American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  For its part, the West had waged an abortive hot war and then a long cold war against the Soviet Union. The United States had a monopoly on nuclear arms for years following World War II, while the Soviets were still militarily depleted and economically devastated, but Washington did not use the ultimate weapon. State and Defense Department officials adopted a series of carefully considered position papers, culminating in 1950 with NSC-68, which pictured the Soviet Union as “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own,” and as seeking to “impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world,” but Washington did not back up this dire assessment with military action. Above all, the Americans and British had followed their own national interests in the timing of the second front, as postwar revelations of Lord Beaverbrook and others made clear, and had left Moscow feeling deceived and millions of Russians without the sons, fathers, and brothers who had taken the brunt of the Nazi onslaught, but the Kremlin realists could not have doubted that, had the situation been reversed, they would have done exactly the same.

  The cold war, in short, had started early and had never ended, not even during the war. The conflict was far too deeply rooted to be quickly or easily eliminated, but it could be managed or overridden by strong and purposeful leadership. That was the kind of leadership Roosevelt and Churchill had supplied throughout most of the shooting war, in collaboration with Stalin. During both 1942, the year of shocking defeats, and the planning year of 1943 the two Western leaders and their staffs had hammered out the shape of final victory in tandem with the Russians. After five years of doubt and agony men had mastered events, at least for the moment. Now with Hitler gone as a unifying force, could Harry Truman and his Administration offer the same kind of leadership after the war? The issue was not long in doubt.

  Harry Truman would never forget his meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt after he was suddenly summoned from the Capitol to her study on April 12, 1945. “Harry,” she had said quietly, “the President is dead.” Speechless for a moment, he had asked her if there was anything he could do.

  “Is there anything we can do for you?” she had replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.” The widowed First Lady knew well the toll exacted by the presidency. Within a few months the new President was lamenting that being Chief Executive was like “riding a tiger,” as he desperately sought to keep on top of events before they got on top of him.

  Rarely had a new President appeared so poorly prepared for the job. The Missourian had never visited Europe since shipping back from his World War I service as an artilleryman in France. A decent, hardworking New Deal senator, Truman had been chosen as FDR’s running mate largely because, of all the hopefuls, he would “hurt the President least.” Roosevelt barely knew him, and made little effort to see him or keep him informed—even about the A-bomb—during the months after their November victory. The last of the Vice President’s few messages to the President concerned a patronage matter. Politically Truman traded on his plain manners, blunt speech, and I’m-from-Missouri skepticism toward Senate windbags and Washington pundits. Behind the heavy spectacles and homespun features, however, lay a tangle of incongruities—a jaunty self-confidence along with feelings of inadequacy; a calm and sometimes stubborn resoluteness along with sudden flaring rages when he was crossed; a rustic morality that still accommodated itself easily to the unsavory Pendergast machine. He was a high school graduate moving in a world of college-educated men, but he took pride in his wide reading in American history.

  Along with these ambivalences the new President inherited FDR’s divided legacy of principled, idealistic leadership and short-run Realpolitik manipulation. The organizational meeting of the United Nations, opening two weeks after Truman took the oath of office, symbolized both the high ideals and the political pragmatics of the new President and of the nations’ representatives who assembled there. In a brief, simple address piped in by direct wire, Truman urged the delegates to “rise above personal interests” and “provide the machinery, which will make future peace, not only possible, but certain.” But Poland’s seat at the conference lay empty, for Washington and Moscow were still at odds over the composition of the new Warsaw leadership. Also roiling the San Francisco assembly was Stalin’s insistence that one power could not only veto a move to use force but veto even discussion of the question. Happily, Harry Hopkins, in his last major mission to Moscow—he would be dead of hemochromatosis in nine months—persuaded Stalin to withdraw Moscow’s position on the veto. But even Hopkins could make little progress on Poland.

  Overwhelmed by events, irked by the old Roosevelt hands in his cabinet who he felt shared little of FDR’s greatness, immersed in paperwork as he tried feverishly to brief himself on the hard decisions facing him, Commander-in-Chief Harry Truman at least had the satisfaction of presiding over the last battles of the European war, as Allied spearheads stabbed into Germany from east and west. Late in April, American and Soviet soldiers met and clasped hands at Torgau, on the Elbe, while British forces were taking Bremen. Within a few days all ended for the Axis in a leaders’ Götterdämmerung, as Mussolini and his mistress were shot to death by Italian partisans in a town on Lake Como, Dr. and Frau Goebbels killed their six young children and themselves, and Hitler and his bride of thirty-six hours committed suicide in their bunker as the Russians closed in. The German command—what was left of it—unconditionally surrendered on May 7, 1945.

  Japan now fought on alone. American forces completed the conquest of Okinawa late in June, in what historians optimistically called the “last battle,” but losses on this Ryukyu island were so staggering—over 11,000 GIs, marines, and sailors dead, over 33,000 wounded—combined with those earlier on Iwo Jima, as to boost Allied estimates of the human cost of invading the home islands. From the Potsdam Conference in Berlin late in July, the Big Three issued an unconditional surrender ultimatum to Tokyo.

  This conference was a most remarkable affair. It was the first and only wartime summit meeting attended by Truman, and the last for Winston Churchill, who during the proceedings was replaced by Labour’s Clement Attlee as Prime Minister. At times the conferees appeared more like future adversaries than victorious allies, as the Anglo-Americans tussled with the Russians over the future of Germany, reparations, and—more and more bitterly—Poland. Asserting that Poland must never again be able to “open the gates to Germany,” Stalin was adamant that the “London Poles” have no more than token representation in the communist-dominated government. Most remarkable of all was the virtually unmentioned fact hanging over the conference, the fact of American development of the atomic bomb—fleetingly mentioned by the Americans because they thought they had kept the secret from the Russians, unmentioned by Stalin because he knew the “secret” but did not want Truman to know that he knew it.

  Of all the legacies Truman received from Roosevelt, the A-bomb was at once the most constricting and most liberating, the most Utopian and most deadly. Truman was “restricted politically, psychologically, and institutionally from critically reassessing” Roosevelt’s legacy of the bomb, in Barton Bernstein’s judgment. The bomb that had been developed as a military weapon in response to fears that the Germans would have it first was now—after a successful test in the Alamogordo desert of New Mexico—ready for use against Orientals.

  Months before Stimson informed Truman of the “most terrible weapon ever known in human history,” however, the Secretary of War had been contemplating its future political uses as well. The atomic bomb would give the United States “a royal straight flush and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it.” This kind of talk pleased the poker-playing President. The “cards” were in American hands, Truman claimed, and he meant “to play them as American cards.” On the other hand, some scientists and Administration officials hoped the bomb might be a weapon for world peace or at the very least might gain the “liberalization of Soviet society” as a precondition for postwar cooperation. But would Stalin join in the poker game or even higher
pursuits? Truman was disappointed at the Potsdam Conference when he mentioned the mighty weapon in vague terms to Stalin and the dictator showed only casual interest.

  Typically, American planners were thinking more in short-run military terms than in geopolitical. All available forces were now concentrated in the western Pacific. American bombers, stepping up their attacks from ever nearer bases, incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in Tokyo and other cities. While Japanese diplomats felt out Soviet officials on a deal with Russia, the Anglo-Americans approached their momentous decision about using the atomic weapon, with Moscow unconsulted. The American leaders were divided, some arguing that the dreadful weapon was not needed at all, others that a demonstration would be enough, still others that the time-honored American strategy of heavy direct military assault would work again. Whatever his private doubts, Truman took the line that it was a purely military decision, that he did not want to disrupt the enormously costly atomic effort underway, and that a “one-two” punch would knock Japan out of the war, averting hundreds of thousands of American casualties and possibly millions of Japanese. As no one could authoritatively predict how strongly the Japanese would fight on their own soil, the simple, short-range, “practical” strategy of using all available weapons overcame any concerns about long-range consequences.

  The Japanese climax surpassed even the German. So powerful was the will to resist that even after two bombs obliterated much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Soviet troops smashed into Manchuria, Japanese civilian and military leaders argued for days whether to capitulate. Assured that the throne would be protected even under the terms of unconditional surrender, the civilian leaders won out after narrowly averting a palace revolt by officers determined to fight to the finish. On September 2, 1945, MacArthur presided over the Japanese capitulation in Tokyo harbor on the steel decks of the battleship Missouri.

  Long before the hot war ended against Japan, the cold war between the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans was becoming more and more frigid. If the main reason for unleashing the atomic holocaust on Japan was short-run military, the Americans were not unhappy that they could demonstrate the A-bomb to the Russians. The Russians, however, appeared not to be intimidated by the awesome new weapon—partly because they had not been surprised by it. At Potsdam, just after Truman had told Stalin vaguely about the big bomb, Stalin had passed the “news” on to Molotov. “Let them,” his Foreign Minister had said, adding, “We’ll have to … speed things up.” Did he mean speed up work on their own bomb—or prepare for war against Japan?

  In the atmosphere of rising hostility, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, launched even earlier than the Yalta agreement had called for, won few plaudits in Washington. The Russians simply wanted to be in on the kill—and the booty. Still, some American officials were hopeful and even conciliatory. On his trip home from Potsdam, Truman had told the officers of the Augusta that “Stalin was an SOB but of course he thinks I’m one, too.” Stalin was like Boss Pendergast, Truman told a friend later, a man who would size up a question quickly and stand by his agreements. He even mused that Stalin “had a politburo on his hands like the 8oth Congress.”

  Even more hopeful and conciliatory, for a time, was Truman’s Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes. An old Senate hand, briefly a Supreme Court justice and then wartime economic czar, “Jimmie” believed that friendliness, old-time horse-trading, lengthy talk, and perhaps a spot of bourbon could thaw out any adversary, even a communist. When Japan surrendered, Byrnes looked forward to the first meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers that had been set up to carry forward Allied collaboration. That conference, in London shortly after V-J Day, Byrnes found frustrating and a bit baffling. Preach though he might about the need for “free elections” and representative government in Poland and the Balkans, he could make no dent in the adamantine resolve of Moscow to control its spheres of interest.

  As for the bomb, at a cocktail party, Molotov suddenly raised his glass and said, “Here’s to the atom bomb—we’ve got it!” At this point another Russian took Molotov by the shoulder and led him from the room. Byrnes stood there perplexed. Was Molotov bluffing? Had he had one glass too many of vodka? Was the whole thing staged? Or—God forbid—did the Russians “have it”?

  “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” the soldiers had sung on barren atolls and in sweltering jungles, and by the end of 1945, millions of men and women had returned from the wars to their white and green Christmases at home. The joyous family reunions were hardly marred by thoughts of war; the world was at peace. Few could have believed that the next five years could be as crucial and traumatic, if less lethal, a period in world history as the previous five, that those years indeed would end in another hot war.

  Nor could the men in Washington so imagine. By the end of 1945 the leaders who had inherited FDR’s dual legacy were themselves even more ambivalent about the best posture toward Russia. Some saw Moscow pursuing traditional “stale” interests—protecting her borders, establishing control in her own spheres of interest, pursuing old-fashioned bargaining and balance-of-power politics. Others saw “imperial Bolshevism” embarked on global conquest. This ambivalence both fostered and reflected a dualism among the American people, who were divided between a conciliatory and a get-tough policy toward Moscow. Most Americans favored holding on to the “secret” of the bomb, according to polls in late 1945, but most would also turn the United Nations into “a kind of world government” with the power to restrict the use of the atomic weapon.

  Few Americans considered that the Kremlin also might be divided, in part because they perceived Soviet rule as far more monolithic than any Western regime. Yet Stalin too had to heed hard-liners like Andrei Zhdanov, who preached ideological war and revolution to communists abroad, yet also give ear to the many officials and diplomats who had worked with the Anglo-Americans during the war and favored collaboration. Number One blew hot and cold; he certainly had his own reservations about using communist centers abroad, “leaving them in the lurch whenever they slipped out of his grasp,” the Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas noted; but he was not slow to meddle abroad when he saw a Soviet advantage. The Russians talked tough but hardly seemed to be preparing for a war—they labeled 1946 the “Year of Cement.” And somewhere in the background lay the Russian people, taught to hate and fear the imperialists but holding wartime memories of Anglo-American collaboration against the Hitlerites—and broken promises about an early second front.

  After Stalin spoke in the Bolshoi Theater early in February 1946 on the eve of a Soviet “election,” American perplexity about the Russians mounted. Despite praise of the Big Three’s “anti-Fascist coalition” during the war, and a heavy emphasis on Soviet reconstruction through another Five-Year Plan, the speech was ambiguous enough in its foreign policy implications to arouse a new debate in Washington. Was Stalin talking conciliation, isolationism, or remilitarization? Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas privately said it was a “Declaration of World War III.” The State Department queried its most seasoned Russian expert in Moscow, George Kennan, who responded with an 8,000-word telegram.

  Clattering in through State’s tickers, the “long telegram,” as it came to be called, had a quick and lasting impact. Kennan described Soviet official policy as based on the premises that Russia lived amid antagonistic capitalistic encirclement, that capitalist nations inevitably generated wars among themselves, that to escape from their inner conflicts capitalist nations intervened against socialist governments. Hence Moscow’s official policy was to strengthen the Soviet state by any means possible, advance Soviet power abroad wherever feasible, weaken Western ties to colonial peoples, take part in the United Nations only in order to protect and advance its own interests. Russia’s unofficial or “subterranean” policies were even more baleful: to “undermine general and strategic potential of major Western powers” by a host of subversive measures, to destroy individual governments that might stand in the Soviet path (
even Switzerland), to do “everything possible” to “set major Western powers against each other.”

  “In summary,” Kennan telegraphed, “we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our state be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

  Kennan’s telegram brought the thrill of vindication to Washington hardliners and, coming from a diplomat in the field, impressed waverers. The ideas were not all that novel; it was Kennan’s dramatic and apocalyptic presentation of them that galvanized Washington officialdom. Above all, it was Kennan’s imputing of vast skill and incredible efficiency to a regime that had so often seemed incompetent. Not only did the Kremlin have “complete power of disposition over energies of one of the world’s greatest peoples and resources of the world’s richest national territory,” cabled Kennan breathlessly, but it had “an elaborate and far-flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.”

  If this secret telegram sharpened Administration fears of Soviet power, the most famous Anglo-American in the world helped harden attitudes toward the Russians among a far wider public. Winston Churchill, introduced by President Truman, told a Missouri college audience that from “Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Communists and fifth columnists constituted a “growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” Wanting not war but only the fruits of war, the Russians admired nothing so much as strength. Hence Americans and British must form a permanent military alliance, centered on their combined military forces and atomic monopoly.