6

Cold War President

However much the surprise victory elated Truman, he told reporters and a crowd of well-wishers as he left Missouri, where he had gone to vote and track the election returns, that he felt “overwhelmed with responsibility.”¹ His sense of how another four years would challenge him reflected not only his understanding that second terms were almost always more difficult than first ones but also his realism about the state of the nation and the world.

Nevertheless, his victory gave him license to call upon Congress to adopt the main features of a progressive program that some described as an extension of the New Deal or the start of Franklin Roosevelt’s fifth term. By contrast, Truman saw himself as setting out his own distinctive agenda that significantly went beyond anything Roosevelt had proposed. Indeed, once the war began Roosevelt had conceded that Dr. Win the War had replaced Dr. New Deal, and though he had promised a return to liberal legislative action after the war, it was more part of his fourth-term campaign than a clear program of where he would lead the nation in the postwar era.

Truman put his own special stamp on the start of his new term in January 1949 with a State of the Union message announcing that “every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from our Government a fair deal.” Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal now had an appropriate successor in Truman’s Fair Deal.

As described in his message, the president put forth a bold agenda that would fulfill past and current hopes for a more humane and just society. He asked for a fairer, more equitable tax structure, a higher minimum wage, an expanded farm program that could raise food production and farmers’ incomes, increased public power projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, repeal of the Taft-Hartley labor law, larger social security payments, national medical insurance, federal aid to education, additional public housing programs, and the civil rights reforms that had languished in the Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress.

The last failure had left African Americans in the position of an abused minority and America open to accusations from peoples of color everywhere, who were straining to throw off white colonial rule in Africa and Asia, of being a racist society. Soviet propaganda exploited U.S. intolerance to score points in the growing competition between East and West for what was described as “hearts and minds” in the Third World.

While liberals took hope from the president’s renewed call for a series of bold reforms, they and Truman quickly found that the results of the election did not translate into legislative actions. Although the Democrats had a large majority in the House, 263 to 171, and a twelve-seat advantage in the Senate, fifty-four to forty-two, it was not enough to force bills past the coalition of southern Democrats, who now held key committee chairmanships, and conservative Republicans.²

More was at work, however, than just conservative obstructionism. Truman’s share of the popular vote in 1948 was only 49.5 percent, which meant that national sentiment was more lukewarm than enthusiastic about any bold reform initiatives. True, majorities favored increasing the minimum wage and expanded federal aid for low-rent housing, but they remained cool to labor unions, as reflected by the continuing popularity of the Taft-Hartley law. Polls showed less than majority support for national health insurance or Truman’s civil rights program. The public’s greatest concern was not with any of the president’s proposed reforms but with the high cost of living and Communist threats to national security at home and abroad.³

The administration’s inability to lead its Fair Deal program through Congress was made abundantly clear in March when the Senate failed to win a cloture fight against southern Democrats. Before putting any of its civil rights proposals before the Senate, the Truman administration endorsed a strategy of compelling a change in the cloture rules to allow a majority of senators present and voting to end debate rather than the current rules, which required a two-thirds majority. But with eighty-seven members present, the White House could muster only forty-one votes for its position.

“The outcome revealed the hollowness of the 1948 victory,” Hamby asserts, “and plunged most liberals into deep gloom. ‘It is hard to recall a more discouraging … legislative picture,’” James Loeb Jr., a leading member of Americans for Democratic Action, declared. “‘Any illusion that the liberal Democrats dominate either the House or the Senate has been conclusively blasted.’”⁴

If the liberals needed any confirmation of their pessimism, it came in the congressional refusal to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. Most of the congressmen and senators who had voted for the law in 1947 remained in office in 1949 and were not ready to see their handiwork erased. Besides, the public liked the injunctive power that Taft-Hartley gave a president to prevent a strike that could create a national emergency. Truman’s efforts to drop this provision from a reform bill could not gain any traction in the House or the Senate, despite the president’s assertion that the Constitution already gave him sufficient powers to deal with any potential national emergency. Taft-Hartley would remain in effect for the rest of Truman’s time in the White House.⁵

What especially stood in the way of major legislative reforms was a national preoccupation with Communist aggression threatening countries friendly to the United States and the extent to which Communist subversion might be at work in Washington. The tightening Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the ongoing crisis over Berlin (which did not end until May 1949), and a worsening situation in China, where Mao Tse-tung’s Communists were making steady gains in their civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, aroused concerns that another world war was in the offing. And at home, the public was increasingly alarmed by allegations of Communist spies having operated inside Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, including charges from Whittaker Chambers, a Time editor and confessed former member of the Communist Party, that Alger Hiss, a distinguished diplomat and part of the American establishment, had passed government secrets to him. It gave resonance to Republican attacks on Roosevelt’s actions at the 1945 Yalta conference, where they described him as too ill to deal effectively with Stalin, who extracted commitments on Eastern Europe and Asia that critics described as tantamount to the capitulation of the European powers to Hitler at Munich in 1938. The scary conclusion was that America and the West were in danger of defeat by a Communist drive for worldwide control.

The Republican critique of Yalta had less to do with the realities faced by Roosevelt and Churchill at the time than it was a political opportunity to blame the Democrats, who controlled foreign policy, for the frustrations over postwar international developments.

Anticommunism was a transparently popular position for a politician to take in 1949. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was probing Communist subversion and its hearings won wide popular support, despite complaints from critics that the committee was engaged in a witch hunt that would do little or nothing to serve national security. There were calls to require loyalty oaths for labor union officers and to prevent members of the Communist Party from teaching in a college or university. Truman himself had exploited anti-Communist fears to initiate his administration’s loyalty oath program and to press the administration’s case for foreign aid to countries threatened by Soviet imperialism or internal Communist subversion.⁶

At the same time, however, the president had put himself on the wrong side of public sentiment when he agreed with a reporter’s characterization of HUAC hearings on the Hiss-Chambers conflict as “a red herring” aimed at diverting public attention from larger domestic worries about inflation. Congressman Richard Nixon, who was building a national image as a tough-minded anti-Communist, particularly angered Truman. “All the time I’ve been in politics, there’s only two people I hate,” he said later, “and he’s one.”⁷

In 1949, few episodes better revealed the overblown national anxiety about a domestic Communist threat than the Senate hearings to confirm Dean Acheson as George Marshall’s successor as secretary of state. There were few more acknowledged members of the American establishment than Acheson. A prominent Washington attorney, Acheson had served in Roosevelt’s Treasury and State departments and then as undersecretary of state for two years during Truman’s presidency, often functioning as acting secretary when James Byrnes or George Marshall was absent at international conferences.

Because Alger Hiss had also been a respected member of the American upper crust, it was conceivable to some of Truman’s right-wing critics that Acheson could be a stealth Communist as well, however absurd such an accusation might be. It was Acheson, after all, who had been central in the development of the president’s doctrine for aiding Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan. But given the current climate of suspicion in the country, even sensible members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee felt compelled to cite an Acheson statement when confirming his appointment that declared, “Communism as a doctrine is economically fatal to a free society and to human rights and fundamental freedom. Communism as an aggressive factor in world conquest is fatal to independent governments and to free peoples.”⁸ But Acheson was confirmed.

The Truman administration was no less mindful of the Soviet threat than any of its Republican critics. The various actions it had taken in 1947 and 1948 to ensure Western Europe against Soviet domination culminated in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which the United States committed itself to in April 1949. The treaty guaranteed that if any of the other signatories were attacked, the United States would come to their aid. It was the first offensive-defensive alliance in U.S. history since the treaty with France in 1778. It put an exclamation point on the end of America’s long-standing traditional isolationism and its resistance to international political commitments.

The agreement was not made without serious reservations in the State Department, among America’s military chiefs, and at the White House. Since the United States already had troops stationed in Germany, it seemed superfluous for Washington to commit itself by treaty to military action against Soviet aggression. Moreover, in 1949, the U.S. military believed it lacked the resources to honor a commitment to a full-scale defense of Western Europe. The administration understood, however, that if Germany was to be rebuilt as part of a Western alliance, France needed assurances of America’s future military commitment to its defense as well. French fear of German aggression was almost as pronounced as that in Moscow.

The treaty was also meant to signal the Soviets that Washington would not allow Communist domination of Western Europe by either direct aggression or subversion. But, as George Kennan warned, the alliance would militarize the cold war—the Soviets would react to NATO by establishing their own military alliance in Eastern Europe, which is exactly what happened. Moscow established a Warsaw Pact between Russia and its Eastern European satellites as a counterweight to NATO, which they depicted as a U.S. aggressive act aimed at intimidating the Soviet Union. The military buildup on both sides heightened tensions and increased the likelihood of an armed conflict.

In opposing NATO, Kennan argued that the Soviets had no intention of establishing control of Western Europe by military means. Alongside the economic and political stability the United States was supporting through the Marshall Plan, NATO was bound to provoke a pointless “military rivalry.” The formal alliance would produce “a general preoccupation with military affairs, to the detriment of economic recovery and of the necessity for seeking a peaceful solution to Europe’s difficulties.” As Kennan also saw, such a treaty had become irresistible because, however far from reality, Western Europeans did not trust the United States to maintain its presence in the region without a formal commitment.⁹

The administration’s agreement to NATO sat well with most Americans, more than two-thirds of whom approved of the pact. But the nation’s confidence was shaken in September, when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, more than five years before U.S. intelligence anticipated it would be able to do so. Where most officials, including Truman, were confident that America’s monopoly on atomic bombs was its first line of defense and substantially reduced the likelihood of a Soviet surprise attack, Moscow’s acquisition of the weapon changed their minds. They were fearful that the Soviets, who commanded much larger land forces in Europe and on the periphery of Asia, might now become more adventurous and even use a first atomic strike to cripple the United States and Western Europe. They also worried that their European partners might not trust U.S. determination to defend them if it meant risking a war with the Soviet Union and an atomic exchange that could devastate American cities.

Truman hesitated to announce the news of the Soviet breakthrough for fear that it would greatly upset the American and European publics. David Lilienthal, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, tried to persuade the president to tell the public at once. Truman said he wasn’t sure that U.S. intelligence had clearly demonstrated Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb, and he feared that an announcement might “cause great fears, trouble.” But Lilienthal’s assurances that the Soviets now had the ability to build such a weapon and that leaks about this news might undermine public confidence in the president’s leadership convinced Truman to follow Lilienthal’s advice. On September 23, three days after learning about the Soviet breakthrough, Truman told the world about Moscow’s achievement.¹⁰ Although there was no perceptible evidence of public distress over the Soviet advance toward military parity with the United States, it had some limited effect on Truman’s own popular standing. Where the president’s approval rating stood at a robust 57 percent in June 1949, it had fallen to 51 percent by the end of September.¹¹

Truman now faced a critical decision. How should the United States respond to the Soviet Union’s acquisition of a weapon that could eventually put it on a par with the United States and deprive America of its military deterrent to Soviet adventurism and a possible third world war? Truman gave prompt approval to a request from the Joint Chiefs to speed up the development of atomic energy. The idea was to keep ahead of the Soviets and build a larger atomic arsenal than they seemed likely to acquire in the hope that it could continue to be a meaningful restraint on Moscow.

But a much bigger decision revolved around the question of whether the president should agree to have scientists develop a hydrogen bomb, what was called the “super,” a nuclear weapon that was likely to have ten times the power of the two atomic bombs used against Japan and eventually even a hundred times that capacity. Now, more than ever, the buck stopped at the president’s desk.

There was sharp and even bitter disagreement over what to do. Several military and national security chiefs favored a crash program to keep America ahead of the Soviets, who were believed to be intent on developing such a powerful weapon as well. Others in the government, including George Kennan, opposed the idea as “immoral and genocidal,” a weapon that could mean the end of civilization. He believed that atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs were simply not usable weapons in the hands of any sane leader. The need was for diplomacy that emphasized this point to both Soviet and American leaders, who would then find some accommodation rather than an arms race and the possibility of an apocalyptic war.

Could the United States risk holding back with the possibility that Moscow would go ahead anyway and develop a hydrogen bomb that would give it military superiority over the United States and the power to intimidate people and nations everywhere? Even if the Soviets did not intend to use such a weapon, their possession of it could be a huge psychological blow to the West. Secretary of State Acheson asked, “How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to ‘disarm by example’?” He upbraided Kennan for what he called his “Quaker views” and urged him to leave the government. He told Kennan, he “had no right being in the [Foreign] Service if he was not willing to face the questions as an issue to be decided in the interests of the American people under a sense of responsibility.”¹²

There the matter rested as the year came to a close.

Other international and domestic developments now became the backdrop to the president’s verdict whether to develop a hydrogen bomb. Fast-moving events in Asia—Korea and China in particular—could not be ignored in Truman’s calculation of what to do about U.S. military strength alongside of growing Communist power.

A joint Soviet-American occupation of Korea was one consideration in the evolving balance-of-power struggle. In September 1945, inadequate and unprepared U.S. forces landed on the Korean peninsula to liberate the Koreans from fifty years of Japanese colonial rule. After an agreement with Moscow that Soviet forces would occupy the northern part of the country above the 38th parallel, with U.S. forces in the south, a corps under Lieutenant General John R. Hodge entered Korea without a clue as to how to manage the transition to self-rule or American governance. Hodge was so at sea that he initially left thousands of Japanese administrators in place until Korean anger forced Hodge to replace them with Koreans, who were so politically divided that the running of the country became a nightmare.

In 1948, Washington and Moscow established Korean governments in their respective zones, with the American objective to escape direct responsibility for South Korea’s security as quickly as possible. Truman encouraged Syngman Rhee, the South Korean president, to use U.S. aid to build a national police force that could ensure stability inside the country and provide defense against potential external threats from the North. In 1949, with China in growing danger of becoming another Communist stronghold, Truman proposed a three-year aid program of $350 million to $385 million for South Korea, describing the country in his congressional request as a “‘testing ground’ between democracy and communism, with South Korea’s success held to be a ‘beacon’ to North Asians to resist Communism,” in the words of the historian Arnold Offner. Although U.S. military chiefs considered Korea of little strategic value in the emerging Asian struggle with communism, it was an important symbol of resistance to the Soviet Union’s expanded global influence.¹³

Nothing in Asia, however, was more important to an American understanding of the struggle against communism than control of China. The United States had had a long involvement with that country, mostly through religious missionaries, for over a hundred years, and there was great public sympathy for its suffering at the hands of the Japanese during World War II. Though the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek was as repressive and undemocratic as, say, Mussolini’s fascist Italy, many influential Americans, led by Henry Luce’s Time magazine and encouraged by Franklin Roosevelt’s White House, trumpeted China as our best hope for postwar democratic governance in East Asia.

Early in 1942, after a conference with Roosevelt in Washington, Churchill told General Archibald Wavell, the British commander of Allied forces in Asia, that he had “found the extraordinary significance of China in American minds, even at the top, strangely out of proportion … . If I can epitomize in one word the lesson I learned in the United States,” he added, “it was ‘China.’”¹⁴

In 1949 it was clear that Mao Tse-tung’s Communists were moving toward victory over the Nationalists. At the end of April, Communist forces crossed the Yangtze River and occupied the Nationalists’ capital city, Nanjing, making it now only a matter of months before they established themselves as the new rulers of the whole country. Because Stalin had been grudging in support of his Chinese comrades, out of fear that their all-out victory might bring U.S. intervention and force a confrontation with the United States and empower a rival for international Communist leadership, Mao signaled an interest in relations with the United States. First, however, Washington had to break relations with Chiang’s Nationalists and agree to diplomatic and trade relations with Mao’s new regime.

Although the Truman administration gave some indications that it might be receptive to ties to the revolutionary government (a direction favored by some American diplomats, missionaries, and businessmen, and calculated to serve Truman’s privately stated desire to prevent a Sino-Soviet accord), the president declared himself in June unwilling to show “any softening toward the Communists.” Moreover, when the U.S. ambassador in China reported the possibility that he might be welcomed in the Communist capital, Beijing, for talks, Truman vetoed the initiative and directly ordered that “under no circumstances” was the ambassador to go to Beijing.

In retrospect, it seems clear that there was no real chance of an American accommodation with the Communist regime. It did not take Mao long to see that his government’s best hope for outside support and aid would have to come from Moscow, however resentful he was of Stalin’s past reluctance to offer greater help. In June, Mao publicly declared that there was no third path between imperialism and socialism. In July, a Chinese mission to Moscow won promises from Stalin of a $300 million loan and military and technical assistance to combat the remaining Nationalist forces on the mainland and help China assume the role of Socialist leader throughout the East. On October 1, Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China and declared that the United States, with its continuing relations with the Nationalists, was the principal danger to the new regime’s future security.

Whatever Truman and Acheson saw as the value of a diplomatic initiative that could impede the creation of a Sino-Soviet alliance against the West, U.S. domestic politics forestalled any real likelihood that they could act upon it. The reality of abandoning Chiang’s Nationalists and agreeing to recognize Mao’s Communists as China’s legitimate government was certain to bring howls of protest from Chiang’s influential American supporters, who would be sure to attack Truman as an appeaser all too ready to let Communists take over the world.¹⁵

The publication in August 1949 of The China White Paper: United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949 demonstrated the administration’s belief that the domestic argument over China precluded any recognition of a Communist government. The appearance of this 1,054-page volume indicated not only that Truman and Acheson foresaw the end of Chiang’s mainland rule but also that the Communist victory would touch off bitter recriminations over Nationalist defeat. The volume was meant to explain and justify American postwar policy in China. Chiang’s failed governance did not “stem from an inadequacy of American aid,” Acheson asserted in a lengthy letter of transmittal. “Nothing the United States did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed the results.” It was partly an appeal to the traditional American understanding that the United States could not fight a land war in Asia, where China’s vast stretches would require an infinite number of troops and open-ended commitments of resources that the American people would never sustain.

The Nationalists’ collapse, Acheson argued, was the consequence of a failed government, which could not command the loyalty of the Chinese people or field an army that had the determination to meet the severe challenges presented by Mao’s more disciplined troops.

The objective of Acheson’s letter and the whole volume was to win an emerging argument posed by administration critics about “how China was lost.” Acheson gave the American supporters of Chiang Kai-shek—the China lobby, as it was called—a sop by declaring that the Chinese Communists were nothing more than tools of the Soviet Union. They did not represent an independent Chinese movement or speak for the Chinese people but were subservient to Moscow and its drive for worldwide Communist control. It was an argument that Acheson did not really believe. James Chace, Acheson’s biographer, asserts, “He approved this language in order to appease the China bloc and because he thought it would be little noted.”

But it was a mistake. “By asserting Beijing’s submissiveness to Moscow,” Chace notes, Acheson “made it much more difficult to pursue a policy of recognition.” Acheson may have hoped that such a characterization could encourage the Chinese people to ultimately reject Mao’s rule, but it was unrealistic. By 1949, the Chinese viewed such comments as nothing more than cold war propaganda.

In the end, The White Paper, however persuasive it seems in retrospect, did nothing to help solve difficulties with China or to convince a majority of Americans that the administration was faultless for the debacle in China. On the contrary, it incensed the right wing, and the China lobby used it as a launching pad for an unrelenting attack on the administration as weak on fighting communism in China and in Asia generally. The China lobby also branded Truman, Acheson, and the whole State Department as an utter failure in protecting the United States from the rising tide of international communism.

Chace quotes administration critics, who called The White Paper “a smooth alibi for the pro-Communists in the State Department who had engineered the overthrow of our ally the Nationalist Government of the Republic of China” and described the volume as “a 1,054-page whitewash of a wishful, do-nothing policy which has succeeded only in placing Asia in danger of Soviet conquest.”

When Chiang withdrew from the mainland in December 1949 and joined some 300,000 Nationalist troops, who had managed to escape to the offshore island of Formosa (also known as Taiwan), a new controversy erupted over how the United States should respond to Chiang’s appeal to help him defend the island against a Communist invasion and create a base from which he could eventually launch a return to the mainland. Truman and Acheson accepted the advice of the Joint Chiefs that Formosa was not crucial to American security in East Asia and did not warrant military intervention to protect Chiang’s forces there or aid them to launch an eventual invasion of the mainland with the unlikely prospect of overthrowing Mao’s Communists.

The decision brought further attacks on the administration for being too passive toward communism’s victory in China. Truman and Acheson expected Mao to seize Formosa in 1950, which would then eliminate the Nationalists as an element in the debate over China and open the way to an American policy of eventual recognition that could split the emerging Sino-Soviet coalition. But when no invasion occurred, it left Chiang as a continuing presence in the U.S. domestic dispute over China policy and froze the United States into a position of long-term antagonism to Communist China, which the Chinese were only too happy to reciprocate.¹⁶

Looking back almost sixty years later, it is astonishing that so unrealistic or irrational a critique of administration policy on Nationalist collapse could get so receptive a hearing in a nation that prided itself on reasoned public discourse in support of wise national decision making. Although 64 percent of the country had heard or read nothing about The White Paper, the 34 percent who had were critical of its arguments. Fifty-three percent of these attentive Americans thought that the administration had “blundered” badly in its handling of the Chinese civil war by failing to give the Nationalists more help, though no one could say just how this help might have made a difference. In November, 76 percent of a survey said that they had heard about China’s civil war and only 20 percent of these Americans wanted to recognize the new regime; 42 percent were opposed.¹⁷

The country seems to have been terrified by the sudden postwar turnabout from an America that had defeated the forces of totalitarianism everywhere in 1945 to a nation that seemed vulnerable now both at home and abroad to a new totalitarian threat with an apparent military capacity comparable to America’s. Moreover, Americans faced the frightening realization that the Communists were winning the argument against the United States with hundreds of millions of people everywhere: communism seemed to offer them more hope than a materialistic and “soulless” society that was more committed to self-indulgence than to any ideology that promised poor folks happier times ahead.

The public reaction to events in China was a perfect demonstration of Albert Einstein’s observation that everyone who hoped for public reason and justice needed to be “keenly aware [of] how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.”

What made the fight over China even more difficult for Truman was that it occurred in the context of allegations that he presided over an administration that was corrupted by cronyism. In particular, General Harry Vaughn, the president’s military aide and his friend dating from their service in World War I, was accused of facilitating government contracts for friends and arranging for Bess Truman to receive a scarce freezer for the Truman home in Independence in 1945. Critics now characterized the administration not only as being manipulated by Communists like Alger Hiss but also as being in the pockets of sleazy businessmen, who received favored treatment from Vaughn.

Despite the unflattering public picture, Truman, who was intensely loyal to old friends and knew that Vaughn had done nothing illegal, refused to dismiss him. As Robert Donovan explained, Vaughn was an amusing companion with a sharp wit and an affinity for barnyard stories that lightened Truman’s days. He “made Truman laugh when he needed to—a service not without its value to the state.” Asked by a reporter whether the president intended to remove Vaughn for his indiscretions, Truman snapped, “He will not.” Truman paid a “rather steep price” for “such divertissement,” in Donovan’s words.¹⁸

Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz said that in politics trust is the coin of the realm, and once a president and the people around him lose credibility with the press and the public, it makes it nearly impossible to provide effective leadership. A leader who is seen as untrustworthy cannot lead. At the very least, it opens him to attacks that further erode confidence in his judgment and the acceptance of what he proposes as necessary for the national well-being. The doubts that surfaced about Truman in 1949 would cast a shadow over his remaining three years in office and make every decision a test of whether he was acting wisely in the national interest.