by Benn Steil
ACHESON’S STAFF FOLLOWED ORDERS TO “work like hell” over the weekend of February 22–23, preparing reports on the political, military, and financial situations in Greece and Turkey and position papers laying out the case for U.S. aid. Following a businesslike tête-à-tête between Inverchapel and Marshall on Monday morning, the 24th, Acheson finally sat down with his new boss.
The unflappable sixty-six-year-old general had found Inverchapel’s news “unpleasant . . . but not wholly unexpected.”68 Unafflicted by Acheson’s Anglocentrism, Marshall would certainly have recoiled from his deputy’s biblical analogies. The final collapse of the British empire was, to him, a well-signaled event with regrettable but manageable consequences.
He probed the practicalities. How long could the British be induced to keep troops in Greece? What forces would be necessary to replace them? How would the administration get an effective government going? What would it cost and over what timetable? Acheson had no answers. Needing to prepare for a critical conference on Germany with his Soviet, British, and French counterparts next month in Moscow, Marshall directed Acheson to find them.
Matters proceeded at breakneck speed. Following a lunch meeting with Truman and Marshall, War Secretary Robert Patterson and Navy Secretary James Forrestal agreed with Acheson on the central elements of the recommendations they would prepare for the president: that it was vital to the security of the United States that Greece and Turkey be strengthened so as to safeguard their independence, that only the United States could do this, and that Congress would need to provide the necessary authority and funds.69
On February 25, Acheson met with State’s top political, economic, legal, and information officers to hash out alternate courses of action and an initial draft of the department’s “Position and Recommendations” paper. Perspectives differed over the prudence of challenging the Soviets so directly at that juncture. Whereas “some were elated over the possibility that the United States might at last stand out boldly against Soviet expansion,” others were concerned about doing so when American “military strength was at a low ebb.”70 The exchange was robust, if unnervingly compressed given the enormity of the commitments being proposed. Acheson let the discussion range until it was time to deliver his summation, at which point he issued the inevitable directive: devise a plan for immediate financial and military aid to Greece and Turkey.
Russia specialist Loy Henderson and the Near Eastern Affairs staff worked into the night drafting the final version of the recommendations, which Patterson and Forrestal approved the following day. But the backing came only after an intense discussion of whether similar aid was needed for South Korea, China, and other vulnerable countries and territories; Army chief of staff General Dwight Eisenhower wanted the study to be expanded with a view to making a wider appropriation request. Though the group rejected a wider request as impractical, given the obstacles of time and Congress, the question of the geographic boundaries of the commitment to containing Communism would not go away. Indeed, it would come to trouble Kennan and others who saw great dangers in the president issuing blanket guarantees to protect the globe from communists.
Truman had his report that afternoon. Convinced since Potsdam that the Communist police state was as great a threat as the Nazi one,71 he signed off.
FOR THE STATE DEPARTMENT, THE Military, and the president to coalesce, in peacetime, so rapidly around such a far-reaching, potentially open-ended, American commitment abroad was unprecedented. “The consciousness that a chapter in world history had come to an end,” Jones observed, “was so real and ever-present as to seem almost tangible” to all involved.72 Yet the initiative still faced an enormous hurdle in the form of the Republican-controlled legislature. Truman, an accidental and politically isolated Democratic president, knew he needed to get them on board immediately; the White House telephoned invitations to the House and Senate leadership for a meeting at ten the following morning.
Eight congressmen, four Republican and four Democrat, joined Truman, Marshall, and Acheson at the White House on February 27: Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI), Styles Bridges (R-NH), Tom Connally (D-TX), and Alben Barkley (D-KY) represented the Senate; Speaker Joseph Martin (R-MA), Minority Leader Sam Rayburn (D-TX), Charles Eaton (R-NJ), and Sol Bloom (D-NY) represented the House.73 Acheson eyed the scene around the circular table with foreboding. “I knew we were met at Armageddon,” he reflected later, continuing to pile on the biblical references.
Truman invited his new secretary of state to explain why the group had been assembled at such hasty notice. Marshall, as was his practice in such settings, read from a prepared script.
He “flubbed” it—at least according to Acheson. In Jones’ word, Marshall was “cryptic.” He “conveyed the . . . impression that aid should be extended to Greece on grounds of loyalty and humanitarianism and to Turkey to strengthen Britain’s position in the Middle East,” rather than to resist Soviet expansion. The congressional majority, committed as it was to cutting foreign aid and taxes, was in no mood for suggestions that it do the opposite without strong cause. Their leaders demanded to know why the United States should be “pulling British chestnuts out of the fire” and “how much [it was all] going to cost.”74
When delivering unwelcome news, style is never separable from substance. Skepticism brooks no charity toward inept messengers. Marshall, a dry speaker even in the most friendly of settings, had an aversion to tub-thumping rhetoric. Yet Jones’ account is still curiously at odds with what Marshall actually said—which was that the country was “faced with the first crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.” The words, at least, could hardly have been starker. But Jones was close to Acheson, whose portentously titled memoirs Present at the Creation declared: “This was my crisis. For a week I had nurtured it.”75 Part of him may simply have wanted to reclaim it as his own.
“Is this a private fight,” Acheson whispered to Marshall as the congressmen grumbled, “or can anyone get into it?” Marshall turned to Truman, asking him to give Acheson the floor. Truman agreed.
Acheson was conscious of having one chance to reset the discussion. Failure to persuade the visitors would be fatal for the funding request. With a litigator’s skill, a preacher’s conviction, and a politician’s feel for his moment in history, he laid out a narrative focused on the clear and present communist threat.
Senators Vandenberg and Connally, Acheson recalled to the group, had traveled with Secretary Byrnes from conference to conference in Europe, trying with tenacious goodwill to negotiate peace settlements.76 The Soviet Union, meanwhile, he said, busied itself encircling Germany, Turkey, Iran, and Greece, probing for opportunities to destabilize them. With the British pullback, Greece was, Acheson warned, at imminent risk of collapse. Unhindered by any organized resistance, the Soviets would take control, after which it was only a matter of time before Turkey succumbed. From Turkey, he said, the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East would be open to them, after which penetration of South Asia and Africa was inevitable. All the while, Soviet-backed communist movements would continue to undermine Hungary, Austria, France, and Italy.
Aiding Greece, Acheson insisted, had nothing to do with British chestnuts; Britain was finished. Its financial position was untenable. Only two great powers remained in the world: the United States and the Soviet Union—a polarization of global power unparalleled since the time of Rome and Carthage. The ideological chasm between the two was unbridgeable; democracy and individual liberty were antithetic to dictatorship and absolute conformity. The Soviet Union, which already spanned huge swaths of two continents, was determined to expand its control to two thirds of the world’s surface and three fourths of its people. Aiding Greece and Turkey, therefore, was not about helping the British. It was not about humanitarianism. It was about supporting free peoples against communist aggression and subversion, in the service of preserving America’s national security. The choice
, therefore, was whether to act with determination or lose by default.
A pregnant silence followed. It was Vandenberg who broke it.
He was, he said, “greatly impressed, even shaken” by developments in the Mediterranean. Greece and Turkey, though, however serious their situations, were only part of a much bigger problem the United States needed to face. It was essential, therefore, that any request for funds and authority to act be accompanied by “a message to Congress, and an explanation to the American people,” about the “grim facts of the larger situation.” Greece, he would clarify to a colleague six days later, “cannot be isolated by itself. On the contrary, it is probably symbolic of the world-wide ideological clash between Eastern communism and Western democracy; and it may easily be the thing which requires us to make some very fateful and far-reaching decisions.”77
According to Henderson, who was present at the meeting with the congressional leaders, Vandenberg added that the president would have to “scare the hell out of the country.” But if he would have a go, the senator would back him. “And I believe that most members will do the same.”78 Truman pledged to set out his aid request for Greece and Turkey against the broader background and in the frankest terms.79 “It was Vandenberg’s ‘condition,’ ” Jones concluded, “that made it possible, even necessary, to launch the global policy that broke through the remaining barriers of American isolationism.”80
News of the secret morning meeting spread, as of course did speculation as to its agenda and meaning. The administration now had to get out in front of the story. Acheson arranged for an off-the-record briefing with twenty newspaper correspondents that evening.81
In The New York Times, Reston hit all the notes Acheson needed Congress and the public to hear. Greece was at serious risk of falling to the Kremlin-backed Communist insurgency. This was a critical point in terms of American policy toward Britain, an ally in grave financial circumstances, and the Soviet Union, expansion of whose power and influence the administration was committed to checking—a policy of “stern containment.” Reston noted that there was “no enthusiasm on Capitol Hill for additional foreign loans” and “little willingness to think through the broader implications of the British economic crisis on our foreign policy.” Importantly, however, he concluded that “few leading members of the majority [Republican] party seem eager to take the responsibility for the consequences of rejecting the President’s request” for funds and authority.82 Such wariness could help soften the opposition the administration would face.
The next morning, February 28, Acheson assembled his key departmental officers in the secretary’s conference room, explaining with “unusual gravity” the historic decisions that had been made over the preceding days and laying out the work ahead. They would have to craft a presidential message explaining the “global struggle between freedom and totalitarianism.” It would have to stress, he said, in words that would have made Kennan shudder, the “protection of Democracy everywhere in the world.”
There were, however, clear tensions in Acheson’s framing of the mission. On the one hand, staff were told to proceed “vigorously without any regard to the effect that the Greece-Turkey program, or any public statement of it, might have on the Moscow Conference or upon [the Secretary’s] personal position there.” On the other, they were instructed “not to be belligerent or provocative”; the policy was not to be “directed against any country or even movement.”83 The latter might work as a statement of principle, but not of practical fact. The administration was only backing massive aid to Greece and Turkey because of the presumed intentions of one country: the Soviet Union. These tensions over how broadly Moscow would be confronted, and through what means, would bedevil two fateful initiatives that would emerge in the coming weeks and months: one a “Doctrine” to be named for the president, and another a “Plan” to be named for the secretary of state.
EACH PROPOSED SENTENCE OF THE president’s message to congress was scrutinized from every angle: diplomatic, political, and stylistic. Numerous State Department and White House staff were involved. Truman himself criticized an early draft as too wordy and technical. The Missourian being a straight speaker, there was little room to hide ambiguities behind rhetorical flourish. “I wanted no hedging,” Truman insisted. “It had to be clear and free of hesitation and double-talk.”84 Difficult and consequential decisions would, therefore, have to be made about what was said and what was not.
“If F.D.R. were alive I think I know what he’d do,” observed Acheson, a man who was “without affection” for the former president. “He would make a statement of global policy but confine his request for money right now to Greece and Turkey.” Jones revised accordingly. The president would ask for $400 million ($4.32 billion in today’s money) to aid the two countries, and those two countries alone, through the first half of 1948.
In the end, the speech would be far more Greece than Turkey—strikingly more, given the greater strategic importance of the latter. Turkey’s location made it vital to the defense of the eastern Mediterranean and the security of nations on three continents. Military assistance to Ankara was considered imperative in private discussions between the executive branch and congressional leaders. Yet there was great reluctance to have the president highlighting this publicly. Turkey had not suffered the war destruction that Greece had, and was not in the midst of a domestic uprising. There was therefore an element of raw power diplomacy to Turkish aid that, it was feared, would alienate the American public. Turkey, moreover, unlike Greece, shared a border with the Soviet Union. Though the Soviet Union would, most strikingly, not be mentioned in the address, the State Department still feared that Moscow would make propaganda out of an American military-aid initiative in Turkey that appeared to threaten it with Western “encirclement.” Turkey, one witness before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs observed wryly, “was slipped into the oven with Greece because that seemed to be the surest way to cook a tough bird.”85
Treatment of Great Britain was also cautious. The inability of Britain to continue aid to Greece and Turkey would be cited in each case as a reason why American aid was necessary; yet no suggestion would be made that the United States was stepping directly into the breaches of a collapsing empire. FDR had been too forthright in highlighting the evils of empire for his accidental successor to appear to be creating one.
The speech was anything but cautious, however, in pushing the boundaries of what Congress had previously considered prudent foreign economic policy. When bankrupt Britain had been holding the fort alone against Nazi Germany in 1941, Congress still demanded economic “consideration” for Lend-Lease aid—which was merely in the form of loans, and not grants. When in 1945 Morgenthau and White fought to justify the Bretton Woods monetary and financial agreements before Congress, they were again touting only loans, and not grants, to revive the collapsed international trading system. That vision would be challenged by the new International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), whose 1946/47 annual report observed, understatedly, that “the problem [of recovery] is deeper and more difficult than was envisioned at Bretton Woods.”86
Even just a few days before the president’s address, Truman had delivered a major speech on foreign economic policy at Baylor University that, having been written largely before the Greek and Turkish crisis, went little beyond calling for reciprocal agreements to boost trade. Will Clayton, who had drafted much of it, wanted the president to stress the need for “bolder [economic] measures than have ever been seriously advanced before,” but was overruled.87 Nowhere in the Baylor speech was there a suggestion that the United States might need to intervene, on its own, in the internal economic affairs of other nations—to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance and to direct their use. Or that doing so might be necessary to their survival as independent nations, and even essential to American national security itself.
It was a calculated political gamble for the president to take such a message to Co
ngress. To be sure, the groundwork had been laid in advance through meetings with congressional leaders and briefings to the press. Vandenberg would himself urge Marshall to tell Stalin in Moscow that the United States would use “economic intervention” to block Soviet expansion.88 Still, when Truman assembled his cabinet on March 7 to review the crisis and the program he planned to put before Congress, the support they gave him was tempered by deep skepticism that a majority could be brought to assent. The Senate, after all, had just voted three days earlier to cut the president’s budget for the coming fiscal year by $4.5 billion, and the House fifteen days earlier by $6 billion.89 And as Truman himself noted, the commitment he was asking them to make had no fixed borders or timeline: “It means,” he observed gravely, that “the United States is going into European politics,” with no clear plan to get out.90
Thus was the ground being laid for a radical change in aid policy, one that would place it in the service of front-line foreign policy. Previous large-scale assistance for war-victim relief had been channeled through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Founded in 1943, UNRRA was mainly financed by the United States, but outside of its direct control. UNRRA’s criteria for support were “non-political.”