The nature of the times created other opportunities to show the importance of good relations with us. During the war all foreign travel was controlled by the military, who, except where their own interests were concerned, asked the views of the State Department on most congressional requests. These became more common when, in expanding areas, fighting ended and occupation began. Again our office arranged to transmit the answers, thus radiating an aura of power. Again, as the allied armies moved deeper into Europe, congressmen and senators felt the urge to speak on the great issues of building a peaceful world. Our group could and did emulate the public letter writers in an Asian bazaar, furnishing both political literacy and themes. In return we hoped, with some justification, for sympathetic action on bills the Department favored.
On occasion the situation could be more complicated, as when an able freshman congressman from a protectionist state hesitated to support renewal of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act for fear of punishment in the next election. We suggested that he build up a strong enough individual reputation to support a degree of independence. John Dickey, who was working with us on the renewal, had done some academic work on a proposal to amend the Constitution by having treaties ratified by a majority vote in both houses instead of by a two-thirds vote of the Senate alone. Peace treaties being a subject of lively interest, a proposal for House participation would give pleasure there, bring the new member into favorable notice, and give him publicity at home. The project went off as planned; the young man was invited to speak before his own and other state legislatures; the trade bill gained a vote; and the public welfare was served.
In order to interest and inform more members of the House committee about foreign affairs, we encouraged the creation of regional subcommittees to study particular areas in depth. This, in time, developed the countervailing hazard of congressional travel with its burden upon embassy staffs and its dangers of utterances or conduct not calculated to enhance an idol much worshiped in this country, the American image. But the travel is worth its vexations. Since Ulysses' day it has been an instrument of education, and, as for the American image, we shall be better off to be thought of as we are—with warts and all, in Oliver Cromwell's honest phrase—than as some advertising man's prettified conception of how he would like other people to picture us.
Our hardest work, of course, consisted of the legislative program for the congressional session. Each partner in our firm was assigned certain bills or treaties. As senior partner, I planned and helped on all the work. The man in charge was responsible for drafting, sponsorship in Congress—often a delicate matter—and marshaling testimony and outside support for the legislation. He drew heavily on the division of the Department involved—often more than one —for help and witnesses. Skeeter Johnston was like an army scout in Indian territory—spying out the land and identifying friends, enemies, those open to recruitment, and problems in general. From his guidance the rest of us would begin to tramp the corridors of the Senate and House office buildings, carrying the gospel to converted and pagan alike; neither liked to be taken for granted. Often someone who had to go on record against us could be induced to do it in the least harmful way. For instance, in the House a vote cast against us on a roll call, when Johnston's constantly revised list of votes assured us of a safe margin, would do no harm, while teller or voice votes could be chancy, with members drifting in and out of the chamber. A friendly enemy might be content to make his record and let it go at that. On one occasion, when a member was causing confusion and harassment during the marking up of a bill in committee, we got her to desist from her gleeful wickedness by the promise of a powerful speech against the bill when it came up for final vote in the House. We duly wrote it and all parties profited.
Our "law firm," though small, was highly competent. Its thoroughness in preparation left no contingencies uncovered. Edward Miller came with me from
the economic work. John Ferguson, another lawyer out of New York but with an Oklahoma origin, which was highly satisfactory for congressional purposes even if somewhat unbelievable, joined us from the Foreign Economic Administration. Our last recruit, Herbert Marks, was to pilot me into a weird and nightmare land as yet undreamed of—the world of the atom. Together, after talks within the Department, we planned a legislative program for the first half or more of 1945. Program planning was not only novel in the Department but involved rather more than merely writing down what needed to be done. First of all, we wanted to begin with a success, and then to assign major legislation to each house, so that different hearing and committee work could go on simultaneously; and we wanted to start the most time-consuming legislation first and yet begin with what was ready. Department convenience had to be reconciled with the larger Administration needs and desires. Finally, each chairman, and later each committee, had to be consulted and won over to accepting our calendar as a convenience in planning their own work. In time it was all done.
12. CHIEF LOBBYIST FOR STATE
THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN
We laid out a busy schedule for the first session of the Seventy-ninth Congress. The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations would start with the Mexican Water Treaty, while on the House side the Ways and Means Committee would take up the renewal of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, and the Banking and Currency Committee an act authorizing participation in the Bretton Woods International Monetary Fund and Development Bank. With these well started on their legislative course, we would feed into the Senate the United Nations Charter (not yet negotiated) and two tax treaties, and, into the House, bills authorizing continuation and enlargement of the authority and funds of the Export-Import Bank (which I had fathered in 1933) and our participation in the Food and Agriculture Organization. This work would keep us all busy until after midsummer.
One reason for leading oflE with the Mexican Water Treaty was to broaden and popularize the idea that foreign policy should be nonpartisan, outside of politics. If the opposition were brought into the formulation of policy—so the doctrine ran—they would be guilty of a foul in attacking it later on. Mr. Hull had put forward the idea in 1934 i^ the most political of all areas of foreign policy—tariff making—but it had not flourished. He revived it in his talks with selected members of Congress during 1943 and 1944 about a world organization to enforce peace and, in the campaign autumn of 1944, by his arrangement with Dewey through Dulles that the war should be kept out of election issues. On a minor scale we had succeeded in taking postwar relief—UNRRA—out of the political arena.
THE THEORY OF NONPARTISAN FOREIGN POLICY
We now wanted to go further. Plainly, no effective postwar foreign policy could emerge from political controversy. The idea of a nonpolitical foreign policy was the holy water sprinkled on a political necessity. The perhaps apocryphal sign in the Wild West saloon—"Don't Shoot the Piano Player"—was the basic idea of nonpolitical foreign policy. Foreign policy has no lobby, no vested interest to support it, and no constituents. It must be built on a broad conception of the national interest, which lacks the attraction and support that can be generated by, say, a tax reduction, a tariff increase, or an agricultural subsidy. The Constitution makes the President the piano player of foreign policy, but
unless his immunity from assault with intent to kill is extended to members of either party who work with him in the legislative branch, no consistent foreign policy is possible under the separation of powers. The doctrine, of course, aids the Administration, but its immediate beneficiaries are in the Congress.
This beneficent attitude has its limitations. As Senator Vandenberg would often wryly point out, it did not bring him Democratic support on election day. In his more reflective comments he was quite aware that "common action does not mean that we cease to be 'Republicans' or 'Democrats' at home." It meant that in foreign policy cooperation could be purchased at the price of "consultation and mutual decision from start to finish."^ This was not Senator Robert Taft's view. "The purpose of an opposition," he said, "is to oppose"; and oppose he did, from start to finish.
By virtue of intelligence, convictions, and force of character. Senators Vandenberg, Taft, and Eugene Millikin of Colorado exerted the greatest influence on Republican policy in the Senate. By tacit understanding, Vandenberg took the lead in foreign afifairs and the others led in fiscal and domestic matters. Where the currents crossed, as in tariff and trade policies, the sea was always rough. Gene Millikin insisted that he was the most honest of the triumvirs, adducing as proof that although all three were bald, he let a shining pate proclaim the fact, while the other two, in a vain effort to mislead onlookers in the Senate gallery, brushed hair from the side of their heads over their arid crowns.
The notion that cooperation in a nonpartisan foreign policy could be purchased by consultation is too broad. "Historically," wrote Vandenberg, "this [nonpartisanship] has not been the case in China, Palestine or Japan."- He attributed the exceptions to lack of consultation, a plausible but disingenuous explanation. There was endless consultation. The true explanation was wholly understandable Republican unwillingness to take on the responsibility for what looked like thoroughly messy and probably losing ventures. It is interesting to note that Vandenberg mentioned Japan as one of the countries outside the nonpartisan-policy sphere in August 1948. Three years later greatly improved prospects and the appointment of a Republican, John Foster Dulles, to conduct the negotiations leading to the Japanese peace treaty brought the treaty within the nonpartisan-policy area and led to its overwhelming ratification by the Senate in the midst of the presidential election campaign of 1952. The possibility of this happy result did not escape President Truman in his consideration of the Dulles appointment.
In short, the doctrine and practice of nonpartisanship in foreign policy is a very practical political expedient, designed to moderate asperities inherent in our constitutional system. "The doctrine of the separation of powers," Justice Brandeis has explained, "was adopted by the Convention of 1787, not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was, not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy."^ Today, in the determination of our policies toward "the vast external realm" with all its complexities and dangers, there is a superabundance of friction to save the people from the autocratic imposition of
courses of action. The purpose of nonpartisanship is to ease the difficulties in the way of maintaining continuity and predictability in action. To borrow a phrase of Woodrow Wilson's, it is the essential "oil of government."
THE PRACTICE OF NONPARTISAN FOREIGN POLICY
The nonpartisan oil of government lubricated the machinery of legislation through the leadership. In the Seventy-ninth Congress this operated in the Senate out of the Secretary of the Senate's office, and in the House out of Speaker Rayburn's "Board of Education" room in the basement of the Capitol. Here "Mister Sam" presided at a large desk over a select company ensconced in overstuffed sofas and chairs and refreshed from an immense refrigerator. The Secretary of the Senate's quarters, west of the Senate chamber, were equally secluded from public view and inquiry, approached from a dead-end corridor and through a busy document-and-record office. A long narrow room lined with chairs along two sides ended with Leslie Biffle's desk. A door to the left of it led into his private dining room, served from the Senate restaurant. Here the power structure of the Senate met and decided what, at first, appeared to be largely matters of procedure—what should be taken up, when, how long it should be discussed, when voted on, and so forth. But with experience, and recalling Justice Holmes's dictum that "legal progress is secreted in the interstices of legal procedure," one came to realize that legislative achievement was secreted in the interstices of these procedural decisions and the attitude of the Senate hierarchy that they embodied.
At the committee stage, nonpartisan foreign policy was a sine qua non. There we worked with Tom Connally and Arthur Vandenberg in the Senate and their equally colorful counterparts in the House, Sol Bloom of New York and "Doc" Eaton, once the pastor of John D. Rockefeller's Baptist church in Cleveland and later of the Madison Avenue Church in New York, and in 1945 representative of the Fifth New Jersey district and senior minority member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. With adequate "consultation and mutual decision" they could bring most of their colleagues through the marking-up and committee-report stages of the legislative process. But this only launched the vessel with a fair wind. The hazards of the cruel sea lay ahead. If the bill happened to deal with trade agreements, Senators Taft and Millikin would deny it a fair wind in the Finance Committee, and in the Ways and Means Committee of the House going was heavy on both sides to begin with. On the floor of both chambers any foreign affairs legislation needed strong support. This was arranged in Les Biffle's dining room and in the "Board of Education."
In the former the gay, genial Majority Leader, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, presided while Biffle, the silent, smooth, friendly Secretary of the Senate, the most knowledgeable operator on the Hill, acted as chief of staff. Solemn, courteous, and kindly Walter George of Georgia, the Nestor of the gathering, usually put the seal on a decision by his pronouncement at the end of a rambling discussion over "bourbon and branch water" or lunch. Barkley and Biffle invited those who might be especially wanted, and others wandered in more or
less regularly from the Senate floor at about noon. Sometimes Bifile, I, or one of the senators gave a luncheon. Membership in the group was bipartisan though heavily weighted on the Democratic side. Vandenberg, Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., of Wisconsin, and Wallace H. White, Jr., of Maine were always welcome. Membership seemed to emerge from personality—congeniality, good humor, willingness to compromise and get on with the Senate's business, and general friendliness to the Administration, in varying degrees. Some who had many or all of these qualities I never saw there—for instance, Mr. Truman either before or after he became Vice President, doubtless because he was too occupied with more specific interests. In other instances absence might be due to the angularity of nature or sharpness of tongue, which often made Tom Connally an uncomfortable colleague. The habitues included Ernest W. McFar-land and Carl Hayden of Arizona, George L. Radcliffe and sometimes Millard E. Tydings of Maryland, Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island, Carl A. Hatch of New Mexico, Burnet R. Maybank of South Carolina, Lister Hill of Alabama, and Scott W. Lucas of Illinois. The effectiveness of decisions by this group came not from its sheer power to put them through the Senate but from its knowledge of how to put them through and the willingness to put its knowledge to use.
In the House, leadership was more compact and authoritarian—the Speaker; the Majority Leader, John W. McCormack of Massachusetts; the Majority Whip, Robert Ramspeck of Georgia; and the Chairman of the Rules Committee, Adolph J. Sabath of Illinois. In the Rules Committee resided the all-important power of determining when and under what procedural conditions a bill might come before the House. After a preliminary talk with the Speaker, and then with the rest of the leadership, the time would be ripe for a slightly larger group to meet in "Board of Education" to set the stage. Sam Raybum, a man of few words (once asked about General Eisenhower's qualifications for the Presidency, he is said to have replied, "Good man; wrong job"), was a loyal and true friend. Earlier a small service had earned me McCormack's favor. Mrs. McCormack had been awarded a papal decoration, but under war conditions difficulty arose in getting it from Rome to Washington. A little negotiation succeeded in its being brought over in the diplomatic pouch of Myron C. Taylor, President Roosevelt's Personal Representative at the Vatican. Bob Ramspeck, a most courteous and helpful gentleman, never failed us. Sabath I left entirely to the Speaker; he was not amenable to any persuasions of mine.
The leadership in both houses helped those who helped themselves. Self-help included not only the basic committee work, the hearings, and work with the committee staffs on their reports but the initial canvassing of members' voting predilections. Here one needed both strong feet and patience. At this time and later, as Sam Raybum would tell our weaker successors, day after day Will Clayton and I would take corridor after corridor of the House office building— Will on one side and I on the other—calling at every office, making our sales talk, and keeping a record of the responses we got for Skeeter Johnston's always-current voting lists. Our weapons were reason and eloquence. The leader-
ship worked on the waverers' hope of favors or fear of penalties to come. It also divided the labor of debate, allotting, according to skills and with an authority that we could not command, exposition and guerrilla warfare against the opposition.
REFLECTIONS ABOUT CONGRESS
All through this book runs the thread of my multifarious relations with the Congress, sometimes tumultuous, sometimes calmly cooperative, sometimes framed in the adversary ritual of committee hearings. To make specific episodes more understandable, I have pulled together here a few reflections of a broader character on the nature of the institution, its actual role in our scheme of government as against the constitutional theory of it, and my actual relations with its members, much warped through the myth popularized by press and commentators.^
Long ago Henry Adams pointed out that the chief concern of the Secretary of State—the world beyond our boundaries—was to most members of the Congress only a troublesome intrusion into their chief interest—the internal affairs of the country, and especially of the particular parts of it they represented.
Two aspects of this basic fact should be stressed. First, the principal consequence of foreign impact upon particular districts is trouble; rarely is it, or is it seen to be, beneficial. Second, the legislative branch is designed with a constitutional purpose of making each legislator the representative of a specific and limited area. Reapportionment does not affect this fact. The President is the only elected official with a national constituency. Senators, since their direct popular election, are the ambassadors of states, concerned with their parochial interest. The focus and representation of rhembers of the House of Representatives are even more narrowly circumscribed. Almost every time they legislate they affect foreign interests, but this concerns them only indirectly and seemingly distantly, for the familiar aspects of foreign affairs are war, relief, and trade; and trade more often appears as a threat of foreign competition than as potential markets for American goods. Even producers of commodities historically dependent on export matters, like wheat and cotton, have long been conscious of surplus problems and the increasing foreign production of these staples.
For the most part, then, the Secretary of State comes to Congress bearing word of troubles about which Congress does not want to hear. Furthermore, the members of the legislative branch not only represent narrower constituencies and interests than does the President and those he has chosen to aid him in dealing with the broadest national and international affairs, but largely they share the narrower interests and attitudes which they represent. That this should be so is wholly natural and proper, since under our system they must be residents of the state, in the case of the Senate, and of the district, in the case of the House. Those who live long enough among their constituents to win confidence, support, and the responsibility of representing them are pretty likely to share prevalent views. To say this invites criticism, but it is a simple and obvious fact.
The result is a built-in difference in the point of departure between the legislative and executive branches when problems of foreign policy are considered. Furthermore, the wide difference in their duties creates differences in the time that each can and must allot to foreign affairs and the amount of recent intelligence and deeper background that each has available. This is no different from the relation between a parent and a physician in considering a medical problem of a member of the family; each brings something different and important to the discussion.
What the executive brings is initiative, proposal for action; what the legislature brings is criticism, limitation, modification, or veto. In foreign affairs the tendency toward this division of function has always existed; since the second quarter of this century it has become true of nearly all domestic as well as foreign policy. Once it was thought that Congress would press forward with popular initiatives and the President could hold back with more conservative caution. To aid him he was given a negative veto in each house equal to a third of the total. However, today both the complexity and urgency of matters calling for action and the difference in the nature of the constituencies have made the President the active and innovative initiator and the legislators the more conservative restrainers. They are powerfully armed to perform this role by the complicated annual procedures with which they have surrounded and often whittled down such policies, for instance, as foreign aid, requiring four committee hearings a year accompanying an authorizing act of Congress and an appropriation.
The most publicized weapon of Congress—and one which as often as not proves frustrating to those who employ it—is the investigation. One cannot improve upon Woodrow Wilson's comment upon it: "Congress stands almost helplessly outside of the departments. Even the special, irksome, ungracious investigations which it from time to time institutes ... do not afford it more than a glimpse of the inside of a small province of federal administration. ... It can violently disturb, but it cannot often fathom, the waters of the sea in which the bigger fish of the civil service swim and feed. Its dragnet stirs without cleansing the bottom."^
These experiences induce an attitude of exasperated frustration in many members of Congress, which may be expressed in the kind of sulky opposition that characterized the last two years of relations between the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the Johnson Administration, or the destruction that flowed from Congressman John J. Rooney, of the Appropriations Committee, when he acquired a distaste for the State Department's cultural relations program, which doubtless his Brooklyn district shares, or Senator Allen Ellender's hostility to foreign aid, which his constituents in Louisiana would probably agree was "pouring good money down a rat hole."
To bridge these and other gaps in values and understanding required hours of tramping the halls of the House and Senate office buildings, innumerable gatherings and individual meetings, social occasions of all sorts at which all the arts of enlightenment and persuasion were employed. My years as Assistant Secretary were generously given over to these efforts and brought me a large and
pleasant acquaintance and some warm friendships at both ends of the Capitol. The much-publicized political attacks on me in 1950 and 1951 were accompanied in only a few cases by personal animosity. For instance, Senator William F. Knowland, who later criticized and opposed me strongly, in private always remained most courteous and friendly.
In making our calls, particularly in the Senate, we learned to bear the irrelevant with more than patience as it ate up precious time. Those who assert that I do not suffer fools gladly—and I have seen that view in print—do me less than justice for these anguishing hours. Despite current folklore, one could and did learn to suffer, if not gladly, at least patiently when, as often happened, doing so paid dividends. This recalls a story that Sir Robert Menzies, the former Prime Minister of Australia, has told on himself. At a party victory celebration a particularly crashing and somewhat inebriated bore, poking his grubby finger in Menzies' shirtfront, announced, "The trouble with you. Bob, is you don't suffer fools gladly."
"What," asked Sir Robert coldly, "do you think I am doing now?"
WE TAKE OUR CASE TO THE PEOPLE
During this period not all work was with the Congress. Two friends, Archibald MacLeish and his assistant, John Dickey, were engaged in an attempt to humanize and bring closer to our fellow citizens the work of the State Department. To some extent I was drawn into this estimable but not wholly successful effort. Its most spectacular failure occurred when, between the Yalta and San Francisco conferences, our energetic Secretary went to Chapultepec, Mexico, with a large staff to reorganize the inter-American system. My friends' idea was to dramatize the far-flung work of the Department by a conversation between its officers thousands of miles apart—the Secretary and his party in Mexico City bringing us in Washington up to date on the conference, while we filled him in on events at home. The American people would be "bugged in" on this homey chat between their shirt-sleeved diplomats at work.
MacLeish, Will Clayton, and I, with John Dickey and others who were managing the program, were assembled in a studio in Washington; the Secretary and his followers, in another in Mexico City. Our clocks were allegedly attuned. The zero hour was counted off backward as it is when rockets are blasted off at Cape Kennedy. When the countdown ended, the director pointed his finger at Archie. But science let us down. As Archie began his introduction, we heard the voice of the Secretary of State in Mexico City saying emphatically, "Shut up, you fellows. We will be on the air in thirty seconds." With this, considerable chatter diminished, but hell broke loose. For some reason unknown to me the clocks were never coordinated, nor was the script. We remained thirty seconds ahead of Mexico City. Some stations, I am told, cut out Washington; others cut out Mexico City; some left them both on; some cut them both off. The result, to put it mildly, was chaotic. When the horror finally ended and we were all being driven home, Dickey seemed to be having hysterics. Finally able to speak, he
gasped out that if MacLeish were unsuccessful in his effort to sell the State Department to the American people, he certainly would have a buyer in Bamum and Bailey's circus.
THE FOURTH TERM BEGINS
As we worked at our small tasks, great events were impending—an era and a war were coming to their ends. Because of the war, so it was said, the inauguration on January 20 was a small affair held on the south portico of the White House. I sent off a brief description of it to our son, then the communications officer of a destroyer escort in the Western Pacific.
We have entered upon the Fourth Term. Alice and I were invited, with a considerable number of our fellow citizens, to stand in the cold behind the White House to witness the very brief ceremonies. They had a most complicated arrangement of roping off various spaces. Apparently it gives great satisfaction to the human spirit to be enclosed, if only by a rope and out-of-doors in a small area, seeing other citizens enclosed in a different area. There seemed to be little or no choice since the portico could be seen perfectly well from any one of the enclosures and all the words were bellowed forth by loud speakers. However, the congressmen being by themselves felt superior to the officials, who were by themselves and in turn felt superior to the congressmen and various other groups. On the portico were the Justices and their wives, and the Cabinet members and their wives, and a large number of Roosevelt daughters-in-law, present and past, with their various offspring.
I was interested to see how fundamental to the American nature is the "yoo-hoo" spirit. The Cabinet ladies grouped around the rail of the portico were having a marvelous time waving to various lesser fry standing out on the grass. Everybody "yoo-hooed" to somebody else. This gave the ladies on the portico a definite feeling of condescension and in turn raised the spirits of some creatures standing in the mud to be thus singled out for attention. All in all we had a considerable amount to entertain us and to philosophize about while we were waiting.
The proceedings were opened and closed, quite appropriately, by prayer— opened by Bishop Dun of the Episcopalian communion and closed by Bishop Ryan of the Church of Rome. I was interested to observe that Bishop Dun took a more detached view of the situation than did his Catholic brother. He avoided arraigning the Lord in any intimate way with present hostilities, but merely asked that they should end with the triumph of the right ideas, it being implied that those ideas were ours. However, Bishop Ryan left nothing to chance and made it quite clear that he wanted the Lord on our side.
Henry Wallace then swore in the new Vice President. He did this in loud, ringing, and impressive tones. This was favorably commented upon. The Chief Justice then swore in the President, who delivered a very short inaugural of not more than five minutes. As you know, I do not like speeches very much and the chief impression that I got of this one was that the only two persons quoted were Endicott Peabody and Emerson. After this we all left the premises to return at five o'clock to be received by Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Truman in rather close quarters. In this manner the Fourth Term was inaugurated.
A few days before the inauguration I met with President Roosevelt for the last time. Leo Pasvolsky, Alger Hiss, and I went with Stettinius to brief the
President for the forthcoming meeting at Yalta on Russian claims to multiple votes in the General Assembly of the proposed United Nations. The Russian argument was that since various British Commonwealth countries would vote in the United Nations, an equal number of Soviet republics should be admitted and vote also.
We were all shocked by the President's appearance. Thin, gaunt, with sunken and darkly circled eyes, only the jaunty cigarette holder and his light-hearted brushing aside of difficulties recalled the FDR of former days. I reported that the Russian position would cause trouble on the Hill. He would deal with it, he said, by claiming a vote for each of the forty-eight states and work it out from there, t We wished him well as he gave us a farewell handshake.
Aside from the distant glimpse at the inauguration, I saw him only once again. It was in the chamber of the House of Representatives on his return from Yalta. If possible, he looked even worse. Contrary to his usual custom of walking down the aisle in his iron braces, steadied by the arm of an aide, and standing as he spoke, he was wheeled into the well of the House. He asked "pardon ... for the unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I wish to say, but I know you will realize it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about lo pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs and also because of the fact I have just completed a 14,000-mile trip."^ The voice had lost its timbre. It was an invalid's voice.
THE END OF AN ERA
Thursday, April 12, 1945, opened as the rainy, dismal beginning of my fifty-third year. Dusk came early toward the end of the afternoon. Mr. Karsh, the famous Canadian photographer, had arranged his camera, screens, and lights at one end of my State Department office, lowering the blinds to shut out what was left of the fading daylight. The room was dark with bright light focused on my chair. The door from Barbara Evans' office opened. "The President," she said, "is dead." She knew nothing more than that the press room had this flash from Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had been resting. I walked to the window and raised the blind. The White House flag was at half-mast. We went on with the photographing.
During the next days a dazed sensation developed. No one at home, on the street, in the Department, had much to say. From our windows we watched the flag-covered coffin carried from the caisson into the White House, then out again to lie in state in the rotunda of the Capitol. Day and night the radio played dim, funereal music. "Large crowds," I wrote at the time, "came and stood in front of the White House. There was nothing to see and I am sure that they did not expect to see anything. They merely stood in a lost sort of way." One felt as though the city had vanished, leaving its inhabitants to wander about bewildered, looking for a familiar landmark. The dominant emotion was not sorrow so much as apprehension on discovering oneself alone and lost. Something which had filled all lives was gone. The familiar had given way to an ominous unknown.
13. SUCCESS, DISENCHANTMENT, AND RESIGNATION
"The new President has done an excellent job," I wrote to our son on April 30, 1945. "It so happened that two days before the President's death, I had a long meeting with Mr. Truman and for the first time got a definite impression. It was a very good impression. He is straight-forward, decisive, simple, entirely honest. He, of course, has the limitations upon his judgment and wisdom that the limitations of his experience produce, but I think that he will learn fast and will inspire confidence. It seems to me a blessing that he is the President and not Henry Wallace. I am afraid that we would have been plunged into bitter partisan rowing under Henry Wallace. I listened to him testify the other day on our trade agreements bill and got, in a few minutes, a complete demonstration of how his weak points completely destroy his strong ones. He was well informed and gave excellent testimony. However, on two or three occasions hostile questions made him quite lose his temper, whereupon he made some ill-considered remarks and the whole hearing turned into a brawl."
The meeting with Mr. Truman—the only one I recall before he became President—took place when I went to him for help and received, instead, consolation.
Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, Chairman of the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, before which was pending the Department's appropriation for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1945, had summoned me to learn of his and Mrs. McCarran's wish to attend the forthcoming United Nations conference in San Francisco with official status and as guests of the United States Government. The Senator was not a person who in the eighteenth century would have been termed a man of sensibility. When I pointed out that the delegation had been completed and the long list of senators with equal or better claims who shared his desire to attend the conference, he observed that surely I would be ingenious enough to overcome these obstacles, especially after careful consideration of the alternative. That was, already, only too clear to me. An appeal to Senator McKellar, chairman of the full committee, to promise review and repair of any damage which refusal might bring upon our appropriation was answered, quite reasonably, by his observation that the committee could never get through its work if it undertook minute revision of subcommittee action, especially when it had resulted in cuts of departmental requests.
Then it was that I asked to see the Vice President. He received me in his office in the Capitol and listened sympathetically, and with proper expressions
of outrage, as I poured out my woes. His colorful outline of what, in my place, he would say to his former colleague from Nevada struck a stout blow for righteousness. When I explained the consequences and asked who in the Senate, or from the House in the conference committee (to adjust differences between them), would restore a truncated appropriation, the color faded. In the end both of us concluded that under the circumstances exposure of the Senator to an international conference of such lofty purpose might soften his isolationism and, hence, prove in the public interest. We parted with warm expressions of mutual regard, and the Senator went to San Francisco.
A few days after Mr. Truman assumed the Presidency, his first and I think, at that time, only personally selected assistant, Matthew Connelly, asked me to meet him in the Cabinet Room of the White House just across the street from my office. The west-wing offices were in confusion as movers boxed President Roosevelt's papers. Connelly had two or three men with him, among them an amusing Mississippian and friend of Mr. Truman's, George Allen, at the time manager of the Willard Hotel. George Allen had come to Washington to seek the fortune that he found there. His rise is recounted in his book. Presidents Who Have Known Me} President Truman used to recall that when in introducing Allen to the President's mother he added, "Mr. Allen never saw a Republican until he was twenty-four," that grand old lady, many of whose qualities her son inherited, observed, "He didn't miss much."
The group in the Cabinet Room had a problem, Connelly said, and the President, remembering me and my proximity, thought I might give a lead. Neither the President nor I can remember what the problem was. I was, however, taken through the office of his secretary. Rose Conway, to discuss it with him. He was cordial, simple, and gracious, as he was so often when I saw him thereafter. In a few minutes the problem, whatever it was, was put in the proper channels for solution.
After that the calls across the street continued, particularly when statements of one sort or another were being drafted. Soon my own business on the Hill brought me over to confer with his congressional liaison people and others as his office staff developed. They often took me in to talk with "the Boss." During those first weeks of the Truman Administration the executive office in the White House operated most informally.
From then until the President went to Potsdam on July 7 I was frequently at the White House, especially from the middle of May on, when I worked with the President on his speech closing the San Francisco United Nations conference. Indeed, our daughter, Mary Bundy, contributed from her sick bed at Saranac Lake an excellent and apt quotation from Edmund Burke, which survived in the speech-writing tournament until nearly the semifinals.
Also in May the President called me in for discussions and dinner and luncheon with the Regent of Iraq on a matter that seemed to involve congressional action. "He is a dapper litde man, dark, slim, a slight mustache," I wrote. "He might be a dentist in Eldora, Iowa. But he isn't. And so we had a good dinner and came home early." At a later meeting he said that he had great sympathy for President Truman, since he himself had never expected to be a ruler.
As he told me, one day his brother was killed in an automobile accident, and the next day he had a kingdom on his hands in the midst of all the trouble and intrigue of the early part of the war.
The Regent paid us another visit later on with the young King when I was Secretary. We all gained very considerable respect for him and were saddened and shocked by his tragic and brutal death at the hands of the Baghdad mob in the revolution of 1958.
In May rumor reached me that Fred Vinson would sound me out about succeeding Leo Crowley as Administrator of the Foreign Economic Administration, which he did on June 3. The proposal had no appeal to me, since I must soon return to the practice of law. Saying so, I agreed to think it over. A week later we resumed our talk in Vinson's White House office. My recommendation was to add the duties of the Administrator's office to Will Clayton's existing duties as Assistant Secretary of State. He could have his assistant, Willard Thorp, actually run the FEA, while the elimination of friction by combining the offices and the additional powers would greatly strengthen Will's position within the government and abroad.
Vinson was impressed by the suggestion, which was a truly sensible one. Had it been adopted, it would have prevented the harm that flowed from the ill-considered ending of all lend-lease hardly more than sixty days later upon Japan's surrender. Vinson asked me what I would do should the President insist on my taking over the post. I replied that I would do my best to convince him of the wisdom of the Clayton appointment, and, if I failed, accede to his request. The next day the White House operator tried for hours to get me, calling everywhere except where I told her I would be at definite times. "My curiosity," I wrote Mary, "is almost too much, but superstition prevents my calling to find out what it is all about. If I do, it will turn out to be something that I don't want to have catch up with me." The proposal was never mentioned to me again, although rumors kept appearing in the press that I would be drafted.
BACK TO LOBBYING
From mid-May, for two and a half months, our legislative calendar demanded my attention for its most nerve-racking stage—that of voting in the committees and on the floor of both houses. The Mexican Water Treaty had been approved in April. All the other bills had now reached the point where months of preparatory labor would be put to the acid test of the yeas and nays. The first to come up was the Trade Agreement Renewal Bill in the House. Paragraphs from my letters to our daughter carry something of the tension of dispatches from the front in hard-fought battles.
DA to MAB May 16
We had a great victory in the Ways and Means Committee on our Trade Agreements Bill. We were licked a week ago, but today won a favorable report 14 to 11— all Republicans and one Democrat against us. It now looks as though we should have the same result, or about it, on Bretton Woods. The Republicans are playing rather stupid politics, I think.
DA to MAB May 22
The House got started on the Trade Agreements debate today. I listened for four hours. A dreary and wholly unrealistic debate. Few of the claimed virtues of the bill were really true and none of the fancied dangers. The true facts lay in a different field from that where the shells from both sides were landing.
At lunch at the Capitol I was asked to sit at a table with Jessie Sumner of Illinois, the worst of the rabble rousing isolationists of Chicago Tribune fame. We got along famously. She is a grand old girl and reminded me of the madam in Cannery Row, sort of low, humorous and human. We became great friends and are going to lunch again. I often wonder whether I have any principles at all. It's a confusing world.
DA to MAB May 2^
I have had a day of frenzied lobbying on the Hill. We are in real trouble and may or may not come through tomorrow. We are trying to get a letter from the President in which he lays his political head on the block with ours. It will be interesting to see if he signs it.
DA to MAB May 26
We have had a great day and a great victory. The Trade Agreements Bill came on for voting on amendments and final passage in the House today. We won by a final majority of 86. But this does not tell the true story. It was very close on the critical amendments which would have killed the bill. Our toughest one was an amendment to strike out the additional authority given the President to reduce tariffs.
We won that by a majority of only 23. The Democratic majority in the House is 51. This took weeks of work, ending with a letter which I got the President to sign this morning—having written it last night. I gave it secretly to the Speaker, Sam Rayburn, who used it with great dramatic effect today. This stopped the Old Guard just short of victory.
From then on we gained strength. The last real test gave us a majority of 51. Then the Republican ranks broke and we licked them by 86 on the final vote at about 6:50.
We all went down to the Speaker's room, drank some whiskey, and called Mr. Hull. No one thought to call the President, who had done a great job for us.
The House Committee vote on Bretton Woods was pretty good too. 23-5 for it. I think we shall put that through the House with a bang. The Senate will give us trouble on both bills.
This life is amusing but not calculated to engage or extend all those faculties which when used to the full give one the sense of the good life. But the good life is very hard and takes much courage and much character.
DA to MAB June 7
My poor aching feet! The badge of a statesman lobbying on Capitol Hill. I was at it from nine a.m. to five p.m. in an attempt (a) to get the Trade Agreements Bill ready for a [Senate Finance] Committee vote tomorrow morning, and (b) to express appreciation to the Banking and Currency Committee of the House over Bretton Woods.
That bill had a smash hit success today. It was approved by 345 to 18. Only a declaration of war gets a vote like that, and six weeks ago we were defeated in that Committee—that is, we would have been if the vote had been taken then.
Some of the success came from the panic of the Republicans over their absurd performances on Trade Agreements. They simply couldn't afford to be against every international measure, so they flocked to a man to vote for Bretton Woods. The 18 against are almost a roster of absolute isolationists—all are within the daily circulation of the Chicago Tribune.
Tonight we think that we have a majority of one on the Finance Committee for the Trade Agreements Bill. It is very close. Every Republican is against us again. On the floor of the Senate we think we are all right if we can get our boys back. They will travel at the wrong times.
This is a low life but a merry one.
DA to MAB Jane 8
Today we had a disappointment. Senator Walsh and Senator LaFollette promised to vote with us in the Finance Committee on Trade Agreements. That would give us a majority of one. On the critical vote Walsh moved over to the other side, which gave them a majority of one. So we have our bill reported with its heart out. We can, we think, put it back again. But it was rather a sad day for us, particularly after yesterday's great success.
DA to MAB June 1^
We did not get a vote on Trade Agreements today, but we shall on Monday. It still looks as though we shall win. I talked with old Mr. Hull twice today and gave him reports from the front. He was much pleased.
DA to MAB June 19
Today we had a great victory in the Senate—a vote of 47 to 33 to restore the House bill [on trade agreements] in its original form. This was our most severe test, as we saw it, and I think we have won hands down.
DA to MAB June 20
Our job is done. Finally after what seemed like a millennium of talk the Senate passed our Trade Agreements Act today by a vote of 54 to 21. It was a fine result and one quite unexpected by any of the higher ups in the Senate when we began. They told us that it could not be done. Now I can only hope that the Department can use the Act to some good purpose.
Our next job is to get Bretton Woods out of the lotus-eaters' hands and on the floor of the Senate. Then this San Francisco treaty, and I shall be through!
DA to MAB June 21
I had a fine lunch today in the office of the Secretary of the Senate with Senators and House members. A real Texas ham was offered and whiskey. I am getting to be a real politician.
DA to MAB June 2^
I had hoped to give this note to Alice so that you could get one from me tomorrow, but I nearly missed her and made her miss her train. Senator Barkley gave a lunch for Clayton, [Charles P.] Taft and me at the Secretary of the Senate's private room. We were late in starting; and what with speeches from everybody, it got to be 2:45 before I could get out of the Capitol. Your poor mama was a bit nervous. However, a good time was had by all and we all expressed the highest regard and senti-
merits for each other. That is good Senatorial behavior. ... I find it harder and harder to settle down to hard and sustained application to work. This business of talking to everyone and attending meetings all day is a shiftless way of conducting oneself.
DAtoMAB July 1^
Yesterday the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations reported out the Charter 20 to o. It will come up on the floor July 2 5rd. Bretton Woods comes up on Monday. The House yesterday passed our Export-Import Bank bill with only 6 dissenting votes. We hope to get that through the Senate before it adjourns. So far so good. A pretty fair record.
DAtoMAB July ig
Today another chapter closed. The Senate approved Bretton Woods 6i to i6. We shall have a day or so of frantic efi'ort to get the rest of our legislative program through. Tax treaties with the UK, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Export-Import Bank. And then the [UN] Charter, which I have always thought was the easiest of all. When it is over, I shall be glad to take a bit of a rest. It has been a rather long grind and, I think, a rather successful one.
DA to MAB July 20
We have a law a day these days. Yesterday Bretton Woods (today the House agreed to the Senate amendments); today the Export-Import Bank Bill; tomorrow the Food and Agriculture Organization Act and two tax treaties. This, with the Charter, winds up our program for the season. It has been a big job.
DAtoMAB July 22
The Food and Agriculture Bill was passed on Saturday. The Charter comes up Monday.
DAtoMAB July 28
We are, I hope, on the last day of the Charter debate. I have taken a chance which has annoyed some of the Senators. I got a letter from the President to Senator McKellar, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, saying that he proposes to take subsequent steps under the Charter by statute which requires a majority of both houses rather than by treaty. This may make a flurry and hold things up, but I think not. Rather it will take advantage of all the popular steam behind the Charter to settle the fight our way.
The United States Senate on July 28, 1945, at 5:14 p.m. approved the Charter of the United Nations by a vote of 89 to 2. This completed my legislative labors as Assistant Secretary of State.
However, the record of the eventful summer of 1945 must go on to include the goings and comings in official Washington (my own in both directions) and the end of the Great War. The first day of changes came on Wednesday, May 23. Francis Biddle was replaced as Attorney General by Assistant Attorney General Tom Clark of Texas; Claude Wickard, Secretary of Agriculture, by "a nice congressman from New Mexico, Clinton Anderson, whom I know and like —a clear gain"; and Miss Perkins, Secretary of Labor, by a former Senator and Judge, Lewis Schwellenbach. The next day I had a talk with Francis Biddle, of
which I made a note, who told me that "Steve Early [a presidential secretary] called him up last Monday and said that the President wanted his resignation. Francis replied that a Cabinet Officer might expect to hear that from the President himself. Whereupon the President sent for him and told him the same. Francis says that Harold Ickes will be the next to go. ... He expects that Ed Stettinius will survive until the San Francisco Charter is well on its way through the Senate. ... He told me that he had explained to HST that FDR wanted to appoint me Solicitor General and who the other candidates were. It was Francis' belief that the Administration would appoint a political figure. [This the President did when he named J. Howard McGrath on September 28 to be Solicitor General.] This I said was all right with me as I did not want to be Solicitor anyway, since I had my eye on August or earlier with Mary."
On June 27 Francis Biddle's prediction about Stettinius came true.
DAtoMAB June 2 J
Today has been an eventful one. Ed Stettinius has resigned. The gossip is that Byrnes will succeed him. . . . Archie [MacLeish] says that Ed forced the issue by insisting that he could not go on in this vague way. He must be in or out. And the answer was out.
It will mean other changes, too. Archie and I will be gone soon.
DAtoMAB June 28
Today has been a day of rumors and little work. Archie came for advice as to whether he should resign before Monday, because it was said that Byrnes would be appointed and fire him and Rockefeller. I dissuaded him. One should not hurry mounting the tumbril.
It is said that we shall all be fired except Clayton and Grew.
It is said that Grew will certainly be fired.
It is said that I will be made Secretary—Under Secretary—Administrator of F.E.A.—Solicitor General—President of the Bretton Woods Bank, etc.
I say that I shall resign as of the end of this session, rest and then go to the Union Trust Building again [my old law firm].
Make your own bets.
News Item
Last night about 11:30 John Dickey and I were walking home passing the Penna. Ave. side of the Treasury. We were talking of Ed's resignation. On the street, passing us, was a police derrick truck towing a limousine. Suddenly its license plate hit us like a land mine—Government 120, the Secretary of State's car. We stopped for a moment speechless. Then John said, "Well, they certainly do things thoroughly."
This morning I asked about it and found that last night as usual Ed's chauffeur, Rudolph Warren, delivered the car at the government garage door. A man came to take it, turned it around and disappeared in a cloud of dust. It took the police four hours to find it. Some lad!
DA to MAB July 3
Today we acquired our new Secretary. We all repaired to the White House where we encountered a noble company of the country's political great—Senators, Congressmen, office holders and would-be such. The press was too great for the
President's office so we all moved out to the garden behind the west wing of the White House. There the oath was administered by Chief Justice Whaley of the Court of Claims, a symbolic performance, and the speeches made.
The most important item in the speech to us was that we were asked to stay at our posts until the poor old Department was reorganized again and the Secretary returned from the Big Three meeting. I shall tell him that, of course, I shall stay until then; but then I must go.
In fact, the next day I tried to get the new Secretary to fix some date when, at least for planning purposes, I could look forward to release from official duties. But he did not wish to discuss the matter until his return from Europe.
FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE UNITED NATIONS
When President Truman replaced Mr. Stettinius as Secretary of State with Mr. Byrnes, he announced that the former Secretary would become our representative at the site of the United Nations when its organization had been established.
Before Mr. Byrnes left for Europe, Mr. Stettinius' staff sent to the President, who sent it on to the Secretary, a draft proposal for establishing the position of United States Representative at the United Nations as they wished it. Not unnaturally, these men were interested in exalting this position, even though it might be at the expense of the Secretary of State. The staff paper gave its occupant a seat in the Cabinet and, in general, seemed to equate his position with that of the Secretary of State. Mr. Byrnes, in view of Mr. Stettinius' somewhat ruffled feelings at being summarily replaced, was not inclined to make an issue of it, but I persuaded him that he must do so. The whole integrity of his position was at stake as well as an infinity of trouble over who would be the President's chief adviser and secretary on foreign policy. Mr. Byrnes was able to block the move without a public row; and the Act of Congress creating the post as later passed set it up as another ambassadorial post reporting through and instructed by the Secretary of State. Eight years later the earlier proposal was revived to exalt the position for former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, one of General Eisenhower's chief backers for the Presidency. It has been a source of trouble for secretaries of state ever since. But at least three secretaries were spared this embarrassment.
Although I had nothing to do with the planning of the United Nations Charter or the negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington or the conference in San Francisco that led to its adoption, the management of the hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations regarding its ratification fell within my field of responsibility. I did my duty faithfully and successfully but always believed that the Charter was impracticable. Moreover, its presentation to the American people as almost holy writ and with the evangelical enthusiasm of a major advertising campaign seemed to me to raise popular hopes which could only lead to bitter disappointment. In Chapter i I briefly recafled the nineteenth-century faith in the perfectibility of man and the advent of universal peace and law. This faith was dying in Europe, as "Locksley Hafl Sixty Years
After" sadly recalls, when it crossed the Atlantic to inspire American idealists, and none more than Woodrow Wilson.
As applied to foreign affairs, Americans—as Sir Harold Nicolson pointed out in his brilliant Chichele lectures at Oxford in 1953—distilled from this idealistic belief a number of subsidiary faiths that added up to a grand fallacy. They began with the idea that one could—and should— apply to external affairs the institutions and practices of legislative procedure in liberal democracies. This was regarded as preferable to diplomacy (almost by definition tricky and insincere) because it reached through a fagade to The People. Furthermore, diplomacy was thought to be an instrument of power, the great corrupter of man, which was almost synonymous with force and violence. Among peace-loving peoples—and all others should be or had been suppressed—violence could and would be superseded by reason. What was reasonable and right would be determined by majority vote; and just as the equality of man led to one man one vote, so the doctrine of the "sovereign equality of states" led to one state one vote.
Thus to the true believer, of whom Arthur Vandenberg was to become one of the most vociferous, the General Assembly appeared as the Town Meeting of the World. Unfortunately, the proliferation of states and the perverse ingenuity of man (to which, as we shall see. I was to make a not inconsiderable contribution) have minimized the more modest role of the United Nations as an aid to diplomacy, which Dag Hammarskjold saw as its true role.t Instead it has become a possible instrument of interference in the affairs of weak white nations, as Rhodesia is experiencing as I write.
When later the United Nations was looking for a site, I believed that it should be in Europe and favored Geneva or Copenhagen, but pressure grew for its headquarters to be in the United States. President Truman's offer of the beautiful Presidio site on the shore of the Pacific at the Golden Gate seemed a perfect one, establishing its home in the city of its birth. The misplaced generosity of the Rockefeller family, however, placed it in a crowded center of conflicting races and nationalities.
THE WAR ENDS AND I RESIGN
When the President and the Secretary went to Potsdam on July 7 for a month, most of us in the Department were left in a fog of rumor and ignorance about the war in the Pacific. Events were moving to a crisis of some sort. Troops and supplies bound westward betokened, we assumed, an invasion of Japan on the model of General Eisenhower's operation in Europe. Committees within the Department and between the Department and War and Navy discussed postsurrender policies toward Japan. Sitting with them because of the obvious necessity at some point of bringing in congressional leaders, I was soon engaged in a sharp difference of opinion with Joe Grew regarding the future of the Emperor of Japan. Grew argued for his retention as the main stabilizing factor in Japan; I argued that he should be removed because he was a weak leader who had yielded to the military demand for war and who could not be relied upon.
Crew's view fortunately prevailed. I very shortly came to see that I was quite wrong.
The proclamation issued on July 26- by the heads of governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and China—the Soviet Union was not at this time at war with Japan—disturbed me greatly. It would, I feared, lose us the opportunity for complete victory over Japan without avoiding the losses which had been predicted. Regarded not as an ultimatum but as an invitation to negotiate, it would lead us into a trap both at home and in Japan. The ruling military and economic groups in Japan would stay in control, and the war would end inconclusively. I thought all these things because, of course, neither I nor the rest of the world knew what the authors of the proclamation were talking about. After defining clear and harsh terms for the surrender of Japan, they issued what was intended to be an ultimatum before the use of the atomic weapon. But this was not referred to and was, of course, then profoundly secret. The last paragraph of the proclamation now gives the clue: "We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."
The destruction of Hiroshima came on August 6, of Nagasaki on August 9. The meaning of that last paragraph was plain to all. What was not known was that those two bombs comprised our whole stock. But that, if known, would only have raised a question of time.
On the evening of the sixth I wrote: "The news of the atomic bomb is the most frightening yet. If we can't work out some sort of organization of great powers, we shall be gone geese for fair. It makes the prospect of Ed Stettinius as our representative on the UN even more fantastic than ever."
AN ATTEMPTED JAIL BREAK
The President and Mr. Byrnes returned from the Potsdam Conference on August 7, 1945. They were deep in a series of almost continuous meetings with military and political leaders regarding negotiations for the surrender of Japan, carried on through the Swiss. It was both impossible and absurd to try to see either one of them to discuss my personal affairs at such a time. Trivial as they were amid the great events impending, they were not trivial to me. I had no part in the discussions of the Japanese surrender. If I stood aside, it was quite possible that weeks might go by before either the President or the Secretary had the opportunity to release me from service in a war that was already over. Some matter, now forgotten, took me into Mr. Bymes's office on August 8. Before leaving, I handed him a letter to the President resigning my office and asked Mr. Byrnes's kindness in presenting it with a recommendation that it be accepted.
My dear Mr. President: A ugust 8, 1 945
I herewith submit my resignation as Assistant Secretary of State. The work for which I stayed on at the time of the reorganization of the Depart-
ment has been finished, and, after four and one-half years of public service, some attention to my own affairs is long overdue.
For the unfailing kindness and support which you have given me I am deeply grateful, as well as for the opportunity to have served the country in these eventful years.
May I assure you of every wish for your continued success in the leadership which you are giving to us all. Very respectfully,
Dean Acheson
The next day I got from his office the long-awaited reply.
Dear Mr. Acheson: August 9, 1945
I have your letter of resignation as Assistant Secretary of State.
The Secretary of State advised me of your conversation with him and of the personal reasons which you believe make it imperative that you should at this time leave the public service. With reluctance I accept your resignation.
You refer to having served for more than four years. I am aware of that fact and I am aware, too, of the fine character of the service you have rendered during that period. You have served at great personal sacrifice but you have the satisfaction of knowing that you have made a substantial contribution to your government in time of war.
Since you feel that you now should return to your profession, I want you to know that you have my best wishes for your success and happiness.
Sincerely yours, Harry Truman
That evening Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Washington Post, was having a small, stag dinner. Of the guests I remember clearly Fred Vinson, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Wayne Coy, an assistant editor of the Post and former Assistant Director of the Budget. A vague recollection that Harry Hopkins was there persists. There were perhaps one or two others. All of us were full of the surrender of Japan. I mentioned that this had brought to me my release and that I was off after another day for a rest and return to private life. Fred Vinson and Wayne Coy, both of whom had become warm friends, protested vigorously, but I assured them that the die was cast.
After dinner the company sat out on the high terrace looking down from the top of the 16th Street hill over the lights of the city. Vinson and Coy began to talk about the State Department, the jumbled personnel made up in part of aging veterans of Mr. Hull's tenure, some wartime volunteers, and a sprinkling of Ed Stettinius' public relations assistants. They spoke of its organization, which resembled that with which General Winfield Scott began the Civil War. I contributed some comments and a few almost elemental suggestions. Having been through the same conversation so many times over the past four years, it had little interest for me, and my mind was occupied with the new future which was to begin tomorrow.
The next day we packed up and went to New York. The following morning at the crack of dawn a train began its wandering over most of New York
State, bringing us in early evening to Saranac Lake, where the first of several anticipatory celebrations of Japan's surrender was being touched oflE. Our daughter, looking radiant and well on the way to recovery, was awaiting us in her bedroom. Our dear friend, Ray Atherton, then Ambassador to Canada, was driving down from Ottawa to dine with us, spend a day or two with Mary, and then take us on to Ottawa. After a first round of embraces, Mary remembered to tell us that Secretary Byrnes had been trying all day to get me on the telephone.
ACTION BEGINS
Under Secretary of State August 1945-June 1947
14. A NEW JOB AND WIDENING RESPONSIBILITIES
THE MYSTERY OF MY APPOINTMENT
No PREMONITORY PRICKLE wamed me of trouble lurking in the Secretary of State's call. Doubtless some loose end needed tying up. There was no hurry about it.
When some hours later that evening Secretary Byrnes came on the telephone, he told me cheerily that the acceptance of my resignation had been an error due to the confusion and pressure of the moment and that, on the contrary, he and the President wished me to come back as Under Secretary of State. This amazed me then as much as it still does today. My appointment, Mr. Byrnes suggested, was not the only replacement under consideration. Although both dumbfounded and appreciative, I clung to my decision to return to private life, but Mr. Byrnes would have none of it. It was, he said, too complicated and serious a matter to be decided in a telephone conversation. He would send an Army plane for me and we would talk it out thoroughly in Washington. The next day, August 12, was our daughter's and my wife's joint birthday. The surrender of Japan was in the final stage of discussion through the Swiss Foreign Office. Combining these private and public exigencies, I got Mr. Byrnes to postpone our confrontation for a few days. My wife suggested that in the interval I assume for one day that I had accepted Mr. Byrnes's proposal and for the next that I had declined it, and see which made me feel worse. The experiment did not help. Both assumptions depressed me.
On Tuesday, August 14, at six o'clock in the evening, the Swiss Charge d'Affaires brought word to the Secretary of State of Japan's surrender. The next day I flew back to Washington in the Army plane and my wife motored to Ottawa to stay at the embassy with the Athertons until I could join her.
On the afternoon of the fifteenth I had a rambling talk with Mr. Byrnes. Will Clayton had agreed to stay on in his post. Benjamin V. Cohen would become Counselor. This post had been a source of trouble with the Under Secretary when it was last occupied by Judge Walton Moore, but Ben Cohen's nature and our long friendship gave assurance that it would not be so with me. To my deep regret Archie MacLeish's resignation had been tendered and accepted. Nelson Rockefeller's would be. Jimmie Dunn would stay on but would be abroad while the European treaties were being negotiated. I tried to get a commitment to keep Julius Holmes in charge of administration, but could get noth-
ing definite. Mr. Byrnes spoke of his former law partner, Donald Russell of South Carolina (later named as the Secretary's choice); a man who knew nothing of the Department did not seem promising in this post. When I spoke of the importance of properly amalgamating the new wartime agencies dealing with intelligence and information into the Department, Mr. Byrnes gave me a Budget Bureau plan of reorganization to read overnight. When we parted, I was still free and uncommitted. The reorganization plan was full of Budget Bureau nonsense about coordination and weak on lines of command, but the parts on the intelligence and information units were sound.
During the night I came to a decision in the curious way one does. One moment one is still pushed about by doubts and hopes and, in the next, clear. In so far as the process was rational, I was pretty sure that the experience would be a frustrating one; but I would never know unless I tried it, so try it I would. The frustrations were all that I expected them to be, but for reasons impossible to foresee at the time, the decision was one of the most fortunate of my hfe. Again I was to learn how vast a part luck plays in our lives.
The next morning Mr. Byrnes and I talked again briefly. He told me that he had approached Walter Lippmann to take on the post Archie MacLeish had vacated, but that Lippmann had refused on the ground that his role as commentator would be destroyed if he became involved in the active conduct of affairs. Mr. Byrnes asked me what I would think of Spruille Braden for the Latin American post. I did not know Braden but said that I had heard well of him.
Then I signed on as mate of the good ship "Jimmie Byrnes" and the Army flew me to Ottawa for my holiday. All the business of resigning and coming back again was too much for the administrative end of the State Department, so it simply ignored the polite exchange of letters between the President and me. On the official record I went happily along as Assistant Secretary until I took over my new post. It made bookkeeping so much easier.
The mystery of the sudden decision to recall me still remains. I did not feel free to cross-examine the Secretary of State, and the only written reference to it which I have from him is not enlightening. It is written on the flyleaf of his book, Speaking Frankly, which he kindly gave me.
I could make the trips described on a preceding page only because I was confident that in my absence the Department was ably administered by the Under-Secretary Dean Acheson. During the war he rendered patriotic service. In July 1945, he had earned the right to return to his profession, but at my request agreed to remain as Under Secretary. He did it to serve his country, but at the same time he rendered me a great service. His loyal friendship always will be appreciated by me. Dec. 1st 1947 James F. Byrnes
It is quite probable that in the busy days of July and August, after Mr. Byrnes's appointment, neither he nor the President had time to think about staffing the State Department. Both left immediately for the Potsdam Confer-
ence and then were overwhelmed by the events leading to the surrender of Japan. Undoubtedly Fred Vinson and Wayne Coy, who had had occasion in the past to consider the organization of the Department, spoke to them both about my departure as soon as they learned of it and stressed the need for a successor to Mr. Grew. This seems the most plausible explanation of how and why my escape from government service was frustrated at the very moment when I thought myself free. At any rate, the whole course of my life was completely changed.
My own about-face on the decision to return to private life apparently baffled our daughter Jane (Mrs. Dudley Brown) as much as it did me. She suggested an answer to the puzzle:
JAB to DA September 1945
Heaven knows where you are now. I have given up trying to keep up with your movements and career. The last development has inspired me to write:
I'm Just a Guy Who Can't Say "No" (With apologies to Celeste Holm)
I'm just a guy who can't say, "No!"
I'm in a terrible jam. I always say, "Okay, I'll bite."
Just when I ought to say, "Scram!"
When a Sec. begins to plead with me,
I'm sure I should say, "Hell, no!" But when they intercede with me,
Somehow I say, "Let's go!"
I'm just a fool when people beg. I seem made for a saint. I ain't got no restraint! How can I be what I ain't? I can't say no!
Suppose they say no other will do;
They gotta have you some maw? What'ja gonna do when they talk like that?
Practice law?
For a while I said, and thought it true,
I'm a weary and broke old man. When they said you're the fella to make
the world new, I wonder—Perhaps, I am!
Whether or not this shot hit the bull's eye, I cannot say that in reversing myself and going back to the Department I was not aware of the difficulties and dangers which awaited the second in command in that place at that time. Not fully aware, to be sure, but acutely conscious that I was entering Indian country. Trouble did not even await our return to Washington.
THE END OF LEND-LEASE
While we were vacationing in Canada and Will Clayton was absent in England discussing British economic problems for the coming year, an action was taken in Washington that had most far-reaching and harmful consequences. If either Clayton or I had been there, I cannot believe it would have been taken.
The action, announced by President Truman on August 21, directed the Foreign Economic Administration to discontinue all lend-lease operations and notify foreign governments accordingly.^ The decision, made two days earlier as a result of a recommendation by Joseph Grew, Under Secretary of State, and Leo Crowley, Foreign Economic Administrator, was arrived at without adequate consideration of its consequences, doubtless without an understanding of them, by those involved. Indeed, in later years President Truman said to me that he had come to think of this action as a grave mistake. Not for two years more was the American Government to understand the full seriousness of even the situation in Europe. In Britain there was no such delay. Mr. Attlee and Mr. Churchill saw Britain in a "very serious financial position" and as the recipient of "very grave disquieting news."- Will Clayton saw Britain facing disaster, and the Secretary of the Treasury immediately recommended a group to deal with the impending crisis in Britain.
At the time, Mr. Truman said to the press in explanation, "The reason is that the bill passed by Congress defined Lend-Lease as a weapon of war, and after we ceased to be at war it is no longer necessary."^ This statement was untrue and the decision disastrous. Made even before the surrender of Japan had been signed on board the USS Missouri, when millions of our own and our allies' troops still had to disarm our enemies and occupy their territory and to stabilize as yet unplumbed situations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, it knocked the financial bottom out of the whole allied military position. While lend-lease could not have been made the vehicle for postwar foreign aid, a decision to end it five days after the white flag was run up in Tokyo was unnecessary and wrong. This is not said in criticism of a new and inexperienced President confronted with thoroughly bad advice from supposedly responsible officials—in this case, what Edmund Burke called "the irresistible operation of feeble councils"—but to mark the point from which he began almost immediately to grow.
On Monday, August 27, I took the oath of office as Under Secretary of State—and was to remain in it under two secretaries until July 1, 1947, a period of six hundred and seventy-two days. During a little more than a third of that time I acted as Secretary of State during my chiefs' many and often protracted absences. The appointment, Congress being absent, was a "recess appointment," which meant that the nomination would have to be submitted to the Senate for confirmation when Congress reassembled. This situation offers the appointee an opportunity to supply senators with grounds for criticizing him. I was not slow to seize it.
*
DA to MAB August 29
I have been here three days. . . . The bloom is off the peach. Everyone has said
how wonderful I am. The power and the glory are over.
My sunburn is fading. My smile is more rubbery. I am looking forward with
dread and fascination to Monday when I am left in charge to sink or swim without
any idea of what we are trying to do. [Mr. Byrnes was in London at the Council of
Foreign Ministers from September 4 to October 8.]
DA to MAB September 1^
Here we are snowed under, exhausted, and getting more so. There are three of us at the head of the Department instead of eight. The place is disorganized, the morale low, and no one has the authority to take the steps which have to be taken. So we struggle on as best we can ....
DA to MAB September 18
Sometimes I wish that I could speak with a little more freedom [a wish I was to fulfill the next day]. The President has been very kind and backed me up at all times. I like him a great deal.
INTRODUCTION TO ATOMIC ENERGY
At a Cabinet luncheon on September 18, 1945, the President discussed briefly the need for determining an approach to the international discussion of atomic energy. The Cabinet meeting on Friday, September 21, would be Colonel Stimson's last. The President proposed to devote it to this subject and to center it upon a memorandum by Colonel Stimson. This memorandum was misunderstood at the time and has been since, partly because the accompanying letter"* referred to "sharing the atomic bomb with Russia," and this put off many in the Cabinet. The memorandum, however, was addressed to the much narrower question of how to approach discussion with the Russians on the questions raised by our development of the bomb. The crucial sentences were:
Those relations may be perhaps irretrievably embittered by the way in which we approach the solution of the bomb with Russia. For if we fail to approach them now and merely continue to negotiate with them, having this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase. . . .
I emphasize perhaps beyond all other considerations the importance of taking this action with Russia as a proposal of the United States—backed by Great Britain but peculiarly the proposal of the United States. Action of any international group of nations, including many small nations who have not demonstrated their potential power or responsibility in this war would not, in my opinion, be taken seriously by the Soviets.^
The discussion was unworthy of the subject. No one had had a chance to prepare for its complexities. Asked as Acting Secretary of State to lead off after Colonel Stimson's statement, I agreed that we should take the initiative with the USSR, being assured of British backing, before going into any larger group. I did this partly out of deference and respect for Colonel Stimson and also be-
cause our Government had previously sought a nucleus of agreement on all postwar problems before plunging into the intricacies of United Nations discussions. As earlier chapters have shown, every subject had been approached in this way, from lend-lease principles through UNRRA and Bretton Woods to the United Nations Charter. It seemed fundamental common sense.
Fred Vinson, Tom Clark, and Clinton Anderson opposed Colonel Stim-son's proposal partly on the ground that we should not "share the bomb." The Colonel had not proposed that we should. What he had proposed was discussing with Russia a sharing of basic scientific data, excluding information on the industrial processes used to manufacture atomic weapons. Others, as I wrote my daughter, "expressed more or less agreement with Colonel Stimson. Henry Wallace soared into abstractions, trailing clouds of aphorisms as he went." The discussion got nowhere, but distorted accounts of it to the effect that the President was contemplating sharing the bomb were leaked to the press, putting the Congress into an uproar. The President met with senatorial leaders. Prime Minister Attlee urged a tripartite conference with Mackenzie King. A message to Congress was gotten under way.
During the morning before the Cabinet luncheon I had had a meeting with the President on atomic energy legislation. For some weeks George L. Harrison, Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and John J. McCloy, who had been collaborating with Colonel Stimson on atomic energy matters, had been urging Mr. Byrnes and me—since I would soon take over from him in his absence—to support with the President the May-Johnson bill on domestic control. Mr. Byrnes had agreed to this before his departure. However, I had become impressed by the complications that might arise if the Administration went too far with domestic legislation before formulating any approach to international problems. I asked Herbert S. Marks, who had been with me since I had taken over liaison with Congress in 1944, to give me a "talking brief" on the matter for my meeting with the President. We had already seen Colonel Stimson's memorandum, so that Marks's brief stressed the necessary information the President would want to determine his position on that proposal and, if he approved it, on problems of timing the overtures with domestic legislation, on consultation with legislators, and on harmonizing the substance of national and international proposals. After our discussion the President asked for a memorandum on the international aspects.
Meanwhile Senator Vandenberg went to work on the Hill in an attempt to head off jurisdictional battles in both houses of Congress over atomic legislation. This he proposed to do by establishing a special Senate-House Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. On September 20 the President decided that his message to Congress should deal with both national and international control. My memorandum on various aspects of the latter, for which he had asked, went off to him on the twenty-fifth. It was deeply influenced by Colonel Stimson's paper. Its conclusion—the premises being stated—was that a policy of scientific secrecy would be futile and dangerous and that the real issues involved the methods and conditions that should govern interchange of scientific knowledge and the international controls that should be sought to prevent a race toward
mutual destruction. Its recommendations were that the United States approach the Soviet Union, after discussion with the British, to attempt to work out a program of mutual exchange of scientific information and collaboration in the development of atomic power to proceed gradually and upon condition that weapons development should be renounced with adequate opportunity for inspection; and that in due course the plan be opened to other nations. Concurrently with these discussions, of which Congress should be fully informed, the Congress should proceed with consideration of domestic legislation to be recommended by the President and later with requests for congressional action on any agreements that might result from these discussions.
The President, after generally approving these recommendations, set me, Judge Samuel Rosenman, his Counsel, and the Pentagon to work on a draft message. Not forgetting the Secretary, absent in London, I cleared it with Benjamin V. Cohen on his behalf over the telecon, a secure and secret telegraphic device. Under instruction I also informed the British Government through Lord Halifax on October i. The President sought the opinion of Speaker Raybum and Senate Majority Leader Barkley and was reassured that the addition of the international proposal would help rather than hurt the message. The message itself, after stating the reasons for international collaboration set forth in the memorandum, proposed "to initiate discussions, first with our associates in this discovery, Great Britain and Canada, and then with other nations, in an effort to effect agreement on the conditions under which cooperation might replace rivalry in the field of atomic power.""^ The full text of the international portion will be found in the Notes.
By all the careful clearance of this message, I hoped that the road had been kept open for discussion with Britain and the Soviet Union before getting into larger and more formal conferences. But it was not to be. Secretary Byrnes, returning from London with painful memories of Molotov's obstructive tactics, had no stomach for taking on another thorny subject with the Russians, an attitude fully shared by his colleagues, Secretaries Robert Patterson and James Forrestal. A month later in the discussions of atomic energy control with Attlee and Mackenzie King, in which I played no part, we agreed to the course that Colonel Stimson had specifically disapproved—to begin international discussions in a large group of nations that included many small ones of no demonstrated power or responsibility. But I doubt whether a contrary decision would have changed the result. The evidence is now strong—including the urgent Soviet collecting of German nuclear scientists and missile experts—that probably by this time, and certainly a very short time later, Stalin had given top priority to the development of a nuclear weapon. It seems most unlikely that even if given complete control of method and means Colonel Stimson could have persuaded Stahn to have forgone a Soviet nuclear-armament system.
A BRUSH WITH SENATORS
At the time of my appointment as Under Secretary, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander Allied Powers in Tokyo, sent me a warm
message of congratulation and an invitation to view the situation in Japan at first hand. I replied appreciatively, hoping that I might be able to do so. There seemed little chance, however, for in those days under secretaries did not travel, but minded the store.
On September 17 General Mac Arthur announced that the occupation force in Japan would be reduced to two hundred thousand men within six months. Asked about this by the press on the eighteenth, the President said that General MacArthur had not consulted him. He was glad to see that the General would not need as many troops as he had originally estimated. Thirty days earlier it had been five hundred thousand, which had been reduced to four hundred thousand, and then cut in half.^
The next day, September 19,1 was asked whether I had been disturbed by the General's statements and if I had any comment on the occupation. The number of troops required, I said, was a purely military matter with which the State Department was not properly concerned. I then added, and authorized direct quotation:
The important thing is that the policy in regard to Japan is the same policy which has always been held by this Government and is still held so far as I know, and I think I know. In carrying out that policy, the occupation forces are the instruments of policy and not the determinants of policy and the policy is and has been that the surrender of Japan will be carried out; that Japan will be put in a position where it can not renew aggressive warfare; that the present economic and social system in Japan which makes for a will to war will be changed so that that will to war will not continue; and that whatever it takes to carry this out will be used to carry it out.^
That same day the President sent my nomination to the Senate. Senators Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska and A. B. (Happy) Chandler of Kentucky delayed action on it. Wherry insisting that I had "blighted the name" of General MacArthur, and Chandler that I had insulted the General. Senator Wherry sent me a long questionnaire concerning policies and authority in Japan, including my own views on both. I replied with relevant documents. The White House released the "U.S. Initial Post Surrender Policy for Japan" and a statement defining General MacArthur's authority.
Thus the stage was set for a Senate debate on Monday, September 24, supposedly on my confirmation but in reality on General MacArthur's position and authority in relation to the position and authority of the President of the United States. It was angry and bitter. Senator Taft observed that he intended to vote against Senator Wherry's motion to recommit the nomination, as he thought I was qualified to be Under Secretary of State. In view of his belief that the policies of the United States were made by the President and not by under secretaries, he did not believe "that the disagreement with Mr. Acheson's policies as expressed in the controversy, so-called, with General MacArthur [was] any ground for refusing to confirm this nomination"—this, in spite of his earlier statement that what I had said at my press conference was "one of the most extraordinary statements on policy I have ever heard." Senators Barkley and Connally defended me stoutly. On the motion to recommit the nomination. Senator Wherry got eleven senators to join him.j The roll-call vote to confirm
was 69 in favor to 1, Senator Wherry, opposed.'' When I told this to our caretaker at Harewood, our farm at Sandy Spring in Montgomery County, Maryland, he said cheerfully, "Hardly worthwhile for the other fella to run!" If we could have seen into the future, we might have recognized this skirmish as the beginning of a struggle leading to the relief of General MacArthur from his command on April 11, 1951.
A CONGERIES OF TASKS
Despite this time-consuming and absurd flurry, the five weeks during which I was "Acting" for Mr. Byrnes were constructive ones. On September 13 financial talks began with the British to find an alternative to lend-lease. I was a member of the United States Group and participated in its decision. So far as meetings of the combined groups were concerned, I contented myself with supporting Will Clayton, who carried the laboring oar for the Department. Having represented our Government in similar talks a year earlier, I found the ground to be covered familiar.
During this time the Department received new facilities with which to discharge enlarged responsibilities. At the end of August the President had transferred to us the foreign functions, facilities, and personnel of the Office of War Information, and in mid-September William Benton arrived to supervise their incorporation into the Department. Later in the month the Research and Analysis Branch and the Presentation Branch of the Office of Strategic Services also came to us. Colonel Alfred McCormack was appointed Special Assistant to the Secretary in charge of research and intelligence. The Department muffed both of these opportunities. The latter, research and intelligence, died almost at once as the result of gross stupidity, discussed in the next chapter. When, therefore, in 1947 the Central Intelligence Agency was proposed as part of the armed services unification bill, the State Department had abdicated not only leadership in this field but any serious position. Information and public affairs had a better chance and were well served by several devoted assistant secretaries. Eventually they succumbed to the fate of so many operating agencies with which the State Department has had a go, including economic warfare, lend-lease, foreign aid, and technical assistance.
In all these cases, either the Department was not imaginative enough to see its opportunity or administratively competent enough to seize it, or the effort became entangled in red tape and stifled by bureaucratic elephantiasis, or conflict with enemies in Congress absorbed all the Department's energies. Then, in the stock market phrase, the new function was "spun off" to live a sort of bloodless life of administration without policy, like the French bureaucracy between Bonaparte and de Gaulle. At about the same time we also received for liquidation a portion of the estate of that problem agency, the Foreign Economic Administration. None mourned its death.
In the week of September 24, the Department and Secretary Ickes brought to conclusion two matters on which I had been working for some time. One concerned an international petroleum agreement; the other, conservation of natural
resources in the subsoil and on the sea bed of the continental shelf and of the fishery resources contiguous to our coasts. 1° These were matters of considerable importance.
It was no small triumph for State and Interior to collaborate successfully. The petroleum agreement was with Great Britain and laid the basis for jointly sponsoring and preparing for an "international [petroleum] agreement among all countries interested in the petroleum trade, whether as producers or consumers," the purpose of which would be to seek the orderly development of this trade in the interest of all parties to it. Already signs of the trouble soon to break out in the Middle East were manifest. Many conflicting interests needed reconciliation, including those between the producing companies and the governments of producing nations; between producing areas—such as the Persian Gulf, the East Indies, and South America—and the United States; between orderly development, including conservation, and unrestricted competition; between producers and consumers; and between commercial and security interests. Unfortunately, our efforts were too litde and too late. They came to nothing, and were engulfed by the turmoil of European economic crisis, Middle Eastern nationalism and nationalization, and the distractions of the cold war. Some such agreement should come about, if this limited natural resource is to be wisely used.
In the conservation effort, more immediately practicable because it was within our own national capacity, we were successful. In proclamations that the departments submitted to him, the President specifically declared the character of the waters involved as "high seas" and that the right to their free and unimpeded navigation was in no way affected by the proposed regulations. In the case of subsoil development, and of fisheries which had been or might be developed by Americans alone, the United States would establish conservation zones where it would regulate and control drilling and fishing. Where fisheries had been or might be developed jointly with commercial interests in other nations, the regulation and control should be by agreements with the other nations concerned. Happily it fell to me, as Acting Secretary, to attest the President's signature on the proclamations, the results of so much patient work.
Finafly, the President began another stage of a long effort to complete the seaway and power development on the St. Lawrence River in his October 3 message to Congress asking for the necessary legislation. Weeks of preparatory work in my former role had gone into cultivating the legislative soil, but it remained reluctant. Interests fearing competition from seaports on the Great Lakes—railroads, labor, Adantic ports—were too strong. For nearly ten years the struggle went on, until on May 13, 1954—more than a year after we had left office—a bill was passed.
15. TROUBLE IN HIGH PLACES
THE NINE-THIRTY MEETING
When the secretary returned to Washington early in October, my pumpkin coach vanished and I found myself back in the kitchen. Meanwhile an instrument had been forged, the "nine-thirty meeting," which gave me some measure of control over or, at least, a knowledge of what was going on in the Department. The meeting in my office was a short one, no more than half an hour, attended by the chief operating officers. With the Secretary's approval I continued it after his return, since he, with a lawyer's impatience of routine, did not wish to take it over. The meeting kept changing its form and losing its utility through growth; only continuous pruning saved it. The most useful period in its history came later, after General Marshall created the Central Secretariat, which served his office and mine and through which we kept track of everything coming in or going out of the Department, and the progress, or lack of it, being made on each matter. Its chief was also kept informed by General Marshall and me of all policy decisions in which we took part in high places. His discretion was our security. With his collaboration the nine-thirty meeting brought the work of the Department under the direction of a chief executive officer. The purpose of the meeting was not to devise policy. That was done elsewhere. Still less was it to discuss and exchange information. It was to assign responsibility for new matters as they arose; to follow and guide work in progress; to assign additional help when needed; to reassign when necessary; and, when ready for action, to present proposals to the President for necessary decisions, authority, and means. The meeting became an administrative method of the greatest importance, but required the sternest discipline. It also gave me an excellent insight into my colleagues.
Parkinson's Law applies to meetings as well as to organizations. Attendance at our meetings soon became a status symbol. Feelings had to be hurt, and were. People invited in for a special matter wanted to stay and had to be ejected. The enemy of its purpose was irrelevancy to that purpose, and irrelevancy mounts with numbers. Finally, to preserve the life and sanity of the secretary of the meeting, we had a large meeting once a week chiefly for morale purposes. Other meetings were, of course, held on specific subjects, and I shall return to them later. Proliferation of meetings, as I have suggested earlier, is an inevitable product of weak leadership and administration in the Department. When it is run by meetings, committees, or Soviets, it isn't run at all.
STRANGE INTERLUDE
A song of many years ago proclaimed the somber sentiment that "into each life some rain must fall." Some was about to fall in mine. The Department had committed me as substitute for my busy superior to a speech in mid-November in New York at a rally sponsored by the National Council of Soviet-American Friendship. The drafting of the speech was in hand, and I would be supported by messages extolling our ally from the President, Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Admiral Ernest King, and other sound men. We did not know in 1945 as much about what to expect of such a rally as we do now, but I do remember being vaguely apprehensive as I traveled to New York because it was being held in Madison Square Garden. That did not suggest the study group on Soviet-American relations for which my speech seemed designed. It had a mildly hopeful, though neutral, tone, produced by blending a past of historical friendship and helpfulness during the stress of the American Revolution and the Civil War with present ideological differences. Apprehension became acute when I got to the Garden. Our information had been gravely defective.
The vast place was packed and vociferous. In its center an elevated boxing ring had been erected with a runway going up to it from a curtained enclosure in which I met my fellow performers: Corliss Lamont, president of the Council, a son of Thomas W. Lamont, Chairman of the Board of J. P. Morgan k Company; Joseph E. Davies, who had been Ambassador to Moscow and written an enthusiastic account entitled Mission to Moscow; Paul Robeson, the great Negro bass who later became a Soviet citizen; and, to top the list, the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, the "Red" Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. On the floor below the prize ring an orchestra played incendiary music. It stopped. Accompanied by a roll of drums and a comparative hush, Ambassador Davies mounted the ramp and the podium. He would, his voice blared through powerful amplifiers, announce the speakers of the evening as they came to the platform. Each did so to a roll of drums, as aristocrats did to Madame Guillotine in the Place de la Revolution or as King Charles I approached the block through the window of his Palace of Whitehall. Paul Robeson and Dean Johnson were clearly the favorites. Indeed, the "Red" Dean received a tumultuous ovation, as he sashayed around the ring like a skater, in the long black coat and gaiters of an English prelate, his hands clasped above his head in a prize fighter's salute. Corliss Lamont opened with a brief welcome. Then Paul Robeson's magnificent voice began the low rumble of "Ole Man River," that moving song of the oppressed and hopeless. It did not end in hopelessness and resignation as the river just kept on rolling along, however, but in a swelling protest, ending on that magnificent high note of defiance produced by a great voice magnified by all the power of science. The crowd went wild.
In time it quieted down enough to be stirred up again by the Dean's rabble-rousing, which even his Oxford accent could not dampen. The speech became an antiphony, the Dean shouting the rhetorical questions, the crowd roaring
back the responses. After an ovation, as much for themselves as the speaker, or for him as one of themselves, my hour had come. I felt like a bartender announcing that the last drink before closing time would be cambric tea. Fortunately mine was a short speech, but between me and the end of it was a paragraph of my own devising—one of the few. It followed an acknowledgment of the Soviet Union's reasonableness in desiring friendly governments along her borders. Then this: "But it seems equally clear to us that the interest in security must take into account and respect other basic interests of nations and men, such as the interest of other peoples to choose the general surroundings of their own lives and of all men to be secure in their persons. We believe that that adjustment of interests should take place short of the point where persuasion and firmness become coercion, where a knock on the door at night strikes terror into men and women."^
I hurried on, trying to outrun the pursuing boos and catcalls, tossing to these wolves a quotation from Molotov and one from Stalin. But I had shown my colors; those who took their red straight, without a chaser of white and blue, were not mollified. When I finished, protest drowned out even polite applause. At the end of the ramp a policeman touched me on the arm. "Come," he said, "I can show you a quiet way to your car." Nothing could have been more welcome, except possibly the quiet scotch waiting for me at the friend's house where I was staying.
Some years later, during what has come to be known as the "McCarthy period," my presence at the Madison Square meeting was adduced as evidence of sympathy for communism. This seemed to me to add a companion thought to Lincoln's conclusion of the impossibility of fooling all the people all the time, the difficulty of pleasing any of the people any of the time.
AN ATOMIC CONFERENCE AT THE SUMMIT
Meanwhile, November lo to 16 were busy days in Washington. Prime Ministers Attlee of Great Britain and Mackenzie King of Canada had come to discuss with President Truman international aspects of atomic energy. These discussions were carried on with secrecy in a very small circle in which I was not included. My old friend Ben Cohen, who had been brought into the Department as its Counselor, and Vannevar Bush worked with Mr. Byrnes on this matter. To insure privacy the crucial discussion was held, as I recall, on the Secretary of the Navy's yacht, Sequoia. If I was consulted at all about the discussions, I have forgotten it.
These meetings resulted on November 15 in an Agreed Declaration by the three heads of government in which they favored the availability and free interchange of the "fruits of scientific research," but not "of detailed information concerning the practical industrial application of atomic energy" or of its "military exploitation." This must await, they declared, "effective, reciprocal, and enforceable safeguards acceptable to all nations. ... A Commission should be set up under the United Nations Organization to prepare recommendations for
submission to the Organization"; its work "should proceed by separate stages, the successful completion of each one of which will develop the necessary confidence of the world before the next stage is undertaken."- Thus, a series of leaks and pressures, and responses to both, had brought the Administration to the opposite pole from Colonel Stimson's position. But Colonel Stimson had been quite right. Although I was far from realizing it at the time, I was destined to be one of the principal instruments in proving Colonel Stimson's point.
UNRRA AND THE BRITISH LOAN
Meanwhile Will Clayton and I were busy with the supply and financial problems of our allies. On November 13 the President asked Congress for one and a third billion dollars for our share of the second year of UNRRA's operations. Clayton and I bore the burden of testimony for the Government before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. One of the methods by which the Congress keeps a tight rein on the executive is by authorizing appropriations for such endeavors as UNRRA, foreign aid, and lend-lease for only one year at a time. Since a point of order will lie against any appropriation not authorized by law, two legislative acts each year, requiring four hearings before four separate committees, are necessary to keep each activity going. The substantive committee of each house—say Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs—must authorize an appropriation; the Appropriations Committee of each must recommend the amount to be appropriated. Depending on the end of Pennsylvania Avenue from which one views the procedure, it is either needed insurance against executive extravagance or congressional usurpation and harassment. As might be expected, I strongly hold the latter view, especially about the annual authorization, which seems to me the product of committee jealousy at its most picayune.
At about that time our Division of Chinese Affairs issued a statement that takes a high place in the category of "famous last words." It noted that our forces in China were assisting the Chinese Government in effecting the surrender, disarming, and repatriation of Japanese troops in China—approximately two million men—and then concluded: "The activities of our armed forces in the Far East, including the transport of Chinese troops, are being carried out solely for the purposes indicated above. It is neither our purpose nor our desire to become involved in the internal affairs of China."^ In a month we were involved over our heads.
Early in December the combined British and American groups completed an immense schedule of invaluable work on a loan to Britain, a settlement of lend-lease and reciprocal lend-lease accounts, the disposition of surplus American property in Britain, settlement of mutual damage and other claims, and a comprehensive agreement on proposals for expansion of world trade and employment, including the creation of an International Trade Organization. On any standard of scope or excellence, it was an impressive achievement of international collaboration. As chief contributors, it is enough to single out three
men, all of whom are now dead—Maynard Keynes, Harry White, and Will Clayton.
Alas! Good as was the work of those months and those men, it still lacked that little more of imagination, daring, and luck essential to success. The lack was chiefly on our side. The loan—three and three-quarters billion dollars— was too small; we still vastly underestimated the extent of British and European economic and financial exhaustion. The brave new world of expanding trade and employment we envisioned was to run into a block in the Republican Eightieth Congress. As helpful as Vandenberg proved to be in the areas within his sphere of influence, it did not extend to trade matters. In that area the most powerful Republican senators, Millikin of Colorado and Taft, were not seeing visions or dreaming dreams. The Marshall Plan would prove to be acceptable if Vandenberg approved, but lowering protective tariffs had gone far enough, and from the Imperial Box thumbs were turned down on the International Trade Organization and its purposes. But all that was still in the future. Flushed with success, we turned confidently to new problems, to be met by a vicious line squall out of smiling skies.
INTRODUCTION TO CHINA AND GENERAL MARSHALL
Patrick J. Hurley, the former Oklahoma cowboy who struck it rich. Secretary of War under Hoover, a Major General wounded in action by the Japanese, was at the moment U.S. Ambassador to China, home for consultation. Trouble moved with him like a cloud of flies around a steer. Handsome, vain, and reckless, he boasted of lethal speed on the draw in the old days in the West and gave ample evidence of seeking equally simplistic answers to complicated problems in this present mission. His complaints were vocal but unclear. They began with charges that Foreign Service oflficers in China had been undercutting him and United States policy in China and ended with an attack on the Department generally, and presumably the Secretary, for not making its policy clear to the public. Throughout his charges ran the demagogic note of the impending epoch, that those who differed with him were "soft on communism."
I had had my own troubles with Hurley in 1944 when, after being invalided out of active military service, he was attached to the Middle East Supply Center. Then, as this time, he had returned to Washington breathing charges about the misuse of lend-lease goods, chiefly that they were being distributed in Iran by the British. This was correct, since British forces held southern Iran and the exigencies of war prevented the presence of Americans. When that factor was eliminated by victory in North Africa, Americans handled lend-lease to Iran. Another charge deplored Russian and British imperialism and urged that the United States disassociate itself from and supplant this by bringing the message of democracy. Hurley's memorandum was sent to Mr. Hufl for comment and by him to various of us for reply. I was, perhaps, too brusque with Hurley's proposal to bring democracy to occupied Iran, describing it in the phrase of one of my assistants as "messianic globaloney" which might await the end of the war
134 Under Secretary of State 1944-45
against Hitler and Mussolini in which we and our criticized allies were cooperating. The phrase leaked to Hurley. I continued the story before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations:
... a few weeks after that General Hurley, who was on his way back from the Middle East, came to my office and asked for a meeting on the subject. We had a meeting of several officers of the Department, including a young assistant of mine. The meeting progressed amicably for a while, and then General Hurley referred with some heat to a phrase used in my memorandum to the Secretary. He attributed this phrase to the young assistant, who was present. I pointed out to the General that how I conducted the internal affairs of my office was not of any concern outside of the office, and that all memoranda which bore my name were my responsibility, and this one in particular was. The General brushed that aside as a somewhat quixotic attitude on my part, and continued to attack the assistant.
The matter became heated. Temperature rose, and with it the voices of the contestants, until finally the General asked my assistant why he was not in uniform, fighting with the forces of this country.
That seemed to me a particularly undesirable and unfortunate observation, because the young man not only had tried very hard to get in the Army, but he had been in the Army and had been discharged because he had a serious ailment of the back, for which he was then preparing for a major operation. He shortly afterward had that operation and was laid up for the better part of a year.
I intervened in the debate at this point and drew the General's attention to the undesirability of his remark. The general temperature seemed to cool a bit. We got everyone seated and withdrew appeals which had been made to trial by combat, and finally we worked out an agreement by which the General withdrew this unhappy remark and I apologized to the General for any observations in my memorandum which he might regard as personally offensive.
That seemed to solve the matter and we went on and had a very amicable discussion, and I never heard of the thing from that day until it was printed in Mr. Pearson's newspaper column on May 20th, and I never heard of it again until the General brought it up in his testimony.
We have met several times. We have had several discussions of the subject of lend-lease supplies, and I had not realized that I was supposed to have wrecked any policy.. . .
The idea expressed by the General that I am in favor of monopoly and imperialism and against democracy is utterly fantastic. No action of mine, no word of mine, has ever furnished any basis whatever for such a statement.'*
Such was the man who now charged other officers of the Department with wrecking other policies on the other side of the globe. Secretary Byrnes dealt with him tactfully and soothingly, as only he could do, and had, so he thought, on the morning of November 27, persuaded Hurley to go back to China. By lunch time at the White House, he discovered the extent of his illusion. There the President and Cabinet were informed that at the National Press Club Hurley had launched a passionate attack not only upon the Department but upon the Administration, charging a lack of any clear policy regarding China. His resignation, he said, was on Mr. Byrnes's desk. That afternoon the President telephoned General Marshall, who was planning to retire from active service for a long rest, and asked him to go to China as his personal representative with the
ic)_|.5 Trouble in High Places 135
rank of ambassador. Typically, the General answered that he would serve anywhere in any capacity that the President wished. The same day the White House announced both resignation and appointment.
Although Hurley's nature was not one to excite sympathy, his frustration later became the frustration of us all. The Administration had a policy and proceeded to define it clearly. It was to do all we could to restore a "strong, united, and democratic China," without intervening in the Chinese civil war but by reconciling the warring factions. Pending that time we would continue to recognize Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Government and "cooperate with it in international affairs and specifically in eliminating Japanese influence from China."^ General Hurley had long proclaimed these dual purposes as his. They were fully shared throughout the Administration, the Congress, and the country. However, few if any of us, including Hurley, myself, the Secretary, General Marshall, and the President, realized that these admirable aims were mutually exclusive and separately unachievable. How and when this realization came we shall leave until later chapters.
RIFT BETWEEN PRESIDENT AND SECRETARY OF STATE
Even before General Marshall set out for China, Secretary Byrnes flew to Moscow for a meeting with Molotov and Bevin to discuss five important matters: the procedure for arriving at peace treaties with European enemy states, excepting Germany; Balkan problems; Chinese pacification; Japanese occupation; and international control of atomic energy. Procedures were agreed upon for the first, fourth, and last of these, which proved successful in the first and fourth and failed in the last. Agreements reached on the second and third points brought nothing but bitter disappointment. They taught us, however, that Soviet diplomatic method was to bargain hard, accept all concessions in the other side's sphere, and nullify all apparently granted in their own.
However, the principal result of the Moscow conference of 1945 was the rift it opened between the President and the Secretary of State. Mr. Byrnes intensely disliked large retinues. He traveled light, taking to Moscow hardly more than a half dozen officers and counting on the embassy for essential services. The communications he sent back were few and terse. The manner of his departure left disquiet behind him. The instructions that he had had worked out for himself on atomic energy were somewhat more liberal in seeking collaboration from the Soviet Union than the terms of the Agreed Declaration of November 15. General Groves and Secretary Forrestal expressed uneasiness. Before leaving Washington on December 12 for Moscow, the Secretary discussed his plans with several members of the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Special Committee on Atomic Energy and the uneasiness grew. Two days after his departure the Special Committee met with the President, who had me present. They wanted new and stricter instructions issued. Instead, the President merely had me report the discussion to the Secretary, who replied that he would stay within the terms of the Declaration. The President had me reassure Byrnes that the congressional flurry had not disturbed him, adding that he would be
glad to consider any proposals the Russians might have. Very little information came out of Moscow.
On December 27 the President was in Independence. A coded message began to come in to us from Moscow announcing the end of the Council of Ministers and their conclusions. Before we had its full text, press summaries were in the papers and on the air. Vandenberg, misreading one section, was up in arms. The President was annoyed by the failure to make any progress with the Russians on Balkan matters. By the time the President and I had got Vandenberg reassured and calmed, it was my unhappy duty to ruffle the President's temper still further. Mr. Byrnes had cabled me the date of his arrival in Washington and asked me to arrange a time that evening when he could make a report to the nation over all radio networks. This was not in accordance with etiquette, nor was it wise in view of the President's state of mind. Both required that he report first to the President, get straightened away there, and then make his speech with the President's blessing. Despite knowing that Mr. Byrnes might take exception to my doing so, I suggested to the President that it would be more convenient for all concerned, including the networks, if Mr. Byrnes spoke the day after his return. The President agreeing, we arranged it this way.
Driving from the airfield to the Department with the Secretary, I broke to him gently the President's displeasure. He was disbelieving, impatient, and irritated that Mr. Truman had sailed down the Potomac on the Williamsburg, leaving word for him to follow. Tired from his long flight, he had had enough traveling for that day. Afterward both men gave me accounts of their meeting. The President's report was even more vivid than the one published in his memoirs, and included the memorandum which he reports having written out and read.^ In it he insisted that the concomitant of his giving scope to the Secretary was the Secretary's keeping him fully informed. Mr. Byrnes's account could not have been more different. To him the discussion was informative on his side and pleasant on the President's. They parted with affectionate mutual good wishes for the new year. Mr. Byrnes thought me an imaginer of trouble where none existed.
Both impressions were quite possibly entirely genuine. On most occasions Mr. Truman's report of his bark vastly exaggerated it. When thoroughly aroused by what he construed as a discourtesy to Mrs. Truman or his daughter, he could lo.se his temper and lash out viciously. But Mr. Truman is a kindly and courteous man. However spicy his political comments may be, his private talk is most considerate of others' feelings. 1 have never heard him say, or heard of him saying, a harsh, bitter, or sarcastic word to anyone, whatever the offense or failure. Mr. Byrnes is not sensitive or lacking in confidence. A vigorous extrovert, accustomed to the lusty exchanges of South Carolina politics, where by ancient tradition all opponents debate together in every county, he would not take as personal criticism Mr. Truman's desire to be kept more fully informed.
Furthermore, Mr. Byrnes maintained toward Mr. Truman—at least so the President thought—the attitude of the leader of the Senate to a freshman senator. To this was added the bitter experience of the vice-presidential nomi-
nation in 1944. I mention it only because it is relevant to what happened later. In the early summer of 1944 many Democratic leaders, including Mr. Byrnes and Mr. Truman, but not Robert Hannegan, believed that FDR wanted Byrnes rather than Wallace as the vice-presidential candidate in the coming campaign. Accordingly, at Mr. Byrnes's request, Senator Truman agreed to nominate him at the Chicago convention. However, at the convention Hannegan argued strongly that the Senator's information was wrong and that FDR wanted neither Wallace nor Byrnes on the ticket with him, but Truman. Then he got the President on the telephone as he was about to board the Baltimore to meet Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur at Pearl Harbor. Explaining Truman's belief and purpose, Hannegan turned the receiver so all could hear the President confirm Hannegan." Deeply embarrassed, Truman was reluctant to accept even the President's request, which involved going back on a promise to a friend. At length convinced, he went to Byrnes, told him the story, and asked to be released. Although bitterly disappointed and angry at Hannegan's part in his rejection, Byrnes remained on friendly terms with Truman. This is the story as written by Mr. Truman and told to me before that. He added that Byrnes could hardly help but wonder how determined his resistance had been to the wiles of the anti-Byrnes cabal, and that in offering Byrnes the chief Cabinet post on the way back from the Roosevelt funeral he was not only recognizing and using great ability but compensating in part for what Byrnes believed to have been a gross injustice at the hands of the late President.
The whole unhappy episode impressed me deeply with the reciprocal nature of the President-Secretary of State relationship. If, as pointed out earlier, the President cannot be his own Secretary of State, it is equally true that the Secretary cannot be his own President. However much freedom he may properly be given for operation and maneuver, he cannot be given or take over the ultimate presidential responsibility. To discharge that, the President must be kept fully informed far enough in advance of the need for decision to make choice possible. On his future trips Mr. Byrnes took with him fully instructed communications officers to keep the Department, and through it the White House, advised.
When four years later my own secretarial travels began, I put these lessons to use. The staff was fully equipped to report. Officers attended aff meetings for this purpose or received immediate reports from me on private ones. A detailed cable went off every day to the Department with a shorter summary for the President's use if his time was short or to show senators and others. He also received personal—"for his eyes only"—estimates of the situation, dictated by me, containing appraisals of people, of obstacles ahead and methods of avoiding them, and of opportunities for initiatives, as well as requests for suggestions if any occurred to him. He often said that these made him feel present at the scene and participating. We received frequent helpful and encouraging replies from him. The Department, fully informed also, could and did play its part in furnishing us with material and advice.
Another point about traveling secretaries of state is worth mentioning
138 Under Secretary of State
here—the degree to which they divest themselves of their office while away except as it pertains to their mission. General Marshall was meticulous that when the door to his aircraft closed, the command passed. He even on occasions asked for instructions when a wholly novel and unexpected point arose. Mr. Byrnes was inclined occasionally, as when in 1946 Tito's planes downed two Army transport C-47S, to give us instructions while he was away from Washington. This is workable, but eventually commands have to issue from Washington. The Marshall procedure seemed tidier to me when the time came.
16. WASHINGTON AGENT FOR THE MARSHALL MISSION: PHASE ONE
THE SITUATION AS WE SAW IT
Even before Ambassador Hurley's dramatic exit had made Chinese affairs a main concern of the State Department's high command, the recalcitrance of events in China in refusing to conform to any preconceived pattern had made them a principal concern of mine. The immediate occasion was a paper that came to me on November 15, 1945, on its way from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary Byrnes. Both the paper, which asked whether and when United States Marines should be withdrawn from China, and the State Department's comments upon it seemed to me inadequate as a basis of judgment. Accordingly, I asked John Carter Vincent, Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, to prepare a more comprehensive analysis and alternative recommendations. On the nineteenth he gave me a memorandum. It suggested four possible courses of action:
1. To withdraw the Marines from north China. (This was the course recommended by General Wedemeyer, Commanding General in China.)
2. To leave the Marines in China without changing their mission. (There seemed to be a dispute between General Wedemeyer and the Joint Chiefs as to what this mission was. The former thought it was to facilitate the takeover of China south of the Great Wall by Nationalist troops from the Japanese, which had not yet been completed.)
3. To leave the Marines in China and enlarge their mission to provide assistance to the Nationalist Government in stabilizing conditions in north China and Manchuria. (It was not clear what "stabilizing conditions" meant or what force would be required.)
4. To leave the Marines in China with the mission of providing a more effective and speedy surrender and repatriation of the Japanese.
The Marines had been sent to north China to seize and hold certain port areas and airfields to assist the surrender and repatriation of Japanese forces and the transport of Chinese Nationalist forces to key areas where they could assume responsibility for the surrender. An estimated one million Japanese troops remained in north China, of whom about a third had not been disarmed. Many were still located at inland points. Also about one hundred sixty thousand Nationalist troops and an estimated four hundred fifty thousand Communist troops were in north China. The Joint Chiefs believed that the Japanese
troops could not be repatriated without the presence and aid of the Marines, and that if political agreement between the factions in China had not been reached by the time of withdrawing the Marines, any Japanese troops remaining in China would be employed in the resulting Chinese civil war. Alternatively, the Soviet Union might obtrusively enter the scene. It was not a reassuring picture.
This paper and one by the armed services were discussed by the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy at a meeting on November 27 just before Ambassador Hurley's resignation burst upon the astonished capital. As I contemplated the papers and listened to the discussion, certain conclusions seemed to emerge inevitably from the facts. Toward the end of the meeting I stated them to clarify the discussion for the Cabinet officers. They were:
1. The Marines must be kept in China.
2. We must prepare to move other Chinese Nationalist armies north and support them. (Presumably, though not stated, this could include movement to Manchuria as well as to north China.)
3. In areas now held by Japanese troops and which might later be disputed by Nationalist and Communist forces we should seek to arrange a truce.
4. We should continue to support the efforts somewhat desultorily conducted by Nationalists and Communists to bring about a political settlement under Chiang Kai-shek and including the Communist areas and forces in a unified China state and Chinese army. (The Joint Chiefs doubted Chiang Kai-shek's capability to reunify China, and especially Manchuria, by military means.)
This summary was well received by the Cabinet group. Although a duality of policy is clearly apparent in it—the military support of Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists while sponsoring an attempt to work out a political agreement between them—it was not so clear to us at the time. As we shall see, in our talks about his instructions General Marshall worried from time to time that they might require a prestidigitator's skill to execute. But only later did we understand that we were, in effect, seeking the reconciliation of irreconcilable factions. The people's democracy of Mao would not willingly accept the dominance of Chiang Kai-shek nor a democratic China friendly to the United States, while the Nationalist Government could not impose its dominance on the Communists without the military intervention of the United States (if it could even with it) due to the ineptitude of the Kuomintang. That the policy adopted is now seen to have been doomed carries no implication that any other would not have been equally doomed. Hindsight does not carry comfort, like a St. Bernard to an exhausted traveler.
A WORD ABOUT GENERAL MARSHALL
The moment General Marshall entered a room everyone in it felt his presence. It was a striking and communicated force. His figure conveyed intensity, which his voice, low, staccato, and incisive, reinforced. It compelled
respect. It spread a sense of authority and of calm. There was no military glamour about him and nothing of the martinet.
With General Marshall self-control came, as I suppose it always comes, from self-discipline. He was, in a phrase that has quite gone out of use, in command of himself. He could make himself go to bed and go to sleep on the eve of D Day because his work was done and he must be fresh for the decisions of the day to come. He could put aside the supreme command in Europe in favor of General Eisenhower because his plain duty was to stay in the Pentagon dealing with that vast complex of forces that, harnessed, meant victory.
My first meeting of any length with General Marshall left an abiding memory of his self-command. It was during the war. We had both gone to Hot Springs, Virginia, to address meetings of the Business Advisory Council of the Department of Commerce. At the time both Mrs. Marshall and the General's close colleague and friend. Field Marshal Sir John Dill, were seriously ill. But the General, having made the engagement, kept it, and was to fly back to Washington after he spoke. During dinner a note was brought to him informing him of the death of Sir John Dill. He spoke unhurriedly for an hour on the military situation, giving, with maps, an appreciation of the problems and possibilities on all fronts and the resources necessary to exploit them. After another hour to answer questions, all of which he did without involving security either by way of excuse for not answering or by indiscretion in answering, he went to his plane.
Never was I more conscious of how richly endowed was General Marshall than when, years ago, we talked through several long evenings about the considerations that led him to favor Operation Overlord (the invasion of Hitler's Europe across the Channel from England) over Mr. Churchill's plan to seek a junction with the Russians farther to the east by striking at the "soft underbelly of Europe" in the eastern Mediterranean.
What impressed me was the wide scope of the factors he had weighed. They went far beyond the purely military considerations and the usual political ones. He thought of the vast amount of shipping involved in shifting the allied army, its supplies and base, from England two thousand miles or more eastward, of the delay of perhaps a year in the final move on Japan, of a million additional casualties. He was aware of President Roosevelt's obviously deteriorating health, of the possible coincidence of the congressional election of 1946 with a crisis of the war in the Far East, and of the mutual and interacting effect of these momentous developments.
All elements of the problem were held, as it were, in solution in his mind until it was ready to precipitate a decision. This is the essence and the method —or rather the art—of judgment in its highest form. Not merely military judgment, but judgment in great affairs of state, which requires both mastery of precise information and apprehension of imponderables.
It is not by chance that the man who possessed this capacity served his country not as soldier-President—we have had many of these—but as General of the Army and Chief of Staff throughout the war, as Ambassador, Secre-
tary of State, and Secretary of Defense. Here truly was a Man for All Seasons, a man who understood the relevancy to military decision and action of considerations transcending those of the service in which he had been trained, or even those thought only a few years ago to have been comprised within the whole field of military interest.
WE DRAFT THE GENERAL'S INSTRUCTIONS
At the time of his selection to go to China, General Marshall was appearing before the Senate's Pearl Harbor investigating committee. He requested specific written instructions governing his proposed mission to China. Mr. Byrnes turned to me and John Carter Vincent, already immersed in China policy, and shortly afterward read to General Marshall our memorandum outline of instructions. General Marshall did not approve it. It seemed to him to be susceptible of serious misunderstanding and that it was not definite enough to serve as a basis for a directive to General Wedemeyer, to give Chiang Kai-shek an understanding of the number of troops available to him, or to inform the American public. He therefore tried his own hand at a draft with the help of Generals Thomas T. Handy, Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, John E. Hull, and Louis A. Craig. The draft of the four generals increased clarity and definiteness at the expense of one of the conflicting elements of policy. Vincent sought to restore a balance by amending the Marshall redraft to preclude the transport of Nationalist Government troops by the United States into areas, such as north China, when their introduction would prejudice the objectives of the military truce and the political negotiations. Secretary Byrnes and I supported Vincent's point and forwarded to General Marshall an amended version of the four generals' draft containing it.
General Hull complained to General Marshall that the amendment put a basic contradiction in the policy. Here he erred; the contradiction was there all the time. The real issue was what to do. General Hull was in favor of transporting the Nationalist armies north and taking over from the Japanese before attempting to negotiate a military truce and political settlement. The State Department officers believed that to do this would prejudice the attempt and perhaps precipitate civil war.
On Sunday, December 9, Secretary Byrnes and General Marshall met in Old State, with General Hull, Vincent, and myself present, to discuss the generals' draft with State's amendments. Mr. Byrnes made a strong statement in support of it; General Hull reiterated his worries about a basic contradiction in the statement of policy. In the meantime a message from Generals MacAr-thur and Wedemeyer and Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (Commander in Chief Pacific) to the Joint Chiefs opened an escape from direct confrontation in execution of policy between the diplomatists and the military. The Far East commanders approved the basic decision to move more Chinese armies north and to repatriate the Japanese troops, but suggested that its execution be left in General Marshall's hands in negotiating a compromise agreement between the major opposing groups in order to promote a unified, democratic China.
The upshot of the meeting was agreement upon General Marshall's draft as amended and giving to him discretion to determine when Chinese troops might be moved to north China consistently with the purposes of his mission. This was set forth in a memorandum from Secretary Byrnes to the War Department dated December 9, 1945, and approved by the President.
At this meeting and at two subsequent meetings with the President, General Marshall asked for specific agreement on how he should exercise his discretion to move Nationalist troops into north China in the event that negotiations for national unity broke down through the Generalissimo's failure to make reasonable concessions. On December 9 Mr. Byrnes replied that General Marshall should inform Chiang Kai-shek that no assistance to move the troops would be provided and that we would be forced to deal directly with the Communists in repatriating the Japanese from north China. At a meeting on December 11 with the President, Secretary Byrnes, and Admiral Leahy (at which I was not present). General Marshall raised the question again, apparently dissatisfied with Secretary Byrnes's earlier reply. He favored supporting the Generalissimo and moving the troops. The President and Secretary agreed.
At this meeting the President also went over and approved the statement of policy and the memorandum to the War Department. A letter from the President to General Marshall to which the other documents would be attached was not yet completed. This I brought to him when General Marshall and I (Secretary Byrnes having gone to Moscow) met with him on December 14. He inquired whether the papers before us had been approved by all concerned. Told that they had been, he signed the letter and handed it and the enclosures to General Marshall.f General Marshall then said that he would like (possibly for emphasis, possibly because I, now Acting Secretary, had not been present on December 11) to go over once again his instructions in the event of failure of the negotiations. He repeated them as recorded here, and again the President concurred and asked whether anything further could be done to facilitate his mission.
The General said that he would need what was known in the Army as a rear echelon, a person left behind with right of access at any time to the Commander in Chief, in this case the President, through whom General Marshall would communicate. This man would bear personal responsibility for immediate reply and for action upon his requests, with authority to call on the President himself for help, if necessary, to get action. The General would want an Army officer detailed to handle incoming and outgoing messages through Army channels, which would be used exclusively as they were the only reliable facilities in China. This officer would deliver the messages to the rear echelon personally, not through a secretary, and would receive the answers. General Marshall wanted personal, not institutional, responsibility. He was no stranger to Washington bureaucracy.
When the President agreed and asked whom he would select, the General said that he would like to have me charged with this duty. I asked that my assuming it be cleared with Secretary Byrnes, pointing out that I would neces-
144 Under Secretary of State 1945-46
sadly have to act out of channels and, probably, annoy a good many people in fulfilling this assignment. My intuition was entirely correct. The relationships established in those few minutes greatly affected my life. They were also to create most confusing and difficult conflicts of loyalties. The beginning of these was not far distant.
We walked across the street to my office. The General asked whether I knew a suitable officer with whom I could work happily on his communications. I did. General John Hilldring, Chief of G-5, military government, on the Army staff, had an able aide, Colonel James A. Davis, a lawyer in civil life from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He had earned my respect by outmaneuvering us several times in the past. I mentioned him, adding for its stimulating effect that General Hilldring would probably not let him go. Hilldring had been saved by General Marshall from retirement when he had a heart attack while commanding a division and been put into a Pentagon job. He had a drill-field voice. We used to tell him not to bother with the telephone, just to open his Pentagon window and speak naturally. I got him on the telephone. General Marshall's end of the conversation went something like this:
"Hilldring? General Marshall speaking. Do you have a Colonel James Davis? Very well. Have him detached and assigned to duty with Acheson at the State Department." A dull crackling came from the receiver. "Did you say something, Hilldring? Tomorrow morning will do."
After waiting a discreet period, Hilldring called me back. The receiver crackled again as a colorful description of my character as seen from G-5 came over the wire. Jim Davis proved as capable as I thought he would be and later received from General Marshall an oak leaf cluster on his military medal. General Hilldring became my colleague as Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas in April 1946 and served until September 1947.
MONTHS OF HOPE
General Marshall's mission to China went on throughout the whole year 1946. It falls into three periods. From the beginning until April 18, when the General returned to China after a brief visit to the United States, were months of hope. Then hope was succeeded by reluctant and growing pessimism, until in October China plunged into a long civil war that led, finally, to the collapse of the Nationalist Government. The last two months saw the liquidation and withdrawal of the mission. It is not my purpose to detail its history but to view it from the point of view of its Washington agent, destined to inherit the consequences of its failure.