American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The speech caused such a storm that American officials, including the President, discreetly but distinctly distanced themselves from the former Prime Minister. But these subtleties eluded the men in the Kremlin. Denouncing the Anglo-American in a Pravda interview for plotting against the Soviet Union’s right to exist, Stalin called Churchill a Hitlerite racial theorist, stoked memories of the 1918 intervention in Russia, and castigated his wartime ally for his “call to war with the Soviet Union.”

  For almost a year after Kennan’s cable and Churchill’s speech the spiral of hostility slowly mounted. The Kremlin tightened its grip on Poland and the Balkans, save for Yugoslavia, while the Americans extended their guard over Greece and Turkey. Meetings of Foreign Ministers erupted in quarrels over “free elections” in Stalin’s buffer states, the disposition of Germany, and reparations. Zhdanov demanded a crackdown on the “putrid and baneful” influence of bourgeois culture in the Soviet Union, and the American public, still divided and uncertain, became more and more drawn into the spiral. But the spiraling slowed at times. The Foreign Ministers finally agreed on a host of postwar treaty settlements; the Administration urged control of atomic energy through an international agency, though one dominated by Washington; Stalin withdrew his troops from Iran after a sharp confrontation in which Washington tried out, within the framework of the United Nations, its strategy of “get tougher”; Truman, despite deepening suspicion and fear of the Soviet Union, did not yet openly support Churchill’s hard line.

  Then, late in 1946, the spiral of confrontation began to quicken. A number of forces converged. As Moscow appeared to become more intransigent, perceptions and misperceptions of Soviet behavior narrowed and hardened among Truman lieutenants who had to deal daily with the Russians. Navy Secretary James Forrestal, former head of the investment firm of Dillon, Read, not only worried about the dangers of communism but inundated his colleagues with hundreds of copies of anti-Soviet reports and warnings—most notably, Kennan’s long telegram. Slowly Forrestal’s worry was becoming an obsession. Dean Acheson, after finding his natural niche in the State Department, took increasing leadership there even as he held decreasing hopes of dealing with the Russians.

  Kennan’s telegram became more and more influential—especially after it was offered to the public in a Foreign Affairs article by “X”—even as Kennan worried more and more about overreaction to it. A clear omen was seen in the fate of Secretary of State Byrnes, whose efforts at conciliation with the Soviets had fared less well than his give-and-take with senators. After Truman became increasingly critical of Byrnes’s soft approach to Moscow, the secretary took a harder line, but by now he and his boss were drifting apart.

  Increasingly the President, so lacking in broad executive experience or in FDR’s ability to manipulate and stay on top of his advisers, was becoming a prisoner of his staff. An even more important cause of the President’s hardening, however, was clearly political. In the congressional elections of November 1946 the Republicans ran a skillful negative campaign. Their slogan “Had enough?” promiscuously fused grievances over inflation, strikes, price controls, meat shortages—and fears of communism at home and abroad. The Republicans swept the Senate and House for the first time in sixteen years. The Chicago Tribune called it “the greatest victory for the Republic since Appomattox.” Harry Truman had lost his first election as President.

  Now controlled by Republicans, the House Un-American Activities Committee early in 1947 planned a dramatic effort to “expose and ferret out the communists and communist sympathizers in the federal government.” The election had brought into Congress the “Class of ’46,” which included such anticommunist militants as Richard Nixon of California, William Jenner of Indiana, and Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Truman, responding to the political currents, tried to play their game and beat them to the punch. Proclaiming that the presence in (he government service of “any” disloyal or subversive person constituted a “threat to our democratic processes,” he created a Federal Employee Loyalty Program that, operating through scores of loyalty boards at lower levels, was empowered to sack employees for “membership in, affiliation with, or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization” that might be designated by the Attorney General as “totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.” The Attorney General’s “little list” was compiled without giving a hearing to named organizations or specifying the nature of the threat they posed.

  Worse was to come. Employees under investigation were granted a hearing and the right to appeal, but the burden of proof was on them. They had in effect to prove their loyalty. They need not know the accusations; the specification of charges, according to Truman’s executive order, was “to be as complete as security provisions make possible.” Nor could they hope to confront their accusers, for in almost all cases the FBI, intent upon protecting its informants, withheld the sources of derogatory information. Loyalty boards quizzed employees as to their views of coexistence, peace, civil liberties, and other horrendous things advocated by the Communist party. Said a top loyalty boss, “The man who fears that his thinking will be curbed by a check of loyalty may be thinking things that tend to be disloyal to his country.”

  To those who cried out that the program threatened the most basic and old-fashioned American value—individual liberty—the Administration retorted that communism threatened liberty even more. Moreover, it contended, the Democrats must clean house or the Republicans in their zeal would burn the whole house down. If the White House thought that its loyalty boards could outshine the real “red hunters,” however, it had underestimated the congressional lust to investigate. In the fall of 1947 HUAC opened a star-spangled extravaganza on communism in Hollywood. The dapper character actor Adolphe Menjou testified that anyone “attending any meeting at which Paul Robeson appears, and applauds, can be considered a Communist.” Gary Cooper, whose appearance evoked sighs from the audience, said of communism, “From what I hear, I don’t like it because it isn’t on the level.” Friendly witnesses had a glorious time trading in rumor and speculation.

  The mood changed when the Hollywood Ten—a group of screenwriters, producers, and directors—contended that HUAC had no right to ask them about Communist party membership. Much shouting and gaveling-down ensued, all before an avid press. The Ten, who had expected their appeal to the First Amendment to be upheld in the courts, were fined and jailed for contempt and blacklisted by the studios. A purge by terrified Hollywood and radio executives followed. Some 350 Hollywood actors, writers, and directors and perhaps 1,500 television and radio employees lost their jobs in the next few years. Some ex-communists, on the other hand, came before the committee to expiate their sins—to name names, denounce former comrades, provide delectable details of disloyal activities. Some admitted their own sins but refused to name others; some named names reluctantly; some named them eagerly; and a few took up ex-communism as a livelihood, testifying at trials, writing books, touring the lecture circuit, acting as “expert consultants.”

  Most of the government people targeted by HUAC were small game until, one day in 1948, a pudgy, rumpled, troubled man appeared before HUAC, a man who had consorted with tramps and prostitutes as well as communists, a self-confessed thief and perjurer. His name was Whittaker Chambers. He had come to name several government officials. One name leapt out, a Harvard Law School graduate, protégé of Felix Frankfurter, clerk for Justice Holmes, rising young State Department hand, adviser at Yalta, presider at the UN organizing meeting, now head of the Carnegie Endowment. His name was Alger Hiss.

  Two days after Chambers named Hiss as a communist, Hiss testified that he was not. So persuasive was Hiss, so boyish of face and earnest and attractive of demeanor, that he received congratulations from spectators and even handshakes from HUAC members. One Republican committeeman moaned, “We’ve been had! We’re ruined.” But another member thought differently. Richard Nixon kept the case alive, arranged a Hiss-Chambers confrontation, pursued loo
pholes and inconsistencies in Hiss’s testimony. When the young New Dealer sued Chambers for libel, Chambers produced the “pumpkin papers”—microfilms of classified State Department material he had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm— as evidence that Hiss had been not only a Communist party member in the 1930s but a spy for the Soviet Union. Four days later, Hiss was indicted for perjury.

  As the Republicans continued to exploit the communism issue, President Truman tried to defuse this atomic bomb of domestic politics. The menace of communism was not foreign agents, he told a Chicago audience, but the areas of American society in which the promise of democracy remained unfulfilled. He dismissed one HUAC hearing as a “red herring.” But Truman could not bottle up the genie of suspicion he had helped release. The spiral of fear intensified among Americans as the spiral of hostility intensified between Washington and Moscow.

  A sudden sharp crisis early in 1947 spun the Administration toward a sphere-of-interest commitment in the eastern Mediterranean that almost equaled the Soviet Union’s in Eastern Europe. Warned by the British that they could no longer shore up Athens with economic and military aid, informed by advisers that the crisis-laden Greek government was near the breaking point, Truman responded largely to the communist threat. Moscow expected Greece to fall into its hands soon like a “ripe plum,” said an Administration adviser. Then “the whole Near East and part of North Africa” was “certain to pass under Soviet influence.” The domino theory was gaining adherents. In fact, although communists in neighboring Balkan countries were stirring up what trouble they could in the ancient “cradle of democracy,” Stalin himself was observing his sphere-of-interest deal with Churchill. If the domino was falling, it was falling of its own weight.

  In mid-March, Truman asked Congress for $400 million for Greek and Turkish aid. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he told a joint session of Congress, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This urgent call to economic and military arms, soon named the Truman Doctrine, was followed three months later by a momentous proposal to shore up the European economy, still stricken by the effects of total war. General Marshall, now Secretary of State, from the steps of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard portrayed to “you gentlemen” of the graduating class—and to T. S. Eliot, another honorary degree recipient that day—a Europe near “breakdown,” requiring “substantial additional help.” Marshall announced that the United States would do everything possible to “assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” American policy, he said, was directed “not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” Such an effort could not be piecemeal, however—all nations must join, pool their needs, and present Washington with a single combined request.

  At once the new plan—the Marshall Plan—was swept into the spiral of East-West hostility. It quickly became evident that Congress, now dominated by Senator Taft and other economizers and budget balancers, would respond far more enthusiastically to an “anticommunist” measure than to a welfare program for Europeans. But the more the plan was sold as anticommunist, the more Russian suspicions of it were inflamed. Invited to take part, Moscow at first seemed tempted, sending a delegation to Paris for consultations with other Europeans, then coldly declined, rightly suspecting that many of the inviters hoped that this particular guest would not sup at the table. Over the following weeks, while Congress debated the plan and the billions of dollars requested, Stalin immensely helped its passage by establishing the Cominform—the “Communist Information Bureau”—to replace the old Comintern, and by clamping harsh controls on Czechoslovakia just as debate over Marshall Plan funding came to a head. Then it was Washington’s turn to react, as Truman called for a renewed draft, worked out collective security arrangements with Western Europe, and declared his intention to set up an independent West German state.

  The cold war appeared on the verge of turning red hot, as the spiral of fear and hatred reached its apogee. In part the hatred was the logical manifestation of Great Power conflict over ideology and interest. But even more it was a reflex of perceptions. Washington underestimated Moscow’s absolute determination to control its bordering states and grossly exaggerated Soviet designs outside its sphere. Moscow exaggerated Truman’s disposition to use atomic weapons and underestimated his genuine concern over the European economy and his absolute determination to unify Western Europe, including the West Germans, behind an anticommunist strategy. And behind the misperception lay age-old psychological tendencies, among which Ralph K. White included diabolical enemy images and moral self-images, overconfidence and worst-case thinking.

  The growing anticommunist militancy that buoyed the Administration ran into political volleys from all directions—from Taft unilateralists, old-fashioned isolationists, pro-Soviet radicals, and a handful of pundits and publicists who viewed themselves as “realistic” as the most hard-nosed Truman hand. Among the latter stood Walter Lippmann, who differed so sharply with George Kennan that he devoted fourteen successive columns to refuting the “X” article—and to lambasting the Truman Doctrine, which Kennan’s long telegram had helped inspire. The Truman strategy was too grandiose, Lippmann contended, too indiscriminately global, too unrealistic in view of the nation’s limited resources, and based on false premises— especially the perception of Moscow as pursuing ideological and messianic goals rather than traditional sphere-of-interest and balance-of-power statecraft.

  The Truman Administration could dismiss hostile pundits as not having the votes, unilateralists as mere go-it-aloners, isolationists as head-in-the-sand ostriches. But as 1947 gave way to the election year of 1948, the political leaders in Washington could not dismiss one man who was neither isolationist nor unilateralist and might have some critical votes. This was Henry Wallace, behind whom loomed at times the evocative figure of Eleanor Roosevelt. While Truman had switched back and forth between Roosevelt’s dual foreign policy tracks of Wilsonian idealism and conventional power politics, Wallace stayed squarely on the former path. He was still serving as Secretary of Commerce, the post FDR had chosen for him after easing him out of the vice-presidency. During 1946, as Truman’s advisers and Soviet provocations drew the President into an ever stronger cold war posture, Wallace’s friends—old-line pacifists, anti-anticommunists, liberals and radicals of all stripes, scientists heartsick over Hiroshima—fortified Wallace’s own determination to break with the White House.

  The messy rupture began with a Madison Square Garden speech before the National Citizens Political Action Committee. Hissed whenever he said anything derogatory about Russia, Wallace called for a “real peace treaty” between the United States and the Soviets, amid such provocative remarks as “We should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe and the United States.” Wallace added—correctly—that the President had gone over the speech, and had said it represented Administration policy.

  A Washington tempest followed. Byrnes threatened to resign. Vandenberg said that the Republicans could “only cooperate with one Secretary of State at a time.” Truman explained lamely that there had been a misunderstanding—he had only approved Wallace’s right to give the speech, not its contents. In a long face-to-face meeting Wallace told Truman that the people feared that American policy was leading to war, adding pointedly, “You, yourself, as Harry Truman really believed in my speech.” But Harry Truman the President made clear that he must keep unity in his cabinet and present a united front abroad. The President revealed his true feelings the next day in a memorandum about Wallace:

  “He is a pacifist one hundred per cent. He wants us to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo. I do not understand a ‘dreamer’ like that.… The R
eds, phonies and the ‘parlor pinks’ seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger.

  “I am afraid,” he added, “that they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.” These remarks were a measure of Truman’s tendency to strike out at his adversaries in crude personal terms and of the completeness of his break with the anti-cold war forces.

  Eleanor Roosevelt followed the rupture with rising concern. She had worked with Wallace during the New Deal and respected his idealism and commitment; she had counseled Truman on how to get along with both Churchill and Stalin. In the United Nations she was experiencing firsthand Soviet suspicion and stubbornness. As Truman and Wallace spun away from each other, she was left isolated in the void between them. She believed Wallace was unwise to make speeches in Europe criticizing Administration policy; she was disturbed by the go-it-alone aspects of the Truman Doctrine and by the President’s failure to offer relief and rehabilitation in cooperation with the UN. While lauding Wallace’s commitment to world understanding, she also approved of the Marshall Plan and admired its author. As the Wallace forces moved toward establishing a third party, however, Eleanor Roosevelt knew where she would stand. She had always believed in working within the Democratic party.

  Political leaders on all sides had long expected 1948 to be a “showdown year.” At long last the Republicans could battle someone other than Franklin Roosevelt. The Democrats could no longer depend on the electoral magician in the White House. The Wallace movement, soon to be converted into the Progressive party, expected at least to hold a critical balance of power. Within each party too, rival leaderships hoped to establish their factional dominance. Conservative Republicans headed by Senator Taft planned to wrest their party away from men of the Willkie, Stimson, and Dewey stamp. The presidential Republicans, headed by aggressive young activists like Harold Stassen, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Dewey himself, labored to deny party leadership to the isolationists and to set the GOP on a steady course of moderation in domestic policy and of internationalism abroad. On the Democratic side, hawks and doves, as they would come to be called, fought for the soul of the Democracy, as did states’ righters against the Truman forces backing the social welfare and reformist programs of his Fair Deal.