American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Bipartisanship in foreign policy, however, was largely a façade behind which the two parties fought each other and—even more—factions within the parties fought one another. Democrats were as usual splintered into almost as many fragments as there were Democratic leaders, but they broadly fell into a Truman-Acheson-Harriman camp calling for hard-line policies toward the Soviets, and a circle that included Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, and Connecticut governor Chester Bowles, supporting various forms of détente, with Adlai Stevenson seeking to bridge the gap. The Republicans had their own sharp differences— especially between backers of such ideas as massive retaliation and Dulles’s brinkmanship and old-time isolationists like Taft and his followers.

  Bipartisanship was a skimpy blanket hauled out at every point of military crisis or foreign policy quandary so that it could cloak differences and present a national posture of harmony and unity. “Politics must stop at the water’s edge,” the politicians and pundits would cry out. This was nothing new. In 1948 bipartisanship had been used to thwart the posing of fundamental alternatives to cold war assumptions. Writing a quarter century later, Robert A. Divine found it “a tragedy that the containment policy did not receive the careful analysis and debate it merited. Wallace’s attack on Truman’s policy suffered from emotional charges and flabby rhetoric, but beneath the shrill oratory there were important objections to the ‘get tough with Russia’ policy that deserved thoughtful consideration rather than contemptuous dismissal as Communist propaganda.” It was estimated that less than 1 percent of the nation’s newspapers supported Wallace’s views in 1948, and many gave him short shrift even in their news columns. Neither Dewey in 1948 nor Eisenhower in 1952 challenged the cold war assumptions of the Truman Administration. The argument was over means, not ends, over cold war tactics, not strategy.

  Cold war assumptions continued to grip the American mind during the fifties. A soothing bipartisanship discouraged clear, focused debate and shrouded fundamental choices in a cocoon of bland harmony. The most visible impact of consensus was on the election of 1956. Along with Eisenhower’s personal popularity and the rally-’round-the-President impact of the Budapest revolt against Moscow and the Suez crisis, that consensus helped produce Stevenson’s staggering 1956 loss to Eisenhower. The President carried both the electoral college and the popular vote by an even bigger margin than in 1952. His challenger won only Missouri and six southern states. Shifting back and forth between bipartisan agreement and opposition on details but always following cold war assumptions, Stevenson simply could not come to grips with the amiable figure in the Oval Office. The Democratic party—especially the Democratic leaders in Congress—had not built up a credible, consistent, comprehensive foreign policy program resting on premises different from cold war encirclement and containment of Russia.

  Part of the trouble was that Americans, unlike the British, had no loyal but militant opposition with an institutional base. The Democratic party as such was too fragmented to provide a coherent alternative program to a strategy of containment, which after all it had bequeathed to the Eisenhower Republicans in 1952. Following the 1956 debacle the Democrats sought to remedy this situation by establishing the Democratic Advisory Committee (later Council). In joining it Stevenson called for “strong, searching, and constructive opposition.” The DAC’s advisory committees on policy included perhaps the most remarkable collection of political and policy brains of the era: William Benton, Bowles, Senators Kefauver and Herbert Lehman, political scientist Hans Morgenthau, Michigan governor G. Mennen Williams on foreign policy; economists John Kenneth Galbraith, Marriner Eccles, Walter Heller, Leon Keyserling, Isador Lubin, and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on domestic policy; labor leaders James B. Carey, Sidney Hillman, David J. McDonald, Walter Reuther on industrial policy. The DAC issued brilliant position papers but in doing so revealed anew the policy splits within the Democracy—especially the deep divisions between the presidential Democrats and the congressional Democrats. The Democratic leaders of the House and Senate casually boycotted the Council.

  The most conspicuous victim of cold war consensus was the twice-defeated Stevenson. A man of such sparkling wit and elegant charm that he made even the most sophisticated “madly for Adlai,” a scintillating speaker who eschewed bombast and banality, a politician with a high sense of responsibility and probity, he was unable to break out of the intellectual cocoon of containment and put forward a comprehensive alternative strategy. Instead he called for specific changes—an end to the draft and a ban on H-bomb testing—but both of these lay in the field of military expertise where the voters preferred to trust the general in the White House. Stevenson’s campaign faults—endless reworking of speeches, immoderate moderation, excessive cautiousness—were not simply personal failings. They were the flaws of a candidate whose party, fellow leaders, and personal philosophy left him in a consensual void in which he desperately cast about for some winning stance and failed to find it.

  Could the Democrats have found another leader who could have united the party behind a strategy of détente? It was unlikely, given the divisions in the party. But there was one leader who transcended the divisions, who maintained good personal relations with Truman, Harriman, Stevenson, and the congressional leaders even as she campaigned for peace. This was Eleanor Roosevelt. During these years she threw herself into the war against war and poverty, the campaign for civil rights and social welfare. She proved herself once again a consummate politician, as in the 1956 campaign when her appearance for Stevenson at the Democratic convention proved crucial in stemming a last-minute push by Harry Truman for Harriman. Though she was seventy years old by the mid-1950s, it was not really her age that prevented her from becoming the acknowledged leader of the Democratic party, perhaps even its candidate. The explanation was simpler. She was a woman.

  Still, the political failures of the 1950s had much deeper sources than the Democrats’ incapacity to offer a united front behind an alternative foreign policy. They lay in the cold war consensus that in turn stemmed from the spiral of fear and hate that continued to dominate Soviet-American relations. This spiral thwarted the steady, day-to-day diplomacy, the thoughtful and imaginative planning, the flexible but purposeful policies necessary to deal with Khrushchev. In the absence of such determined statecraft, problems festered, tempers rose, crises broke out, Americans rallied behind the President, Congress delegated him gobs of power. Brinkmanship was the inevitable result of drift and indecision. It was not Eisenhower’s fault that the crises of Hungary and Suez erupted at the height of the 1956 campaign. It was simply his luck.

  Dilemmas of Freedom

  If the Democrats would not challenge cold war assumptions, who would? Not the media as a whole in the climate of the fifties, nor the churches, nor the educators. In Western society the task of political criticism and social dissent, if all other leaders or groups failed, lay with the intelligentsia. Freed of close dependency on institutions, the intellectual, in Richard Hofstadter’s words, “examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines,” rather than seeking to manipulate or accommodate. During the 1950s American foreign policy was the target of the most searching criticism by four men—a journalist, a diplomat, a professor, and a theologian— who in the view of some were reminiscent of the great thinkers of the eighteenth-century constitutional founding era in the breadth and depth of their intellectual power.

  If Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Reinhold Niebuhr could even be compared with the men of 1787, it was in part because they, like the Framers, had lived and reflected in a time of almost ceaseless ferment and conflict. Reaching adulthood early in the century, they had witnessed all its traumas—World War I and its aftermath, the great depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, the slave-labor camps and death factories, the incinerated cities and the atom bomb and hydrogen bomb, the cold war. They had known evil in much the way that J. Robert Oppenheimer could say to President Truman: “In some
sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

  Lippmann, oldest of the four, was still in his early sixties when Eisenhower first ran for office. Although he backed the general over Stevenson in 1952, the noted columnist was as unsparing of Republican foreign policy as he had been of Democratic. Just as he had attacked Truman’s NATO policy as the work of “zealous cold warriors” who sought to bribe and bully nations into an anti-Soviet alliance, now he questioned the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, incidentally noting that it included only one Southeast Asian nation. Just as he had confronted Acheson in a blazing argument over the Truman Doctrine and later called for his resignation, now he lectured Dulles face to face—and was lectured back.

  Lippmann could consistently criticize Democrats and Republicans because he consistently thought in terms of fixed assumptions: that foreign policy must act always for a carefully defined national interest, that world peace depended on a balancing of national interests, that great nations must wield their power circumspectly amid a network of secondary as well as primary powers, that prudent diplomacy called for professional foreign-policy-makers insulated against the wilder passions and selfish interests of the masses, that apocalyptic visions and abstract “solutions” must be rejected in favor of “practical” arrangements such as old-fashioned spheres of interest and regional neutralization. These ideas were broad and flexible enough to allow for a variety of applications and even contradictions; his support for a global equilibrium of power with the Soviets, for example, appeared to clash with his calls for withdrawals from Berlin and from Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

  The traumas of the age of Korea and McCarthyism had indeed left Lippmann so pessimistic about the paralysis and indecision of democracies that his faith in popular rule fell even lower than it had been in the years when he was writing Public Opinion and The Phantom Public. The people, he argued in what he hoped would be his culminating masterwork, The Public Philosophy, had “acquired power they are incapable of exercising, and the governments they elect have lost powers which they must recover if they are to govern.” He called for the restoration of “government strong enough to govern, strong enough to resist the encroachment of the assemblies and of mass opinions, and strong enough to guarantee private liberty against the pressure of the masses.” Jumping on this sentence, Archibald MacLeish, former Librarian of Congress, now a Harvard professor, and always a poet, accused Lippmann of narrowing freedom to fit within the rational, ordered society in which the columnist appeared to believe. He accused Lippmann flatly of being opposed to real freedom and democracy. Lippmann indignantly responded that he did believe in freedom—his kind of freedom.

  While Lippmann was seeking a “public philosophy” as the intellectual foundation for the kind of polity and policies he favored, George Kennan was coping with the aftermath of the “X” article that Lippmann had attacked so tellingly. Kennan’s harsh portrait of Soviet power and motivation became so rigid a dogma in Administration councils as to leave the diplomat penitent and fearful. He continued to write and speak against the “legalistic-moralistic” approach to world affairs—and especially its application to Russia—that he felt had crippled Roosevelt’s dealing with wartime problems and possibilities. Kennan continued to preach “realism,” but under Acheson’s State Department leadership it was increasingly evident that once you founded your foreign policy strategy on “realism,” you were on treacherous ground. It could lead to endless ambiguities and self-contradictions, as it did even with Kennan. And tougher and more “realistic” realists could make a dogma out of what Kennan, at least, had seen as a policy of prudence. By 1950 Kennan was so disturbed by the Administration’s cold war extremism as to greet with relief an invitation from Oppenheimer, now head of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, to continue his historical studies there.

  In the quiet of the Institute, Kennan hoped to think through his own premises and experiences. He had maintained his friendship with Lippmann despite their differences over containment and over specific policies, and those very differences between two men who prided themselves on their “realism” illustrated the pitfalls of the concept. When it came to military alliances, German policy, disengagement in Europe, summitry, and indeed the whole strategy toward Russia especially after Stalin, what was realistic? Who admitted to being unrealistic? The concept had no intrinsic meaning. The problem was especially acute for Kennan because behind the cool façade of the diplomat and the detachment of the historian lay a deeply humane, sensitive, and indeed moral person who had seen the errors of “realists” in power, viewed diplomacy as the vocation of skilled men of the highest probity and responsibility, and insisted that a nation must seek to live up to its own moral standards even while rejecting the will-o’-the-wisp of global utopianism. And the more Kennan pondered in the groves of academe, the more he questioned the whole philosophy of cold war containment.

  What seemed to be lacking in both Kennan and Lippmann was an overriding philosophy of international relations and a coherent strategic concept that could stand the test of repeated shocks like Korea and Berlin, Hungary and Suez, as well as the endless currents of change. And no one seemed readier to supply this need than Hans J. Morgenthau, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago. A veritable child of conflict, Morgenthau had grown up in a Bavarian city seared by race hatred even in the early 1920s; when, as a young Gymnasium student at the top of his class, he was chosen to give the annual Founder’s Day address, the deposed duke of the region sat in the front row during the speech holding his nose in an obviously anti-Semitic gesture. Morgenthau left Germany as the Nazis moved toward power and later settled in Madrid to teach diplomacy, only to be overwhelmed by the Spanish Civil War; he made his way to Paris during the Popular Front days and then to Brooklyn College, only to be vilified there by young ideologues who were put off by the émigré’s sober and scholarly approach to some of the passionate questions of the day.

  Later, at Chicago, Morgenthau produced a series of volumes—Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Politics Among Nations, In Defense of the National Interest—that marked him as a formidable strategist of international politics. Morgenthau began with the premise that power politics, “rooted in the lust for power which is common to all men,” was inseparable from all social life. There was no escape from it: “whenever we act with reference to our fellowmen, we must sin and we must still sin when we refuse to act.” Power was the central, almost the exclusive, foundation of national interest and criterion of foreign policy. Such power, essentially military, must of course be prudently managed, but managed also quickly and decisively, which required strong executive leadership. The executive branch, however, took little initiative in foreign policy, Morgenthau lamented to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1959, because it feared Congress, and Congress feared public opinion. Yet public opinion, he went on in much the same vein as Lippmann, should be not the cause but the result of “dynamic executive and congressional leadership.” Public-opinion polls measured the impact of past leadership, not the potential of the new. They must not be the yardstick of foreign policy.

  “The history of America,” Morgenthau instructed Senators J. William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, and Wayne Morse among others, “is the story of the enthusiastic responses of the American people to dynamic leadership on behalf of foreign policies which can be shown to have a positive bearing upon the national interest.”

  Critics were not slow to challenge Morgenthau’s realism. If the national interest was the foundation of foreign policy, they said, the power underlying it must be clear and measurable, which meant military power—but even this power had often been miscalculated by both its wielders and its targets. The professor himself, the critics added unkindly, had miscalculated the national interest—for example, in his expectation that the Soviets would risk or even start a ground war in Europe o
nce they acquired nuclear power. There were, moreover, other tangible and intangible bases of power—economic, psychological, ideological—that had to be included in assessing the might of nations. Yet if these were included, the “national interest” became such a tangle of multiple, shifting, and dynamic forces as to defy measurement and analysis. Hence to be for the national interest or for realism was no more clarifying than to be for wisdom or common sense or statecraft. Who wasn’t?

  Realism, in short, was a necessary but inadequate component of a strategy of international relations. It was a preoccupation with means—the marshaling of power—in a series of world crises that called for a sense of proportion and perspective, a wider comprehension of ends, a philosophy of world politics, even a theology of the human condition. If this was the call, it appeared to have been answered in the 1950s by a theologian-philosopher-politician who had for twenty years been leaving church pulpits and college campuses dazzled by his stabbing oratory and pungent sermonizing. This was Reinhold Niebuhr.

  Schooled at Elmhurst College in Illinois and at Yale Divinity School, he had held an evangelical pulpit in Detroit until 1928, when he joined the Union Theological Seminary in New York, much to the dismay of the established theologians there who deplored his lack of a doctorate, his bumptious midwestern manner, and his outspoken radicalism. His years in Detroit had left Niebuhr filled with fierce indignation over the industrial and human wasteland he had witnessed outside his own middle-class parish.

  Detroit made Niebuhr a socialist; then for the next thirty years he followed a zigzag route through a series of doctrines and causes as he tried to come to grips with the depression, the New Deal, and the cold war. What kept him from intellectual faddism was his philosophical ambivalence—his tendency to embrace different doctrines at the same time in a kind of continuous internal dialectic; even while proclaiming a thesis he nurtured the seeds of its antithesis. Thus in Detroit he proclaimed the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch even while he exhibited, in his passion for new ideas and his instinct for irony and political practicality, many of the intellectual traits of the pragmatism of James and Dewey. His Detroit experience and the onset of the depression now moved him toward Marxist ideas, but it was Niebuhr’s own brand of Marxism, shot through with concern over the havoc of capitalism, fear of rising fascism, an ornery repugnance for communist dogma and messianism, and a hatred for Soviet bureaucracy and oppression. During the late 1930s, after holding the New Deal in some distaste for its opportunism and its “whirligig” of reform, he deserted Norman Thomas and the socialists to vote for Roosevelt. This shift too was marked by ambivalence: Niebuhr, who turned to FDR in part because of the President’s resistance to Nazism, had earlier attacked him for expanding the Navy.