The article in Fortune may have given Schlesinger a few uncomfortable moments with some of Washington, DC’s most powerful establishment figures. But it also added to his name among the District’s cognoscenti, not least the increasingly influential set who dined and schemed together in Georgetown.
The immediate postwar period was an intoxicating time in Washington. Almost without anyone quite noticing until it had happened, the nation’s capital became suddenly and indisputably the world’s capital. America was the richest country in the world, with gold reserves of $20 billion (almost two-thirds of the global total). It supplied one-third of the world’s exports. Militarily, it had the greatest navy, an even more commanding lead in air power, and a monopoly on the atomic bomb—the most destructive weapon in history (with the H-bomb soon on the way). And with these resources of money and might, the United States was operating in a global vacuum, with the other great powers exhausted or in ruins. Even the military might of the Soviet Union was balanced out by its huge population losses and weak economic base. As Paul Kennedy points out, by 1945 few doubted that “the Pax Americana had come of age.”23
But was Washington, DC, up to the job of serving as capital of the world? Many, not least those who lived in New York, doubted it. Vanity Fair had described DC as “a political village which has become a world capital, without becoming a metropolis . . . conspicuously lacking in what might be described as intelligentsia.” Although there was “a small group composed chiefly of newspaper correspondents, who live in Georgetown and aspire to create a sort of Greenwich Village or synthetic rive gauche on the right bank of Rock Creek,” the magazine continued snootily, “hitherto they have failed to produce anything but malicious gossip and political muckraking.” Washington may have been the seat of government, but New York was the seat of financial, cultural, and intellectual power. A legal, economic, and political umbilical cord would continue to tie New York to DC. But within the space of just a few years, that same Georgetown enclave began to rival Manhattan as the center of political influence and fashionable glamour in the newly minted superpower.24
Maîtres d’hôtel of this “Georgetown set” were the Alsop brothers, Joseph and Stewart, Roosevelt relatives, who wrote a thrice-weekly syndicated Matter of Fact column for the New York Herald Tribune. With their houses on Dumbarton Street (sometimes called Dumbarton Avenue), the Alsops each hosted bibulous dinners for their friends and acquaintances who became willing (usually) sources for the brothers’ columns. At least in the early days, all the friends shared a fixed determination not to let political differences get in the way of social relationships. Most infamous of all were Joe’s Sunday night suppers—soon christened the Sunday Night Drunk—where he would serve vast amounts of alcohol to accompany his pungent terrapin soup and then cajole his guests loudly from his place at the head of the table to spill what gossip they knew.25
Schlesinger had run across Stewart Alsop, three years his elder, in Paris at the end of the war. He fluffed the connection by asking, to Stewart’s apparent irritation, if he was related to the columnist Joseph Alsop. (“Plainly, he was tired of the question.”) He had better luck with another member of the group. Philip Graham was two years older than Schlesinger, but although the two men had overlapped at Harvard, where Graham was at the Law School, they were not friends. Graham clerked for Felix Frankfurter, but when the United States entered the war, he signed up to join the army, rising from private to major (trumping Schlesinger’s modest rise from private to corporal). With his quick mind and charismatic personality, Graham seemed destined for politics. When he married Katharine Meyer, her father, Eugene Meyer, harnessed Graham’s energy for the Washington Post instead. After Meyer (a former chairman of the Federal Reserve) was appointed first president of the World Bank for six months in 1946, he made Graham publisher of the newspaper, subsequently returning as chairman and leaving Graham in place.26
Phil Graham gave Schlesinger a path into the Georgetown set. Marooned out in unfashionable Chevy Chase and unable to afford even a modest property on the likes of Dumbarton Street, Schlesinger was outside the Georgetown loop. But Marian did have a useful connection through Wilma Fairbank, her sister. “John Fairbank’s mother had this house in Georgetown that backed up on the house that Kay and Phil Graham had when they came back from the war,” Marian recalls. “And it was through her that we met the Grahams. They were very nice people.” It was the Grahams who suggested Schlesinger for the job of writing the history of the Post. “It was a very expanding period of our connections and everything else,” Marian remembers. “It was really fun.”27
It was also somewhat overwhelming. In his letters home to his parents, Schlesinger could barely hide his star-struck feelings, listing the names of the great, the good, and the rising generation with whom he had dined. As a boy at Phillips Exeter Academy he had been emasculated by their kind; now their provenance and power intoxicated him. On one occasion in 1946, he found himself at dinner with Stewart Alsop (great-nephew of President Theodore Roosevelt), Franklin Roosevelt Jr. (fifth child of President Franklin Roosevelt), two members of the Truman administration (Averell Harriman and Clark Clifford), and the speechwriter (Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World) usually credited with coining the term “Cold War.” Schlesinger was “quite favorably impressed” with Secretary of Commerce Averell Harriman, with whom he would go on to develop something of a protégé relationship. It was at these dinners that Schlesinger also had his first proper sight of a direct contemporary, born in 1917, but two years behind him at Harvard in the class of 1940. “Jack Kennedy [was] there,” Schlesinger wrote home. “Kennedy seemed very sincere and not unintelligent,” he continued, adding presciently, “but kind of on the conservative side.” It surely did not occur to either man that Schlesinger would be the chronicler of the thirty-fifth president.28
All sorts gathered at the “Sunday Night Drunk” and other Georgetown dinner parties in those early postwar years. If one philosophical point of view broadly held Schlesinger and many of his friends together, it was their growing sense of belonging to the non-Communist Left. Liberals passionately debated how the United States should handle the Soviet Union, with many important and influential figures sharply disagreeing. When Harriman, for example, as ambassador to Moscow at the end of World War II, had said in front of Walter Lippmann, America’s most famous columnist, that “our objectives and the Kremlin’s objectives are irreconcilable,” the latter, who desired wartime cooperation to continue, had ostentatiously risen from his seat and walked out.29
Schlesinger admired Lippmann, but for the historian the important element of that debate was the battle going on in Western Europe between democratic socialism and Stalinism and the extent to which American policy might tilt the outcome of that battle. During the 1930s, many young idealists, including Schlesinger, were attracted by elements of Marxism and Communism. As a Harvard undergraduate, he became a member of the American Student Union, which was Popular Front/Communist–controlled, and was influenced somewhat by his junior-year tutor, the Communist fellow traveler F. O. Matthiessen. During his Henry Fellowship at Peterhouse, he became close friends with Eric Hobsbawm, later among the most prominent Marxist historians. And while there, he had run his undergraduate thesis through a Marxist prism, writing an academic article, “Orestes Brownson: An American Marxist before Marx.” Brownson, he explained, “had the set of doctrines—class conflict, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, and the historic function of capitalism—which form so necessary an apparatus for enlightenment today.” But Schlesinger’s experience during the Second World War had brought him to the new enlightenment that American patriotism and Communism were incompatible. His battles in OSS with Maurice Halperin had left a deep imprint. Schlesinger had seen at first hand how the system would tolerate and protect an out-and-out Communist (and Soviet spy) working against his own government; Schlesinger’s attempt to push back had led to physical intimidation and a lasting suspicion towards him within OSS, with almost dis
astrous consequences for him during the rest of the war. There was no question that Schlesinger’s smarty-pants demeanor could often irritate colleagues, but on this occasion he had been proven right, as would have been known high up in the OSS in 1945 after the Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley turned informer and named Halperin to them as a Soviet agent.30
The lesson that Schlesinger took from this experience was that his own political class could not be trusted to hold the line against Communist sympathizers. William Langer, after all, who had protected Halperin and made Schlesinger’s life so wretched in OSS, was a Harvard history professor and friend of Arthur Sr. It was this instinct that drew Arthur into a major preoccupation, both intellectual and political, that would dominate this controversial phase of his life. It began with an investigation into the US Communist Party for Life, part of the same Luce empire as Fortune and the country’s most widely read weekly magazine. This devastating critique combined alarmist language with Schlesinger’s trademark trenchant analysis. “Communists are working overtime to expand party influence, open and covert, in the labor movement, among Negroes, among veterans, among unorganized liberals,” he wrote, comparing them to proselytizing “Jesuits, the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses.” He then examined organizations such as the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP) to illustrate how “groups of liberals . . . organized for some benevolent purpose, and because of the innocence, laziness and stupidity of most of the membership, [were] perfectly designed for control by an alert minority.” Then came the thrust to the heart. “The communist party is no menace to the right in the U.S.,” Schlesinger wrote. “It is a great help to the right because of its success in dividing and neutralizing the left. It is to the American left that Communism presents the most serious danger. On the record, Communists have fought other leftists as viciously as they have fought fascists. Their methods are irreconcilable with honest cooperation, as anyone who has tried to work with them has found out the hard way.” It is not difficult to imagine Schlesinger thinking of Halperin as he wrote those last words.31
The Life article provoked immediate and strong reaction, with an onslaught against Schlesinger, predictably, as a “Luce Liberal” in the Daily Worker. Less predicted was the reaction of some friends and mentors, including F. O. Matthiessen, who cut him off completely. Other individual responses were more sympathetic, including one that would have implications for subsequent American history: Ronald Reagan, then a New Deal Democrat, would later say that the article was a moment of epiphany, showing him for the first time what was going on within organizations such as the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), which Schlesinger had named in the piece. Critics would later say it was evidence of Schlesinger’s culpability in the creation of the blacklist.32
The Life article plunged Schlesinger into the middle of a sharp national debate that was existential as much as it was strategic: what to do about Communism and the Soviet Union. On one side were figures like Lippmann, who argued there were “no direct conflicts of vital interest as between the Soviet Union and the United States,” adding that America’s role in the world should be as “mediator, that is, intercessor, reconciler, within the circle of the big powers.” Popular Front liberals, including writers Norman Mailer and I. F. Stone, reinforced that view by promoting cooperation with Communists at home and, in 1948, by supporting former vice president Henry Wallace’s run for president. “Communists also supported Wallace,” Leo P. Ribuffo notes, “too openly for his own comfort” (he won 2.4 percent of the vote). Ranged against them were centrist liberals like Reinhold Niebuhr and Schlesinger plus the “wise men” who coalesced around the new president Harry Truman. Harriman and friends such as Dean Acheson and George Kennan began to put in place new military, economic, and political institutions to contain and, some hoped, even roll back Soviet expansion. On the right, figures such as Robert Taft, the senator from Ohio, feared there was “no limit to the burden” of such commitments, but Arthur Vandenberg, the influential Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1947 to 1949, helped drive the measures through. Waiting in the wings were the Cold War hawks such as rising Republican congressman Richard Nixon and government official Paul Nitze, who believed the fight against global Communism had not gone far enough and sought to extend it. “The result,” worried George Kennan, architect of containment, “is that there is no place in public life for an honest and moderate man.”33
That was the febrile environment in which those making and writing about policy in the late 1940s found themselves. With the world having been divided into rival camps, the question naturally arose in the United States, was there an “enemy within,” and if so, what should be done about them.34
Philip Rahv, a former Communist and cofounder of the Partisan Review, argued in 1952 that Communism was a threat to the United States, it was not a threat in the United States. By the late 1940s membership of the Communist Party (CPUSA) hovered around the forty-three thousand mark, a number similar, Stephen Whitfield points out in The Culture of the Cold War, to American membership of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran church. Most CPUSA members, two thousand of whom were sent underground on subversion schemes, were the worst kind of Stalinist fellow travelers; some were in positions of influence at leading universities, on newspapers, and in Hollywood; others could damage the interests of the United States at the Department of State or the new Department of Defense. The number of Communist Party members, however, was more red herring than red threat: important agents throughout the West were usually not indigenous party members or else had their membership expunged. In Britain, for example, MI5 thoroughly penetrated the CPGB but missed the Cambridge Five spy ring that included Philby, Burgess, and Maclean. Soviet spies had already stolen the A-bomb secret from the United States. As pertinently, Communist penetration by the likes of Alger Hiss and Halperin destroyed the bonds of trust among the elite—exactly as the Soviets had intended to do from the moment in 1944 when Stalin recognized that the United States would replace Britain as the leading capitalist power.35
Bentley’s defection revealed a vast infiltration of US government life by Soviet operatives. “Today nearly every department or agency of this government is infiltrated with them in varying degree,” chief special agent Guy Hottel wrote to FBI director Hoover in March 1946 after reviewing the Bentley file. “To aggravate the situation they appear to have concentrated most heavily in those departments which make policy, particularly in the international field, or carry it into effect.” State Department security official Samuel Klaus summarized the figures in his department in early 1946 as being twenty Soviet agents including Hiss (director of the Office of Special Political Affairs), with a further twenty-seven Communists or sympathizers, and seventy-seven more suspects. The Venona counterintelligence project would lead to the unmasking of a long-standing network of “atomic spies,” including Klaus Fuchs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Harry Gold, and David Greengrass. As agents and cyphers were blown, writes Jonathan Haslam in his history of Soviet intelligence, “the sequence of events had a chilling effect on Kremlin hopes.” By June 1952 Stalin would order all operatives to go dark as the means to “function without interruption under any conditions.”36
Schlesinger’s Life piece in 1947 was his first step toward developing a sustained analysis on issues surrounding the Communist threat at home and abroad. The eventual result would be an antidogmatic pluralism that became the general liberal consensus and that Schlesinger, George Marsden points out, was “one of the first to define.” Temporarily putting aside plans for research on FDR, Arthur now turned to making the case on behalf of the non-Communist Left with a series of articles on the topic: “The future of socialism” for Rahv’s Partisan Review, “Political Culture in the United States” for The Nation, and two articles, “What is loyalty” and “Not left, not right” for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He made a plea for level-headedness and perspec
tive. “The situation cries out for a little less hysteria and a little more calm sense,” he wrote in “What is loyalty” in November 1947. After all, he summed up, “A calm survey surely reveals two propositions on which we can all agree: (1) that Americanism is not a totalitarian faith, which can impose a single economic or political dogma or require a uniformity in observance from all its devotees; but (2) that a serious problem for national security has been created by that fanatical group which rejects all American interests in favor of those of the Soviet Union.”37
In the context of 1947, his two propositions did not evince calm. After FBI investigations and the Venona project revealed the extent of Soviet penetration in the US government, Truman that year had introduced a “Loyalty Order” for federal employees that included FBI background checks on potential Communist links. Congress also joined the fray, reconvening the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which soon began turning up the heat on suspected Communists, particularly in the film industry. Critics cried foul, pointing to an unpleasant strain of anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, and nativism in a process that traded in gossip and innuendo. Even Truman feared what he had unleashed. “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” the president implored, telling advisors, “this must stop.”38
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