Chapter Seven
Yet if there was a problem with the pragmatism of the period, it was that there were simply too many foreign policy problems, too many crises, each crowding the others, demanding to be taken care of in that instant. There was too little time to plan, to think; one could only confront the most immediate problems and get rid of them piecemeal but as quickly as possible, or at least postpone any action. Long-range solutions, thoughtful changes, would have to wait, at least until the second term. And thus it was the irony of the Kennedy Administration that John Kennedy, rationalist, pledged above all to rationality, should continue the most irrational of all major American foreign policies, that policy toward China and the rest of Asia. He was aware of the change in the Communist world, he was aware of the split between the Chinese and the Russians; it was, he realized, something very important. But he would deal with it later.
Early on, when Stevenson and Bowles repeatedly mentioned China to Kennedy, saying that the policy was absurd and that it was urgent to try to change it, Kennedy would smile and agree and say yes, it was a stupid policy, but it would all have to wait. Until the second term. It could not be changed now. There was a limit to the things he could do. Nor was anyone other than Bowles at the State Department eager to look ahead; Rusk believed in the demonology of China, the yellow giant inhaling her neighbors. At State’s Policy Planning Council, the one organ of government which was charged with long-range thinking on foreign policy issues, there was no change. George McGhee, Rusk’s hand-picked man there, called in his staff very early in the Administration and made it clear that he wanted no new ideas on China. The Policy Planning Council, he told a meeting of its staff, was a sacrosanct place. It had never been investigated by the Congress, and he did not want it to be. “Now,” he said, pausing and looking around the room, “I’m sure no one in this room is in favor of recognizing Red China and now that we’re all agreed, we can go ahead . . .” At virtually the same time, at a meeting of the Committee of Principals (the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the head of the CIA), Jerome Wiesner, the President’s Science Adviser, suggested that there be a major review of America’s China policy. He was met by total silence. If discussed at all, he learned, China must be discussed in private, not even at the most secret meetings, for fear that the idea that the Administration was even thinking of China might somehow leak out to the press and arouse the primitives.
Even at a personnel level there could be no change or re-examination. A number of people had already begun to push for another look into the case of John Paton Davies, Jr., one of the most grievously wronged China officers. The new Administration was well stocked with friends and admirers of Davies’ who thought that rehabilitating him was long overdue, and more, would be a sign, albeit a small one, that the new Administration was going to make amends for old wrongs, and also to take a new and more rational look at China and Asia. Harriman, Bowles, Kennan, Schlesinger and McGeorge Bundy all brought up the issue of John Davies at various points (Harriman was the most vociferous, feeling that it was one of the major injustices of the Eisenhower years), but nothing came of their efforts. Rusk, though an old friend of Davies’, did not push the idea, and Kennedy was in no rush to take the political heat for what might be a peripheral issue. Not that he thought Davies was a victim of anything but gross misjustice. He told White House aides that he wanted, while in office, to clear two people, J. Robert Oppenheimer and John Paton Davies, and he wanted Charlie Chaplin to perform once more in this country. He got only as far as Oppenheimer, whom he gave the Fermi Award; Davies and Chaplin would have to wait. When the issue of Davies was brought before him he said yes, it was a terrible injustice, but it would have to be postponed until the second term.
All of this was part of one of the great illusions of the country and the Administration in 1961, the belief that the McCarthy period had come and gone without the country paying any real price, that the Administration and the nation could continue without challenging or coming to terms with the political and policy aberrations of that period. If there were problems, the Administration would somehow glide around them, letting time rather than political candor or courage do the healing. It was a belief that if there were scars from the period (and both the Democratic party and the Department of State were deeply scarred), they were by now secret scars, and if there were victims, they were invisible victims. If one looked away and did not talk about them, somehow they would go away. Yet the truth was altogether different: the scars and the victims were real, and the McCarthy period had frozen American policies on China and Asia. The Kennedy Administration would in no way come to terms with the aberrations of those policies; it had not created them, as its advocates pointed out, but it did not undo them, either. It would take no new stands on China (the one Kennedy Administration speech on China, by Roger Hilsman, was not given until after the President’s assassination), and Davies was finally cleared by the State Department in the last few months of the Johnson Administration.
The failure to come to terms with China and with the McCarthy period was costly, because without looking realistically at China, the Administration could not look realistically at the rest of Southeast Asia. It was failures and frustrations over China which had involved the United States in Vietnam and changed American policy there in 1949; now, because it was not coming to terms with China, the Kennedy Administration would soon expand the Eisenhower Administration policy and commitment in Vietnam. Above all, John Kennedy did not want to revise America’s Asia policy (even in October 1963, with Vietnam falling apart, he told television interviewers that he did not want to cut off aid to Vietnam because that might start events comparable to those preceding the fall of China, and that was the last thing he wanted). Thus, because he did not look back on America’s China policy, it was easier for him, in 1961, to move forward in Vietnam.
American policy in the immediate postwar years had been marked by uncertainty and ambivalence. Although the French were allowed to return to Indochina, they were not given the arms they wanted, the transport they said they needed, the economic assistance they sought. The United States was traditionally anticolonial, and anti-Communism as a major issue had not yet arisen, though there were already some disturbing signs; the 1944 Dewey-Roosevelt race had seen the first use of major Republican Red-baiting. In Indochina, American sympathy for nationalism was muted, not so much for fear of Communism as by a kind of inertia, a preoccupation with other areas, an unwillingness to go against an old and threatened ally. But an even-handed approach, if such was the case, obviously worked in favor of the French; a status quo attitude meant they would reassert their control of Indochina, perhaps not as readily as with U.S. aid, but a reassertion nonetheless. What was most striking about this first failure of American policy was that it took place before the Cold War had hardened, before the Iron Curtain descended, at a time when there was still some residual influence from Roosevelt, essentially anticolonial in his viewpoint, and when the Secretary of State was George Catlett Marshall, who was more dubious about an American order, a man of some modesty in his view of what the U.S. role in the world should be, a representative of an older and more modest generation, a preAmerican-empire generation. (Thus in 1947 Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, the first of the militant Cold Warriors, would write of Marshall: “The only areas where I am not sure of his equipment are, first, the economic background, and second, awareness of the nature of Communist philosophy. However, he learns fast.”) Marshall, as Roosevelt before him, saw a more diverse and pluralistic world, but their successors in the world of national security would not be quite so tolerant of the world’s instincts to go its own way. The Cold War was coming and the American empire would be part of it.
Yet even in the years of Secretary of State Marshall, the policy was a particularly unsatisfactory one, and in 1946 he cabled Paris instructions which noted both the injustices of the colonial regime and Ho Chi Minh’s Communist associations. The cable concluded: “Frank
ly we have no solution of the problem to suggest.” If the State Department did not apply adequate pressure on the French to negotiate (it applied pressure without leverage, knowing full well the limits of its position), by the same token it did not accept the French tenet that this was a free-world fight against Communism, an idea close to the hearts of the French government. Though the American press did not delve with great insight into the struggle between the Vietminh and the French, it did not accept the assumptions of the French that this was a great Western crusade against Communist hordes. The war was, in fact, viewed as a colonial war.
Two events would change the American perceptions, and equally important in this case, the disposition to perceive nuances. (Many things, after all, were perceptible, if one wanted to see them, but the seeing involved increasing risk. It became better not to see the shades of difference—the fact, for instance, that Ho, although a Communist, might also be primarily Vietnamese and under no orders from Moscow.) The first event was the hardening of the Cold War as tensions in Europe grew; the second was the fall of China, which sent deep psychic shock waves into the American political structure. These events, coupled with the Korean War and the coming of Senator Joseph McCarthy, would markedly change the American perceptions of international Communism, and more important, change the disposition of high political figures to discern subtleties within the Communist world. The spectrum of American political attitudes would sharply narrow, and there would be an enormous two-party consensus of anti-Communism. The only main difference was on how to implement it, one centrist group believing in subtle anti-Communism, using economic aid as a weapon, using nationalism as a weapon; the other believing more in sheer military force. A major party would find itself on the defensive on the charge of having lost a major country to the Communists; and most remarkable of all, the key architect of an entire era of militant anti-Communism, Dean Acheson, would find himself the center of a national political campaign, the charge being not that he was too harsh in his anti-Communism, but that he had been too soft.
It was an unreal time. The events in Europe, the postwar drawing of lines between the Communists and the Western powers, probably had a historical inevitability to it. Two great and uncertain powers were coming to terms with each other, a task made more difficult by their ideological differences (each believed its own myth about itself and its adversary) and by the additional frightening factor of the atomic weapon. Long-range historical analysis will probably show that in those years they were like two blind dinosaurs wrestling in a very small pit. Each thought its own policies basically defensive, and the policies of its adversary basically aggressive. Out of this would come new tensions and new fears for a new world power like the United States. But the China issue, even more emotional, and the coming of the Korean War, would legitimatize the fringe viewpoints, would limit rational discussion and rational political activity. China would help freeze American policy toward Communism. A kind of demonology about a vast part of the world would become enshrined as accepted gospel. One major political party would be too frightened to challenge it, the other delighted to reap the benefits from it. All of this would affect Indochina.
Nineteen forty-seven and forty-eight were the watershed years. The lines of a hard peace were becoming apparent; the foreign ministers’ meeting had failed. Czechoslovakia went Communist in a coup, and Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk jumped or was pushed to his death. A few months later the Berlin blockade took place.
In 1947 Marshall had announced the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery, a move which the Soviet Union regarded as a gesture of economic warfare. In May of 1947 the Truman Doctrine was announced. The American policy was now clearly one of containment. The Soviet Union had become an adversary and the national security planners were committed to total and constant conflict. The Forrestal Diaries, which provide poignant insights into the thinking of one of the most forceful and persuasive architects of that period, are filled with references, first, to the dangers and vulnerability of the American public and the American press to Communist propaganda, and second, to the old post-Munich fear of the democracies of competition with a totalitarian dictator (in October 1947, during a lunch with Robert Lovett, Walter Bedell Smith, Robert Murphy and General Lucius Clay, Forrestal asked Smith, our ambassador to the USSR, if the Russians wanted war. Smith answered by quoting Stalin as saying the Russians did not want war, “but the Americans want it even less than we do and that makes our position stronger”). It would be this fear that the American public might be soft plus the parallel need to make decisions for it in this most difficult and complex struggle, which would become a basic tenet of faith for national security planning in this era; a belief that by its nature the competition was simply unfair. There was a certain irony here; it was as if the national security people in 1947 under Forrestal and Acheson had worked so hard to gear up a campaign of anti-Communism that some eighteen years later their lineal descendants could not escape the rhythms they helped create; having once mounted the tiger’s back, they found it difficult to descend.
But they were worried less about descending than about motivating this country to the threat they perceived. These men were all from the big investment and banking houses, or lawyers for them; they and their class had long harbored an abiding suspicion not so much of Russia as of Communism. Their tendency was to see the growing American-Soviet conflict in their terms and definitions, fulfilling their long suspicions. To them it was an ism, not just two new great powers struggling to find their balance. Thus the men who defined postwar American policy defined it in ideological, not national terms. Forrestal, who was particularly suspicious of Communist designs, was delighted to find a brilliant young diplomat-intellectual named George F. Kennan at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and Kennan’s warnings about Soviet intentions were immediately seized upon by Forrestal as intellectual and historical evidence of the great struggle ahead. Forrestal made the Kennan reports available to friends throughout Washington, and Kennan’s career took off overnight. His reporting was eventually published both in Foreign Affairs (under the byline X) and as a book which became the primer of postwar American diplomacy and was read by almost every college student at every great university, one of the most influential books of an entire generation. Kennan became known as the author of the containment policy, but he had been talking more about Russia than about Communists. He would eventually find his ideas being exploited, as it were, by his superiors, used as a justification for an increasing militarization of American foreign policy. He eventually broke with the other foreign policy architects because he thought they were too ideological and too military-oriented in their policies. He felt that the Communist world was much more nationalist in its origins than it was monolithic, and that we were creating our own demonology. His opinions in the early fifties represented the first truly major dissent within a largely consensus view of a nonconsensus world.
The Kennan experience was not to be the last time that the national security principals would take the intelligence reporting of their own experts and exploit it out of context, de-emphasizing the issue of nationalism and exploiting the issue of Communism. The same thing happened during the Korean War, when the China experts predicted accurately what China would do, not based on Communist intentions but on Chinese history, and the last time would be during the Vietnam war, when again the experts predicted accurately Hanoi’s responses to American escalation. But these were distinctions few were interested in twenty years ago; what was needed was a unity of national purpose against the Communists. Nothing else would suffice.
It was an ideological and bipartisan movement; it enjoyed the support of the press, of the churches, of Hollywood. There was stunningly little debate or sophistication of the levels of anti-Communism. It was totally centrist and politically very safe; anything else was politically dangerous. Acheson would note that in 1947, when Truman was discussing his proposals for American aid to Greece and Turkey with congressional leaders,
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sp; he stressed that these attacks and pressures upon these countries were not, as surface appearances might suggest, merely due to border rows originating with their neighbors, but were part of a series of Soviet moves, which included stepped-up Communist party activity in Italy, France and Germany. I can see Senator Vandenberg now, suddenly leaning forward on the sofa in the President’s office and saying, “If you will say that to the whole country, I will support you.” The presentation was put in this way, to the surprise and disapproval of some commentators.
Among those who were surprised was Acheson’s boss, George Marshall, who thought the statement a little rash and too broad. He misunderstood the coming need to overlook certain subtleties as the Cold War developed. Thus were Greece and Turkey the first dominoes, and thus did a Democratic Administration offer up as justification for its foreign policies something far closer to what the Republican minority wanted, which reflected the interests and prejudices of the most influential bankers and lawyers. In order to get the job done, the Administration was willing to see the conflict in ideological rather than nationalist terms. The Democrats, feeling themselves vulnerable on this question (liberals often associated with reform causes which were tainted with domestic Communism), were increasingly willing to trim their own sails and accept the assumptions of their more conservative domestic adversaries.
The Best and the Brightest Page 18