In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  WHETHER IN JUDGING FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and their contemporaries, or merely in seeking to understand them, the most important thing to note is that they were coping with change on an unprecedented scale: with more and greater change than had been experienced by any generation in history. It was true in all aspects of life. In warfare, for example, MacArthur, brought up in bow-and-arrow country during the Geronimo wars, became a general who considered using nuclear weapons. He and his contemporaries were born when Europe was dividing up Africa, as young men were indignant when Europe carved up the Middle East; and then only twenty-five years later, in one of the greatest of all reversals of fortune, they saw Europe herself partitioned.

  The private lives of these public men has been touched upon in these pages only in order to give a sense of the challenging experience of a generation that was trying to deal with revolutionary changes in politics, economics, science, technology, and warfare while at the same time having to deal with profound changes in sexual mores and family life.

  It is amazing that they were able to retain a degree of balance and perspective—enough to allow them, as world conquerors in 1945, to behave well, certainly as compared with the heads of other victorious great powers.

  THE EARLIEST EMPIRES, those born in the river valleys of the Middle East, subjugated their neighbors in order to exact tribute, to tax, to loot, or to enslave them. Later conquerors—even those, like sixteenth-century Spain, claiming to be doing the Church’s work by converting the heathen—in fact followed the same pattern.

  The American notion, brought by Wilson’s speeches to Paris in 1919, was that those who had won the world should serve the interests of all of its peoples, everywhere; but the Allies were prepared to incorporate such ideas only in their propaganda, not in their policy. Clemenceau’s France and Lloyd George’s Britain sought peace terms that would benefit only their own countries and empires—which is what countries always had done, and was, at least in part, what the United States did, too, whatever Wilson might say.

  What was so startling about the conduct of the leaders of the American government after the Second World War was that to a considerable extent they practiced what Wilson had preached. In 1949 Churchill wrote: “Many nations have arrived at the summit of the world but none, before the United States, on this occasion, has chosen that moment of triumph, not for aggrandizement but for further self-sacrifice.”

  After the fact, and at this remove, it is taken for granted; but it should not be. It was one of the most unusual acts in the history of international warfare. Prior to twentieth-century America, the rule had been: losers pay. Now one of the victors chose to pay. A country that had been so isolationist that it regarded nothing that happened abroad as of vital concern took upon itself responsibility for the whole of the European continent: so far had it traveled in so short a time.

  It was particularly remarkable in contrast with the behavior of America’s rival, the Soviet Union. Russia looted the countries she occupied, seeking compensation for what she had lost in the war; while the United States, neither asking nor taking reparations, poured money into wartime allies and enemies alike in order to revive them, and offered to do the same for Russia and her client states.

  Demanding a sphere of influence in Europe, the Soviet Union took something more—what might be called a sphere of control—but the United States took something less. America chose to restore the countries of Western Europe to independence. The United States in clandestine operations channeled funds to European political movements of both the Left and the Right, so as to promote pluralism; Moscow gave its moneys to Communist parties to push one line from which deviation was not permitted.

  American officials were consciously pursuing their country’s self-interest in fostering Europe’s recovery, for they wanted Europe to be prosperous enough to buy American goods in large quantity. The merit of their policy was that it reflected an enlightened view of self-interest. And they carried out their policy generously. In the Marshall Plan, American businessmen made it possible for Western European companies to compete effectively—even against the American automobile industry and other key U.S. businesses. It is inconceivable that any other country would have put such a plan into operation. Certainly Russia, within its bloc of peoples and countries, did not do so.

  During the cold war years, it was not uncommon to think of the twentieth century as a competition between the two great powers and their rival systems. On his deathbed in 1959, that is what John Foster Dulles told his brother Allen: that their lives had been coextensive with the contest that had opened up when Lenin and Wilson emerged at the same moment in history to challenge Old Europe from two different sides. It was a rivalry like that of Athens and Sparta, or Rome and Carthage.

  It was a subject of lively debate within the generation to which the Dulles brothers belonged as to whether the Soviet Union was to be thought of in national or rather in ideological terms: whether it was merely tsarist Russia in disguise or the militant church of an atheist political religion. Certainly it was to some degree a mixture of the two; but whatever the Soviet leaders themselves might have thought, in practice they far more closely resembled the tsar than they did Karl Marx. And though they claimed that within their part of the world they were building a new social system, different from that of the West, they were not.

  That was what was discovered when the iron curtain was lifted: behind it was an old world, not a new one. It had been supposed that Russia and the West were competing to build the social system of the future, but it turned out that there was no contest; the Soviet side did not have a modern society that they could enter in the competition. Their system of government, their farms, and their factories were all things out of the past.

  The armed forces and the secret police functioned effectively, but that was all—and it was not enough. The system was intellectually bankrupt. It disintegrated when its leaders and managers lost faith in the official ideology. They had justified the workings of a brutal empire by a belief in its underlying mission. When they lost that belief, they saw their society as its subjects saw it: as just another despotism; another empire except for its totalitarianism, and nothing that would have surprised the last kaiser, the last sultan, or the last tsar.

  IF THE SOVIET THREAT was narrower than the Dulleses had believed—more military and less philosophical—so was the American achievement broader. It was not just the empire of the Soviets that the United States had outlasted; it had outlasted them all. The United States had led the other countries into a world without empires. Americans of the 1990s could say that, with relatively few exceptions, no people in their time lived unwillingly under the rule of another—and that the FDR generation had played a significant role in causing that to be true.

  FDR’s policy at Teheran and Yalta had been to voice his disagreement with Russia—but not to go to war against her to get America’s way. That was the essence, too, of the various Truman, Marshall, Acheson, and Kennan policies after the war: to hold the line against Soviet expansionism in the vital geopolitical regions, and wait for the communist bloc to collapse from within. Dulles and Eisenhower were dissatisfied with that approach, but could think of none other that was viable.

  Their juniors claimed that they could do better. New York Times journalist James Reston remembers what John F. Kennedy told him in 1961, just after Kennedy became President. “It was now essential to demonstrate our firmness” to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, “and the place to do it, he remarked to my astonishment, was Vietnam!… I was speechless.… [T]he reference to Vietnam baffled me.”

  Kennedy, in drawing the line between his generation and Eisenhower’s and Truman’s, focused strategic attention on the areas outside of Europe and on the possibility of actually engaging the enemy in armed combat in such places. Presidents of his generation, from his day on, led the country on a long detour through the jungles, deserts, and urban slums of the Third World in search of victory over communism. It may be tha
t in their wanderings through Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Central America, they struck some mortal blow at the Soviet Union§; but as of now there is no compelling evidence that they did so. Instead, the victory seems to have been won in Europe, by the long-term strategy set in motion by the first Truman administration. To the extent that Kennedy and his successors, through Presidents Reagan and Bush, contributed to that result, it was by continuing the strategy of focusing American resources on the conflict with the Soviet Union, especially in Europe, rather than by dissipating resources in pursuing their own strategy of waging campaigns against client states on the periphery.

  WHEN THE SOVIET EMPIRE dissolved, the clock in many senses was put back to 1945. As the Second World War came to an end, the FDR and Truman administrations offered to help in the reconstruction of Russia and the countries that she was occupying. The Marshall Plan, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund all were open to participation by the Soviet bloc.‖ Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Harriman offered generous credits directly to the Soviet Union, but all of these opportunities and offers were rejected at the time by Stalin.

  In the 1990s Russia and the other countries Stalin once ruled found themselves free to change their minds—and did so. They were eager to have done for them what the United States had done for Western Europe. But America, though she wished she could, no longer felt able to do it.

  The curious thing was that the economy of the America of the 1990s that no longer could afford to finance Eastern Europe was—in absolute terms, though not in relation to other countries—much richer, bigger, and more powerful than the America of 1945 that offered to reconstruct both Eastern and Western Europe at the same time. The U.S. economy of the 1990s dwarfed that of 1945; gross national product was more than twenty-five times greater.a

  It was a generational difference. The United States that was personified by Roosevelt thrived on challenges, and had learned from the President to try to do what others said was impossible. Had FDR been told over dinner by ambassadors from former Soviet bloc countries that they were unable to find the American financing needed to reconstruct themselves as constitutional democracies, he would have thrown back his head and roared with laughter. “Come by my office tomorrow morning,” he would have said, “and we’ll take care of it.”

  * The teaching of international relations, giving due appreciation to power realities, began in the United States in the last half of the 1940s. Those most influenced by it were students who would not themselves become policy makers until a later date.

  † James Byrnes was another close associate of FDR’s embittered by the treatment he had received from the late President. He returned home to South Carolina and was elected governor (1951–55). Acclimatizing politically, he became a racist whose parochialism seemed incomprehensible in a former national statesman. Like Bullitt, he wrote about Yalta; unlike Bullitt, he gave a fair account of what he knew of it. Byrnes died in 1972.

  ‡ Five years later Offie was killed in an airplane crash. His nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, died in office two months later.

  § The only lethal blow struck at Russia in the Third World was the one she struck herself: her invasion of Afghanistan. The significant point is that the United States did not commit American forces to the campaign against Russia in Afghanistan.

  ‖ The Truman administration expected the Soviet Union to say no. But the administration did make the offer.

  a Yes, in the 1990s the United States has problems it did not have in 1945, including budget and trade deficits. But these, too, in the author’s view, are essentially political problems. That is: what is difficult is not solving them but having the political will to do what is necessary to solve them. That also is the message in the text above.

  POSTSCRIPT

  JUNE 1970. The palm-fringed Caribbean island, once a colony of the British empire, was independent now. Visiting for the first time, and touring inland by taxi, I caught sight of ruins through the underbrush. They looked to be the shattered remains of an American military airstrip, one of those bases England gave the United States in 1940 in return for destroyers. Nearby—in 1940, too—Roosevelt and Hopkins would have cruised while the President made up his mind to throw isolationism overboard and to set about saving the world.

  That had been a turning point in the story of the American century. But it struck me that if my friends, instead of remaining on the beach to sunbathe, had joined me on the taxi tour, they would have been unlikely to hit on that particular association. At the time—in 1970—most of my friends were in their twenties or thirties. What little they knew of the early 1940s probably came from the movies: from Casablanca above all, the darling of campus cinemas and art theaters.

  Seeing history through Hollywood’s eyes is rarely to be recommended, but it occurred to me that in this one case it might be no bad thing. Casablanca taught the few lessons you most needed to know about what happened then. You would hear Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine say, “They’re asleep all over America”—and in those distant days, they were indeed unaware that the threatened Nazi conquest of all Europe also jeopardized them. You would see in Rick the embodiment of all types and persuasions of Americans decades ago whose ideals had been betrayed once too often, and who now refused to be suckered again. As Rick says, “I’m the only cause I’m interested in.”

  But in the end you would witness Rick’s dramatic discovery that what happens to people on the other side of the ocean is his concern, too. Of course, somewhere inside, he had known that all along. So it was with FDR’s generation: after the 1940 election, they were caught up by some of the same ideals they had held in 1917. The blindfold came off their eyes; it now looked to them as though Woodrow Wilson had been right all along. They recognized again, as they had when they were young, that the United States was called upon to have a foreign policy. Many if not most of them also went back to Wilson’s view that the goal of a foreign policy should be to do right.

  The United States was to win wealth and power in the wars against the dictators, but it was not for that reason (though some historians believe otherwise) that it enlisted in the cause. Like Rick, who stopped putting himself first, FDR and his associates and immediate successors turned the country away from its exclusive concern with self: the historic isolationism that was its preferred course. They did that, and committed the United States instead to play an active role in world affairs, because they thought it was the right thing to do.

  In the spring of 1970, on my windswept island, I stood before modest but visible remains of the first steps they took along the road. I wondered how the pieces I could see on the ground once had fitted together, and what the American air base had been like. But the taxi driver waved away my questions. He seemed to know only one thing about it: it was a relic of an era in which people were built on a more heroic scale. As though recalling some age in which gods and giants walked the earth, he said: “It’s from the time of the Americans.”

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1 Washington, D.C., Friday, January 20, 1961: The factual details that follow are taken from The New York Times, Saturday, January 21, 1961; Time, January 27, 1961; Ambrose 1983–84; Wofford 1980; Eisenhower 1974; Schlesinger 1965; and Sorensen 1965.

  2 “it’s like being in the death cell”: Ambrose 1983–84, 2:616.

  3 “The President kept saying”: Ibid., 2:604.

  4 “the atmosphere in the West Wing”: Eisenhower 1974, 287.

  5 “grouped behind Kennedy”: Sorensen 1965, 244–5.

  6 “he was sixty-two”: Schlesinger 1965, 140.

  7 “seemed to be very much”: Wofford 1980, 81.

  8 “nothing vital”: Time, January 27, 1961, 13.

  1 The Middle of the Journey

  1 “The buildings are low”: Howells 1901, 343.

  2 “Expositions are the timekeepers”: Morgan 1963, 517.

  3 Henry Adams … was inspired to believe: Adams 1918, 488–98.

  4 Tulsa … consisted of o
nly one street: Sullivan 1926–35, 1:21.

  5 almost 40 percent of the country’s white population: Sullivan 1926–35, 1:35.

  6 “marshalled, herded”: James 1907, 84.

  7 “ingurgitation”: Ibid.

  8 a “spaciously organized cage”: Ibid., 134.

  9 “170,000 M. of railway”: Baedeker 1893, xxvii.

  10 “The collapse of the old order”: James 1907, 386.

  11 Asking how, in a great … society: Ibid., 418.

  12 He traveled 18,000 miles: Werner 1929, 95.

  13 “not a rich man”: Chernow 1990, 159.

  14 “local jealousies”: Adams 1889, 107.

  15 “government … politics”: FitzGerald 1979, 48–9.

  2 Europe and Us

  1 “elsewhere” means Europe: James 1907, 327.

  2 “The American stood in the world”: Adams 1889, 109.

  3 “Believing that in the long run”: Ibid.

  4 In the words of John Quincy Adams: LaFeber 1989, 80.

  5 “true friends of mankind”: Flexner 1965–72, 4:37.

  6 Daisy Miller was inspired by a story: James 1934, 267.

  7 relief in both countries when they did not go to war: Campbell 1976, 212.

  8 in 1892 … raised their legations: Widenor 1980, 101n.

  9 fond of Spring-Rice, “hated his country”: Spring-Rice 1929, 1:54.

  10 the circle of Henry Adams: O’Toole 1990; Samuels 1989.

  11 six for breakfast: Spring-Rice 1929, 1:53.

  12 “almost appalling”: Dos Passos 1962, 2.

  13 “The same important news”: Ibid.

  14 “God and man”: Ibid.

  15 “Isolation is no longer possible”: Ibid.

  16 “Don’t … hurt him”: Morgan 1963, 521.