Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (16 page)

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Authors: James T. Patterson

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These Soviet moves placed the United States in a reactive position. Truman and his advisers were not only frustrated but irresolute. Part of the problem, Truman gradually came to believe, was Secretary of State Byrnes. Truman had known him well since the 1930s when Byrnes, a South Carolinian, had served with him in the Senate. Byrnes had then assumed other high-ranking positions, including a place on the Supreme Court in 1941 and head of the Office of War Mobilization after 1943. Many people, Truman included, had expected Byrnes to be Roosevelt's choice for vice-presidential nominee in 1944. In July 1945 he appointed Byrnes as his Secretary of State.
10

Given Byrnes's experience, it seemed a logical appointment. But Byrnes had no good strategy for dealing with the Soviets, other than hoping that economic pressures would lead them to make concessions. By the end of 1945 it was becoming ever more clear that this was not happening. Leading senators, including Tom Connally of Texas, head of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, top Republican on the committee, came to Truman to complain that Byrnes was too willing to horse-trade with the Soviets. Acheson, who was Undersecretary of State, meanwhile fretted at Byrnes's frequent absences from Washington and at his inattention to orderly administration. "The State Department fiddles while Byrnes roams," wags were saying.
11
Acheson and others in the State Department also tired of Byrnes's improvisational style of diplomacy. That might have worked well in the Senate but, Acheson believed, was wholly inappropriate in dealing with the Russians. Byrnes, who had expected to be Vice-President, compounded his problems by patronizing Truman and by failing to keep him informed of his discussions with allies and enemies. Truman, always sensitive to slights, grew increasingly irritated, referring privately to his "able and conniving secretary of state."
12

By early 1946 Truman was rapidly losing patience with the Soviet Union. Ordering Byrnes to keep him better informed, he also made it clear that he intended to hold firm against Soviet pressure in Iran, the Mediterranean, and Manchuria. He exclaimed, "Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand—'how many divisions have you?' . . . I'm tired of babying the Soviets."
13

It was characteristic of Truman's persisent uncertainty at this time, however, that he did not get rid of Byrnes, who stayed on as Secretary for all of 1946. Truman also kept on other high officials, including Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace—FDR's Vice-President between 1941 and 1945—who were calling for a much more accommodating policy toward the Russians. The continuing presence of such diversity of opinion in the Cabinet testified to the President's difficult quest for clear direction in policy-making. Here, as in many other matters in 1946, he was hardly the super-decisive, "buck stops here" President of legend. As late as January 1946 few observers foresaw an end to the irresolution that marked American foreign relations during the new President's first nine months on the job.

"T
HE ULTIMATE AIM
of Soviet foreign policy," Navy Secretary Forrestal wrote a friend in April 1946, "is Russian domination of a communist world."
14

Forrestal's opinion by no means determined American policy; he was just one high official among many. But it reflected a growing consensus among top-ranking American officials that developed fairly rapidly in February and March of 1946. During that critical period a rapid-fire sequence of events convinced all but a few American leaders that Soviet behavior was offensive, not defensive, and that the United States had to act decisively if it hoped to avert repetition of the sad spectacle of appeasement of the 1930s.

The first two events came a week apart, on February 9 and 16. On the ninth Stalin gave a major speech in which he blamed "monopoly capitalism" for the onset of World War II and implied that it must be replaced by Communism if future wars were to be avoided. Many Americans, now perceiving an unrelenting ideological thrust behind Stalin's behavior, reacted in alarm. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, a liberal, proclaimed Stalin's speech the "Declaration of World War III." A week later Canada announced that it had arrested twenty-two people on charges of trying to steal atomic secrets for the Soviet Union during and after World War II. The announcement intensified the investigatory zeal of the anti-Communist House Committee on Un-American Activities, which made headlines for the next several years as it probed allegations of Soviet influence in American life.
15

At this critical juncture there arrived in Washington one of the key documents of the early Cold War: the so-called Long Telegram of George F. Kennan, minister-counselor of the American embassy in Moscow. Kennan was one of a handful of well-trained experts on Russian history and language, having studied them since his graduation from Princeton in 1925 and entry into the foreign service a year later. Much of his subsequent diplomatic career had concentrated on the study of Soviet behavior, which he observed from posts in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. Learned and eloquent, Kennan went on to have a distinguished career as a diplomat and historian. He was conservative in the sense that he doubted the capacity of democratic governments, driven by the dangerous winds of popular opinion, to chart a steady and well-informed course in the world. He preferred instead a foreign policy guided by experts such as himself. He was also revulsed by the Soviet system, which he considered brutal and uncivilized. His Long Telegram offered an anguished statement of his views, which fell on especially receptive ears at that time.

The Soviet Union, Kennan wrote, was an "Oriental despotism" in which "extremism was the normal form of rule and foreigners were expected to be mortal enemies." The Kremlin used Marxism as "the fig-leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability" to justify military growth, oppression at home, and expansion abroad. The USSR was "a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the United States there can be no permanent
modus vivendi
, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, . . . if Soviet power is to be secure."
16

It would exaggerate the influence of the Long Telegram to say that it formulated American foreign policy for the future. But thanks in large part to Forrestal, who circulated it aggressively among American leaders, it received widespread attention. It gave them a congenial theoretical explanation for what they already considered to be Stalin's anti-Western behavior: that it stemmed from a combination of ideological and totalitarian imperatives deeply rooted in Russian as well as more recent Soviet history. This explanation was simple, clear, and therefore psychologically satisfying to American policy-makers, already irate at Soviet actions.

The explanation also offered Americans a way of coping with the Soviet Union. This was what later became known as the policy of "containment," which Kennan himself, identified only as "Mr. X," elaborated on in a famous article in
Foreign Affairs
in July 1947.
17
The containment approach assumed that the Soviets, not the Americans, were responsible for the breakdown of wartime cooperation and that the USSR was an implacable totalitarian regime. In dealing with it the United States must be firm, thereby confronting the Soviets "with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world."
18

Later in his career Kennan was to complain that American policy-makers—mainly after 1950—overemphasized the military thrust of containment, thereby erecting an enormous edifice of military alliances that pitted the so-called Free World against the threat of worldwide Communist revolution. This military emphasis was not his in 1946 or 1947. The West, he said, should be watchful, and it should respond quickly to aggressive moves. Kennan, indeed, favored covert actions by United States intelligence agents in the Communist bloc. But the West should not overreact by building up huge stores of atomic weapons or making military moves that would provoke a highly suspicious Soviet state into dangerous counter-actions. The United States should above all be prudent and patient, vigilantly containing Soviet expansion and awaiting the day—which Kennan thought would come—when the Communist world would fall apart because of its own internal contradictions and brutalities.

Two weeks after Kennan's Long Telegram, Winston Churchill, speaking at Westminster College in Missouri, offered yet another voice for firmness against the Soviets. Churchill had been voted out of office in 1945, but he remained not only leader of the Conservative party but a towering symbol of wartime Allied unity and to Americans a much-admired foreign leader. As head of Great Britain during the war he had often been shrewdly realistic—insofar as British interests were concerned—in dealing with Stalin. But long before 1946 he was also known to be highly suspicious of Soviet intentions. At Westminster he voiced these suspicions in a memorable address that featured one of the most enduring metaphors of the Cold War, the "iron curtain":

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness.
19

Churchill's clarion call seemed especially significant because it had been delivered at the invitation of Truman himself, who arranged for Churchill's appearance at the college (in the President's home state) and who rode out on the train, playing poker the while with him, from Washington. Truman introduced Churchill, sat behind him on the dais while he was speaking, and applauded at several times during the presentation. Without explicitly endorsing what Churchill said, Truman seemed to signal that he agreed on the need to take a strong stand against the Soviets.
20

These developments in February and March of 1946 led to mostly firmer, containment-like policies in the following months. During this time the United States moved the Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean and stepped up its protests against Soviet pressure in the area. This response seemed to bring results. By late 1946 the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from northern Iran and seemed less insistent on its demands from Turkey. The Truman administration also refused to let the Soviets play a significant role in the postwar occupation of Japan and resisted Communist pressures to reunite Korea under North Korean domination. Though cool to the Chinese Nationalist regime of Chiang Kaishek, which was widely known to be corrupt, Truman encouraged Marshall, his emissary in China, to try to resolve the civil war there and agreed to significant congressional appropriations—$3 billion between 1945 and 1949—in aid to Chiang. In Germany the United States stopped shipment of reparations out of its zone of occupation and began moving to an anti-Soviet consolidation of American, British, and French zones.
21

In these months the Truman administration also took enduring steps to harden its atomic shield. Some of Truman's advisers, notably Stimson, had argued in late 1945 that the United States consider sharing control of atomic weapons with the Soviet Union, which was certain to develop an A-bomb within a few years. "The chief lesson I have learned in a long life," Stimson said, "is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust." He warned: "If we fail to approach them now and continue to negotiate with . . . this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes will increase."
22
Other advisers, including some leading scientists, backed Stimson, pointing out that United States, by building and storing atomic weapons, was guaranteeing the escalation of a dangerous new arms race. Still others pointed out a flaw in relying heavily on such weapons: they were clumsy at best as deterrents in the vast majority of diplomatic disputes.

Truman at first had seemed open to such arguments, and he appointed Acheson and David Lilienthal, a liberal, to devise a plan to be presented to the United Nations. They recommended setting up an international Atomic Development Authority that would be able to control all raw materials used in making such weapons, including those in the Soviet Union, and would ban all subsequent A-bomb-making. It is very likely that the Soviet Union would have rejected the plan, because it permitted the United States to keep its own small stockpile while preventing the Soviets from developing theirs. Truman, however, ensured Soviet rejection when he authorized Bernard Baruch, a strongly anti-Communist financier, to present a revision of the Acheson-Lilienthal plan to the UN. The new plan authorized sanctions against violators and stipulated that no nation could use the Security Council's veto power to escape punishment for such violations.
23
When the Soviets insisted on the veto power in such matters, it seemed to Americans that Stalin was bound and determined to develop atomic weaponry on his own and that no agreement was possible. By the end of 1946 passed the last hopes, small though they had been, for amelioration of the atomic arms race that thereafter frightened the world.

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