,” and only after a wide-ranging search by Truman’s personal aide was an essential pint of whiskey located. The President himself introduced the former prime minister, who delivered a typically eloquent address. Speaking of the Soviet Union in terms of friendship and admiration, Churchill said that facts nonetheless had to be faced: that the Kremlin had rung down an “iron curtain” across Europe, behind which they had imposed a brutal and totalitarian rule. Churchill argued that the Anglo-American democracies should unite and build up their strength to deter the evils that might lie ahead.

  Across America the response was hostile. Churchill was
attacked on many counts, and Truman, who may have agreed with him, was moved by politics to disassociate himself from what his guest had said at Fulton. The President claimed not to have known the contents of Churchill’s speech in advance.

  In a zigzag typical of his foreign policy at the time, Truman nonetheless stood firm in the spring and summer when faced with what he viewed as attempts by the Kremlin to disrupt Iran and intimidate Turkey. Angry at the Soviet regime, Truman showed the side of him that was to become a cold war crusader.

  In order to win over Henry Wallace and others friendly to Russia, Truman asked his special counsel, Clark Clifford, to provide him with a report that detailed Soviet treaty-breaking. To the President, who was on weak ground here, the basic issue was that the Russian leaders did not keep their word. The report proved to be a long and detailed document, drafted for Clifford by George Elsey, the naval officer in charge of the map room at the White House. Expressing essentially the same views as those outlined in Kennan’s Long Telegram, but in a much more alarming way, the Clifford-Elsey report was a top secret summary of the outlook of selected American officials: Forrestal, Leahy, Patterson, Kennan, Bohlen, Acheson, and others.

  “Powerful stuff,” said Truman when he read it. He ordered Clifford to bring all twenty copies of it to him immediately. He then hid them, saying, “If it leaked, it would blow the roof off the White House.”

  WHAT WAS CONFUSING about the emerging conflict between the United States and the USSR was that it was about more than one thing.

  First, it was about America’s refusal to accept continued Russian rule of the countries the Red Army had occupied during the war. On the one hand, the United States, which promptly demobilized and disarmed in 1945, gave no thought to the question of how America could force Russia to retreat; on the other hand, Americans refused to make peace with the existing situation.

  Next there was the issue of Soviet expansionism: the Russian tendency to push against the frontier. It would have been entirely coherent for American leaders to argue in 1946 (though none did) that it was legitimate for the Soviets to hold the frontier line with which they emerged from the war—but not to go beyond it. Presumably that is the position Great Britain would have taken had Churchill returned to office and had he continued the policies he advocated during the war. The point to note here is that the quarrel with Russia for expanding to her 1945 boundaries was separate and distinct from the quarrel with her for attempting to go beyond them.

  A third quarrel was about potential subversion of governments outside the Soviet sphere. In France and Italy, for example, there were large parties of the revolutionary Left. They were born before the Soviet state, and would have existed even if the Soviet Union did not. But they had come under Russia’s control, taking money and orders from Moscow. And they were in a position to threaten to pull down some of the European governments that the United States was attempting to prop up.

  The Clifford-Elsey report discussed the danger posed by this disciplined worldwide party apparatus. It was the doctrine behind it—communism—that most disturbed and indeed obsessed Forrestal. Whichever way America’s leaders looked at it in 1946 and succeeding years, this threat to the stability of countries within the Western sphere of influence in Europe (the sphere FDR intended for Britain, but which was on the verge of becoming American) was yet a third cause of the conflict with the Soviet Union.

  The dark prospect from Washington was that just as the first half of the century had been spent waging war about where the German frontier ought to be, so the second half would be spent waging war about where communist Russia’s frontier should be.

  PARALLEL TO THE CONFLICTS about the existing and perhaps moving frontier of the Soviet sphere was the even greater quarrel about the nature of that sphere. In seeking to establish a new and stable world order that would provide a framework for a long-lasting peace between the great powers, Americans naturally thought in terms of one world. Stalin’s determination to cut off his sphere from the rest of the globe was something they could not understand at first. It took time for them to realize how dangerous foreign contacts, ideas, and even goods were to the police-state Soviet empire. Only then could they see that the Russians objected not only to the specific one-world design of an FDR, but to the very notion of one world—unless it were ruled from Moscow. Until then, two worlds were all they would accept. Wilson’s way was not for them.

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  TR’S WAY

  IN EUROPE IN THE IMMEDIATE postwar years, communism and Russia were not the chief concerns. The overriding issues were the breakdown of civil society and of the economy. “The human problem the war will leave behind it has not yet been imagined, much less faced by anybody. There has never been such destruction, such disintegration of the structure of life,” wrote Anne O’Hare McCormick in The New York Times on March 14, 1945. The extent of the devastation and of the collapse of civilized life was beyond comprehension—or at least beyond that of the American public at the end of the war. Americans expected that their forces in Europe could pack up and leave, that the financial support they had provided to countries abroad could now be stopped, and that their responsibilities were at an end.

  But tens of millions of Europeans had no light, no heat, no home, and no food; and across the Continent, economic activity had ground to a halt. There was little power: Germany and Britain, the chief prewar suppliers of coal, no longer could export. Transport was paralyzed: even if 4,000 kilometers of France’s railroad tracks and five-sixths of her locomotives had not been destroyed, her trains could not have moved for lack of fuel. The same was true of Holland, 60 percent of whose transport had been demolished, and of other countries as well.

  Factories had been reduced to rubble, and in central Europe two-thirds of the industry had been carted off to Russia by the Red Army. There were shortages of everything. In Vienna there were no nails to hold down the lids of coffins, and many Austrians dressed in recycled rags. There were no clothes to be had in Norway, Holland, and Greece; shops were closed.

  Streaming across the face of the Continent were 20 million homeless refugees, displaced from wherever they once had lived by the settlement terms of the war—some headed one way, some another.

  In the summer of 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council was told that 100 million Europeans were starving—eating less than the body needed to function—and that an additional 40 million were just on the line.

  The connection between country and city had been cut. Urban areas no longer produced industrial wares with which to bargain, and currencies were losing value in an inflationary, black-market world of shortages and profiteers; farmers therefore kept what they had. Factory workers without jobs or food turned in troubling numbers to strikes, to demonstrations, and to the communist parties of their countries.

  THE FIFTEEN WEEKS in which postwar American foreign policy was created began on a cold, gray, and rainy Friday afternoon. It was February 21, 1947, and movers and packers already had taken many of the files from the old State, War and Navy Departments Building* to the new State Department quarters at Twenty-first Street and Virginia Avenue.

  A last-minute phone call from the British ambassador saying that he had notes of such importance that they had to be delivered to the secretary himself came too late: George Marshall, recently appointed to the job,† normally would have been available but had left for Princeton, where he was scheduled to deliver a speech the following day. Undersecretary Dean Acheson suggested that the ambassador might honor the spirit of his instructions by having a member of his staff deliver the documents to Old State, to be handed to Marshall first thing Monday morning.

  For whatever reason, Acheson himself was unavailable. So was the assistant secretary for European affairs. So H. M. Sichel, first secretary of the British embassy, found himself delivering his government’s communications to the assistant secretary for the Near East, Loy Henderson.

  Henderson quickly saw the importance of the notes from London
. Typically understated in style, they announced in effect that Great Britain had decided to stop being a world power. Under a Labour government, she already was in the process of withdrawing from India, Burma, Egypt, and Palestine. The specific message to Marshall was that England no longer could afford to shore up the opposition to threatened Soviet expansion in Greece and Turkey. British aid to Greece would terminate March 31. If America wanted to take over the British position, she therefore should do so effective April 1.

  Henderson, along with Assistant Secretary for Europe John D. Hickerson and Acheson, immediately initiated a decision-making process that led on March 12 to the proposal by the President of a Greek-Turkish aid bill; subsequently enacted by Congress in the context of the Truman Doctrine, it was a sweeping and arguably much too far-reaching pledge of U.S. support for the independence of free peoples everywhere.

  Several things were especially striking about this rapid American decision. One was the unusual unity with which the State Department, the Congress, both political parties, and the office of the President worked together to shape the program. Another was that the only obstacle to be overcome was that senators worried they might be “pulling Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire.” A third point was the shared recognition that the newly created United Nations Organization already had become irrelevant to the world of the 1940s: it would be quite useless in dealing with precisely the sort of problem that the public expected the UN to solve—a threat to the independence and territorial integrity of the member states. The fourth was that at a meeting of congressional leaders with the President, Marshall, and Acheson, it was accepted that the American people would not support the policy if candidly and openly presented in the way Marshall thought about it: as a program of aid to two countries of strategic importance to the United States in maintaining the existing balance of power. Acheson instead described it to the senators, in an extemporaneous speech, as a program to stop communism from infecting first one country and then another; and Vandenberg told the administration (which agreed with him) that he could get the necessary support for it only if the policy were proposed to the country on Acheson’s terms. So the Truman Doctrine was born: the U.S. taking England’s place in upholding the European balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean, but pretending instead to be mounting a worldwide ideological crusade against communism.