by Benn Steil
President Truman signs the Foreign Assistance Act, implementing the Marshall Plan, April 3, 1948. In the background, from left to right: Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett, Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI), Treasury Secretary John Snyder, Representative Charles Eaton (R-NJ), Senator Tom Connally (D-TX), Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug, Representative Joseph Martin (R-MA), Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson, Representative Sol Bloom (D-NY), Attorney General Tom Clark, and Postmaster General Jesse Donaldson. (Secretary of State George Marshall was away attending the Ninth International Conference of American States in Bogotá, Colombia.)
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TEN
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PASSAGE
MARCH 1, 1948: THE PACKED Senate gallery was silent. it was nearly a year since Truman had delivered the speech that became his namesake doctrine, nine months since Marshall gave voice to a plan to define and to dignify it. Kennan cloaked the plan in a diplomatic strategy; Clayton gave it economic principles and resonance. Many others—Acheson, Clay, Bohlen, Lovett, Caffery, Douglas, Harriman in particular—lent it practical and political substance. But the snow-haired, bow-tied, bespectacled sixty-four-year-old Republican senator who took the lectern that day, white handkerchief poking from the pocket of his somber suit, was as essential as any of them in forging the bill necessary to give the plan effect. Former isolationist and steadfast opponent of spendthrift government, Arthur Vandenberg had credibility with the Republican Congress that even the storied General Marshall could not match. He had drafted and typed his nine-thousand-word speech himself, reworking it seven times.1
“Mr. President,” Vandenberg intoned with the presence of a studied speechmaker, a man The New York Times called “unquestionably one of the best orators in the land”:2
with the unanimous approval of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I report the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 [that is, the Marshall Plan] in its perfected text. This legislation, Mr. President, seeks peace and stability for free men in a free world. It seeks them by economic rather than by military means. It proposes to help our friends to help themselves in the pursuit of sound and successful liberty in the democratic pattern. The quest can mean as much to us as it does to them. It aims to preserve the victory against aggression and dictatorship which we thought we won in World War II. It strives to help stop World War III before it starts. It fights the economic chaos which would precipitate far-flung disintegration. It sustains western civilization. It means to take western Europe completely off the American dole at the end of the adventure. It recognizes the grim truth—whether we like it or not—that American self-interest, national economy, and national security are inseverably linked with these objectives. . . . The iron curtain must not come to the rims of the Atlantic either by aggression or by default.
There is only one voice left in the world, Mr. President, which is competent to hearten the determination of the other nations and other peoples in western Europe to survive in their own choice of their own way of life. It is our voice. . . .
[This bill] is the final product of 8 months of more intensive study by more devoted minds than I have ever known to concentrate upon any one objective in all my 20 years in Congress. It has its foes—some of whom compliment it by their transparent hatreds. But it has its friends—countless, prayerful friends not only at the hearthstones of America, but under many other flags. It is a plan for peace, stability, and freedom. As such, it involves the clear self-interest of the United States. It can be the turning point in history for 100 years to come. If it fails, we will have done our final best. If it succeeds, our children and our children’s children will call us blessed. May God grant His benediction upon the ultimate event.3
Senators and guests rose in applause.
Polls found that nearly 80 percent of the American public had now heard of the Marshall Plan, up from under 50 percent in November 1947. Of those who had heard of it, favorable opinions outnumbered unfavorable ones by over three to one (57 percent vs. 18 percent).4 These numbers were both a reflection of Vandenberg’s assiduous shepherding of the legislation through the political process and a vindication of the personal risks he, as a presumed presidential candidate, took in adopting Truman’s policy as his own. “[B]ut for [Vandenberg’s] leadership and coordination in the Senate,” Marshall reflected several years later, “the plan would not have succeeded. I feel that he has never received full credit for his monumental efforts on behalf of the European Recovery Program, and that his name should have been associated with it.”5
MEANWHILE, OVER IN EUROPE OFFICIALS from the United States, Britain, France, and the Benelux nations gathered in London for the most consequential conference on the future of Germany since the war’s end. Douglas cajoled the French “tactfully” behind the scenes, using hints that their share of Marshall aid might depend on their cooperation in merging Germany’s western zones. But events on the ground also helped his case. The French “greatly fear the Russian advance in central Europe,” noted a memo to Washington. Little was heard any longer concerning reparations or “hymns of hate for the Germans.” There was talk of a Franco-German, “perhaps even Pan-European[,] collaboration for reconstruction [of] the post war world.”6
On March 5, 1948, the three Allies issued a historic communiqué announcing a plan to coordinate economic policies between the Anglo-American bizone and the French zone, to incorporate western Germany into the Marshall Plan, and to create a West German federal government.7 The launch of what came to be known as the “London Program” set off alarms in the Kremlin. “[O]n the basis of restored industry in Western Germany and its massive Ruhr military-industrial system,” Foreign Ministry official Vladimir Treskov concluded, the Marshall Plan aimed to “create an arsenal and bridgehead for future aggression.”8 Khrushchev would later reflect that the initiatives “represented a direct threat to [Soviet] national security, a challenge to the impregnability of our borders.”9
“Within the last few weeks,” Clay cabled the Army General Staff’s director of intelligence, “I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define.” War might now “come with dramatic suddenness.” In Berlin, Murphy reported to Marshall, “the Soviet delegation now seizes upon every question . . . and every statement . . . to launch violent propaganda attacks.”10
Shown Clay’s “bombshell” on March 15, a distressed Kennan was sure the general had overreacted. Events in Prague, and tensions in Berlin, were, he wrote, predictable “defensive reactions on the Soviet side to the initial success of the Marshall Plan.” But the consequence was that “a real war scare ensued.” The Air Force and Army leadership began planning contingencies for nuclear weapon deployment in Europe and the Mediterranean. For its part, the CIA could only reassure the president that war was “not probable” within the next fifteen to sixty days.11
“The seizure of power in Czechoslovakia and the incorporation of Finland within the Soviet military sphere,” Lippmann wrote on March 15, “must be regarded . . . as strategic actions, planned by military men, in anticipation of war.”12 Stalin was pressuring Finland to sign a defense pact,13 the trigger being his realization that the Marshall Plan was an imminent reality that would “consolidate a large part of Europe against Russia.”14 Reston noted that the United States was committing itself “and half of Europe to the Marshall Plan, which has roused the objections of the Soviet Union, but we have not yet organized a security system that will defend our friends on the Continent or restrain the Russians.”15 It made no sense, he said, to ship “a lot of Marshall Plan goods to Europe to be taken over by the Red Army.”16
Bevin urged Marshall to recognize “the strategic threat involved in the extension of the Russian sphere of influence to the Atlantic.” Marshall, who had for months resisted his entreaties to begin creating a western military pact, now told his British counterpart that the United States was “prepared to proceed at once in the joint discussions on the establishment of an Atlantic security system.” Though the two ke
pt Paris in the dark over the talks for fear of leaks to Moscow, their worries were misplaced. The latter was already being kept informed by British double agents Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.17
Congress, too, was on edge. “The coup d’état in Czechoslovakia,” observed World War II OSS official Edward Mead Earle, “changed the whole climate of opinion on the issue of the Marshall Plan.”18 It made Republicans more receptive to aiding Europe, but also more apprehensive about the military implications.
“What has happened in Czechoslovakia and Finland,” Vandenberg said, “makes it obvious that time is of the essence.”19 House speaker Joseph Martin proclaimed that “the constant advance of the iron curtain across Europe [has] created a grave crisis in our international relations.” The very “fate of civilization is at stake.” The United States had therefore to “build up [its] military and naval establishments. . . . We must make ourselves absolutely supreme in the air and under the sea.” In such an environment, the Marshall Plan on its own, insisted Georgia Democrat E. E. Cox, would not pass in the House. It would have to be accompanied by military aid to vulnerable U.S. allies. “The money we have sent abroad” thus far, he said, “has been more than cancelled by the zeal of the Communists.”20
Lippmann laid out more clinically the deficiencies of the Marshall Plan that had been made apparent by the growing Soviet menace. “All the calculations of the [Marshall Plan] are based on the assumption that [France’s and Britain’s] military effort would remain at a very low level in order not to draw off manpower, capital equipment and imported raw materials,” he wrote. “If now they must arm, and that is what the western alliance demands, then the estimates of the [Plan] will have to be reviewed and revised upward.”21
Lippmann had sympathetic ears in the administration, although they did not want to raise their voice at the time for fear of jeopardizing passage of the ERP. “My interest in the whole Marshall Plan was the security aspect,” Harriman would reflect years later, “and some of us felt that you could not have a successful economic development of Europe unless there was a sense of security; that people could not go ahead and make investments for the future without some sense of security.”22
And indeed, France and Britain, together with the Benelux countries, set themselves on the path to rearmament through the creation of a new Western Union Defence Organization in Brussels on March 17. But the so-called Brussels Pact was mainly backward-looking: it bound its members to “collaborate in measures of mutual assistance in the event of a renewal of German aggression.” The concern about Germany was real, but was beginning to fade into the distance just as Russia began looming larger.23
Lippmann was emphatic that the Western Union “now expects and requires effective American military support,” as promised under the Truman Doctrine, in Lippmann’s interpretation, to “any nation which is threatened with Soviet domination.” No longer content to call merely for U.S. airpower supremacy, as he had in December, he now insisted that the United States needed “the power to make a tactical defense of the Western Union at the Elbe if possible, at the Rhine at a minimum.”24
Belgian prime minister Spaak echoed Lippmann, arguing that “defense arrangements which did not include the United States were without practical value.” For him to pretend otherwise was to “deceive the Belgian people.”25 Danish foreign minister Gustav Rasmussen anticipated Moscow putting the same pressure on Denmark for a nonaggression pact as it did on Finland. Such pressure might force it to seek a military alliance with Washington. But he was anxious not to have to take the step before the Marshall Plan went into effect, hoping to “avoid [the] implication [that it] had military strings attached.”26
Bevin endorsed “the construction of a North Atlantic defence system [to] put heart into the whole of Western Europe and . . . encourage them in their resistance to the infiltration tactics.” He stressed that it would also reassure the French of their security “in the event of a resurgence of the German menace.”27 The French feared such a resurgence if a united Germany fell under Soviet domination, as Czechoslovakia had.28 Douglas passed on their concerns to Marshall, indicating that they were more likely to “relax in their attitude regarding German industry and reconstruction,” which were vital to the Marshall Plan, if “assured of long-term defensive cooperation against German aggression.”29 Bidault wrote to Marshall that Soviet methods of external pressure “are similar to those used by Hitler in 1938 and 1939.” Truman, he said, now had to understand “the gravity and the imminence of the danger” to France and western Europe. “The U.S. has shown admirably generous concern” through the offer of economic aid. “But the moment has now come to extend the collaboration of the Old and the New World to the political and, as quickly as possible, to the military field.”30
Lovett emphasized that the Marshall Plan was “intended to . . . lessen dangers and possibilities of war,” and that airing the issue of a U.S. defense commitment too soon would spook Congress and jeopardize its legislative prospects. Hickerson, a tough-talking Texan who deeply distrusted the Soviets, also felt that “the state of United States defenses severely limits [its] immediate military capabilities.” He stressed to Marshall that “the problem at present is less one of defense against overt foreign aggression than against internal fifth-column aggression supported by the threat of external force, on the Czech model.”31 Secretly, however, the Policy Planning Staff and the National Security Council began preparing for possible U.S. military support of the Western Union, including “a unilateral assurance by the United States to the nations in [the] Western Union that the United States will consider armed attack by the USSR or its satellites against any one of these nations to constitute armed attack against the United States.”32 The State Department opened secret talks with the British and Canadians in Washington on March 22, examining “the possibilities of a military ERP.”33 Truman would in April approve private talks with congressional leaders on extending the Brussels security pact to North America.34
Thus, it seemed, the core of the Marshall bloc was well on its way to becoming militarized, much as Stalin had always said it would. A Soviet Foreign Ministry analysis prepared for Vyshinsky and Molotov concluded that the new Western Union was “the first official military-political allied agreement in the general creation of the ‘Western Bloc,’ under the leadership of the USA”:
The agreement presents itself as a military alliance, directed first and foremost against the Soviet Union and new democratic countries, and is an instrument of American expansion. In the economic sense this agreement complies with the Marshall Plan and is part of its development. In the political sense this agreement is leading towards the division of Europe.35
The American, British, and French governments would maintain that theirs was only a necessary defensive response to clear acts of Soviet aggression. But one thing was clear to both sides: it would not stop here. In the West, a full-scale transatlantic military alliance was in the making.
STALIN DID NOT WANT WAR—ONLY the threat of it in Berlin, which he believed the Allies could not defend.
On March 9, 1948, Marshal Sokolovsky and his political adviser, Vladimir Semenov, were summoned to Moscow from Berlin. Foreign ministry official Andrei Smirnov told them that Moscow now needed to “disrupt [Allied] plans to put together a Western bloc including Germany.” If the Allies rejected cooperation within the Council of Foreign Ministers, this would mean they had “finally decided against settling the German question on the basis of the Potsdam decisions.” In that case, “the Soviet Government would . . . be obliged to close off completely its occupation zone, introducing the appropriate financial measures [and] organizing frontier defense.”36
Shortly thereafter, Stalin began authorizing a spiral of measures designed to asphyxiate the western powers in Berlin. Official and impromptu air, train, and auto traffic restrictions into and out of the city, begun without fanfare early in the new year, were ratcheted up. The city’s Soviet-controlled press reported that “subversive and
terrorist elements” had been exploiting lax transit controls to undermine the eastern zone, requiring that “supplementary regulations” relating to western travel into and out of the city be brought into effect from April 1. Within the city itself, a “People’s Police” was established, effectively giving the Communist SED party a private militia in the east.37
On March 26, SED co-chairman Wilhelm Pieck told Stalin in Moscow that he would be “glad if the [western] Allies left Berlin.” This might be the only way for the Communists to avoid defeat in the city’s autumn elections. “Let’s try with all our might” then, Stalin responded, “and maybe we will drive them out.”38
On April 17, Semenov cabled Molotov from Berlin confirming implementation of his orders to block transport communications between Berlin and the Western occupation zones. These notably excluded air traffic,39 likely owing to a fatal encounter two weeks earlier, on April 5, when a Soviet Yak fighter jet “buzzing” a British civilian plane over Berlin collided with it. Both pilots died, along with two Americans and twelve other Britons. Each side blamed the other.40 Military airpower being a Western strength, Stalin may have preferred to avoid further such incidents for the time being. “Our measures,” Semenov reported, had already “dealt a serious blow to the prestige of the Americans and British in Germany.”41 The Soviets could therefore just let the weak Allied “air bridge” supplying West Berlin collapse of its own weight.42