by Benn Steil
For their part, the Soviets were thrown off guard by the U.N. gambit. To that point, they had had little experience manipulating the Security Council. On September 25, Vyshinsky, in a six-thousand-word speech before the General Assembly, denounced the Western powers and the “instigators of a new war.”118 In a show of sheer comedic paranoia, he backed up his claims of American warmongering by referring to a map allegedly showing “The Third World War, Pacific Theater of Military Operations.” The map had been forwarded to him in July by Colonel-General Fyodor Kuznetsov, head of the Main Intelligence Agency (GRU) of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, who said that it had been “created by the American oil company ‘ESSO’ ” and received “from our source in Tokyo.” The map was in fact titled “ESSO War Map III, featuring the Pacific Theater;” it was produced during World War II as a customer marketing give-away.119
Conscious of the West’s built-in voting advantage, and recognizing a show trial when he saw one, Stalin rejected U.N. jurisdiction on the Berlin question. He ordered Vyshinsky to invoke Article 107 of its Charter, which said that “Nothing in the present Charter shall invalidate or preclude action, in relation to any state which during the Second World War has been an enemy of any signatory to the present Charter, taken or authorized as a result of that war by the Governments having responsibility for such action.”120 On this basis, Vyshinsky insisted that German policy could only be discussed within the Council of Foreign Ministers.
By refusing to participate in Security Council debate, however, he gave the three permanent western members free rein to denounce Soviet behavior unrebutted.121 The result was predictable. On October 5, only Soviet Ukraine joined Vyshinsky in voting against U.N. jurisdiction.
The following week, Vyshsinsky tried to quash the intervention through the Security Council’s Argentine president, Juan Atilio Bramuglia. The Peronist is “critical of the capitalist system,” Vyshinsky noted approvingly in his diary; “he said [it] had outlived its day.” Fawning and apologetic in their secret meetings, Bramuglia had, Vyshinsky told Molotov, “tried to avoid presidency of the Council,” and with it responsibility for “the Berlin question, but did not succeed.”
On October 11, Bramuglia briefed Vyshinsky, warning him that they were speaking in the strictest privacy. Having conferred with the Allies, he said, the neutrals believed they could take Berlin off the Security Council agenda if the Soviets agreed to a simultaneous lifting of both sides’ trade and transport restrictions. The Council of Foreign Ministers could then reconvene to resolve remaining issues related to Berlin and Germany as a whole.
Vyshinsky demurred, demanding that the Allies also complete removal of the B-mark at the same time the restrictions were lifted. Bramuglia warned that the Allies would insist on an end to the blockade before the currency transition was complete—not after. If the Soviets wanted their version, what could they offer in exchange? Nothing, Vyshinsky said. The best option was to drop the point. Bramuglia responded that the Allied position was actually closer to the August 30 directive, to which Vyshinsky replied that it could in that case form the basis of the CFM discussion. This proposal served Molotov’s aim of elevating the directive—or the Soviet interpretation of it—into a legally binding commitment. Bramuglia liked the idea. Vyshinsky promised an official response within a few days.
After securing approval from Molotov and Stalin, Vyshinksy affirmed his stance, “remind[ing] Bramuglia that the Berlin question was not,” in any case, “subject to discussion in the Security Council.” It should be removed. Bramuglia returned for clarification the next day: were the Soviets saying the August directive should regulate matters “until” the CFM could meet? This was, he said, how the other neutrals understood it. No, Vyshinsky said. It must govern “within” the CFM. “I thought this was the case,” the Argentine responded dejectedly, knowing the Allies would reject it.
Bramuglia, Vyshinsky cabled Molotov on October 15, “expressed regret that he ever fell into this story.” The Argentine pledged to “do the utmost for the Berlin question to be decided in the interests of the Soviet Union, seeing as how he is a close friend of the USSR.” But “we of course know the worth of Argentine promises.” His translator, Yuri Dashkevich, suspected “Bramuglia was acting as a defender of the Anglo-Americans.”122
Unbeknownst to Vyshinsky, his useful idiot was feeling heat from Washington. The State Department, Acheson revealed years later, was working “to connect the price of Argentine wheat with cooperation on the Berlin matter.”123 On October 25, the neutrals put forward a broad resolution calling for the lifting of all restrictions on traffic and commerce into and out of Berlin, resumption of four-power currency talks, and a reconvening of the Council of Foreign Ministers to resolve other disputed matters in Germany. Marshall had wanted the neutrals simply to condemn the blockade, but the Allies joined in support. The Soviets cast their veto.
Vyshinsky was unconcerned. The French U.N. press department deputy had been passing on encouraging intelligence about airlift challenges from a loose-tongued American delegation contact. “In winter, flights are extremely complex and staff are so exhausted that it requires a great effort to keep the pilots flying,” Pravda journalist Georgii Mikhailovich Ratiani recorded; “material parts very quickly wear out. . . . [T]he American army command and the State Department fear that the ‘air-bridge’ will cease to operate in the very near future.”124 Time, it seemed, was on Moscow’s side.
For its part, the State Department suspected that “the Soviets count on the failure of the air lift during the winter months,” and “would not lift the blockade until proven wrong.”125 Philip Jessup, the U.S. representative to the U.N. General Assembly, “discounted at 1000 to one [the] probability [of] Soviet desire for [a] real settlement of [the] Berlin situation” at this point.126 Meaningful diplomacy would have to wait until the Allies could demonstrate mastery of the weather.
The Security Council resolution was, in the end, a minor diplomatic victory for Marshall, helping to show Moscow as intransigent on a matter of global security interest. But there was a cost. The issue would remain on the Council’s agenda, and continued efforts by the neutrals to resolve it would clash with events in Berlin—events that were now moving decidedly in Washington’s favor.127
German children cheering an American airlift plane during the Soviet blockade, Berlin, 1948.
* * *
TWELVE
* * *
DIVISION
ON NOVEMBER 2, 1948, AMERICAN voters delivered a monumental electoral upset. In defiance of the pundits, polls, betting lines (15 to 1 against), and a legendary Chicago Tribune headline declaring the reverse, Truman defeated Dewey. The Democrats, furthermore, swept both houses of Congress. Capped off by a relentless six-week whistle-stop national tour, the president, in Marshall’s words, had “put over the greatest one-man fight in American history.”
The standoff with Russia had played a big part. “The bear got us” in the end, reasoned Dewey aide Elliott Bell. Or at least Truman’s handling of it. The Berlin airlift was by now widely seen as a great success. Stalin was on the defensive. And though the president’s clumsy peace effort had upset Marshall’s delicate diplomacy, even critics such as Walter Lippmann now conceded that it had played well with nervous voters.1
Three days after the election, press reports said Truman would reach across the aisle and tap Vandenberg to replace Marshall. The sixty-four-year-old senator had reason to be interested; his party had just lost control of the Senate. But he was determined to stay put. And knowing Truman’s propensity to announce-first-and-ask-later, he quashed the idea through friendly Democrats.
By severing ties with Republicans, the senator explained, “I [might] lose my best chance to be helpful in supporting bi-partisan foreign policy.” He had, during the campaign, taken exception to Truman’s deriding of the “do nothing, good for nothing” 80th Congress. This Congress was, he pointed out, the one that had funded the Truman Doctrine, enacted the Marshall Plan, an
d laid the groundwork for a North Atlantic security pact. “[I]n all that relates to foreign affairs,” he retorted in an October radio address, it was “the best” in the nation’s history.2
With Vandenberg out, Truman would, at the end of November, quietly offer the post to an astonished but agreeable Acheson.3 The two men—curiously given their different backgrounds and demeanors—would form a much closer personal bond than Truman and Marshall ever did.
Across the ocean in West Berlin, support for the president was sky-high. Berliners had come to identify American pilots—such as young Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, “the Candy Bomber” (der Schokoladen-flieger), who rained treats on the city’s children from the air—with a commitment to preserving their lives and freedoms. In an October survey, 84 percent were confident the Allies would continue adequately supplying the city by air. Ninety-five percent supported their remaining in Berlin.
Overruling concerns about the effect on military preparedness, Truman ordered dozens of new Navy planes to be deployed in the airlift just before the election. And he would approve procurement of twenty-three more planes to replace worn-out C-54s in December. After long deliberations, the Attlee government also agreed to put its aircraft under the control of a Combined Airlift Task Force headed by Tunner.4 Against this background, Clay ordered a 20 percent increase in Berlin food rations, to 2,000 calories a day. Though far lower than the 3,300 calories the average American was consuming, this was higher than anywhere else in Germany.5 Meanwhile, Washington even funded cultural initiatives in the besieged western sectors. These included the legendary literary magazine Der Monat, founded by American journalist Melvin Lasky. Mixing “anti-Stalinism and esoteric high culture,” sixty thousand copies of the first issue arrived from Munich by American bomber in October. It featured original contributions from notables such as Bertrand Russell, Arnold Toynbee, Jean-Paul Sartre, V. S. Pritchett, and Rebecca West.6
At the same time, Germans were growing increasingly bitter toward the Soviets. The Red Army had carted off over half Berlin’s prewar industrial capacity, more than twice what had been destroyed in the war. Eastern businesses were being pillaged, their bank accounts seized by Soviet authorities. Refugees by the thousands continued to pour into the west each month. Eighty-eight percent of West Berliners said they preferred the privations of life under blockade to Soviet control.7 And they were about to affirm this conviction in their own historic vote.
On October 8, the City Assembly set December 5 as the date for the election of new legislators. But with the Communist SED set to fare even worse than it had two years earlier, Soviet commandant General Alexander Kotikov imposed impossible conditions for allowing the poll in his sector. The Magistrat and City Assembly therefore voted to proceed in the western sectors alone. Lacking authority but determined to block it, the SED deputy speaker of the Assembly, Ottomar Geschke, called an “extraordinary meeting” for October 30. With only Communists in attendance, the gathering “dismissed” the Magistrat and elected a new one under Fritz Ebert (son of the Weimar Republic’s first president).8 The SED, which now claimed a mandate to rule the entire city, launched a menacing campaign to keep West Berliners from going to the polls. Following orders approved by Stalin and the Soviet Politburo on November 12, the party worked vigorously to “persuade the populations of the western sectors not to participate in elections, to promulgate its platforms, or to disseminate flyers, placards, [or] brochures.”9
When the NSC met in Washington on November 26, Marshall explained the stakes: proceeding with the election would likely split Berlin for good, while delaying it would be seen as a western “retreat.” From Berlin, Murphy cabled an impassioned appeal against delay, insisting it would be a “cowardly surrender” to the SED and the Soviets. Bohlen acknowledged it might give the Security Council time to find “a way out” of the crisis, but “would in effect be confirming the right of the Soviets to act illegally.” He insisted the SED coup was a “stroke of luck” that took the millstone of the August 30 directive from Washington’s neck and made Moscow responsible for the city’s division.
Marshall cabled back his agreement. The consequences of Allied intervention to postpone the election would, he said, be “disastrous.” But the Security Council would have to be handled delicately. The neutrals were preparing “currency and trade plans . . . for implementation by a single city administration,” which were now “perhaps impossible.” They would need to be persuaded that the fault lay with Moscow, which, in blocking the vote in the east, was violating a four-power agreement that city elections be held every two years.
On polling day, voter turnout in the west was, in spite of organized Communist intimidation, a remarkable 86 percent—testimony to the strength of anti-Soviet feeling. The SPD garnered 65 percent of the vote, with the CDU and Free Democrats splitting the remainder. Reuter, a former Communist turned anti-Stalinist, became West Berlin’s first mayor. Acknowledging the existential dangers facing the new political entity, however, the SPD agreed to govern with its rivals in a unity coalition. 10
Though the election affirmed the confidence of Berliners in the airlift, it made the fallout from Marshall’s U.N. gambit that much more difficult to manage. Paris and London, still fearful of Russian reprisals, wanted to intensify efforts with the neutrals to secure a currency deal that would end the Berlin standoff. Marshall and Clay, in contrast, were determined to make the new political entity of West Berlin a success—even at the cost of permanent separation from the east. That meant, in the first instance, monetary union with West Germany and an end to U.N. efforts that could only delay it.
“SHE BESTRIDES THE WORLD LIKE a colossus: no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations,” wrote British historian Robert Payne in 1949. “It is already an axiom that the decisions of the American government affect the lives and livelihood of the remotest people.”11
This notion owed in no small part to the Marshall Plan. By the end of 1948, nine months after passage of the legislation, it had delivered over $2 billion in assistance ($20.57 billion in today’s money). Industrial production in western Europe surpassed prewar levels for the first time. Confidence in recovery was growing. In the donor country itself, a poll at election time found 62 percent satisfied with the plan’s performance, compared to only 14 percent dissatisfied.12 Such public approval was remarkable for an aid initiative.
Truman’s inaugural address on January 20, 1949, devoted to foreign policy, reflected his pride and confidence in the Plan. His breath freezing in the chill winter air, he blasted communism as a “false philosophy” that “threat[ened] the efforts of free nations to bring about world recovery and lasting peace.” But the United States would “keep [its] full weight behind the European recovery program,” which he called the “greatest cooperative economic program in history.” The ERP would ensure that “the free people of that continent can resume their rightful place in the forefront of civilization and can contribute once more to the security and welfare of the world.”13
Over in Paris, a European partner to the Economic Cooperation Administration, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), had been up and running since April 1948. Belgian foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak became the first chairman of its council, French economist Robert Marjolin its first secretary general. Ernst van der Beugel, now a Dutch OEEC delegate, credited Hoffman and the Marshall Plan with the impetus behind an element of recovery that would otherwise have been politically unachievable: European integration. But there were teething pains. Just as with the Committee of European Economic Cooperation, tasked with formulating the Marshall aid request the previous summer, the OEEC would struggle with infighting over the division of aid.
The French chafed under Hoffman’s integration drive, although they could never escape the sense that the alternative was worse. “If we refuse,” MRP (Christian Democrat) politician Jean Letourneau reasoned, “the United States will bestow this lead
ership role on Germany within six months.” The British, for their part, dragged themselves along for the sake of keeping influence with Washington, but would never wholly buy into the venture. “We are being asked,” groused one official, “to join the Germans, who started two world wars; the French, who had in 1940 collapsed in the face of German aggression; the Italians, who changed sides; and the Low Countries, of whom not much was known but who seemed to have put up little resistance to Germany.” This was small consolation for loss of an empire.
Hoffman, however, was relentless. “Make no small plans,” he told colleagues, “for they have no magic to stir the imagination of men.”14 In December 1948, in a midnight meeting with Sir Stafford Cripps—now Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, and representing the OEEC ministers—Hoffman insisted on showing Congress a 50 percent reduction by volume in intra-European trade barriers by February. At 3 a.m. an “exasperated” Cripps gave his word. “It was done,” Hoffman recalled with pride.
Yet Hoffman continued to press, year after year. On October 31, 1949, he would deliver a speech in Paris insisting that the “steady improvement in the conditions of life [requires] nothing less than an integration of the West European economy.” A British official complained that it meant remaking Europe in the image of America, “God’s own country,” yet three days later the OEEC would back the creation of “a single market in Europe.” Members would agree to cut quantitative import restrictions in half by year’s end, and to collaborate on the creation of a payments union, underwritten with Marshall funds, to eliminate currency barriers to trade.