Read Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 Online
Authors: James T. Patterson
Tags: #Oxford History of the United States, #Retail, #20th Century, #History, #American History
James Forrestal was the closest the navy had to a Stimson or a Marshall. Like many leading Establishmentarians, he had an Ivy League education—in his case Princeton—and a prewar career on Wall Street as an extraordinarily successful bond salesman. Ambitious and driven, Forrestal was a workaholic and a loner whose intensity worried people around him. His marriage was a shambles, and he had no time for his children. He, too, entered government service in 1940, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. In 1944 he became Secretary. By 1946 he had become an influential voice in the ever-louder chorus that demanded tough policies against the Russians. In 1947 Truman named him as America's first Secretary of Defense, whereupon the tensions involved in trying to curb interservice rivalries worsened his erratic behavior. Truman finally removed him in March 1949. Two months later, as a patient at the naval hospital at Bethesda, Forrestal jumped from a high window to his death.
All these men identified easily with tough-minded approaches to many foreign policy questions. So, too, did many other leading American diplomatists. Few took a harder line in 1945 than Harriman, whom Truman kept on as Ambassador to the Soviet Union until March 1946. Harriman then served Truman as Ambassador to Great Britain and as Secretary of Commerce. Long after that Harriman remained influential in Democratic politics, both as governor of New York in the mid-1950s and as a dark horse for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1956. He surfaced again as Lyndon Johnson's negotiator in the forlorn quest for peace in Vietnam during the late 1960s.
Harriman was the son of railroad tycoon Edward Henry Harriman and was educated at Groton School (FDR's alma mater) and Yale. He was tall, rich, imperious, bored with the railroad business, and eager—detractors said sycophantically and desperately eager—to make a name for himself in government. He entered public service by working for the New Deal during the 1930s and was posted in 1941 to Great Britain as FDR's "defense expeditor." Named Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1943, Harriman never acquired much expertise about the Soviet system, and until mid-1944 he agreed with what he took to be Roosevelt's quest for accommodation and cooperation with Stalin. Later that year, however, Harriman convinced himself that the Soviets were not to be trusted, and he fired off cables calling for get-tough policies. These did not much affect Truman in 1945, but they echoed the strong anti-Soviet feelings that many other Establishment advisers were developing at the same time.
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Dean Acheson, in many ways the most powerful Establishmentarian of them all, was also a product of Groton and Yale, followed by the Harvard Law School and later by two years as secretary to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Acheson, too, had entered public service during the 1930s, but he found New Deal economic policies far too liberal for his conservative tastes and resigned as Undersecretary of the Treasury in 1933. He returned to government service as Assistant Secretary of State between 1941 and 1945 and as Undersecretary from August 1945 to mid-1947. Acheson was quick-witted, widely read, arrogant, and condescending. He dressed in well-tailored clothes and spoke with a clipped accent that betrayed his unapologetic Anglophilia. Many Republicans (and some Democrats) literally loathed him. But Truman found him a forceful adviser and a faithful admirer. When the President returned from Missouri to the Washington train station in November 1946 after Republicans had swept the mid-term elections, Acheson stood virtually alone on the platform to greet him. Truman never forgot this show of faith and relied ever more heavily on his counsel thereafter. Acheson served as Secretary of State during Truman's second term.
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Acheson held conservative views about most domestic policies and had little but contempt for Marxist or Communist ideas. He was certain that there was little if anything to be gained by trying to negotiate seriously with the Soviets. More than most diplomatists of his generation he had formed a self-assured and broad view of world history that he thought explained Russian behavior. The Soviets, he believed, practiced old- fashioned Russian geopolitics aimed at securing warm-water ports and greater influence in Iran, Turkey, and eastern Europe. They had to be countered with equally determined tenacity by the West.
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Acheson's greatest influence on the Truman administration came later, in 1947 and again after 1949. But by 1946 he, too, was offering a highly self-confident voice for firmness against the Soviet Union.
In 1945 there were other, lesser-known Establishment figures who stood in the wings of policy-making and who became prominent later. Among them were John Foster Dulles, a Princeton-educated New York attorney who served as a special adviser in the State Department in the Truman years and Secretary of State under President Eisenhower; Allen Dulles, his younger brother, another Princeton-educated lawyer, who became a dashing wartime intelligence agent, headed the influential Council on Foreign Relations between 1946 and 1949, and later ran the Central Intelligence Agency; Charles Bohlen, a career diplomat who served as an interpreter of Russian at Yalta and became Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1953; George Kennan, a cerebral Princeton graduate who shared Bohlen's special competence in Russian affairs; Dean Rusk, a Georgian who became a Rhodes Scholar and served as an army officer in the Burma-India-China theater during the war, then rose steadily in the State and War departments, becoming Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in March 1950; and many other well-educated young men whose self-assurance was whetted, though usually not in combat, during the dire days of World War II.
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Most of these people, too, had gone to private schools and elite universities. (Roughly 75 percent of State Department recruits between 1914 and 1922—senior officials after 1945—had prep school backgrounds.) They tended to be Europe-oriented and Anglophilic and were often well connected to major eastern law firms, banks, and investment houses. Some of them, including Acheson, Rusk, and the Dulles brothers, were sons of Protestant ministers: like Woodrow Wilson before them, they brought a high-toned moralism to their duties.
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All moved ahead rapidly in the expanding foreign policy and War Department bureaucracies. Then and later their network of contacts helped them to shift easily from one such bureaucracy to another, or at least to communicate informally by congregating at one of the exclusive clubs to which they belonged.
By the mid-1940s many of these officials—Acheson and Kennan above all—tended to become critical, even contemptuous, of the less well educated, democratically elected "politicians" who had traditionally played major roles in American foreign policy-making during the more relaxed and amateur days before World War II.
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In this way the war, and the Cold War years that followed, did much to change the way that foreign policy was conducted. Henceforth it was to depend more on non-elected officials who circulated in and out of private life (especially the law and high finance in New York and Washington), and less on members of Congress and other elected politicians, who necessarily (Establishmentarians thought) catered to ill-informed constituencies and pressure groups at home. A foreign policy run by knowledgeable elites who knew and trusted each other, the officials thought, could be protected from the dangerous explosions of popular opinion.
The Establishment, needless to say, was hardly monolithic. Truman had a very different background from those of most of his advisers. Some influential officials, such as Kennan and Rusk, did not come from the Northeast. Marshall was a Virginian and a professional soldier. Forrestal, though a Princetonian, had a middle-class Irish-American background (which he resolutely tried to erase from his consciousness). They differed also in their views on domestic policies—Harriman was a liberal Democrat, Acheson a conservative, the Dulleses Republicans—and on many controversies involving foreign and defense policies.
Still, there is merit in using the term "Establishment." Save some older men like Stimson, most of these key people formed their opinions during World War II, a hot forge of patriotism. They emerged from the conflict believing that the United States had fought nobly in a good and necessary war and that America—democratic and well-meaning—stood for what was morally correct in the world. They especially deplored appeasement, which they thought had encouraged the bullies of the 1930s. The message of history was therefore clear: dangerous foreign leaders like Stalin must be met with power and firmness, so that war did not break out again. However these officials may have differed, in age, background, and political persuasion, they also shared a central faith in the capacity of well-educated, sophisticated "experts" like themselves to band together and conduct an "enlightened" foreign policy based on the essential goodness of American principles.
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Underlying their thinking were two other assumptions. The first was that the United States must maintain a strong economic and military posture. Without this, policy would not be
credible
. This quest for "credibility"—a consistent concern of virtually all American leaders after 1945—lay at the center of United States diplomacy throughout the Cold War years.
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The second was that the United States had the means—economic, industrial, and military—to control the behavior of other nations. This belief, which became widely shared by the American people during the postwar years, helped the Establishmentarians to shape what the historian John Gaddis calls the "inner-directed" nature of postwar American foreign policy: it often depended less on what other nations did or did not do than on what the experts thought the United States had the capacity to do.
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This capacity, the Establishmentarians thought, was vast, and they developed correspondingly grand expectations concerning the ability of the nation to prevail in the international arena.
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It helped the generally high reputations of these officials that they seemed not only self-assured but also fairly selfless. Mostly rich and well-connected, they could move in and out of government without worrying much about salary. As appointive officials they did not need to cater to voters. They could appear to be—and truly thought they were—disinterested, far-seeing, and patriotic public servants. Indeed, they thought of themselves as missionaries of a gospel that could save the world; Acheson later entitled his memoirs
Present at the Creation
. For all these reasons the Establishment exercised a special influence in postwar America, most especially in the confused and turbulent years that confronted the brand-new Truman administration after 1945.
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Hardening of the Cold War, 1945–1948
In coping with the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1948, Truman's foreign policies went through three interrelated phases. The first, lasting until early 1946, exposed a good deal of floundering and inconsistency as Truman sought to find himself. The second, dominant through the end of 1946, revealed a little more floundering and uncertainty but also a stiffening of purpose. Although Truman and his advisers still hoped to ameliorate gathering tensions, they made only half-hearted efforts to accommodate the Soviets, or even to negotiate seriously with them. In the third phase, clear by February 1947, the administration hit on a more consistent, clearly articulated policy: containment. The essential stance of the United States for the next forty years, the quest for containment entailed high expectations. It was the most important legacy of the Truman administration.
W
HEN
T
RUMAN TURNED
his attention in 1945 to what was happening in eastern Europe, his first instincts were to act firmly. Stalin, he thought, was violating the Yalta accords, especially in Poland. Roosevelt, he was certain, would have resisted. The President was determined to be decisive and called in Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, to tell him how he felt.
The meeting took place within two weeks of Roosevelt's death and was one of the most fabled of Cold War contacts. Truman wasted no time on small talk and told Molotov that the USSR was breaking the Yalta agreements. Molotov was shaken by Truman's tone and replied, "I have never been talked to like that in my life." Truman retorted, "Carry out your agreements and you won't get talked to like that." Molotov, a Truman aide recalled, turned "a little ashy." But Truman did not relent. "That will be all, Mr. Molotov. I would appreciate it if you would transmit my views to Marshal Stalin."
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Truman, who liked to let people know he was tough, was pleased at this encounter. "I gave him the one-two, right to the jaw," he told a friend.
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He followed with two other moves that signified his faith in the sticks of economic diplomacy. The first postponed (as Roosevelt had) an American response to urgent Soviet requests for an advance of $6 billion in credits. The second, taken quickly after Germany's surrender in early May, called off lend-lease shipments to the USSR. Truman maintained that American law tied lend-lease to the existence of war in Europe and that he had had no choice but to terminate the aid. But in fact he possessed more flexibility than that, and he moved more decisively than he had to: ships already bound for the Soviet Union were told to reverse and come home. Stalin later said that the American action was "brutal," done in a "scornful and abrupt manner."
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These actions demonstrated Truman's capacity, on occasion, for quick decision-making. They also exposed his lack of interest in the subtleties and ambiguities of diplomacy, which he never made much effort to practice. The irony was that he thought he was doing as Roosevelt would have done. But Roosevelt had been more indirect and tactful. To the already intensely suspicious Stalin and his fellow leaders in the Kremlin it appeared that Truman, far from carrying out the policy of FDR, was dramatically reversing it.
Truman's toughness, moreover, had little effect on Soviet behavior. On the contrary, Stalin soon imprisoned sixteen of the twenty Polish leaders of the anti-Communist government who had returned to their homeland from wartime exile in London. He claimed they had been inciting resistance to Soviet occupation forces in Poland. Stalin then permitted the other four to take part in a Soviet-dominated puppet government. By imposing Soviet control on Poland—and similarly pro-Communist regimes on Romania and Bulgaria—Stalin underscored two Cold War realities: first, that he was determined to ensure his domination over bordering nations in Europe; and second, that he had the military power to do so, no matter what the Allies said in protest. For Truman, as well as for many later American Presidents, this was a sobering and greatly frustrating reality.
At this point Truman backed and filled a little. Recognizing that he had been brusque with Molotov, he sent Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's closest adviser, to Moscow, in the hope that the gesture would reassure the suspicious Soviet leadership. Following Hopkins's advice, he then accepted the new arrangements in Poland. He further conceded that Stalin could dismantle factories in eastern Germany and other parts of eastern Europe and that the Allies were to be frozen out of any significant role in all these areas.
Truman's acquiescence reflected several key realities that continued to stave off a consistently get-tough policy in the next few months. The first was that the United States, which had not yet tested the Bomb, was anxious to secure the Soviets as allies in the Pacific. At Yalta Stalin had promised to enter the war against Japan within three months of the defeat of Germany. That would presumably be in early August. Second, military advisers reminded Truman of the obvious: the huge Soviet army already occupied much of central and eastern Europe and would not be dislodged. Third, with the war over in Europe, pressures in the United States for demobilization and reconversion were mounting rapidly. Then and in 1946 popular opinion in America showed little stomach for new military commitments, especially in areas to the east of Germany that seemed remote.
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With these thoughts in mind Truman went in July to Potsdam, in Germany, for his first (and only) face-to-face meeting with Stalin. Later Truman maintained that he returned from this conference deeply disillusioned with the Russians. At the time, however, he seemed mostly pleased. "I can deal with Stalin," he noted in his diary at Potsdam. The President remarked to an associate that Stalin was "as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know." This was in many ways intended as a compliment, for Pendergast kept his word. Then and later Truman seemed to think that Stalin meant well but was a prisoner of a recalcitrant Politburo.
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Some of Truman's optimism at that time derived from news of the long-awaited atomic test. This took place at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on July 16, the day before the Potsdam conference opened, and was powerful beyond all expectations. It imbued Truman with great self-confidence. Churchill later observed, "When [Truman] got to the meeting after having read the report he was a changed man. He told the Russians just where they got off and generally bossed the whole meeting."
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Other top Americans at the conference, notably Secretary of State James Byrnes, were also emboldened by having the Bomb. They imagined that monopoly of such a weapon, along with the sticks of economic diplomacy, would bring Stalin to his senses.
Possession of the Bomb nonetheless confronted Truman with difficult decisions. Should he tell Stalin about it? What sort of warning, if any, should he give to the Japanese? Should such an awesome weapon be used at all in war? If so, when and under what circumstances? In coping with the first question Truman resolved to tell Stalin no more than he had to. At Potsdam he mentioned to him casually that the United States had a big new bomb but made no effort to engage him in discussion about it. Stalin, who had spies working for him, expected the news and showed little interest. In deciding what to do with the Bomb Truman apparently pondered the moral questions a little more than he later cared to admit. But not very deeply, and he did not let moral scruples stop him from his determination to drop the Bomb on Japan. At Potsdam he warned the Japanese to surrender or face "prompt and utter destruction." This was scarcely a clear warning, especially to leaders of a nation whose cities had already been devastated by fire-bombs of napalm and jellied gasoline, the most horrific of which in March had killed 100,000 Tokyo civilians. When Japan did not respond to the warning, Truman made no effort to postpone the bombing of Hiroshima, which was destroyed on August 6. When Japan, confused by what had happened, still did not surrender, the bombing of Nagasaki went off according to standing orders, on August 9. The attacks killed an estimated 135,000 people, most of them civilians. Another 130,000 or so died within the next five years of radiation sickness and other bomb-related causes.
These decisions have naturally stimulated a vast amount of controversy and second-guessing, much of it many years after the fact. Some of Truman's critics deplore as immoral the use of such weapons at all. Others argue that he could have issued more explicit warnings, waited longer for a Japanese response, or arranged for top Japanese leaders to see a demonstration in an uninhabited area. Even writers who are relatively friendly to Truman can find little excuse for his refusal to reconsider standing orders to bomb a second city (Nagasaki). Still other critics insist that use of the bombs was unnecessary, because moderate factions among Japanese leaders had already sent out diplomatic signals indicating a desire to surrender, providing that they could retain their Emperor (which Japan ultimately was allowed to do). Truman's defenders retort that a demonstration might not have worked, which at the least would have been embarrassing. At that time, moreover, the United States had only two A-bombs ready for use. Above all, Truman insisted later that he decided to drop the bombs in order to stop the carnage of fighting as soon as possible. His defenders cite official American estimates—based in part on the suicidal resistance between April and June of Japanese forces in Okinawa—that a bloody land invasion of Japan (not scheduled to start until November) would otherwise have been necessary to end the war. The A-bombs, they claim, ended the war immediately and saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of American and Japanese lives.
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Use of the atomic bomb has also prompted angry and unending debates concerning Soviet-American relations. Some revisionist writers dispute Truman's claim that he authorized the bombings solely to defeat Japan as soon as possible. They argue that he wanted to force a Japanese surrender before the Soviets could make good on their promise to enter the war in the Pacific. (As it happened, the Soviets declared war on Japan on August 8.) Ending the war quickly would help to prevent the Soviet Union from claiming important concessions in Asia. Revisionist critics add that Truman used the Bomb in order to show the Russians that the United States would indeed drop it against an enemy in war. That would make them respect American resolve in the future. Truman, they say, should not have used the Bomb until he saw what the Japanese would do, especially after the much-feared Russians joined the Allied forces against them. That he did not wait, revisionists conclude, indicates that he was playing Atomic Diplomacy.
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Several conclusions seem fair concerning these heated debates. First, Truman had no serious qualms about using the Bomb against Japan. During the months before the successful test at Alamagordo he gave only cursory attention to the counter-arguments of those scientists who raised moral concerns. He took this position in part because the Bomb had been developed with wartime use in mind (though not, at first, against the Japanese), and in part because the weapon was ready as of August in 1945. The majority of Truman's aides, moreover, favored dropping it on Japan; expressed doubts about the wisdom or morality of doing so mostly came later, after the fact. In effect, neither Truman nor his advisers resisted the powerful bureaucratic momentum that had accumulated by mid-1945. Truman also decided as he did because he thought that the Japanese—whose most influential military leaders seemed determined to fight on—were "savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic." Like many people in 1945, the President was swept up in the passionate emotions of a long and catastrophic war. Finally, Truman felt a considerable responsibility as commander-in-chief. He believed it his duty to put an end to the fighting—especially to American casualties—as soon as possible.
The decision to use the Bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was politically popular in the United States—no doubt of that. And it quickly ended the war. Amid the awful passions of the time, it is hardly surprising that Truman acted as he did. Still, revisionism persists. In retrospect, it seems clear (though this is debated) that he could have waited longer—to give the shaken and bewildered Japanese time to figure out what had happened at Hiroshima—before approving use of the Bomb that leveled Nagasaki. It also seems clear that he would have risked little by postponing the bombings in order to ascertain whether Japanese moderates in Tokyo might succeed in their efforts to reach a peace. Postponement would also have given Truman time to assess the impact on the Japanese of Russian engagement in Asia. The land invasions, after all, were not scheduled to take place for another three months, during which time America was unlikely to suffer much in the way of casualities. That Truman pushed ahead, however, does not prove that he was playing Atomic Diplomacy with the Soviets; the best evidence suggests instead that he wanted to stop the fighting as soon as possible. Moreover, subsequent studies of official Japanese decision-making suggest that most top leaders in Tokyo adamantly opposed peace in August 1945: only the A-bombs, bringing on the intercession of Emperor Hirohito, finally forced the Japanese to surrender. For these reasons, the revisionist arguments, while understandable given the horror of nuclear weapons, command only partial acceptance among scholars of the subject.
Still more ironies. Still more Western frustration. Dropping the bombs did not in fact change or soften Soviet behavior. Apparently unimpressed by America's atomic might, Stalin clamped down harder on Romania and Bulgaria. Having absorbed a large slice of eastern Poland, the Soviets compensated the Poles by giving them a chunk of eastern Germany. They made a satellite of northern Korea, resisting Western efforts to reunify the nation. The Soviet Union refused to take part in the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, Western-dominated institutions that the United States deemed central to economic recovery. By late 1945 Stalin was intensifying pressure on Turkey for greater control of the Dardanelles and on Iran for a sphere of interest.
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