Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (19 page)

Critics of the plan subjected it to extensive debate that lasted through the winter of 1947–48. Doubters continued to wonder if such massive aid was necessary. But congressmen who visited Europe that winter returned with reports of widespread suffering, including starvation. Moreover, the American economy was healthy, and the federal budget under control; it seemed the United States could afford the help. And after more than two years of Cold War Americans were increasingly ready to believe the worst of Stalin. Everett Dirksen, an influential Republican congressman from Illinois, backed the plan in late 1947 in the course of crying in alarm of "this red tide" that was "like some vile creeping thing which is spreading its web westward."
⁵⁵
Stalin indeed seemed more dangerous than ever, rigging elections to assure a pro-Soviet regime in Hungary in August 1947 and promoting a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February and March 1948. This provocative act guaranteed passage of the plan. In April 1948 Congress approved a fifteen-month appropriation for $6.8 billion.

It is arguable, especially in retrospect, that the Marshall Plan had some unfortunate, though unintended, consequences. Together with the Truman Doctrine, it greatly alarmed Stalin, who more than ever suspected that these American efforts were part of a concerted conspiracy to encircle him.
⁵⁶
Stalin, expecting that the ERP would bolster European prosperity, may have called for the coup in Czechoslovakia to prevent the Czechs from joining with the West. It is also true, as revisionists have emphasized, that the Marshall Plan was "selfish" in the sense that it did much for well-placed American business interests. ERP, along with American military aid, which escalated after 1949, greatly revived the capacity of Europeans to buy American goods.
⁵⁷

It is also possible to exaggerate the impact of ERP on the European economies. Americans, certain of their rectitude, power, and wealth, tend to do this without recognizing the important role that the industrious and efficient west Europeans played in their own recovery. Indeed, the Europeans deserve much of the credit for their economic revitalization after 1948. The plan gave them considerable autonomy and initiative, and they took it, reviving their historical possibilities in rapid time.
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In later years, when the United States directed aid at other less developed parts of the world, the results were by no means so felicitous.

But most of these qualifications do not detract from the remarkable success of the Marshall Plan, which funneled $13.34 billion in aid to western Europe between 1948 and 1952. Welcomed eagerly by suffering European nations, the assistance hastened a very impressive recovery. It probably promoted greater political stability, if for no other reason than that it demonstrated the commitment of the United States to that part of the world. Compared especially with the selfish reaction of the United States to the plight of Europe after World War I, the Marshall Plan represented a remarkably enlightened effort. Few other postwar foreign policies of the United States can claim as much.

D
RAMATIC THOUGH THE
Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan were, they still had little effect on the overall defense policy of the United States. Leading American officials for the most part did not expect the Russians to stage a military attack. Rather, like Kennan, they worried mainly about the psychological appeal of Communism to frightened citizens of unstable countries. Hence the need for "patient" containment, mainly via the means of economic aid.
⁵⁹

The struggle for a National Security Act, finally approved in 1947, reveals how little these defense policies changed. In seeking such legislation Truman and others hoped that Congress would strike a blow against interservice battling by creating the office of Secretary of Defense to design and coordinate military policy. Instead the services, notably the Navy Department under Forrestal, fought tenaciously against centralization, and the final bill left the services with considerable autonomy. Forrestal became the nation's first Defense Secretary in September 1947, at which point he battled for the powers that he had opposed as Navy Secretary. He got nowhere before he was replaced eighteen months later.

The National Security Act created two other agencies that were later to become important parts of America's defense bureaucracy. One, the National Security Council (NSC), was to be controlled by the White House, not—as Forrestal had wanted—by the Pentagon. The other, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), promised to give the United States—at last—a permanent intelligence-gathering bureaucracy. The statute left fuzzy the degree to which the CIA would be subject to meaningful congressional oversight, and it implicitly authorized covert activities. A key clause said the CIA could "perform other such functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct."
⁶⁰

It was revealing, however, that Truman made little use of these agencies in the late 1940s. He attended only twelve of the NSC's first fifty-seven meetings.
⁶¹
He had disbanded the CIA's wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, not long after the fighting ended in 1945 and had dispersed its activities thereafter to the contentious and non-cooperating armed services. While he accepted creation of the CIA, which quickly engaged in covert activities in Italy, he paid it little attention for most of his presidency. It was only later, in the 1950s and 1960s, that the provisions of the National Security Act turned out to be significant additions to the centralized power of the State.

Truman also continued to fight against large defense expenditures and to rely primarily on economic aid to conduct the Cold War. This was true even when the Russians staged their coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Truman wrote his daughter, "We are faced with exactly the same situation in which Britain and France were faced in 1938–39 with Hitler. Things look black. A decision will have to be made. I am going to make it."
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But he recognized that there was little, given the conventional military power of the Soviets, that he could do about the coup. It was much the same on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress angrily denounced the Soviets and reauthorized the draft, but they took no major steps to increase American preparedness.

Shortly thereafter, in June 1948, the Russians clamped a blockade on West Berlin. They did so for many reasons, mainly because they were frightened by Western plans then underway to establish West Germany as an independent nation. The Soviet blockade touched off even larger fears among policy-makers in the United States, some of whom recommended that American troops force their way into the beleaguered city. The Truman administration resisted this course of action, responding instead with a heroic and ultimately sucessful airlift, which involved sending hundreds of planes daily to relieve the West Berliners.
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As before, Truman had refused to take steps that would have greatly militarized the Cold War. Defense spending continued to be modest, and the Soviets maintained a large edge in military manpower in Europe.

E
VENTS SUCH AS THESE
showed how dangerous the Cold War had become by mid-1948. It was not only raising the risk of armed conflicts but also souring the political atmosphere at home. Right-wing opponents accused the administration of being "soft" on Communism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities eagerly investigated a wide range of alleged subversive activities. Unions, universities, and other large institutions were gearing up to purge themselves of leftists.
⁶⁴
Soviet athletes in 1948 stayed away from the Olympic games in London and St. Moritz.

The Truman administration had not always dealt very adeptly with the events that led to this sour state of affairs. In 1945 Truman, inexperienced and insecure, had tended to vacillate. In early 1946 he and top advisers devised a policy of containment, showing firmness concerning Soviet pressures on Iran and Turkey, but still seemed unsure of how to apply it. In 1947 and 1948 the United States acted more forcefully, especially with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. These policies, countering Soviet coldness, symbolized the polarization of East and West.

In its defense policies the Truman administration was largely consistent, preferring for the most part to combat the Soviets by monopolizing the Bomb and by relying otherwise on foreign aid. This approach had potential flaws, for it left the United States without a flexible military deterrent in many parts of the world. Still, the alternative, building up a large military apparatus, was politically impossible before 1948. Controls over defense spending appealed to a population—and its congressional representatives—that was anxious and increasingly angry at the Soviets but that also feared yet another war and its attendant sacrifices. Advocates of a get-tough policy found these popular attitudes frustrating, for they did set limits on American responses.

To focus on mistakes of the Truman administration or on the role of American popular opinion, however, is to miss the most significant source of the Cold War in the 1940s. That was the uniquely difficult and bipolar world that suddenly arose after World War II: two very different societies and cultures found themselves face-to-face in a world of awesome weaponry. In part because they worried about their security, the Soviets proceeded to oppress their eastern European neighbors and to threaten Western interests in the Mediterranean and Middle East. The Americans, believers in democracy, had high expectations about their capacity and duty to contain such threats. They also came to fear that the USSR was bent on even wider territorial expansion that would endanger the economic and political supremacy of the United States. Leaders on each side, frequently believing the worst of the other, proved unable to curb the escalation of tensions.

To stop there, however—assigning responsibility for these tensions to both sides—is to ignore the apocalyptic tone that came to surround Soviet-American relations in the late 1940s and thereafter. This stemmed in part from the tendency of the Truman administration, anxious to stand firm, to whip up domestic fears in order to secure political support for containment. Truman and his advisers knew that war with the Soviet Union was highly unlikely. Yet they had to have domestic political backing for firmness; the United States, after all, had a democratic system. To secure this support they resorted to a fair amount of harping—and some exaggeration—about the dangers that the Soviet Union and international Communism posed to the "Free World."

The apocalyptic character of the Cold War owed even more, however, to the peculiarly suspicious, dictatorial, and often hostile stance of Stalin. This truly alarmed policy-makers and over time aroused popular attitudes. In these years it was the Soviet Union, more than the United States, whose behavior—especially in eastern Europe—seemed alarming in the world. Not just the United States but also other Western nations concluded that "appeasement" would be disastrous. "Credibility" required that they resist. A defter American administration might have coped more sure-handedly with these problems than did Truman's, thereby muting to some degree the extremes of Cold War hostility. Given the understandable determination of the United States and its allies to contain the Soviets, however, there is no way that serious friction could have been avoided. Some sort of "Cold War"—even a quasi-apocalyptic one—seems as close to being inevitable as anything can be in history.

6
Domestic Politics: Truman's First Term

The shadow of Roosevelt fell heavily on Truman early in his first term. Jonathan Daniels, one of FDR's White House aides, remembers seeing Truman in the Oval Office shortly after Roosevelt died. "He swung around in the President's chair as if he were testing it, more uncertain than even I was about its size."
¹

Truman's uncertainty was entirely understandable, for to millions of Americans, especially the poor, Roosevelt had been an almost saintly father figure. Liberals had regarded him as the very model of strong presidential leadership in battles for social change. Although FDR had lost most of these battles after 1937, progressive Americans blamed Congress and "the interests," not the President. As recently as 1944 Roosevelt had rallied reformers—and raised popular expectations—by calling for an "Economic Bill of Rights" after the war. It is not too much to say that liberals were shattered when FDR died in April 1945. For them and many other Americans, no man could have filled Roosevelt's chair.
²

Any liberal successor to Roosevelt faced especially large structural obstacles to change. Unlike many west European countries, the United States lacked a strong political Left. The Socialist party headed by Norman Thomas had been undercut by the New Deal in the 1930s and by factional splits during the war, which Thomas had opposed. It was barely alive.
³
The Communist party, though stronger in 1945 than ever before, remained tiny; most Americans feared to associate with it.
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The labor unions had record membership but by 1945 were beginning to lose momentum as a progressive political force. Roosevelt, indeed, had enjoyed advantages denied to Truman. During the Depression FDR could generate enthusiasm from "have-not" groups, such as restless workers and poor farmers, and during the war he could appeal to their patriotism. By 1945, however, many of these people, such as upwardly mobile blue-collar workers, were becoming "haves"—interest groups with much to be gained from supporting the status quo. In this way, as in many others, the recovery of the American economy reshaped American politics—for the most part toward the center and the right.
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A special obstacle to liberals in 1945, as throughout much of postwar American history, was Congress. On the surface this did not necessarily seem to be the case. Truman had comfortable Democratic majorities in both houses, 242 to 190 in the House and 56 to 38 in the Senate. In the House he could count on Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, a bald-headed bachelor who devoted his life to the chamber he had first entered in 1913. Popular with his colleagues, moderately liberal, a partisan Democrat, Rayburn was a forceful leader. In the Senate Truman could rely on Democratic majority leader Alben Barkley of Kentucky. Barkley was more easy-going and less effective than Rayburn. He was also aging, turning sixty-eight in 1945. But Barkley, too, had put in long service on the Hill, dating to 1913 when he, like Rayburn, had first entered the House. He had moved to the Senate in 1927. A moderate, he was liked by most of his colleagues and by Democratic party leaders throughout the country. Despite Barkley's age, Truman asked him to be his running mate in 1948.

But since 1937 power on Capitol Hill had usually belonged to a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, many of them from the South. They returned to Capitol Hill in September 1945 in an uncooperative mood. They were especially tired of aggressive presidential leadership.
⁶
Most of the Republicans could hardly wait until 1948, when they expected—at last—to recapture the White House. The late 1940s were among the most partisan, rancorous years in the history of modern American politics.

Some observers of Truman thought that he was essentially a partisan who accepted this state of affairs. One was the journalist Samuel Lubell, who described Truman as "the man who bought time." "Far from seeking decision, he sought to put off any possible showdown, to perpetuate rather than to break the prevailing political stalemate."
⁷
This is accurate insofar as it captures Truman's sometimes zigzag approach, as he alternately tried to satisfy and to fend off the claims of interest groups. It is a little unfair, however, as a description of Truman's motivation. The new President had been a loyal New Dealer in the 1930s, and he believed in strong presidential leadership. He sincerely supported most of the liberal programs that he introduced during his years in office.
⁸

For a variety of reasons, however, the President failed to persuade many liberals that he was one of them, at least not in 1945–46. While Truman wanted to protect the New Deal, he was uneasy around some of the liberals—a "lunatic fringe," he called them—who had risen to high office under Roosevelt. One was Wallace, another the curmudgeonly Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes. Truman was uncomfortable even with words like "liberal" or "progressive." He preferred "forward-looking." Correctly sensing the temper of the times, he also doubted that major reforms had much of a chance right after the war. "I don't want any experiments," he told his adviser Clark Clifford. "The American people have been through a lot of experiments, and they want a rest from experiments."
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Some of Truman's views also put him at loggerheads with liberals. One was his fiscal conservatism. As an administrator in Jackson County, Missouri, he had prided himself on his attempts to balance the budget. He was a man of modest means—perhaps the poorest member of the United States Senate while he was in it—and he had always had to be careful with money. Truman's fiscal conservatism was good politics: most Americans at that time believed that the government, like a household, should normally spend no more than it took in. Moreover, few politicians in Truman's lifetime (Roosevelt included) favored deficit spending in times of prosperity. But Truman's conservative feelings on the subject were powerful and genuine, rooted in all of his experience. He remained cautious about advancing liberal social programs that would cost a good deal of money.

Truman also believed strongly that he was President of
all
the people. This did not mean that he claimed, as President Eisenhower later did, to be above politics. On the contrary, Truman was never happier than when in the company of fellow politicians, and he was intensely partisan. But he considered it his duty as President to rise above what he thought were the more local, provincial concerns of members of Congress and to resist interest groups that acted against what he considered the
national
well-being. This feeling provoked him to oppose union wage demands in 1946—opposition that did him temporary harm with liberal supporters of the labor movement.

As much as anything, Truman's personal style discouraged liberal Democrats in 1945–46. Roosevelt had been Harvard-educated, eloquent, and charming. People warmed to the glow of his buoyant personality. By contrast, Truman had risen from machine politics and had reached the White House by accident. Harry Dexter White, Undersecretary of the Treasury, expressed this feeling well in 1946. When FDR had been alive, White said, "we'd go over to the White House for a conference on some particular policy, lose the argument, and yet walk out of the door somehow thrilled and inspired to go on and do the job the way the Big Boss had ordered." Now, White lamented, "you go in to see Mr. Truman. He's very nice to you. He lets you do what you want to do, and yet you leave feeling somehow dispirited and flat."
¹⁰

No one was unhappier with Truman than the cantankerous journalist I. F. Stone, who wrote columns for liberal journals such as PM and
The Nation
. Under Truman, he wrote, the New Dealers

began to be replaced by the kind of men one was accustomed to meeting in county courthouses. The composite impression was of big-bellied, good-natured guys who knew a lot of dirty jokes, spent as little time in their

offices as possible, saw Washington as a chance to make useful "contacts," and were anxious to get what they could for themselves out of the experience. They were not unusually corrupt or especially wicked—that would have made the capital a dramatic instead of a depressing experience for a reporter. They were just trying to get along. The Truman era was the era of the moocher. The place was full of Wimpys who could be had for a hamburger.
¹¹

This was an unfair comment. Truman in fact made many distinguished appointments, especially in the area of foreign affairs, where he relied heavily on experienced advisers. In stating it, however, Stone reflected a characteristically liberal view of presidential leadership: that White House dynamism was in and of itself a key to progress. Liberals also assumed wrongly that there was great reform sentiment among the people, just waiting to be aroused by an inspiring leader. They forgot that Roosevelt, their idol, had struggled unsuccessfully since 1937, and they ignored signs in 1945 and 1946 that many Americans wanted a respite from the excitement and intrusiveness of governmental activism.

Still, liberals like Stone were correct that Truman in 1945–46 seemed indecisive and uncertain in domestic matters, just as he did in foreign affairs at the time. Again, Roosevelt loomed as their standard. FDR, Max Lerner said, had given the country a "confident sense of direction." Truman lacked this ability.
Progressive
magazine added, "A curious uneasiness seems to pervade all levels of the Government. There is a feeling at times that there is no one at the wheel."
¹²

A
LTHOUGH
T
RUMAN WAS ABSORBED
in foreign policy matters for much of 1945 and 1946, he wasted little time in advancing an ambitious domestic agenda. On September 6, 1945, he stamped himself in the mold of Roosevelt by praising FDR's Economic Bill of Rights and calling on Congress to approve a host of reforms. These included laws that would expand federal control of public power, increase minimum wages, provide funds for public housing, broaden coverage of Social Security, and establish a national health program. Truman also made it clear that he expected Congress to confer permanent status on the wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission and to approve the so-called full employment bill, which would commit the government to promote policies against joblessness.
¹³

Conservatives erupted in dismay at Truman's proposals. House Republican Leader Joseph Martin of Massachusetts cried, "Now, nobody should have any more doubt. Not even President Roosevelt ever asked so much at one sitting. It is just a case of out-New Dealing the New Deal."
¹⁴
Martin was a conservative, partisan legislator who had marched in torchlight parades for William McKinley in the late 1890s and had befriended Calvin Coolidge while serving with him in the Massachusetts legislature. He would have opposed most of these programs no matter how cautiously they had been introduced. But others, including loyal Democrats, were also taken aback by Truman's sweeping requests. Truman, they grumbled, was asking too much too fast, expecting Congress to do his bidding and setting the stage to blame it if it did not. This was hardly the way to develop a harmonious working relationship along the length of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Complaints such as these punctuated all seven years of Truman's presidency, which witnessed unusually antagonistic relations between the White House and Congress. Truman vetoed 250 bills in his seven years, third only to FDR, who vetoed 631 in twelve, and Grover Cleveland, who vetoed 374 in eight.
¹⁵
Twelve of his vetoes were overridden, the most since the days when Andrew Johnson defied the Radical Republicans over Reconstruction. Truman, however, acted as if these complaints did not bother him. "What the country needed in every field," he said, "was up to me to say . . . and if Congress wouldn't respond, well, I'd have done all I could in a straight-forward way."
¹⁶
He was a little unwise to sound so cavalier, both because members of Congress resented his attitude and because they had trouble distinguishing between what he really wanted and what he demanded. Truman, like many who followed him to the Oval Office, did not always delineate his priorities.

It is unlikely, however, that the deftest of presidential leadership would have made much of an impression on the conservative coalition or on the well-established interest groups that dominated Capitol Hill. Southern senators launched a filibuster against the FEPC bill, ultimately preventing its consideration. Business interests, which had grown powerful during the war, had special influence. Oil companies and state political leaders pressed for a "tidelands" bill that would have turned over to states oil-rich "submerged lands" off their coasts; the bill passed twice during Truman's presidency, was vetoed twice, and finally was enacted when Eisenhower signed it in 1953. The electric utility lobby took the lead in successful efforts against proposed new federal power authorities in the Missouri and Columbia valleys. Railroad interests urged passage of a bill that would have exempted many of their practices from anti-trust prosecution. This, too, later passed over a Truman veto.
¹⁷