by David Milne
In dispensing instruction on how best to shape the postwar world, Lippmann was farsighted on some issues but unduly pessimistic on a host of others. Insightfully, Lippmann observed that Germany should be weaned off notions of autarky—or continental Germanism—and encouraged to forge a new economic identity as an exporting nation: “It will be safer for all of Europe, and also for Russia, if Germany becomes dependent upon maritime commerce. The less self-sufficient Germany is, the better for her neighbors whom she has sought to dominate, and for the Atlantic nations which will emerge from this war with the command of the seas.”127 Channeling Germany’s formidable economic potential in this export-led direction made sound geopolitical sense and anticipated the nation’s remarkable journey from militarized, authoritarian aggressor to war-averse, export-led superpower. On Japan, conversely, Lippmann’s usual perspicacity was hindered by a failure of imagination. He wrote, “The American objective will have been attained if Japan is incapable of recovering the military force to strike again. The reform and reconstruction of Japan are beyond our ken, and we shall be wise to solidify our relations with China by being in these matters her second … we cannot manage a Japanese revolution.”128 The United States has enjoyed few foreign-affairs successes comparable to its occupation of Japan, which indeed amounted to a revolution of sorts in the nation’s polity and external bearing.
On potential sources of conflict with Moscow, Lippmann appeared blithe. He downgraded the significance of ideology and focused instead on the positive aspect of geographical remoteness. “The two strongest states in the world will be as widely separated as it is possible to be,” Lippmann wrote. “The core of the Soviet power is at the Urals in the deep interior of the Eurasian continent; the American power is in the Mississippi Valley in the heart of the island continent of North America. Not since the unity of the ancient world was disrupted has there been so good a prospect of a settled peace.”129 Here, Lippmann was guilty of viewing events through a nineteenth-century paradigm, failing to anticipate that a divided Europe would become a source of considerable friction between Moscow and Washington, and that liberalism-capitalism and Marxism-Leninism represented not just antagonistic ideologies in theory but also proactive rationales for intervening across the world to steer “progress” in the right direction.
The important thing to note is that Lippmann’s realism was a theory. It assumed permanent trends in the structure of world affairs. It held that the “true statesman” balances resources and commitments, and eschews reckless adventurism, in pursuing policies that redound to the nation’s advantage. It was a social scientific insight. But Stalin was not motivated simply by material concerns. Soviet foreign policy required a wider ideological purpose; it was bound tightly into the nation’s raison d’être. In a pugnacious speech delivered at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1946, Stalin observed that the First and Second World Wars had broken out “as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism.” He pondered whether such wars were avoidable in the future but concluded that only the universal victory of Marxism-Leninism made this possible: “Perhaps catastrophic wars could be avoided if it were possible periodically to redistribute raw materials and markets among the respective countries in conformity with their economic weight by means of concerted and peaceful decisions. But this is impossible under the present capitalist conditions of world economic development.”130
Stalin’s reading of Marx and Lenin blinded him to the reality that conflict between liberal-capitalist states was not inevitable. Under American leadership the West cohered rapidly and effectively in opposing the spread of communism. But in holding that Stalin’s rationality outweighed his ideological convictions, Lippmann similarly misread the taproots of Soviet foreign policy.
Lippmann was also unduly optimistic about Stalin’s capacity to evolve in a more humane direction, writing that “since we became allies in war, the Soviet Union has been committing itself more and more definitively to a foreign policy based on democratic, and not totalitarian, principles … The fact is that Marshal Stalin has now repeatedly affirmed the democratic principle in respect to his dealings with his neighbors within the Russian Orbit.”131 Thinking the best of Stalin was forgivable to someone less informed; the despot had been presented to the American public in a flattering light—as “Uncle Joe”—due to the pressing concern of defeating Hitler. As someone with privileged political access and a wealth of published information, however, Lippmann might have known better.
Lippmann’s purpose in writing the book was to elevate the importance of a close working relationship with the “Russian Orbit” and steer Americans away from their habitual tendency to view their place in the world through a moralistic lens. But U.S. War Aims failed to achieve the desired impact. Some people liked it, certainly. Within the Roosevelt administration, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes described the book as “an outstanding piece of work … novel and extremely interesting.”132 John Foster Dulles, then a foreign affairs adviser to the Republican presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, complimented Lippmann on performing “a most able and constructive job,” particularly in identifying the limitations of the proposed United Nations.133 Like U.S. Foreign Policy, it appeared on the bestseller list and was serialized in Reader’s Digest.
But hostility outweighed praise. Henry Luce, the publisher of Life magazine, considered serializing the book, then declined after reading the galleys. Luce viewed Lippmann’s book as “too anti-Russian” for describing the Soviet Union (accurately) as a “totalitarian state,” even though Lippmann was crystal clear in detailing the diplomatic benefits of a close working relationship between the orbits.134 A former colleague at The World, John L. Balderston, complained to Lippmann that the book’s underlying pessimism left him with a “feeling of despair.” Lippmann defended his portrait of the postwar world as both accurate and reasonably optimistic:
There’s a great deal of confusion among our friends who think that war, which is a destructive process, can create the brave new world. The brave new world, in my view, can be created only if and when the threat of great war had disappeared for two or three generations. In other words, I think we shall get a peace as conclusive as that which followed the Napoleonic Wars and a century as free from great wars as was the Nineteenth. That’s a devil of a lot when you think about it.135
The “friend” who had detailed a path to creating “a brave new world” from the ashes of war was Sumner Welles, FDR’s undersecretary of state and an architect of his Good Neighbor Policy. In 1944, Welles published The Time for Decision, which restated Woodrow Wilson’s ambitions in calling for the creation of a much-strengthened League of Nations. The book was driven by the idealism that Lippmann’s book set out to denigrate, and it captured the public’s mood of optimism much more successfully. The book sold a million copies and garnered critical plaudits from across the spectrum of opinion. Welles also reviewed U.S. War Aims critically. As Lippmann recalled, “Sumner Welles reviewed the book and opposed it because he said it was old-fashioned belief in the balance of power … all of which we had to get away from in one word—the United Nations.”136 In 1944, foreign policy appeared to be running away from Lippmann’s modest spheres-driven realism, as he well realized: “The whole trend of our policy went in the other direction. The first theory was that we were going to unite everybody, including the Russians, in one world, and all were going to think alike. When that broke down, then we were going to unite everybody but the Russians in one world … The book came out as Roosevelt was in his last phase, and Truman, of course, never read a book.”137
As Lippmann had cautioned in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, the “outsider” American population, “served” by weak political leadership, was driving the nation toward needless confrontation with the one power with which America should remain on reasonably good terms. Worst of all was the notion that the United Nations should assume the essential role of ar
biter. Lippmann complained later that “I can’t help feeling that Welles’s book did enormous damage in diverting the American people from an understanding of the historical realities … I might have accomplished more by a running criticism of him than I did by my own book.”138 Lippmann’s plans had been frustrated by a population swayed by the Wilsonian sophistry of Sumner Welles and Wendell Willkie. If only, he lamented, “the public, and particularly the idealistic public, were not so stubbornly naïve.”139
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Sumner Welles’s collaborative ideas were put to the test from August to October 1944, when representatives from the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and China met in Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., to draw a blueprint for a successor organization to the League of Nations. During these discussions the four major components of the United Nations were established: the Security Council, the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, and a Secretariat. Significantly, the four delegations agreed that the United Nations should possess a military capability. This would be created through member states placing their militaries at the disposal of the Security Council at moments of crisis. Woodrow Wilson’s dreams were being realized. As were Mahan’s and Lippmann’s nightmares.
In a long letter to his friend Grenville Clark, chairman of the Citizens Committee for a National War Service Act, Lippmann poured scorn on events at Dumbarton Oaks. He complained that “the Dumbarton Delegates have sought to create a universal society to enforce peace before the world has been sufficiently pacified … With these conventions to pacify and unite, we should not be quarrelling with Russia over the conundrum of legal equality, but should be bound together with Russia to make and keep the peace in the critical generation ahead of us.” Lippmann thought that the creation of the United Nations was a foolish distraction at a time of profound global flux. When world peace became reality was the right time to vest faith in a new geopolitical experiment. It was “a false major premise” to believe that Dumbarton Oaks could conjure up “a universal society to pacify the world.”140 On this count, Lippmann’s skepticism was well founded.
Remarkably, the creation of a United Nations was not even a campaign issue during the general election of 1944. Both Roosevelt and the Republican candidate, New York governor Thomas Dewey, agreed on the wisdom of establishing a new global organization to keep the peace. Lippmann had grown mightily tired of FDR’s presidency—then in its twelfth year—but Dewey struck him as a worse prospect. Dewey had criticized Roosevelt for refusing to confront Stalin over his future plans for Poland. In “Today & Tomorrow” Lippmann criticized Dewey’s support for those “reactionary Poles” who were foolish enough to resist compromise with Stalin over the nation’s frontiers and political composition.141 John Foster Dulles was furious with Lippmann, writing that “the basic issue between you and the governor is that you do not believe that the United States should have any policies at all except in relation to areas where we can make those policies good through material force. The governor, on the other hand, believes in moral force.” Unwilling to accept a sanctimonious attack from a man who previously favored the appeasement of Hitler—even after the fall of France—Lippmann penned a cutting retort: “I wonder if it would be profitable to argue about who is more aware of the moral issues involved in this war, for that would involve examination of the record, whereas I for one prefer to let bygones be bygones.”142
Lippmann did not so much endorse Roosevelt as eviscerate Dewey. In “T&T,” he wrote, “I cannot feel that Governor Dewey can be trusted with responsibility in foreign affairs. He has so much to learn, and there would be no time to learn it, that the risk and cost of change during this momentous year seems to me too great.”143 The voting public appeared to agree with Lippmann, reelecting Roosevelt with 432 electoral college votes to Dewey’s 99—a winning margin of 3.5 million cast ballots. Isolationists such as Hamilton Fish and Gerald P. Nye were voted from office. Self-declared “internationalists” entered Congress in considerable number, including a young, well-traveled Rhodes scholar from Arkansas named J. William Fulbright. Lippmann was pleased with the outcome at both the executive and legislative levels. But he remained concerned by the administration’s still buoyant enthusiasm for the United Nations and the prospect that growing U.S.-Soviet discord might derail his hopes for postwar stability. Roosevelt’s new vice president, Harry S. Truman, did not inspire much confidence in this regard. On June 23, 1941, Truman had observed, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.”144
Engaging in diplomatic cynicism of a different kind, Winston Churchill visited Moscow in October 1944 to propose to Stalin a “percentages deal,” whereby Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe (excluding Poland) would be divided into distinct spheres of interest. The Soviet Union would secure a preponderant stake in Romania, for example, while Britain would play the dominant role in Greece. This was a diplomatic gambit of which nineteenth-century prime ministers such as Disraeli and Palmerston would have been proud. Churchill appeared oblivious of how the times had changed, however, so when his proposal went public, a significant backlash ensued—FDR was compelled to disown his ally’s proposal. In Lippmann’s opinion, Churchill had displayed considerable skill in extracting a quid pro quo from a relatively weak diplomatic position. He was dismayed by such a violent response to sensible diplomacy. Lippmann wrote in December 1944 that American troops had not died to “have a plebiscite in eastern Galicia or to return Hong Kong to Chiang Kai-shek.”145 The irrational passions of the masses were again skewing the pursuit of sound diplomatic strategy driven by those privy to “insider” knowledge.
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met for a final time at the Crimean resort town of Yalta in February 1945. While Germany stood on the cusp of defeat, the daunting prospect of a sea invasion of Japan remained likely. The U.S. atomic bomb was still in development. It is in this context that we must comprehend FDR’s primary goal of securing Soviet support for continued military action against Japan—to which Stalin agreed at a fixed point three months after Germany’s unconditional surrender. The Big Three also hammered out a Declaration on Liberated Europe, which called for free elections in those nations liberated from Nazi occupation. This read well on the page, but the terms were ambiguous and effectively unenforceable.
Attempting to extract a Soviet concession on Eastern Europe, Churchill made clear that an independent Poland for him was a matter of honor. Stalin retorted testily that for the Soviet Union a friendly Poland was a matter of security. Roosevelt interjected that free elections in Poland “should be as ‘pure’ as Caesar’s wife.” Ominously, Stalin replied, “They said that about her, but in fact she had her sins.” Five days of grueling negotiations had produced cloudiness on the fate of Eastern and Central Europe. When Admiral William Leahy, serving as the president’s chief of staff, complained that the common declaration was so elastic that it could be stretched from the Black Sea to Washington without fear of rupture, FDR replied, “I know, Bill. But it’s the best I could do for Poland at this time.”146
Lippmann agreed. Yalta was as good an agreement as could have been made in the circumstances. In “T&T” he wrote that “there has been no more impressive international conference in our time, none in which great power was so clearly hardened to the vital, rather than the secondary, interests of nations.”147 Lippmann was as enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s presidency as he had ever been. Then, at this high point of goodwill, reports began circulating about the fragile state of FDR’s health. The long trip to Yalta had taken a severe physical toll on a man with serious and long-standing health problems. Upon his return, Roosevelt had retreated swiftly to Warm Springs for rest and medical attention. The prognosis was not good, as photographs of a visibly frail Roosevelt at Yalta testified. “Fearing that the president might not live much longer,” Ronald Steel writes, “Lippmann, as a final gesture to the man toward whom he had such confl
icting feelings, decided to write a tribute to FDR—in effect an obituary—while the president was still able to read it.”148 Having subjected Roosevelt to scathing critical treatment throughout the 1930s, Lippmann graciously observed that his performance during the Second World War had been exemplary. In this respect, the warmth of Lippmann’s assessment was aided by the fact that Roosevelt’s narrow conception of the national interest had come to converge so closely with his own. Painful concessions to Stalin at Yalta had proved beyond doubt that “[President Roosevelt’s] estimate of the vital interests of the United States has been accurate and far-sighted. He has served these interests with audacity and patience, shrewdly and with calculation, and he has led this country out of the greatest peril in which it has ever been to the highest point of security, influence, and respect which it has ever attained.”149
It was an accurate and generous premortem eulogy. America’s greatest twentieth-century president died from a cerebral hemorrhage five days later.
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Lippmann had emerged from war as the nation’s most powerful journalist-analyst of foreign policy. U.S. War Aims had failed to hit its intended target, but his “Today & Tomorrow” column went from strength to strength in terms of its national and international readership. Losing a president devoted to a friendly relationship with the Soviet Union, however, was a major blow to Lippmann’s persuasive aspirations regarding the postwar world. President Harry Truman’s blunt, straight-talking style and provincial roots concerned Lippmann. Yet there were other political problems that commanded Lippmann’s attention. Foremost was the imperative that the Republican Party be prevented from turning lethal fire on FDR’s legacy—in the same way as Woodrow Wilson’s diplomatic goals were crushed after the First World War.