14
"A Novel Burden Far from Our Shores"
Truman, the Cold War, and the Revolution in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1953

With a touch of modesty—and no small hyperbole—former secretary of state Dean Acheson titled his 1969 memoir Present at the Creation and in the introduction called the Truman administration's task after World War II "just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis." The challenge, Acheson remembered, was to create from the chaos left by war "half a world, a free half . . . without blowing the whole to pieces in the process." Acheson took understandable pride at "how much was done."¹ In fact, the results in terms of U.S. foreign policy were more revolutionary than even he allowed. Responding to the turmoil that was the new world "order" and to a perceived global threat from the Soviet Union, the Truman administration between 1945 and 1953 turned traditional U.S. foreign policy assumptions upside down. A country accustomed to free security succumbed to a rampant insecurity through which nations across the world suddenly took on huge significance. Unilateralism gave way to multilateralism. Through the policy of containment, the Truman administration undertook a host of international commitments, launched scores of programs, and mounted a peacetime military buildup that would have been unthinkable just ten years earlier. The age of American globalism was under way.

I

The Second World War shattered the international system beyond recognition. Across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, the greatest conflict ever waged left a broad swath of destruction and human misery. An estimated 60 million people were killed, more than 36 million of them Europeans. The Soviet Union lost as many as 24 million, 14 percent of its prewar population. In China, an estimated 1.3 million soldiers were dead, perhaps 15 million civilians. Japan lost almost 3 million people out of a prewar population of 70 million. Through much of the world, cities lay in ruins, factories demolished or idle, roads and bridges destroyed, fields unplowed. Food and water were in short supply if available at all, causing starvation, malnutrition, and disease. The war took an especially heavy toll on civilians. Millions of people were homeless—9 million in Japan alone. Hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons roamed the continent of Europe. In Berlin, according to U.S. diplomat Robert Murphy, "the odor of death was everywhere," the canals "choked with bodies and refuse." Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane described Warsaw as a "city of the dead." The war ended at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course, and the especially gruesome destruction of those cities marked in horrific fashion the end of one era and the beginning of another.2

The war produced a redistribution of power more sweeping than in any previous period of history. Among the leading nations in the multipolar prewar international system, Japan, Italy, and Germany were defeated and occupied. Exhausted and nearly bankrupt, once-dominant Britain was reduced to a second-rank power. Defeated at the outset of the war and liberated by its allies, France suffered even greater loss of status and power. The Eurocentric world largely through a process of self-destruction came to an inglorious end. A new bipolar system replaced the old. Only the United States and the Soviet Union emerged from the war capable of wielding significant influence beyond their borders.

Decolonization, the liquidation of colonial empires that had been an established feature of world politics for centuries, further upset the old order. The war graphically displayed the weakness of the ruling powers, giving a huge boost to already potent nationalist movements.³ In the Middle East and in South and Southeast Asia at war's end, revolutions erupted against onetime colonial masters. For the most part the colonial powers acquiesced in independence, leading to the creation of hundreds of new nations over the next three decades. The resulting instability shook the foundations of an already fragile international system and in the context of the Cold War provided a fertile breeding ground for Soviet-American conflict.

The war caused domestic political turmoil throughout much of the world. The discredited regimes of the 1930s vied with insurgent groups for power; leftists challenged the more entrenched, conservative elites. In Poland, Greece, France, Yugoslavia, Korea, and China, to name a few, contending factions bitterly fought for power, causing instability and presenting opportunities for U.S. and Soviet intervention. In a broader sense, historian Thomas Paterson has written, the war "unhinged the world of stable politics, inherited wisdom, traditions, institutions, alliances, loyalties, commerce, and classes."4

Technology dramatically—and to contemporaries frighteningly—altered the postwar international system. Advances in transportation, especially aviation, drastically shrank distances. The world seemed more compact, more accessible—and more menacing. A people who historically had enjoyed relative freedom from danger portrayed these new threats in the most alarming way. "If you imagine two or three hundred Pearl Harbors occurring all over the United States," one official warned in 1944, "you will have a rough picture of what the next war might look like."⁵ Add to this what Secretary of War Henry Stimson called "the most terrible weapon ever known in human history"—the atomic bomb—an enormously destabilizing element in the postwar years.⁶ In this smaller and more menacing world, places and events that previously seemed unimportant suddenly took on great significance, drawing the attention, and often the intervention, of the two major powers.

Of all the world's nations, only the United States emerged stronger and richer at war's end. An economy recently devastated by depression soared to new heights from the demands of war. The gross national product skyrocketed from $886 million in 1939 to $135 billion in 1945. The nation's productive capacity doubled in wartime; the losses suffered by the rest of the world, the Soviet Union especially, made America's economic power relatively—and artificially—much greater. Economically, without question, the United States was the world's dominant power.⁷ America's relative military power exceeded its economic strength. On V-J Day, the United States had 12.5 million people under arms, more than half of them overseas. Its navy exceeded the combined fleets of all other nations; its air force commanded the skies; it alone possessed atomic weapons. Washington took London's place as the capital of world finance and diplomacy. Not surprisingly, the new United Nations Organization was located in New York.

Americans faced the postwar years with both optimism and concern. They reveled in Allied victory and took enormous pride in their nation's awesome military power. They were cheered by the return of abundance. At the same time, they worried that postwar demobilization could bring a return of economic depression, even the rise of a new fascism. The war had exposed a horrible capacity for evil and destruction, highlighted by the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Some Americans naturally feared that another conflict could exceed even the scale of World War II, perhaps destroy humankind. Despite their vast power, perhaps indeed because of it, some Americans worried about their nation's postwar security. Because of advances in technology, the United States could no longer depend on the oceans, allies like Britain, or hemispheric defense for its security. It could prevent future Pearl Harbors, Navy Secretary James Forrestal insisted, only by maintaining enough military power to make it "obvious that nobody can win a war against us."8 The United States could no longer focus its attention on the Western Hemisphere, Gen. George C. Marshall warned. "We are now concerned with the peace of the entire world."⁹ Other Americans recognized that their nation had a special opportunity—a new manifest destiny—to straighten out the mess made by the Europeans. "We have . . . the abundant means to bring our boldest dreams to pass—to create for ourselves whatever world we have the courage to desire," Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish exulted.¹⁰

Postwar periods generally bring major problems of readjustment, and World War II was no exception. Demobilization of millions of troops and reconversion of industry to civilian production brought hardship to many Americans. After decades of sacrifice and deprivation, a people eager once again to enjoy the fruits of abundance was frustrated and increasingly angered by recurrent strikes, shortages of consumer goods, and skyrocketing inflation. The Truman administration responded clumsily to these events and increasingly bore the brunt of public outrage. "To err is Truman" was a common witticism. For those who plaintively queried "What would FDR do if he were alive?" the jocular answer was sometimes "What would Truman do if he were alive?"¹¹ Languishing in the political wilderness since 1932, power-hungry Republicans sharpened their political knives and savored the prospects of regaining control of Congress and the White House.

Policymaking changed dramatically under Truman's very different leadership style. Understandably insecure in an office of huge responsibility in a time of stunning change, the new president was especially ill at ease in the unfamiliar world of foreign relations. Where FDR had been comfortable with the ambiguities of diplomacy, Truman saw a complex world in black-and-white terms. He shared the parochialism of most Americans of his generation, viewed people, races, and nations through the crudest of stereotypes, and sometimes used ethnic slurs. He assumed that American ways of doing things were the correct way and that the peace should be based on American principles. An avid student of history, he drew simple lessons from complicated events. He preferred blunt talk to the silky tones of diplomacy, but his toughness on occasion masked deep uncertainties and sometimes got him in trouble. His courage in facing huge challenges and his "buck stops here" decisiveness—a sharp contrast with his predecessor's annoying refusal to make commitments—have won him deserved praise. But decisiveness could also reflect his lack of experience and sometimes profound insecurity. An orderly administrator, again in marked contrast to FDR, he gave greater responsibility to his subordinates and insisted upon their loyalty.12

Given his lack of experience and knowledge, Truman at the outset had no choice but to turn to the experts. But he shared Roosevelt's disdain for State Department professionals—"the striped pants boys," he called them—and he profoundly distrusted the advisers he had inherited. To fill an enormous vacuum, he first turned to former South Carolina senator James F. Byrnes, FDR's "assistant president" for the home front. Truman may have felt a twinge of guilt at having taken the 1944 vice presidential nomination from the more prominent Byrnes. The secretary of state was next in line for the presidency, and he certainly felt the South Carolinian was better qualified than the earnest but out-of-his-depth incumbent Edward R. Stettinius Jr. Truman also mistakenly believed that because Byrnes had been at Yalta he could provide much-needed foreign policy expertise. Small of stature, possessed of a "characteristic Irish charm," according to a British diplomat, the new secretary of state was a skillful politician and master fixer—"conniving," Truman said of him admiringly. On the other hand, his background was as provincial as his new boss's, and he too lacked knowledge of and fixed ideas about foreign policy. But he was not without confidence, and with the apparent blessings of the president, he set out to run foreign policy as he had managed wartime domestic programs. His lone ranger approach quickly got him into trouble with the bureaucracy and the man who had appointed him.13

As with domestic issues, between V-J Day and the end of 1945 Truman and Byrnes responded hesitantly and uncertainly to the baffling new world bequeathed by war. Like many other Americans, they yearned for simpler times, what Warren Harding had called normalcy. The United States' power was at its pinnacle, but it brought uncertainty instead of security, and Americans felt threatened, as Byrnes put it, by events from "Korea to Timbuktoo."¹⁴ They worried about instability in Western Europe and the strategically vital Mediterranean region. Not ready to scrap wartime cooperation with the USSR, they were increasingly alarmed by Soviet behavior. They especially feared that an aggressive Stalin might exploit global instability. Truman and Byrnes thus veered between tough talk and continued efforts to negotiate. By the end of the year, the administration had branded the onetime ally as an enemy.

As it had been central to the beginnings of Soviet-American conflict, so also Eastern Europe played a critical role in the postwar transformation of American attitudes toward the USSR. Haunted by memories of the depression and World War II, U.S. officials fervently believed that the Wilsonian principles of self-determination of peoples and an open world economy were essential for peace and prosperity. The United States had negligible economic interests in Eastern Europe, and U.S. officials understood poorly if at all the determination of some of its indigenous leaders to nationalize major industries. They saw the trend toward nationalization as a threat to capitalism and a healthy world economy and attributed it to the imposition of Communism from the outside. They vaguely understood Soviet concern for friendly governments but continued to call for free elections even where they might result in anti-Soviet regimes.

Those Americans who accepted some degree of Soviet influence called for Soviet restraint and for an open sphere that allowed access for Western capital and journalists. From across Eastern Europe, U.S. diplomats reported with alarm the political oppression imposed by Soviet proconsuls backed by the Red Army, especially in the former Nazi satellites Romania and Bulgaria. Eastern Europe provided a litmus test of Soviet postwar behavior. It was seized upon by U.S. officials to raise fears about Stalin's aggressive methods and expansionist designs.15

As they looked out across an unsettled world, Americans saw other alarming signs. In the tense postwar atmosphere, they tended to ignore cases where the Soviet Union had kept its agreements and acted in a conciliatory manner and fastened on examples of uncooperative and threatening behavior. They viewed demands for a role in negotiating a peace treaty with Italy and for reparations not as a response to U.S. protests about Eastern Europe but as manifestations of Soviet designs on Western Europe and the Mediterranean region. Soviet requests for a trusteeship over Tripolitania in North Africa suggested the broadening scope of the USSR's ambitions. Over Western protests, it kept troops in Iran and Manchuria. The fiercely independent Yugoslav leader Tito's seizure of Trieste, fulfilling long-standing Serbian ambitions, was viewed in Washington as confirmation of Soviet expansionism.

The first clash of the postwar era took place at the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in London in September 1945. Now in charge of U.S. diplomacy, Byrnes went abroad naively confident of success. A skilled political broker at home, he was certain that these same talents could produce solutions for international disputes. He also believed that the awesome power so dramatically manifested at Hiroshima and Nagasaki would enable him to dictate settlements. He crossed the Atlantic, in his own words, with the atom bomb in his hip pocket. He was quickly disillusioned. If anything, America's atomic monopoly complicated postwar negotiations by forcing the Soviets to demonstrate they could not be intimidated. Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov repeatedly joked about the bomb, on one occasion offering a drunken toast to its power. He refused to make concessions. While Byrnes and British foreign minister Ernest Bevin joined in acrimonious exchanges with their Soviet counterpart, the two sides remained deadlocked. Molotov refused Byrnes's demands to reorganize the governments of Romania and Bulgaria; the secretary withheld recognition. The British and Americans rejected Soviet efforts to exclude China and France from discussion of the Balkan treaties. To Byrnes's dismay, the conference broke up without resolving anything, the Russians protesting that the secretary of state, although reputedly a practical man, "acted like a professor," Byrnes damning Molotov as a " 'semi-colon' figure [who] could not see the big picture." "The outlook is very dark," Byrnes gloomily confided to friends.16

Apparently more interested in achieving agreements than in their substance, Byrnes focused on the next Council of Foreign Ministers meeting, set for Moscow in December, where he hoped to get around the obstructionist Molotov and deal directly with Stalin. Once there, he failed to move his hosts on the Balkans, eventually agreeing to recognize the existing governments after token Soviet concessions. In other ways, the Moscow conference looked more like Yalta than London, with Byrnes's old-fashioned horse-trading based on sphere-of-influence principles producing significant results. The ministers resolved the procedural differences that had stymied negotiation of European peace treaties. The Soviets acquiesced in U.S. domination of occupation policy in Japan and its preeminent influence in China. They accepted without significant modification Byrnes's proposals for international control of atomic energy.¹⁷

Ironically, Byrnes's conciliatory diplomacy at Moscow marked a major turning point in the evolution of U.S. Cold War policies. The imperious secretary failed to keep his boss informed about what he was doing. When the Moscow deal proved a political liability, Truman turned on him with a vengeance. Byrnes's pragmatic—and generally realistic—efforts to resolve postwar issues proved out of fashion in a Washington increasingly caught up in Cold War anxieties. Critics seized upon his concessions to denounce any compromise with Moscow and push for a get-tough approach. The U.S. chargé d'affaires in Moscow, George F. Kennan, privately condemned Byrnes's Balkans concessions as adding "some fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship."¹⁸ Truman's military chief of staff, the crusty, hard-core anti-Communist Adm. William Leahy, denounced the Moscow communiqué as an "appeasement document."¹⁹ Journalists and politicians joined in the criticism. When Truman subsequently received a report condemning Soviet repression in the Balkans and warning of a Soviet threat to the eastern Mediterranean, he flew into a rage.

The president responded to Byrnes's Moscow diplomacy with what has been aptly called a "personal declaration of Cold War."²⁰ Angered at the secretary's independence—which at first he had encouraged—Truman set out to reassert his control over foreign policy. Confused, indeed befuddled, over the emerging conflict with the Soviet Union and embattled on the home front, he found comfort in the certainty of a black-and-white assessment of Soviet intentions and a hard-line foreign policy consisting of tough talk and no concessions. In a private letter to Byrnes in early 1946, he affirmed he would not recognize the "police states" in Bulgaria and Romania until they radically reshaped their governments. He denounced Soviet "aggression" in Iran and warned of a threat to Turkey and the straits linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. There would be no compromise simply to achieve agreements. Stalin understood only an "iron fist" and "How many divisions have you?" the president concluded in ringing terms. "I'm tired [of] babying the Soviets."21

It remains impossible to determine with certainty what Stalin actually sought at this time, but Truman's assessment appears much too simplistic. The Soviet dictator was a cruel tyrant who presided over a brutal police state. Neurotic in his suspicions and fears, he slaughtered without mercy millions of his own people during his long and bloody rule. He ruthlessly promoted his own power and the security of his state. He was determined to secure friendly—which meant compliant—governments in the crucial buffer zone between the USSR and Germany and to guard against a renewed German threat. He was also a clever opportunist who would exploit any opening given him by enemies—or friends. But he was acutely aware of Soviet weakness. And he was no Communist ideologue. Especially in the immediate postwar years, when he needed breathing space, he refrained from pushing revolution in a war-torn world. His diplomacy manifested a persistent streak of realism. He did not seek war. "He was devious yet cautious, opportunistic yet prudent, ideological yet pragmatic," historian Melvyn Leffler has written.²² Some of his ploys were intended to secure confirmation of great-power status for the Soviet Union, others merely to gain a bargaining edge. Some commentators have claimed that this "battle-scarred tiger," as Kennan called him, was as skilled at outwitting foes as he was evil. In truth, he made repeated mistakes that brought about the very circumstances he desperately sought to avoid.²³

Americans could not or would not see this in early 1946, and Truman's hard-nosed assessment of what was now presumed to be a distinct Soviet threat seemed validated from every direction. In a February 9 "election" speech, Stalin warned of the renewed threat of capitalist encirclement and called for huge boosts in Soviet industrial production. The speech was probably designed to rally an exhausted people to further sacrifice. Even Truman conceded that Stalin, like U.S. politicians, might "demagogue a bit before elections." But many Americans read into the Soviet dictator's words the most ominous implications. The hawkish Forrestal found confirmation of his belief that U.S.-Soviet differences were irreconcilable. Liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas labeled the speech "The Declaration of World War III."24

Less than two weeks later, Kennan unleashed on the State Department his famous and influential "Long Telegram," an eight-thousand-word missive that assessed Soviet policies in the most gloomy and ominous fashion. The namesake of a distant relative who in the late nineteenth century had documented for enthralled U.S. audiences the horrors of the Siberian exile system, the younger Kennan was one of a handful of men trained after World War I as experts on Bolshevik Russia. Conservative in his tastes and politics and scholarly in demeanor, he developed a deep admiration for traditional Russian literature and culture and, from service in the Moscow embassy after 1933, an even deeper antipathy for the Soviet state. Frustrated during the war when the Roosevelt administration ignored his cautionary recommendations, he eagerly responded when Truman's State Department requested his views. "They had asked for it," he later wrote. "Now, by God, they would get it."²⁵ In highly alarmist tones, he delivered over the wires a lecture on Soviet behavior that decisively influenced the origins and nature of the Cold War.²⁶ He conceded that the Soviet Union was weaker than the United States and acknowledged that it did not want war. But he ignored its legitimate postwar fears, and by showing how Communist ideology reinforced traditional Russian expansionism and portraying the Soviet leadership in near pathological terms, he helped destroy what little remained of American eagerness to understand its onetime ally and negotiate differences. He warned of a "political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure." By thus demonizing the Kremlin, he confirmed the futility and even danger of further negotiations and prepared the way for a policy he would label containment. The Long Telegram was exquisitely timed; arriving in Washington just as policymakers were edging toward similar conclusions, it gave expert confirmation to their views. Forrestal circulated it throughout the government. Kennan was brought home to head the State Department's recently created Policy Planning Staff.27

The hard line was publicly affirmed in early March by wartime hero Sir Winston Churchill. In a speech in Truman's home state of Missouri, the former prime minister warned that from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent," coining a phrase that would become a staple of Cold War rhetoric. Like Kennan, he conceded that the Soviets did not want war, but he insisted that they did want the "fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines." Like Truman, he insisted that they responded only to force. He called for an Anglo-American "fraternal association," an extension of the wartime alliance, to meet a new and ominous threat. This proposal provoked a furor in the United States, causing Truman to disavow prior knowledge of the speech (which he had) and even to invite Stalin to visit the United States (an invitation he knew would be declined). But the Iron Curtain speech, delivered with typical eloquence by a leader who had been right about Hitler, confirmed the administration's assessment of Soviet behavior and the need for a firm response backed by military force.²⁸

From March to September 1946, tough rhetoric was matched by increasingly tough action. After extended debate, Congress finally approved in the summer a $3.75 billion loan for Britain at low interest. To be sure, the United States drove a hard bargain with a financially exhausted ally, demanding an end to preferential arrangements that discriminated against U.S. trade and insisting on sterling convertibility within a year. The administration also agreed to cancel the United Kingdom's $20 billion lend-lease "debt," not generous enough to satisfy some Britons, but a vast improvement over the 1920s. In Congress, Republicans who wanted drastic budget cuts and knee-jerk Anglophobes vigorously opposed the loan. Setting a precedent that would be used repeatedly in the Cold War, U.S. officials employed anti-Soviet rhetoric to gain passage of the bill.29 Not surprisingly, Truman and his advisers took no similar steps to assist the Soviet Union. Whether Stalin would have accepted a loan even if it were offered on generous terms is doubtful. If he had, Congress likely would not have approved it. And a loan, even if provided, might have made no difference. But the administration's lame explanation that a wartime Soviet request had been lost in a records transfer after V-J Day fooled no one. When U.S. officials finally got around to offering a loan, they attached conditions they must have known the USSR would not accept. A loan would not have prevented the Cold War, but its denial certainly increased Soviet-American tensions and reflected mistaken U.S. views of Soviet dependency on external assistance.³⁰

The administration also took a tough stand on Iran in the summer of 1946—the first full-fledged Cold War crisis. To the growing alarm of U.S. officials, the Soviets left occupation forces in Iran after the March deadline for withdrawal, demanded an oil concession, and backed a separatist movement in the northern province of Azerbaijan. Stalin's motives cannot be precisely divined. He certainly sought an oil concession to match those already given Britain and the United States. Following Germany's defeat, he probably hoped to reassert Russian power in a traditional sphere of influence. Fearing increased British and U.S. influence, he may also have been seeking a buffer to protect precious Soviet oil reserves in nearby Baku. He may have had designs on Azerbaijan, or he may simply have been seeking a bargaining chip for concessions on oil. Whatever the case, Truman and his advisers viewed Soviet actions as further evidence of an expansionist threat to a region now deemed vital to U.S. national security. They encouraged Iranian resistance to Soviet demands and backed Iran's appeals at the newly organized United Nations for withdrawal of Soviet forces.³¹

A Soviet retreat reinforced the administration's faith in the get-tough approach. In fact, the crisis was defused largely through the shrewd diplomacy of Iranian prime minister Ahmad Qavam. The sixty-eight-year-old Persian statesman began a long political career at age twelve. Described by a British official—with perhaps unintended praise—as "sly, intriguing and unreliable," he had mastered the art of protecting Iranian interests by playing outside powers against each other.32 Qavam bolstered his bargaining position by enlisting U.S. support. He then cut a deal with the Soviets exchanging controlling interests in a joint oil company for a troop withdrawal. Once the troops were gone, he sent Iranian forces into Azerbaijan to crush the separatists. The Iranian parliament subsequently rejected the oil concession, leaving the USSR a victim of Persian chicanery.³³ The Americans interpreted Soviet withdrawal as a result primarily of their own tough talk—Truman later falsely claimed to have issued an ultimatum. Engaging in some double-dealing of their own, they formed ties at Qavam's expense with the young and more pliable Shah Reza Pahlavi and gave Iran $10 million in military aid.

The U.S. handling of atomic energy in the spring of 1946 gave further evidence, as Byrnes put it, that American opinion was "no longer disposed to make concessions on important matters."³⁴ Undersecretary of State Acheson, not yet a Cold Warrior, and old New Dealer David Lilienthal, working with scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer, presented in March 1946 a remarkably internationalist proposal. The Acheson-Lilienthal plan would have established an international authority to control the extraction, refinement, and use of atomic materials. Plants would be made difficult to convert to military use and would be scattered so that no single nation could gain a dominant position. The plan was to be implemented in stages, during which time the United States would retain its monopoly. It sought security through international cooperation.

The Acheson-Lilienthal plan was out of fashion in Truman's Washington by the time it was completed. Already persuaded of the futility of cooperation with the Soviet Union, the president and other Americans were further alarmed by revelations of a Soviet spy ring seeking to steal atomic secrets in Canada. Congress toughened Truman's spine by imposing limits on international cooperation. By appointing elder statesman Bernard Baruch to head atomic negotiations, Truman sealed the demise of nuclear internationalism. A relentless self-promoter and ardent nationalist, the seventy-five-year-old financier was inalterably committed to U.S. control and believed that the United States must retain its monopoly until it got the treaty it wanted. He added tough provisions for inspections and penalties for violators—"sure and swift punishment," as he put it—neither subject to Soviet veto. Although he did not like Baruch, Truman went along, affirming that "we should not under any circumstances throw away our gun until we are sure the rest of the world can't arm against us."35 When Baruch presented his proposal to the UN in June 1946, the Soviets countered with an even more unrealistic plan calling for outlawing atomic weapons, terminating ongoing programs, and destroying existing stockpiles. The Security Council eventually approved the Baruch Plan, the Soviet Union and Poland abstaining, but as Soviet-American conflict intensified there was no chance of agreement. Congress passed an additional act prohibiting exchanges of atomic "secrets" in the absence of international control. The two nations pressed ahead with their atomic projects.

Given its economic potential and its pivotal role in Europe, Germany could not but be a crucial issue in the emerging Soviet-American conflict. During 1945–46, the former allies had attempted sporadically to negotiate a peace treaty, but their actions increasingly spoke louder than their words. Occupation commander Gen. Lucius Clay admitted that the Soviets had kept most of their agreements and that France had been far more obstructionist. But the Soviets' vengeful treatment of Germans, their promotion of leftist political parties in their occupation zone, their incessant demands for additional reparations, and their insistence on sharing the precious resources of the Ruhr industrial area reinforced already well formed U.S. suspicions. Fearing that an impoverished Germany would delay European recovery, the United States stopped reparations from its own zone and announced plans to merge the three Western occupation zones, provoking loud Soviet protests.

By September 1946, the former allies had reached an impasse that would leave Germany—and especially divided Berlin—a Cold War hot spot for the next quarter century. In a much publicized speech at the Stuttgart Opera House, Byrnes curried German favor by pledging that the United States would not seek vengeance against its former enemy and did not want Germany to become a pawn in the emerging inter-Allied struggle. He denounced at least by implication Soviet efforts to shape politics in their occupation zone, opposed additional reparations and reparations from current production, and denied Soviet access to the Ruhr. To assuage German fears that a frustrated United States might leave Europe, he emphatically vowed: "We will not shirk our duty. We are not withdrawing. We are here to stay." The Stuttgart speech represented an important turning point in the origins of the Cold War. It made clear U.S. abandonment of a punitive policy and commitment to a strong, democratic Germany. Although designed in part as a message to France, it also drew a clear line against presumed Soviet expansionism.36

A crisis over Turkey in the fall of 1946 provoked the first of numerous war scares. Following threats against Turkey and troop movements in the Balkans, Moscow in August demanded revision of the Montreux Convention governing the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, the straits providing access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. The proposals would have given the Soviet Union bases along the straits and joint control with Turkey over access. A Georgian by birth, Stalin came naturally by his hatred of Turkey; his demands reflected ancient Russian interest in the straits. There is no reason to believe that at this point he contemplated invading Turkey, but he was willing to indulge in brinkmanship. United States officials attributed to him more sinister designs. Relying on superficial historical knowledge and dubious analogy, Truman had long since concluded that Stalin sought to grab the straits as a springboard for further expansion. Recently devised U.S. war plans highlighted the essentiality of the straits to control of the Mediterranean. Newly converted to the hard line, Acheson portrayed Turkey as the "stopper in the neck of the bottle" and issued extravagant warnings of a Soviet threat to Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East, even India and China. If necessary, he concluded, the USSR must be checked by force.³⁷ Yugoslav downing of an unarmed U.S. C-47 transport overflying its territory heightened tensions. "We might as well find out whether the Russians were bent on world conquest now as in five or ten years," Truman affirmed.³⁸

The United States firmly resisted revision of the Montreux Convention. The Truman administration emphatically rejected Soviet demands for joint control of the straits. Backing up its strong words, it pressed Britain to assist Greece and Turkey in fending off the Soviet threat, making clear it would fill the breach if necessary. It dispatched an armada of eight warships, including the legendary battleship Missouri and the newly christened aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, to the Mediterranean. The Joint Chiefs of Staff developed the first war plan for conflict with the USSR. Even without Western backing, Turkey would have fiercely resisted Soviet demands. The crisis fizzled out amidst Soviet-Turkish disagreement over whether talks on the straits should include the United States and Britain. As with Iran, it ended in net strategic gain for the United States. The Soviets withdrew substantial forces from the Balkans. The United States established a new Mediterranean command of twelve warships, giving it naval supremacy in the region. The Turkish affair of late 1946 persuaded many U.S. officials that Stalin would not be content with a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and reinforced their view that it was necessary to demonstrate a willingness to go to war.39

The Clifford-Elsey report of September 1946 codified in one eighty-two-page document ideas that had been circulating in Washington for weeks. In a fit of pique, Truman in July asked Clark Clifford and George Elsey, two young White House staffers, to document recent Soviet violation of agreements. They produced much more, a lengthy assessment of Soviet intentions and capabilities phrased in the most ominous tones along with a clarion call for U.S. rearmament and the containment of Soviet expansionism. Their analysis borrowed heavily from Kennan's Long Telegram and drew ideas from hardliners like Leahy and Forrestal. It was phrased in the black-and-white terms Truman preferred. Ignoring cases where the Soviets had kept agreements and the ways in which U.S. actions might have alarmed Moscow, the authors compiled a legal brief to justify actions most U.S. officials now agreed must be taken. The Soviets were committed to expansion and sought world domination, Clifford and Elsey insisted. They would use any means, including political subversion and military force, to achieve their goals. Soviet expansionism posed a grave threat to U.S. vital interests across the world. There was no point in further negotiation; it was futile and even dangerous to seek cooperation. The Soviets understood only tough talk and military power. The United States must therefore maintain a high state of military readiness, acquire overseas military bases, expand its nuclear arsenal, and be prepared to use force if necessary. It must assist "democratic" countries threatened by Soviet expansion. A failure to act resolutely, as with the Western democracies in the 1930s, would encourage further aggression. Considered too hot to release to the public or even circulate within the government, the report was kept locked in a White House safe until discovered many years later. It was the first major government attempt to analyze Soviet behavior and recommend a proper U.S. response.⁴⁰

The firing of dissident Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace just two weeks before delivery of the Clifford-Elsey report solidified the Cold War consensus. For years Wallace had been the torchbearer for American liberals. After most other New Dealers had left office or jumped aboard the Cold War bandwagon, he kept the faith, privately and publicly pleading for cooperation with the Soviet Union and questioning the get-tough approach. On September 10, Wallace met with Truman to go over an upcoming speech. The two subsequently differed over what took place, Wallace claiming, and Truman denying, that the president had cleared the secretary's draft. That speech departed sharply from what had become the conventional wisdom, urging Americans to examine how their actions might appear to other nations. Like Kennan, Wallace harked back to Russian history to explain Soviet insecurity, but he drew very different conclusions, warning of their sensitivity to U.S. moves they viewed as provocative. He sharply criticized U.S. atomic policy and the get-tough approach. "The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get," he averred. The speech caused a furor and immediately put Truman on the spot. Indulging his penchant for writing letters he later—in most cases wisely—declined to mail, the president privately denounced Wallace as one of the "parlor pinks" and "soprano-voiced men" who constituted a "sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin."41 Pressed by now hard-liner Byrnes, he demanded Wallace's resignation and got it. Wallace's firing removed from the executive branch the last dissenter from Cold War orthodoxy for many years to come.

II

Now fully agreed in their assessment of the danger and the urgency of a U.S. response, Truman and his advisers moved decisively after 1947 to take up what Acheson called "a novel burden far from our shores."⁴² They revamped the national security bureaucracy. Focusing on the eastern Mediterranean and Western Europe, they developed large-scale and unprecedented economic aid programs to combat ongoing insurgencies and clear up breeding grounds of economic want in which they believed Communism flourished. They intervened politically in various parts of the world where U.S. influence had been slight. Most remarkably, they formed an alliance with the Western European nations that involved binding commitments to intervene militarily, the first such obligations since the French alliance of 1778. If it did not quite match up to the Book of Genesis, as Acheson claimed, it was nonetheless revolutionary in conception and consequences.

The administration first addressed the personnel and institutional problems that had afflicted policymaking since the end of the war. The independent and unpredictable Byrnes resigned in late 1946, and Truman named the illustrious George C. Marshall to succeed him. The president had enormous regard for the general—"What I like about Marshall is he's a man," he once affirmed, the highest praise one gentleman of that era could lavish upon another.43 A person of vast experience, good judgment, and towering prestige, Marshall could shield the State Department from partisan attack and could be counted upon to work closely with the president, areas where Byrnes had conspicuously failed. Indeed, under Marshall's firm leadership and orderly administrative style, the State Department enjoyed a rare period of preeminence in the making of U.S. foreign policy.

Marshall was only one—and by no means the most important—of those men who became the architects of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Kennan and Acheson played crucial roles as intellectual godfather and prime mover respectively. They were joined by such notables as Forrestal, John J. McCloy, W. Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, and Paul Nitze. Known collectively as the American Establishment—also the Wise Men—this group came out of the tradition of public service founded by Elihu Root. Henry Stimson was their mentor and beau ideal. Mostly northeasterners, they had in common prep school and Ivy League educations and the gentleman's values inculcated there. Most of them rose to power through the great New York banking houses and law firms and belonged to the city's most prestigious social clubs. They drew from Root and Stimson a devotion to public service that transcended partisan politics, an unswerving loyalty to their presidents, a firm commitment to internationalism, and a passionate belief in the nation's destiny to reshape a war-torn world. Although they spoke of the "burdens" of world leadership, they went about their task with zest. Staunch Atlanticists who revered European traditions, like Root and Stimson they could be patronizing toward "lesser" peoples. Coming from the very nerve center of world capitalism, they were appalled by Marxist dogma and Soviet totalitarianism. They were generally pragmatic and realistic rather than ideological in resisting the Soviet Union. But they frequently exaggerated the Soviet threat to sell their programs. Sometimes, they were persuaded by their own rhetoric or became its political captives.⁴⁴

Of all the Wise Men, none was more controversial and influential than Dean Gooderham Acheson. The son of British and Canadian parents, Acheson was educated at Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law School. After clerking with legendary Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, he joined one of Washington's most prestigious law firms. He entered the State Department in 1941, working mainly on economic issues. A large man, aristocratic in bearing and haughty of demeanor, he cut quite a figure with his heavy eyebrows, carefully waxed guardsman's mustache (which one writer swore had a personality of its own), elegant suits, and Homburg hat.45 He was brilliant of mind and suffered fools poorly. A clever wordsmith, he did not hesitate to turn his acerbic wit on adversaries, which sometimes got him into trouble with Congress. He was certain that his nation had the power and the proper values to grasp the reins of world leadership. The United States was the "locomotive at the head of mankind," as he once put it, and "the rest of the world is the caboose." Once he became a Cold Warrior, he focused his formidable intellect and estimable diplomatic skills on building what he called "situations of strength" to contain Communism. Although pilloried by the Republican right for being soft on Communism, as undersecretary (1945–47) and secretary of state (1949–53), he played a decisive role in shaping the Truman administration's Cold War policies. "He was not merely present at the creation," biographer James Chace has observed, "he was the prime architect of that creation."⁴⁶

The first task of the Cold Warriors was to restructure the government for a new era of global involvement. The changes reflected a broad recognition that, as the world's most powerful nation with global responsibilities, the United States must better organize its institutions and mobilize its resources to wage the Cold War. But changes of this magnitude did not come easily. Truman's efforts to eliminate crippling interservice rivalries by unifying the armed services provoked a revolt by the navy's top brass and an extended struggle within the government. At one level, the battles were about parochial bureaucratic interests. They also reflected a deeper conflict between those who sought to centralize authority in the mode of the New Deal to promote efficiency and economy and protect civilian prerogatives and those traditionalists who saw decentralization and checks and balances as the best way to avert militarization and a garrison state.⁴⁷

The National Security Act of July 1947—what has been called the "Magna Charta of the national security state"—was an awkward compromise.48 It created a cabinet-level, civilian secretary of defense to preside over separate departments of the army, navy, and air force. It institutionalized the wartime Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), established a National Security Council (NSC) in the White House to better coordinate policy-making, and provided for an independent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to replace the defunct OSS. The effects of this landmark legislation were not immediately apparent. Under Marshall, Acheson, and their Republican successor, John Foster Dulles, State would dominate policy-making for the next decade. The act as subsequently modified, however, revolutionized the making of U.S. foreign policy. It institutionalized the enhanced role assumed by the military during World War II. The NSC would in time usurp the central role of the State Department. The CIA, as Clifford later put it, became "a government within a government, which could evade oversight of its activities by drawing the cloak of secrecy about itself." With the addition of more players and more competing centers of power, the policy process became more complex and more conflict-ridden.⁴⁹

Even before the National Security Act passed Congress, the administration had taken the first step in implementing a policy of containment: economic and military aid for Greece and Turkey under what came to be called the Truman Doctrine. The United States' attention was first drawn to the eastern Mediterranean during the 1946 Turkish crisis. The possibility of a British withdrawal from Greece in early 1947 brought decisive action. Since 1944, British occupation forces had been assisting the Greek monarchy's efforts to suppress a left-wing insurgency. This costly and futile effort drained already scarce resources. In February 1947, London informed the State Department it could no longer keep forces in Greece.

Britain's demarche came as little surprise to many U.S. officials, was welcomed in some quarters in Washington, and spurred the government to action. Stalin did not instigate the indigenous Greek insurgency and thus far had provided no more than moral support, a point vaguely perceived by some U.S. officials. To promote their own regional and geopolitical interests rather than ideological agendas, Communist governments in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria had backed the Greek rebels. United States officials feared that if the insurgency succeeded, Stalin might exploit it. A leftist victory could have a bandwagon effect on the already fragile political situations in France and Italy. The collapse of the Greek government, in American eyes, could shatter Western influence in one of the most critical regions of the world and leave other areas vulnerable to Soviet influence. With the zeal of a new convert, Acheson in a secret February 27 meeting with congressional leaders—he called it an "Armageddon"—warned ominously that "like apples in a barrel infected by a rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all the East" and even threaten Africa, Asia Minor, and Western Europe. Not since Rome and Carthage, he concluded, had the world seen such a polarization of power.50

Truman took a hard-sell approach to secure congressional support for an unprecedented program of $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey. The Republicans had won smashing victories in the 1946 elections, regaining control of both houses of Congress and vowing to implement massive budget cuts. Americans feared the Soviet Union, but they were preoccupied with domestic problems, uninformed about the situation in Greece, and wary of intervention abroad. Republican Senate leader Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan urged the president to "scare the hell out of the country," and Truman heeded his advice. In a much publicized speech before a joint session of Congress on March 12, the president echoed Acheson's warnings of a world divided between freedom and totalitarianism. Avoiding direct reference to the USSR, he compared the threat to Greece with the crisis preceding World War II. He called upon the United States to "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures." Failure to act could threaten the Middle East and Western Europe. "If we falter in our leadership," Truman concluded, "we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation."⁵¹

A program so novel was bound to spur opposition. Columnist Walter Lippmann protested the sweeping language of the doctrine, its seemingly indiscriminate commitment to global interventionism, and its apparent rejection of diplomacy—arguments that proved over time prescient—provoking a Washington dinner party spat with Acheson that almost ended in fisticuffs. Critics emphasized that the Greek government was a repressive monarchy rather than a democracy. Many Americans who sympathized with the purposes of the doctrine feared that unilateral U.S. action would undermine the nascent UN, in which much hope had been invested. Others worried that aid to Greece could lead to direct U.S. military intervention in a messy civil war in a faraway land.52

As so often in the Cold War, the president's call to action, abetted by a massive public information campaign, carried the day. The threat seemed ominous, the need urgent. A Congress in open revolt on domestic issues but perhaps recalling all too vividly its obstruction of executive authority in the 1930s fell into line. In a statement rich with symbolism, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., grandson of Wilson's nemesis, averred that the choice was "whether we are going to repudiate the President and throw the flag on the ground and stamp on it."⁵³ Legislation for measures without precedent in U.S. foreign policy passed quickly and by sizeable, bipartisan majorities, 67–23 in the Senate, and 287–107 in the House. The era of Cold War interventionism was under way.

Under the Truman Doctrine, the United States plunged into the Greek Civil War, the first of many such forays. It was an especially savage conflict with atrocities on both sides in which even children became pawns, brought home by the brutal and still unexplained assassination of CBS newsman George Polk, an unsparing critic of the Greek government. United States advisers tolerated their client's mass political arrests and executions for fear of undermining it. They would not abide incompetence, however, and assumed such control in Athens that the head of the aid mission was known as "the Most Powerful Man in Greece."⁵⁴ When the counterinsurgency effort stalled in 1948, the administration rebuffed Greek appeals for U.S. combat troops, mainly because they were not available. It relied instead on massive military aid and a 450-man advisory group headed by World War II hero Gen. James Van Fleet. Van Fleet reorganized the Greek army and infused it with a fighting spirit. In late 1948, using the massive firepower provided by the United States, napalm included, the army launched a decisive offensive against rebel encampments. In November 1949, Truman claimed victory. Some Americans viewed Greece as a prototype for future interventions.⁵⁵

Such claims must be qualified. In portraying the war in Greece as a struggle between Communism and freedom, U.S. officials misinterpreted or misrepresented the conflict, ignoring the essentially domestic roots of the insurgency, blurring the authoritarian nature of the Greek government, and greatly exaggerating the Soviet role. Victory came at great cost: more than 100,000 killed, an estimated 5,000 executed, 800,000 refugees including 28,000 children, and atrocities on both sides. The United States focused narrowly on military success and did little to address the problems that had caused the rebellion in the first place. United States aid undoubtedly played an important role in the government's survival and may have deterred greater Soviet involvement. But the insurgents also made a fatal error by shifting prematurely to conventional warfare and thus exposing themselves to U.S. firepower. The crucial factor in the outcome was the role of the Communist nations. Stalin responded to the Truman Doctrine by briefly aiding the rebels, but he hedged his bets by refusing to recognize them and within six months had cut off assistance. More important, he insisted that Yugoslavia's Tito do the same, causing an irreparable split, the first fissure in the Communist "bloc." When Tito at first refused to give in, Stalin set out to destroy him through increased political and economic pressure. Ultimately, to save his regime, Tito went along. His subsequent shut-off of aid and closing of the border was the decisive event, depriving the Greek rebels of assistance and sanctuary and leaving them little choice but surrender. Here, as in similar cases, local circumstances were decisive. The United States thus achieved its primary goal in this first Cold War military intervention, but at high cost for the people involved and for reasons more complex than it conceded or perhaps recognized. Greece offered a dubious precedent for future interventions.56

"This is only the beginning," the president told his cabinet while discussing the Truman Doctrine in early 1947, and indeed one of the most creative and important ventures in the history of U.S. foreign policy quickly followed, the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery.⁵⁷ It was disturbingly clear by the spring of 1947 that the crisis in the eastern Mediterranean was but the tip of the iceberg. In contrast to 1919, the United States had responded generously to postwar Europe's needs, but $9 billion in aid brought little progress toward recovery. Production had stalled, trade languished, and Europeans lacked the dollars to purchase urgently needed American goods. Acute shortages of food and fuel were exacerbated by a crippling summer 1946 drought and a bitterly cold winter. Hunger and malnutrition were rampant. United States officials viewed Germany as the key to European recovery and concluded that it was essential to stop reparations and take the limits off German industrialization. Still facing enormous reconstruction problems themselves, the Soviets understandably rejected such proposals. Americans interpreted Soviet intransigence as a sinister design to drag Europe further down and exploit the chaos. Two years after the war, the continent remained, in Churchill's words, "a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground for pestilence and hate." Americans feared that the worsening economic crisis might produce Communist takeovers through the electoral systems in such crucial countries as France and Italy, an obvious and compelling threat to U.S. prosperity and security.58

Through the rest of 1947, U.S. officials hammered out the details of a major new aid program. They insisted that the Europeans take the initiative in planning but set firm guidelines for them to follow. The essential goal was to spark economic recovery and relieve the vast human suffering. But the administration also sought to use U.S. aid to check an alarming leftward drift in European politics. Communists were to be excluded from recipient governments and socialist tendencies in domestic planning curbed. Americans pushed for balanced budgets, convertible currencies, and guarantees for U.S. trade where dollars were used for purchases. They required Britain and France to accept a reindustrialized Germany and France to abandon plans to detach the Ruhr, in effect substituting for a unified Germany a combined Western zone integrated into the rest of Europe. To promote greater efficiency and check ancient and destructive tendencies toward narrow nationalism, they designed a "creative peace" that would integrate the Western European economies and Britain and promote multilateral trade. They pushed the Europeans to institute mixed, collaborative systems such as the United States had created through the New Deal, in the words of one cynical Briton, "an integrated Europe looking like the United States of America—God's own country."⁵⁹ Not eager for Soviet participation but anxious to avoid responsibility for the division of Europe, the administration invited Moscow to join but set terms it believed Stalin could not accept. Some Americans even hoped that a powerful, reintegrated Western Europe might help split off Eastern Europe from its Soviet masters.

The Marshall Plan was not an easy sell at home. The amount proposed—$25 billion—and the multiyear authorizations were without precedent. Many Americans fretted that such expenditures would fuel an already insidious inflation. Critics from the right loudly protested a U.S.-funded European New Deal, from the left a "Martial Plan" that would irreparably divide Europe. The administration shrewdly attached Marshall's name to the program to minimize partisan attacks, but in an election year it was impossible to avoid politics. Over vigorous administration objections, Republicans insisted that aid also go to Chiang Kai-shek's embattled government in China, then losing its civil war with the Communists. A Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, along with the alleged suicide—possibly murder—of popular Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, evoked terrifying memories of Hitler's conquest of that same country a decade before, generating popular support for the program. With official backing, the Committee for the Marshall Plan, modeled on the prewar Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, mounted a massive "public education" program. Composed of a bipartisan group of top leaders from business, labor, and academia, the committee sent out more than 1.25 million reprints of articles, organized petitions, sponsored radio broadcasts, and lobbied Congress. "There was never such propaganda in the whole history of the nation," one critic complained.60 The administration also scaled back the amount and reluctantly agreed to assist Chiang. Congress passed the legislation in April 1948, a $6 billion appropriation in June.

The United States did not replicate itself among the economies of Western Europe, as some U.S. officials had hoped. The Europeans were dependent but by no means powerless. While welcoming America's aid and even advice, they resisted the imposition of its ways. The result was a mixed economic system similar to that of the United States but far from identical. The Americans could not establish the type of France they preferred.⁶¹ While moving closer to Europe, Britain clung to its special relationship with the United States. It also held on to the pound sterling and even secured a U.S. commitment to back it. Western Europe and Britain were thus no more than "half-Americanized."⁶²

European revisionist historians have correctly pointed out that the Marshall Plan was not by itself responsible for Europe's dramatic postwar recovery, as Americans often assume, but they err in suggesting that it was not even an important factor. In fact, U.S. aid, along with the massive spending by the United States and its allies for the Korean War, provided the indispensable margin that made possible European recovery.63 Between 1948 and 1952, the Marshall Plan furnished $13 billion in economic assistance. United States funds performed a dazzling array of tasks, helping to rebuild Italy's Fiat automobile plant, modernizing mines in Turkey, and enabling Greek farmers to purchase Missouri mules. The Marshall Plan provided the capital and imports essential to European recovery without sparking inflation. The import of American methods helped improve Western European budgeting and economic planning. By 1952, industrial productivity shot up to more than 35 percent over 1938 levels, agricultural production by 11 percent. Aid from the United States helped stabilize currencies, liberalize and stimulate trade, and promote prosperity. It started the process of integration that led to the Common Market and ultimately the European Union. Where possible, Europeans had to use U.S. funds to purchase American supplies, boosting exports and promoting prosperity at home. For Europeans and Britons, the Marshall Plan provided a huge psychological boost and restored hope and optimism. It helped to resolve the German problem by promoting reindustrialization and integration into Europe in ways acceptable to France, thus mitigating a bitter conflict dating to the late nineteenth century. It also solidified the shaky European governments against Communism, thereby reducing opportunities for Soviet expansion into Western Europe. The Marshall Plan was the one of the United States' most successful twentieth-century initiatives.⁶⁴

The United States did not rely exclusively on economic assistance to contain Communism in Western Europe. Exporters pushed the distribution of such things as films and Coca-Cola—"the essence of capitalism in every bottle"—to promote the American way of life, provoking in a dependent and therefore especially hypersensitive France charges of "Coca-colonization."⁶⁵ Claiming to be the "spearhead of the democratic world," the American Federation of Labor opened a European office in late 1945.⁶⁶ Sometimes working with the CIA and the State Department, it set out to combat radicalism in European trade unions. In France, the AFL and the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union provided to conservative unions moral support, advice, and substantial money, some of it furnished by the U.S. government and corporations. The French accepted the money and rejected the advice. The AFL's influence remained limited. It had much greater success in Germany, where, with government support, it provided urgently needed funds and relief assistance to help conservative unions gain control of the West German labor movement.67

The Truman administration employed many of its new national security mechanisms, including a CIA covert operation, to prevent a Communist victory in the crucial Italian elections of 1948. The threat seemed immediate and urgent, and there was talk of a possible civil war and even Soviet and U.S. military intervention. The United States employed carrot and stick. Top officials publicly threatened to cut off aid should the Communists win. Immigration visas were denied to Communists, and U.S. party members were threatened with deportation, endangering the livelihood of numerous Italians who depended on support from relatives in the United States. The administration also provided generous interim aid before the Marshall Plan went into operation, gave Italy twenty-nine merchant ships, and furnished arms to the Christian Democratic government. With firm U.S. backing, the Vatican mobilized Catholics to vote and excommunicated some Communists. The Voice of America broadcast a steady stream of propaganda. Films such as the anti-Soviet satire Ninotchka were distributed to Italian viewers. Prominent Italian Americans such as boxer Rocky Graziano and leading entertainers such as Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore affirmed support for a democratic Italy. Italian Americans urged relatives in Italy to vote Christian Democratic. In its first major covert operation, the CIA channeled huge sums of money to the Christian Democrats for their newspaper and for electioneering purposes. The party won a resounding victory, saving Italy from Communism, bolstering other Western European governments, and boosting Truman's stature among Italian Americans in an election year. Having solidified their power, on the other hand, the Christian Democrats refused to institute reforms Americans deemed essential for Italian democracy. Success in Italy, the result of many factors, also produced inflated faith in the utility of covert operations, leading to other, more questionable ventures.⁶⁸

Early challenges to Soviet control of Eastern Europe were far less successful. A policy of containment implied U.S. acquiescence in Moscow's sphere of influence, but from the onset of the Cold War the Truman administration thought in terms of rollback. Kennan proposed in 1947 a radical program of political warfare using sabotage, guerrilla operations, and propaganda activities to stir up rebellion in Soviet bloc countries and perhaps even the USSR itself. At least, he reasoned, such operations might have nuisance value. A top-secret agency innocuously titled the Office of Policy Coordination took charge of Operation Rollback. It dropped refugees and displaced persons from Eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain by plane and ship. The results were generally disastrous. Soviet agents infiltrated training camps and were well informed about the operations. Some of the infiltrators were betrayed by British spies. Most were easily captured, many executed. Kennan later conceded that Operation Rollback was "the greatest mistake I ever made."69

The dramatic U.S. initiatives of 1947–48 hardened the division of Europe. Stalin at first displayed interest in the Marshall Plan, sending Molotov to a meeting in Paris and permitting Eastern European leaders to attend. Once it was clear that the terms were unacceptable and even threatening, especially the revival of Germany and the possibility that Eastern Europe might be drawn into the western economic orbit, the Soviet dictator abruptly changed course. Increasingly certain that U.S. policies were designed to undermine Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, he rejected the Marshall Plan, abandoned further efforts to negotiate with the West, and cracked down on his sphere of influence. In the summer of 1947, the Soviet Union "negotiated" a series of bilateral trade treaties with Eastern European nations collectively known as the Molotov Plan. In September, representatives gathered in Poland and established the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) to enforce ideological purity. In words strikingly similar to those of the Truman Doctrine, Stalin's representative Andrei Zhdanov spoke of a world divided into two camps. From this point, Stalin refused to tolerate diversity within his sphere, insisting upon pro-Soviet governments that tailored their policies to his specifications. Through rigged elections, Communists took over in Hungary in late 1947. The Czech coup followed in early 1948. An increasingly paranoid Stalin and his henchmen in the East European satellites used purges, show trials, forced labor, and exile to eliminate possible enemies and squelch dissent.⁷⁰ The Soviet crackdown

initiated forty years of brutal repression in Eastern Europe. The divided Europe that both sides had declaimed about rhetorically was becoming reality.

The most serious crisis of the early Cold War soon followed. Alarmed at the prospect of a reindustrialized West Germany under Allied control, Stalin launched a risky gamble to restore movement toward a unified Germany or drive the West from its Berlin enclave and solidify Soviet control over East Germany. When U.S. military commander Gen. Lucius Clay announced plans for currency reform in the Western occupation zones, a major step toward a West German state, nervous Soviet occupation authorities in July 1948 sealed access to the city by highway, rail, and water.

The Berlin Blockade posed a major challenge for the United States and its allies. They correctly perceived that Stalin did not want war, but they also recognized that the blockade created a volatile situation in which the slightest misstep could provoke conflict. Certain that the Allied position in West Berlin was militarily indefensible, some U.S. officials pondered the possibility of withdrawal. Others insisted that the United States could not abandon Berlin without undermining the confidence of Western Europeans—a "Munich of 1948," warned diplomat Robert Murphy.71 Previously more open to negotiations with the Soviets than Washington, Clay now urged sending an armed convoy through East Germany to West Berlin.

Truman and Marshall chose a less risky course, "unprovocative" but "firm," in Marshall's words.⁷² Drawing on Army Air Force experience carrying supplies over the Himalayas to China in World War II and a mini-airlift during a Soviet "baby-blockade" of West Berlin just months before, they turned to air power to maintain the Western position in Berlin and sustain its beleaguered people. It was the sort of thing Americans do best, a stroke of genius. The United States backed up the airlift by dispatching two squadrons of B-29 Superfortress bombers to Germany and Britain, signaling to the Soviets the danger of any escalation of the crisis. For eleven months in what was called Operation Vittles, fleets of C-47 Skytrain and C-54 Skymaster transports flew 250 missions a day around the clock, moving an average 2,500 tons of food, fuel, raw materials, and finished goods daily into Berlin to feed and heat two million people and maintain some semblance of a functioning economy. At the height of the blockade, planes landed every forty-five seconds. Some of the pilots who had bombed Berlin during the war now saved it. The Soviets also handled the situation delicately, refusing to challenge U.S. aircraft and, reflecting their contradictory goals, allowing huge gaps in the blockade that helped Berlin survive. Stalin's gamble proved a major blunder.⁷³ America won German gratitude for its firm response, and Truman earned crucial accolades at home in an election year. German anger undermined already slim Soviet hopes of heading off Western plans for a divided nation. Recognizing that the blockade had been counterproductive, Stalin in the spring of 1949 backed down. Originally, he had insisted that he would not drop the blockade until the United States and its allies scrapped plans to rebuild West Germany. By the time he gave in, West Germany was near reality. A remarkable indication of Western military and economic power and political will, the Berlin airlift also sealed the division of Europe that would mark the Cold War.74

The Berlin Blockade also helped bring about the most radical U.S. step of the early postwar era, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Drawing upon their own historical experience in the Articles of Confederation, Americans in promoting the Marshall Plan urged the Western Europeans to find security through unification. The Czech coup underscored their importuning, and in April 1948 Britain joined four European nations in forming the Brussels Pact, a mutual defense treaty. For their part, the Europeans insisted that a U.S. defense commitment was the key to their political security and economic recovery. "Political and indeed spiritual forces must be mobilised in our defence," Bevin, a founder of the North Atlantic alliance, intoned.⁷⁵ Looking toward the Atlantic as well as the continent and fearing Soviet intimidation and subversion more than its military power, the ruddy, hard-drinking, fiercely anti-Communist former labor leader went further by seeking to bring the Scandinavian nations and the United States and Canada into a regional alliance. Some Americans like Kennan vigorously objected that the military emphasis of the discussions would harden the division of Europe, but the Berlin Blockade gave urgency to Bevin's warnings, leading to formal talks in Washington in July 1948, "the crucible in which NATO was formed."⁷⁶

Over the next year, the alliance took shape. The most difficult issues were those of membership and the nature of the U.S. commitment. Western Europeans objected to Bevin's Atlantic focus, "a fabulous monster," French foreign minister Georges Bidault protested.⁷⁷ They bent to U.S. pressure, however, and Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Canada, along with Italy and Portugal, became charter members. The Europeans sought from the United States a binding pledge as in the Brussels Treaty requiring signatories to give member nations under attack "all military and other aid and assistance in their power." Wary of entanglement in Europe and especially of provoking a reaction from isolationist remnants in Congress, U.S. negotiators preferred a more restricted commitment. The participants eventually agreed that in response to an attack on a signatory, each member individually and acting with others should take "such actions as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force." The Treaty of Washington was signed in April 1949 with appropriate pomp and ceremony; the only discordant note, Acheson later recalled, was the Marine Band playing Cole Porter's "It Ain't Necessarily So," a tune that might have fed lingering European doubts about the sanctity of U.S. promises. By this time accustomed to radically new foreign policy measures, the Senate approved the treaty with little dissent in July 1949. What has been called the "American Revolution of 1949" was complete.78 An alliance designed in the words of NATO's first secretary general, Lord Ismay, to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down" would turn out to be one of the most enduring such arrangements in world history.⁷⁹

III

By the late 1940s, the Cold War began to influence policies in other regions. In Latin America, the United States shifted from neglect to concern to active involvement centered around anti-Communism. The Good Neighbor spirit of the 1930s had reflected U.S. insularity during the depression. As the United States addressed a wide range of urgent global issues after the war, attention naturally shifted from the hemisphere. Unlike Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles, the Atlanticists who directed postwar policy had little interest in or knowledge of Latin America. Many held distinct prejudices about the peoples and cultures. While lavishing billions of dollars on Western Europe, the Truman administration responded to Latin American appeals for economic aid with proposals for limited technical assistance, loans, private capital, and increased trade. United States diplomats did expand and institutionalize the collective security arrangements created before Pearl Harbor. The 1947 Rio Pact was the first of the postwar regional military alliances authorized under Article 51 of the UN Charter and provided a model for NATO. By the spring 1948 inter-American meeting in Bogotá, the State Department had identified Communism as a potential danger to the hemisphere. Riots in the Colombian capital as the meeting took place—which U.S. officials incorrectly attributed to Communist influence—seemed to underscore the threat. The United States at Bogotá first began to mobilize anti-Communist sentiment in the hemisphere. The conferees created the Organization of American States to enforce regional security and passed an anti-Communist resolution sponsored by the U.S. delegation.80

Once more viewing the hemisphere as threatened by an alien ideology, the United States fell back on the reliance on dictators pioneered by Stimson in the 1920s. With U.S. support, democracy had flourished in Latin America during and immediately after the war, spawning reformist governments, a militant labor movement, left-wing political parties, and even a surge of Communist activity. Increasingly concerned about Communism elsewhere, U.S. officials believed that Latin America's "Hispano-Indian culture—or lack of it," as Acheson condescendingly labeled it, left the region especially susceptible to Communist penetration.⁸¹ The United States thus acquiesced in and in some cases encouraged a movement on the part of conservative elites to turn back democracy. "We cannot be too dogmatic about the methods by which local communists are dealt with," Kennan observed.⁸² Military dictators seized power in numerous countries. With U.S. sympathy and even support, they outlawed Communist parties, suppressed leftist organizations, and with AFL assistance drove out left-wing unions. To curry favor with Washington, Latin governments reduced or cut off trade with the Soviet Union and even severed diplomatic relations, which, ironically, had been established in wartime at Washington's behest. By 1950, U.S. officials viewed Latin America as an "arena for Cold War competition."⁸³

The Cold War created dilemmas for the United States in faraway South Africa. Facing rising anger at the end of World War II on the part of their oppressed black populations, the minority white governments of southern Africa silenced dissent with brute force and dealt with their racial problems by imposing rigid and brutal systems of segregation called apartheid. The Truman administration confronted racial protests of its own at home, and African American leaders increasingly linked the evils of racial discrimination at home and colonialism abroad. United States officials also sought to take an enlightened position on racial issues to counter increasingly shrill Communist propaganda and win the allegiance of peoples of color across the world. The administration would have preferred to distance itself from South Africa's racial policies. Instead, as historian Thomas Borstelmann has pointed out, Cold War exigencies made the United States a "reluctant uncle—a godparent—at the baptism of apartheid."84 United States leaders had long-standing ties with the South African ruling class. South Africans shrewdly waved the anti-Communist banner to win points with the United States. American corporations found South Africa a lucrative place for exports and investments. But the most vital link was through strategic raw materials. Nuclear weapons were vital to U.S. Cold War strategy, and uranium was essential for nuclear weapons, "an absolute requirement of the very life of our nation," Nitze observed. South Africa possessed large quantities of uranium. "Faced with the juggernaut of apartheid in a country of profound strategic importance to the United States," Borstelmann concludes, the administration chose to "ally itself closely with the world's leading apostles of racial discrimination."⁸⁵

One place where Cold War imperatives did not rule was in the rapidly escalating conflict between Arabs and Jews. The postwar situation in Palestine defied solution. Under a now defunct League of Nations mandate, Britain exercised nominal control. But Zionists agitated more determinedly for a Jewish state and with the moral force of the Holocaust behind them pressed for rescission of the 1939 white paper to permit thousands of refugees into Palestine. Terrorists such as Menachem Begin launched deadly attacks against Arabs and British alike. Arabs girded to defend what they considered their homeland. An Anglo-American study group in 1946 recommended the admission of one hundred thousand Jews to Palestine and partition through the creation of a single state with separate Arab and Jewish provinces. Others proposed a UN trusteeship. Britain tossed the hot potato into the lap of the United Nations. Backed by the Soviet Union and the United States—a rare moment of agreement—the world organization in late 1947 approved partition by a bare two votes. As violence mounted, the beleaguered British announced they would leave in May 1948. The Jews vowed to create a provisional government.⁸⁶

The Palestine issue posed a huge dilemma for the United States. Support for a Jewish state risked alienating those Arabs who sat on top of the world's richest oil deposits and controlled territory deemed strategically vital, perhaps driving them into the arms of the Soviet Union. Top diplomatic and military officials thus repeatedly urged the president not to endorse an independent Jewish state. The White House drew different conclusions. Truman brought to the presidency a strong sympathy for the underdog. Like others worldwide, he was horrified by grim postwar accounts of the Holocaust and troubled by the plight of thousands of Jewish refugees. Some of his advisers had close ties to Zionist groups. Facing an uphill struggle for election in 1948, the president could not but be sensitive to the Jewish vote, especially in key states like New York. Truman at first equivocated, backing a UN trusteeship but giving vague private assurances of support to prominent Jews.87

The issue came to a head in the spring of 1948. As Britain prepared to depart and Jews hurried to establish a government, debate raged in Washington. At a tense meeting on May 12, Clifford reported that a Jewish state was inevitable. Employing the Cold War arguments that usually prevailed, he warned that since the Soviet Union would likely recognize the new government, the United States should seek an edge by doing so first. The normally in-control Marshall exploded, dismissing Clifford's proposal as a "transparent dodge to win a few votes" and vowing that if it went through he, for one, would vote against Truman. Clifford fretted that Marshall's "righteous God-damned Baptist" arguments might sway the administration against recognition. Facing a grim domestic political situation, the president held firm. Through intermediaries, Clifford persuaded Marshall not to oppose recognition. When the announcement came three days later, the United States recognized the new government within eleven minutes. Truman acted on what he considered principle as well as political expediency. The move no doubt helped his stunning electoral upset over Republican Thomas Dewey in November. This essentially political act, taken against the advice of foreign policy experts, also infuriated the Arabs and represented the first step in building what would be the U.S.-Israeli special relationship. It sparked an Arab-Israeli war, the initial engagement in an ongoing struggle that would persist into the next century.⁸⁸

By the beginning of Truman's second term, the Cold War had expanded to East Asia, a region that would command U.S. attention for the next four years. Neither Truman nor Acheson knew much about that part of the world; what they knew tended to have a European bias. The United States became hopelessly ensnared in Chiang Kai-shek's losing cause in the epic Chinese civil war, blundered into hot war in Korea, and then foolishly provoked Chinese Communist intervention. Drawing a ring of containment from Korea to India, it laid the groundwork for long-term conflict with the new government in Beijing and a war in Vietnam.

A tangle the United States could never unravel during World War II, China posed even greater challenges after V-J Day. Japan's sudden surrender left that vast conflict-ridden nation in turmoil, and in August 1945, a civil war that had begun long before World War I entered its climactic phase. The nominal government headed by Chiang's Nationalists and isolated in the southwest corner of China and Mao Zedong's Communists, based in the north, immediately began jockeying for position. At U.S. urging, Stalin had recognized the Nationalists, but as the Red Army withdrew from Manchuria it facilitated Communist takeover of the positions vacated. Nervous about Soviet intentions, the United States saw little choice but to back Chiang. To block Communist gains and ensure his control, military officials ordered the Japanese to surrender only to the Nationalists, mounted a massive air and sea lift of half a million Nationalist troops to strategic locations ahead of the Communists, deployed fifty thousand U.S. Marines to guard railroads and major cities, and provided Chiang more than $1 billion in emergency military aid. Clashes between Communists and Nationalists in Manchuria and northern China and signs of Soviet support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reinforced U.S. fears that conflict in China would provide opportunities for Soviet expansion, risking direct conflict with the United States. To head off a ruinous civil war and keep the USSR out of China, U.S. officials reverted to enticing the Communists into a coalition government in which Chiang would retain the upper hand.89

To implement this policy, Truman in late 1945 dispatched General Marshall to China on one of the most thankless missions ever undertaken by a U.S. diplomat. The task—shot through with contradictions—was to arrange a compromise between two warring parties while keeping a presumably reformed Nationalist government in power and checking Soviet and CCP influence. It was based on the naive assumptions that Chiang would reform his government and the two sides could reach meaningful agreements. Marshall had only limited leverage in the form of promises of aid to each side. In the initial stages, he seemed to accomplish miracles. Called "the professor" by those Chinese he worked with, the illustrious general arranged a cease-fire and an end to troop movements. Even more remarkable, he sketched out the framework for a coalition government and integration of the armed forces. The Communists again spoke of promoting free enterprise and a "U.S. styled" democracy. Mao expressed interest in visiting Washington. It was a "stupendous accomplishment," the commander of U.S. forces in China, Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer, exulted.90

Marshall's skill and prestige ultimately could not bridge the vast chasm separating the two Chinese parties. His departure from China at a critical point removed the tie that temporarily held them together. As the Soviets withdrew from Manchuria, Communist and Nationalist forces again vied for position, provoking armed clashes. After the general returned, the contradictions in his mission were blatantly exposed. The two sides regarded each other as deadly enemies and feared the implications of a coalition government.⁹¹ Hotheads from both camps sabotaged negotiations. Confident of U.S. support, Chiang chose war over substantive concessions. The Communists perceived that Marshall was not in fact an impartial mediator and the United States was pursuing what delegate Zhou En-lai called a "double policy." Negotiations broke down, fighting resumed, and both sides vented their anger with the United States. In January 1947, after a year of frustration, Marshall came home to serve as secretary of state.⁹²

Over the next three years, the Chinese civil war ground to a conclusion. The Nationalists began with a two-to-one advantage in manpower, three-to-one in firepower, but quickly squandered their edge. A corrupt and incompetent government provided a flimsy base upon which to wage a military campaign. Runaway inflation, malnutrition, and disease in Nationalist-occupied areas eroded already limited popular support. The army suffered from abysmal morale and what a U.S. officer called the "world's worst leadership."⁹³ Rather than attacking the enemy when it had the advantage, it stuck to its garrisons. The Communists skillfully exploited Nationalist lethargy, mobilizing the peasants and seizing the initiative. When the tide of battle shifted in 1948, Nationalist armies simply melted away, surrendering en masse or fleeing the battlefield without their equipment. During four months of 1948, Chiang lost nearly 50 percent of his manpower and 75 percent of his weapons. In October alone, three hundred thousand Nationalists surrendered.

The Nationalist collapse began precisely when the Cold War in Europe was entering a crucial stage, posing difficult choices for the Truman administration. Having committed itself to contain Communism, should it use any means necessary to prevent a Communist victory in China? Should it at least make a good faith effort by continuing to support an embattled ally? Or, given the Nationalists' obvious deficiencies, should it cut its losses, abandon Chiang to his fate, and prepare for accommodation with the victors?

As it so often did when facing such choices, the administration took a cautious—in this case fateful—middle-of-the-road course. Truman and Marshall flatly rejected recommendations from some military advisers to send U.S. troops to save the Nationalists. China remained in their eyes a secondary theater. In any event, the troops were not available, and Marshall wisely questioned whether full-scale U.S. intervention could salvage the hapless Chiang. They declined even to send a military advisory group for fear of getting sucked deeper into a quagmire. On the other hand, although Truman viewed Chiang and his entourage as "thieves" and additional aid as "pouring sand in a rat hole," his administration refused to abandon them.94 Chiang had vocal and deeply emotional support in the United States, especially from Henry Luce's Time-Life media empire and congressional Republicans who viewed Asia as the most important Cold War arena and China its key. Ill informed about China and zealous in their support of Chiang, they threatened to condition Marshall Plan aid to Europe on continued assistance to China. In any event, the president recognized that simply to abandon Chiang in an election year would give the opposition a whip to flog him with. United States officials also found a broader strategic rationale for continuing to aid the Nationalists. To drop Nationalist China at a critical juncture, they reasoned, would raise doubts about the credibility of U.S. commitments at home and especially in Europe, while continued aid might reassure Europeans of U.S. good faith. Miscalculating the rapidity of Chiang's collapse, they also hoped that limited aid might delay the international impact of his defeat until Europe was stabilized. In April 1948, the administration agreed to an additional $338 million in economic aid and $125 million in military aid, hoping, in the words of one official, to "sweat it out and try to prevent the military situation from changing too drastically to the advantage of the communist forces."95 It thus maintained its ties to a losing cause and compounded its error by not explaining to Americans why it had not done more. These decisions would have catastrophic consequences at home and abroad.

As the Cold War intensified in Europe and the Chinese civil war turned in favor of the Communists, attention shifted toward the erstwhile enemy, Japan. United States officials decided early in the war that Japanese society must be radically restructured, and they determined to act without interference from allies. Responsibility for the occupation fell upon Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP), who brought to the task a combination of imperial majesty, political populism, and missionary zeal. In the first years, the "blue-eyed shogun" and his entourage ruled Japan as "neo-colonial overlords," brooking little interference from Washington and civilians in Tokyo and issuing "edicts with imperious panache."⁹⁶ They took advantage of a shattered and compliant society to impose sweeping reforms designed to democratize Japan and thereby convert it into a "Switzerland of the Pacific."⁹⁷ While retaining the emperor, MacArthur modified his godlike status and allied him with the occupation. Americans drafted a new constitution creating a parliamentary democracy, established basic civil and legal rights, permitted women to vote and own property, demobilized the military, and renounced war. SCAP drew up plans for breaking up the great industrial combines (zaibatsu), encouraged labor unions, implemented land reform, recast the educational system, and even legalized the Communist Party. The occupation did not always energetically implement its plans, especially with the zaibatsu, and the conservative Japanese bureaucrats upon whom it relied managed to preserve continuity amidst drastic change. Still, the imposition of such profound reforms by an outside power was unprecedented. Satisfied with his handiwork, MacArthur in early 1947 proposed to negotiate a peace treaty.⁹⁸

Washington thought otherwise. Alarmed by the Soviet threat in Europe and a possible Communist victory in China, U.S. officials feared that the economic stagnation and political disarray that accompanied MacArthur's reforms would produce chaos in Japan, leaving the United States isolated in East Asia. Thus, while launching the containment policy in Europe, they joined with conservative Japanese leaders in 1948 to effect a "reverse course" emphasizing economic reconstruction and political stability over reform. As in Germany, the United States removed limits on Japanese industrial growth, encouraged the regrowth of the zaibatsu, and stopped reparations. To meet the growing "dollar gap," U.S. officials promoted the expansion of Japanese exports—even to Southeast Asia, the center of the old Co-Prosperity Sphere. The reverse course curbed the growing power of labor unions and suppressed the radical groups that had formed early in MacArthur's tenure. With economic recovery now the "prime objective," Detroit banker and economic czar Joseph Dodge implemented an austerity program to control inflation, balance the budget, and boost exports. The reverse course imposed huge hardships on Japanese workers. The economy remained stagnant until the outbreak of war in Korea brought relief in the form of massive U.S. purchases.99

The reverse course in Japan was paralleled by a major shift in policies toward Southeast Asia. In both French Indochina and the Netherlands East Indies, the end of the war set off potent nationalist revolutions against colonial authority. Roosevelt's anti-colonialism had ebbed in his last months and passed altogether with his death and the rise of the Cold War. United States officials sympathized with nationalism in principle. On July 4, 1946, the Philippines was granted its independence, although the retention of military bases and close economic ties gave it a sort of neo-colonial status.¹⁰⁰ Americans doubted whether "backward" Asians were ready for independence. Focused in the immediate postwar years on the welfare of European allies and Japan, they took a hands-off approach that favored the colonial nations.

As Cold War tensions increased, however, the Truman administration attached growing importance to Southeast Asia. The triangular trade between the United States, Western Europe, and the Southeast Asian colonies was deemed vital to ease the dollar gap that retarded European economic recovery. Southeast Asia lay astride strategic water routes between the Pacific and the Middle East. Nervous about possible Communist gains there, U.S. officials threatened to terminate Marshall Plan aid to extract Dutch promises of independence for an anti-Communist nationalist group in Indonesia headed by Achmed Sukarno. "Money talked," a U.S. diplomat later observed.101 Because of France's volatile politics and its crucial position in Europe, the Americans dealt with it much differently. In any event, the Vietnamese independence movement was headed by longtime Communist operative Ho Chi Minh. Primarily concerned with France and mistakenly viewing the fiercely nationalist Ho as a puppet of the Kremlin, the Truman administration with little enthusiasm and less optimism recognized in 1949 the French puppet government headed by the playboy emperor Bao Dai. In February 1950, it extended direct military aid to France for its war against Ho's Vietminh, a seemingly innocuous commitment with enormous unforeseen consequences.¹⁰²

IV

The tumultuous years 1949 and 1950 were crucial in the evolution of U.S. Cold War policies in Asia and indeed globally. A series of stunning events sharply escalated Soviet-American tensions, aroused grave fears for U.S. security, and set off nasty internal debates that poisoned the political atmosphere. Responding to a crisis situation not unlike that of 1941, Truman administration officials globalized the containment policy, assumed manifold commitments in the worldwide struggle against Communism, and through National Security Council document number 68 embarked on full-scale, peacetime rearmament. With Truman's full confidence, Acheson, appointed secretary of state in January 1949, took the lead in implementing these radically new policies.

Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb in September 1949 spread dismay and anxiety across the country. Although not unexpected, it came sooner than most Americans had anticipated. It eliminated the U.S. nuclear monopoly, raised fears that Stalin might be emboldened to take greater risks, drastically heightened Americans' sense of their vulnerability, and in time produced a sweeping reassessment of Cold War strategy and the place of nuclear weapons in it.¹⁰³ In light of this shock, some Truman advisers, fearing a nuclear arms race, continued to press for international control of atomic energy. Others urged the production of a much more powerful hydrogen bomb to ensure that the United States maintained nuclear supremacy. Truman sided with the latter group, in February 1950 approving production of a superbomb and significantly escalating an arms race that would continue for the next forty years and at times threaten to spiral out of control. "Can the Russians do it?" he asked at a crucial top-level meeting. When told the answer was yes, he quickly responded, "In that case we have no choice. We'll go ahead."104

The Communist triumph in China had an even more profound impact. For years, Americans had cherished the illusion that China was a special protégé who, with proper guidance, would become a modern democratic nation and close friend of the United States. The "loss" of China to Communism at a pivotal moment in the early Cold War had especially unsettling consequences. It extended to East Asia a conflict that had been centered in Europe. In one stroke, it seemed to shift the global balance of power against the United States. It created the appearance that Communism was on the move and the West on the defensive. It left frustrated and fearful Americans asking the portentous—and pretentious—question: Who lost China?

Vainly hoping for reason to prevail, Acheson released in August 1949 the richly documented "China White Paper" absolving the United States of blame for the Communist triumph. This "ominous result" was "beyond the control of the United States . . . ," the paper stoutly proclaimed. "It was the product of internal Chinese forces . . . which this country tried to influence but could not."¹⁰⁵ Such conclusions have stood the test of time, but they offered cold comfort to already rattled Americans in 1949. For right-wing Republicans, Chiang's most ardent supporters, who were deeply frustrated by Truman's shocking victory in 1948, the fall of China provided a political windfall. The administration had not taken the opposition into its confidence on China as with Europe. Republicans, joined by some Democrats, now charged that the administration had favored Europe at the expense of China and callously abandoned a faithful ally to its dreadful fate.

Revelations of Soviet espionage in the United States seemed to nervous Americans to explain otherwise unanswerable questions. Victim from a history of unbroken success of what British scholar D. W. Brogan called "the illusion of American omnipotence," the nation confronted failure at this critical time in its history by finding scapegoats at home.¹⁰⁶ Soviet spies had speeded Stalin's nuclear timetable by stealing U.S. secrets, it was alleged, a charge technically accurate, as it turned out, but grossly overstated. Repeating in a more susceptible milieu accusations first raised by Ambassador Patrick Hurley in 1945, critics like the ambitious young California congressman Richard M. Nixon charged that Communist sympathizers within the U.S. government had undermined support for Chiang, thus ensuring an eventual enemy triump.107 With the postwar Red Scare already under way, in February 1950, a heretofore obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, in a major speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, claimed to have the names of some 206 Communists working in the State Department, accelerating the witch hunt that would bear his name. Stunned from their complacency, a people who through much of their history had enjoyed relatively cost-free security reacted with panic. A Cold War culture of near hysterical fear, paranoiac suspiciousness, and stifling conformity began to take shape. Militant anti-communism increasingly poisoned the political atmosphere at home and made negotiations with the Soviet Union unthinkable.

The war scare of 1949–50 had major consequences for U.S. policy in Asia. In December 1949, the Truman administration approved NSC-49 advocating that the United States "block further Communist expansion in Asia." With the fall of China, Japan emerged as the most important nation in East Asia, and U.S. officials urged the negotiation of a peace treaty and an end to the occupation. Southeast Asia took on even greater importance as a source of raw materials and markets for Japan and a means to close the Western European dollar gap. Reconciliation with Communist China may have been out of reach by this time. The anger provoked by the U.S. role in the Chinese civil war could not easily have been overcome. China's brutal treatment of American diplomats provoked outrage in the United States. Speaking metaphorically, Mao had vowed to "clean the house before entertaining guests." He would likely have contemplated ties with the United States only on terms the administration could never have accepted.¹⁰⁸ The pragmatic Acheson at times seemed open to eventual recognition of the People's Republic and often expressed hope that Mao might become an Asian Tito. But Truman despised the Chinese Communists and had little interest in accommodation. In any case, the events of 1949–50 created a domestic political climate that made suicidal any move toward reconciliation. Thus while trying to distance itself from Chiang, who had fled to Formosa, and promoting a wedge strategy it hoped might separate China from the Soviet Union, the administration shunned even the smallest step toward the Beijing regime. By late 1950, even this cautious policy was overtaken by events.109

The crisis atmosphere of 1949–50 produced most notably NSC-68, a sweeping restatement of U.S. national security policy and one of the most significant Cold War documents. In late 1949, Truman ordered a review of military policies in response to loss of the nuclear monopoly. Long frustrated by the staunch opposition of the president and Defense Secretary Louis Johnson to increased military spending, Acheson used the study, as he later put it, to "bludgeon the mass mind of 'top government' " into spending the money necessary for adequate defenses.¹¹⁰ NSC-68 was drafted by Nitze, who had replaced Kennan as head of the Policy Planning Staff. A Wall Street investment banker, as intense in personality as his mentor James Forrestal, Nitze exceeded Acheson in his gloomy worldview. His study set forth an urgent statement of the national security ideology. It proclaimed the necessity of defending freedom across the world to save it at home. Written in the starkest black-and-white terms, it took a worst case view of Soviet capabilities and intentions. "Animated by a new fanatical faith," it warned, the USSR was seeking to "impose its absolute authority on the rest of the world." Soviet expansion had reached a point beyond which it must not be permitted to go. "Any substantial further extension of the area under the control of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled."¹¹¹

In this context of a world divided into two hostile power blocs, a fragile balance of power, a zero-sum game in which any gain for Communism was automatically a loss for the "free world," NSC-68 outlined a dazzling array of measures—what Acheson labeled "total diplomacy"—to combat the Soviet threat.¹¹² It proposed shoring up Western Europe's defenses, filling the dollar gap, and extending containment to East Asia. It urged expanded military and economic assistance programs, covert operations, and psychological warfare. Above all, it pressed for a huge boost in defense spending to support a massive buildup of nuclear and conventional arms. The aim was to achieve military superiority and create what Acheson called "situations of strength." The ultimate goal was to win the Cold War by detaching Eastern Europe from the Soviet bloc and forcing a change in the Soviet government itself. To rally a sometimes apathetic public to make the necessary sacrifices, NSC-68 proposed a public education program using plain, hard-hitting language—what former undersecretary of state Robert Lovett called "Hemingway sentences"—to make the threat, in Acheson's words, "clearer than truth."113 Still refusing the sort of financial commitment Nitze proposed, Truman shelved the document in the spring of 1950. Events in Northeast Asia would soon put it back on the table.

In June, hot war broke out in Korea, a country far from the United States geographically but for years a focal point of East Asian rivalries. The product of fierce internal conflict among Koreans as well as the Cold War, the Korean "police action" lasted more than three years. It had profound global consequences, heightening Cold War tensions and producing expanded U.S. commitments in Europe and East Asia. It made possible full implementation of NSC-68, including a huge military buildup, economic mobilization, and a string of global commitments.

Much as in Germany, conflict in Korea arose from occupation zones hastily carved out at war's end. On the eve of Japan's surrender, lower-level U.S. Army officials working with National Geographic maps set the dividing line between American and Soviet occupation zones at the 38th parallel, conveniently leaving the capital, Seoul, and two-thirds of the population in U.S. hands. As with Germany, efforts to unify the country ran afoul of Cold War rivalries. Regimes emerged in each zone bearing the distinct imprint of the occupying power. The United States backed a conservative southern government headed by Syngman Rhee, a longtime exile, Princeton University graduate, and protégé of Woodrow Wilson. Seventy years old in 1945, Rhee was handsome, charming, and fiercely independent. His government was composed largely of wealthy landholders, some of whom had collaborated with the Japanese. In the north, the Soviets supported a leftist regime headed by the thirty-one-year-old Communist zealot Kim Il-Sung. Rhee and Kim were passionately committed to unifying Korea—on their own terms. Fighting raged across the peninsula between 1948 and 1950. Leftist guerrillas plotted to undermine Rhee, while armies from both zones waged sporadic warfare across the 38th parallel. As many as a hundred thousand Koreans were killed, thirty thousand in extended fighting on an island off the coast of South Korea.¹¹⁴

Cold War rivalries made full-scale hostilities possible. Already spread thin, the United States worried that Rhee's ambitions might entangle it in a war it could not afford in an area of marginal significance. The Truman administration thus withdrew its military forces from Korea in 1949. In a much publicized January 1950 speech that accurately stated U.S. policy but said much more than it should have, Acheson left South Korea out of the U.S. "defensive perimeter." At the same time, after the fall of China, the administration increasingly perceived that for reasons of domestic politics it could not afford to lose additional Asian real estate to Communism. As Japan assumed greater importance in U.S. global strategy, Korea became an important buffer against China and the Soviet Union and a market for Japanese exports.115

Professing sleeplessness in his quest to unify Korea, the indefatigable Kim doggedly pursued Stalin's go-ahead for decisive action. Rebuffed numerous times, he finally extracted a qualified commitment in April 1950. Apparently persuaded by the Truman administration's refusal to rescue Chiang, its troop withdrawals from South Korea, and perhaps the Acheson speech that the United States would not respond, Stalin approved an invasion across the 38th parallel provided that Kim press for a quick victory. Kim had also hinted that he might turn to Mao, and Stalin did not want to appear to stand in the way of extending the revolution in East Asia. A unified Korea would solidify the Soviet position in Northeast Asia and put pressure on the United States in Japan. War in Korea, Stalin may also have reasoned, would tie Beijing closely to Moscow and eliminate any chance for rapprochement with the United States. The Soviet leader did caution Kim that "if you get kicked in the teeth. I shall not lift a finger." With Stalin's conditional blessing and ostensibly responding to South Korean provocations, Kim on June 25, 1950, dispatched a hundred thousand troops, backed by tanks, artillery, and aircraft, into South Korea.¹¹⁶

Although caught completely off guard, the Truman administration, to the shock of Stalin and his allies, responded promptly and after little debate. United States officials mistakenly believed that Moscow had instigated the attack as part of its grand design for world domination. They vividly recalled Manchuria and Munich and the Western non-response they believed had led to World War II. If they did nothing, they reasoned, nervous European allies would lose faith in their promises and the Communists would be emboldened to further aggression. The United Nations had been involved in creating South Korea, and U.S. officials also saw the North Korean invasion as a test for the fledgling world organization. Thus within days after the June 25 attack, the administration went to war. The president unwisely refused to seek congressional authorization for fear of setting a precedent that might bind his successors, suggesting the extent to which the Cold War had already shattered traditional attitudes on such issues. Taking advantage of Soviet absence from the Security Council, the administration secured UN backing for military action in Korea. It committed U.S. air, naval, and ground forces to the defense of embattled South Korea. In a significant move that dashed any hopes of reconciliation with China, it deployed the Seventh Fleet between Taiwan and mainland China. It stepped up aid to France for Indochina. In a broad band running from the Sea of Japan to the Gulf of Thailand, the United States extended across East Asia the containment policy already applied in Europe.117

In its first six months, the Korean War witnessed reversals of fortune seldom matched in the history of warfare. United States occupation troops hastily deployed from Japan and unready for battle could not stop the North Korean onslaught. By late summer, UN forces were isolated at Pusan on the southeast corner of Korea, very nearly being driven into the sea. At this point, UN commander General MacArthur devised a daring but perilous plan for an amphibious assault on the northwest port of Inchon to relieve pressure on the Pusan perimeter and catch overextended North Korean forces in a deadly pincer. The scheme was hazardous under the best circumstances. Tricky tides made the harbor navigable but one day a month and then only for a few hours, permitting alert defenders to predict the timing of an invasion. Perhaps to underscore his own brilliance if he succeeded, the imperious MacArthur termed the operation a 5,000-to-1 gamble and overrode the cautions of the Joint Chiefs.

A virtually unopposed landing succeeded smashingly. Now the suddenly victorious UN forces drove the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel. The United States might have stopped at this point, explored diplomatic options, even settled for the status quo ante bellum. But MacArthur's already ample ego was further swollen by a brilliant maneuver, and he was intent on rollback. Washington officials hesitated to take on "the sorcerer of Inchon." Caught up in the hubris, they too were seduced by the prospect of a major Cold War victory, especially on the eve of congressional elections. They arrogantly dismissed Chinese warnings of intervention and rationalized that not to advance might be viewed as a sign of weakness. As UN forces plunged recklessly toward the Yalu River separating North Korea from Manchuria, MacArthur foolishly assured Truman of victory by Christmas. Hindered by ethnocentric blinders, Americans to a person could not see what later would seem so obvious.118

Chinese intervention in late November 1950 produced what MacArthur ruefully admitted was a new and different war. As Mao put it, China and Korea were "as close as the lips to the teeth," and the Chinese could not but view the advance of hostile troops to their border as a menace to their infant state and a test of their credibility.¹¹⁹ Mao may have felt some obligation to the Korean Communists, who had provided vital support during the Chinese civil war. He also saw intervention as a way to enhance China's status by defeating the "arrogant" United States, sustain the revolutionary momentum generated during the civil war, and legitimize the position of the party within China.¹²⁰ Stalin sought to cover his own disastrous miscalculation by encouraging Chinese intervention and promising air support (which he later reneged on). The decision apparently provoked bitter debate in the Chinese Politburo, but Mao carried the day. Shortly after U.S. forces celebrated Thanksgiving near the Yalu, more than two hundred thousand Chinese troops entered the war.¹²¹ MacArthur had foolishly exposed his armies by dividing them. In bitterly cold weather under horrendous conditions, UN forces fell back in what American troops labeled Operation Bugout, a headlong, ignominious, and frightfully costly retreat in bitterly cold weather that would end well south of the 38th parallel. Chinese and North Koreans now vowed to unify Korea.

After six months of armies racing up and down the peninsula, the war in 1951 settled into a bloody stalemate. Humiliated by defeat, a defiant MacArthur pressed for all-out war against China, insisting in conventional military terms that there was no substitute for victory. Constrained by allies and the United Nations, viewing Korea and indeed East Asia as a secondary Cold War theater, and fearful of a Soviet strike into Western Europe, the administration settled for a limited war to restore the status quo ante bellum. When MacArthur challenged the president by taking his case to Congress, Truman, fully supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

happily relieved "Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur" of his command.122 The general returned home to a hero's welcome, including a ticker-tape parade viewed by 7.5 million people in New York City and an emotional farewell speech to a joint session of Congress. Republicans sought to exploit the popular anger to discredit Truman. Flags flew at half mast, the president was burned in effigy, and there were calls for impeachment. In time, however, Americans grudgingly agreed with Gen. Omar Bradley that Korea was the "wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." In the meantime, MacArthur's replacement, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, stabilized the lines around the 38th parallel. Mao—his ambitions as rudely dashed as MacArthur's, his forces hopelessly overextended and suffering heavy casualties—also settled for limited war.¹²³

The stalemate persisted beyond the end of the Truman administration. The Chinese periodically mobilized fresh manpower for new offensives, but they gained little ground. Ridgway developed "meat grinder" tactics to lure Chinese troops into the open and chew them up with artillery and aircraft. The fighting ground on mercilessly, increasingly reminiscent of World War I, the names given to major battle sites—Heartbreak Ridge, No-Name Ridge—suggestive of the cost and frustrations. Negotiations began in the summer of 1951, but they produced no more movement than military operations. The mere fact of negotiations among equals was sui generis for the United States, a nation accustomed to imposing peace terms on defeated enemies. The administration erred in assigning the task to military officers, a job they were ill suited for by temperament and experience. The U.S. negotiators found it especially difficult to deal with Chinese and Koreans, peoples they considered inferior, and Communists, whom they viewed as savages and criminals, in circumstances where they could not use without restriction the military power available to them. The talks quickly stalled over difficult substantive questions such as terms for a cease-fire and an armistice.¹²⁴ The most vexing issue proved to be repatriation of prisoners of war. China and North Korea adhered to the conventional position, endorsed by the 1949 Geneva Convention, of compulsory repatriation. For humanitarian reasons and to score Cold War debating points, Truman doggedly—and perhaps foolishly—insisted that POWs who did not wish to be repatriated need not be compelled to do so. It would take 575 of the most tortuous meetings of the Cold War and a new Republican administration to end the Korean "police action" in July 1953.

The war left a bitter taste for Americans. The harsh climate, rugged terrain, and seemingly inscrutable people made Korea, for many U.S. soldiers, a "land that God forgot." The inconclusive nature of the combat, along with its deadliness, made the war especially difficult to fight. Accustomed to the verities of total war, many Americans bristled at the limits imposed by the nuclear age: a "stalemate—a frustration of desires—a compromise with principle—an acceptance of that which is unacceptable," one army officer complained. Positioned between World War II and Vietnam, two conflicts that touched the American psyche in very different ways, Korea became a forgotten war that Americans happily expunged from their memory.125

Yet this war that Americans preferred to forget had enormous consequences. For the Koreans, whose leaders' suicidal ambitions had sparked it, the results were catastrophic, an estimated three million dead, roughly 10 percent of the population, their country laid waste. The nation remained divided after the "peace" treaty, the South still occupied by foreign troops. For the major Communist nations, the war had mixed results. By holding its own against the United States, Mao's China achieved instant great-power status. China's dependence on the Soviet Union solidified their alliance for the short term, but that very dependence and sharp differences over the conduct of the war opened fissures in the Communist bloc that would widen in the coming decade. For Stalin, who had gambled on Kim's ability to win a quick victory, the Korean War was a major setback. The pressures he imposed on his East European allies to produce war materials created strains that would provoke uprisings that in turn threatened Soviet control over its vital buffer zone. Korea also produced Stalin's worst nightmare, a massive buildup of Western European defenses—including the first steps toward German rearmament—and U.S. mobilization for all-out war.¹²⁶

As waged by the Truman administration, the Korean War became, in historian Walter LaFeber's apt phrase, "the war for both Asia and Europe."¹²⁷ In June 1950, Western Europe's defense structure was underfunded and shaky. With the impetus from the Korean War, NATO expanded to include Greece and Turkey. Tito's renegade Communist government in Yugoslavia became a virtual associate member. Without seeking congressional assent, Truman in December 1950 sent four U.S. Army divisions to Europe, a move previously unthinkable, bringing the total of U.S. troops there to 180,000 and provoking a "great debate" at home over the commitment to Europe and the president's authority to send troops abroad. By the end of 1952, NATO had fifteen well-armed divisions. European defense spending swelled from 5 to 12 percent of the gross national product. A NATO command structure and headquarters had been created, and the U.S. commitment was strengthened by the enormously symbolic appointment of World War II hero Gen. Dwight Eisenhower as its first supreme commander. Rejecting Stalin's belated appeals for negotiations, the United States plunged ahead with integrating West Germany into its economic and political sphere and with plans for a European Defense Community to entice an extremely nervous France to accept German rearmament.128 Although it could not have been seen at the time, in one of history's grand ironies, an immensely unpopular war in Northeast Asia had much to do with winning the Cold War in Europe.

Korea had profound consequences for U.S. policies in Asia. Chinese intervention and the humiliating defeat inflicted on American forces provoked added mutual hostility, destroying any chance for accommodation. It would be nearly thirty years before the nations would establish diplomatic relations. On the other hand, the exigencies of war pushed a previously wary United States into Taiwan's eager embrace, bringing forth in the summer of 1950 a U.S. military mission and $125 million in military aid. For the conservatives who ran Japan's government, the Korean War was a "gift of the gods."¹²⁹ United States military procurement pumped $2.3 billion into a lagging Japanese economy. Exports soared to 50 percent above prewar levels; the GNP increased by 10 percent. Over loud Soviet and Chinese protests, the United States incorporated its former enemy into its East Asian security orbit. The administration shrewdly named Republican John Foster Dulles to negotiate a peace treaty. The bumptious future secretary of state ran roughshod over Cold War enemies and allies alike, negotiating separate agreements that restored Japan's sovereignty over the home islands and provided for U.S. bases. The United States recognized Japan's "residual sovereignty" over Okinawa but ruled that island, with its vital nuclear bases, in what can only be called a neo-colonial fashion. Threats to block the treaty by California Republican William Knowland, widely known as "the senator from Formosa" for his passionate support of Chiang, led to additional provisions requiring Japan to agree to a treaty with Taiwan and accept restrictions on trade with China. Partly out of concern for Japan's export markets and despite sharp differences in goals and approach with France, the United States by 1952 was bearing much of the cost of France's war against Communist-led Viet-minh rebels in Indochina.130

In the summer of 1950, to Acheson's delight, the administration took NSC-68 off the shelf. Following its guidelines, U.S. officials undertook full-scale mobilization for war in Korea—and for the long-term global struggle with the Soviet Union. Warning Congress that modern weaponry made the United States vulnerable to potential enemies as never before, Acheson likened it to the person who, on "the death of a parent, hears in a new way the roaring of the cataract."¹³¹ The legislators heard the sound, and for the next three years military spending soared. Truman's defense budget of $53 billion for FY 1953 quadrupled that for 1949. It represented 60 percent of government expenditures and 12 percent of the GNP, compared to less than 33 and 5 percent respectively for FY 1950. The U.S. Army expanded by 50 percent to 3.5 million soldiers; U.S. Air Force air groups doubled to ninety-five. The military establishment's growing size enhanced its position in the new national security state.¹³²

Between 1950 and 1952, the administration developed new weapons to wage the Cold War. Responding to the failure of U.S. intelligence to forecast the North Korean invasion of South Korea and Chinese intervention in the war, it created in October 1952 a new highly secret National Security Agency (NSA, or "No Such Agency," according to wags) to listen in on enemy communications and crack codes.¹³³ It institutionalized and expanded previously ad hoc foreign aid programs. Even before NSC-68, Congress approved the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, an important instrument in implementing the containment policy.¹³⁴ Designed mainly to boost European morale in the early days of NATO, the initial program authorized $1.3 billion to help equip nations involved in U.S. defense agreements. With the outbreak of war in Korea, the administration secured an additional $5 billion for a significantly expanded military aid program. In his 1949 inaugural address, Truman advanced a proposal, bold in conception if modest in scope, to provide economic and technical assistance to less developed nations to help stave off the poverty he and his advisers believed provided a fertile breeding ground for Communism. By the end of 1950, this so-called Point Four program had been extended to thirty-four nations; visitors from more than twenty countries were in the United States for training.135

Propaganda also became an essential part of Cold War strategy. As early as 1947, the administration had revived the wartime Voice of America to beam broadcasts into the Soviet Union. Persuaded that Europe was a "vast battleground of ideas," Congress through the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act created under the State Department the first peacetime information program. Director Edward Barrett, a protégé of OSS boss William Donovan, set out to "penetrate the iron curtain with our ideas." By 1950, broadcasts from thirty-six transmitters in twenty-five languages were estimated to reach three hundred million people.¹³⁶ Desperate Soviet efforts to jam the airwaves seemed to confirm the program's success. As in other areas, NSC-68 gave the propaganda war a boost. Truman had previously stressed the urgency of combating Communist propaganda with a "great campaign for truth." Former advertising executive and Connecticut senator William Benton called the Campaign for Truth a "Marshall Plan in the field of ideas." Although hampered by poor funding, bureaucratic warfare, and harassment from Senator McCarthy and his followers, the program flooded the world with films extolling the American way of life, provided material to newspapers, established student exchanges, and created information centers in sixty nations and 190 cities. Increasingly, it focused on Eastern Europe and the USSR with the avowed aim of rolling back Soviet power. Harvard and MIT scientists, working with the government through Project Troy (named for the Greek campaign that subverted the city-state of Troy), developed transmitters powerful enough to overcome Soviet jamming and leaflet-dropping balloons that penetrated the Iron Curtain by soaring above it.¹³⁷

The administration also used front organizations. The government helped create and fund the ostensibly independent Committee for a Free Europe that used émigré broadcasters to beam through Radio Free Europe bare-knuckled propaganda denouncing the evils of Soviet imperialism, mocking Communism through satirical skits, and using American popular culture, especially jazz, to subvert East European youth.138 In 1950, an increasingly influential and active CIA established in Paris the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), another ostensibly independent group that waged a cultural Cold War by helping to organize and fund such events as art exhibits, literary symposia, and tours by the Yale Glee Club. The CCF distributed funds through such respectable front organizations as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Time, Inc. (sometimes with their knowledge, sometimes without). It recruited former leftist intellectuals such as Sidney Hook and writers such as George Plimpton to write anti-Communist essays and publish literary journals. The agency came to be known as "the Good Ship Lollipop" by those few artists and intellectuals who knew of its support.¹³⁹

THE NEW PROPAGANDA MACHINE scored some points abroad and helped mobilize domestic support for waging the Cold War, but it could not salvage the fortunes of its creators. In its last years, the Truman administration was shaken by domestic scandals, some touching very close to the White House. The Korean conflict took a huge toll in public war-weariness. The president's approval ratings plummeted. Having waved the banner of anti-Communism to gain support for their bold initiatives, U.S. officials could not contain the monster they had loosed. As the public mood soured in 1951 and 1952, McCarthy and his cohorts viciously and relentlessly attacked the president, Acheson, and even the once invulnerable Marshall, now secretary of defense, for being soft on Communism, sheltering Communists within the government, and not waging the Cold War with sufficient resolve. Truman did not seek reelection in 1952. Democratic nominee Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois stood little chance against General Eisenhower, a moderate Republican and internationalist whose stature, charismatic smile, and vague promises to go to Korea (presumably to end the war) secured him an easy victory, ending twenty years of Democratic rule.

Despite leaving office in disrepute, the Truman administration bequeathed an extraordinary record of accomplishment in foreign affairs. United States officials often misread and sometimes misrepresented Stalin's intentions. They exaggerated the Soviet threat. They unwisely rejected negotiations, leaving unanswered the question of whether the Cold War might have been ended earlier, its worldwide effects somehow mitigated. Still, their firm but measured responses to the challenges of postwar Europe produced creative initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and NATO. United States policies helped to ensure the economic and political recovery of Western Europe, purge it of self-destructive internecine hatreds, and produce firm ties to its trans-Atlantic partner.

Truman and Acheson were much less sure-handed and effective in Asia. Certainly U.S. officials implemented reforms that helped demilitarize and democratize Japan and integrate it into the Western trading community. But the administration could not disentangle itself from the mess in China, with huge consequences for U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics. Its actions and statements likely encouraged Stalin to give Kim the go-ahead to invade South Korea. The free hand given MacArthur after Inchon provoked a wider and much more destructive war. This said, the Communist side still suffered the greatest losses in the Korean War. The United States was perhaps least successful in dealing with problems posed by decolonization. Americans overestimated the economic and strategic significance of the periphery and its vulnerability to Soviet blandishments. Their concern for NATO allies made it difficult to accommodate the new forces of revolutionary nationalism. The extension of the containment policy to Southeast Asia put the United States on the wrong side of nationalist revolutions, laying the basis for war in Vietnam.

Successes and failures aside, the Truman administration in the short space of seven years carried out a veritable revolution in U.S. foreign policy. It altered the assumptions behind national security policies, launched a wide range of global programs and commitments, and built new institutions to manage the nation's burgeoning international activities. Perhaps most important, during the Truman years foreign policy became a central part of everyday life. As early as 1947, the doyen of the Establishment, Henry L. Stimson, would express in somewhat curious but telling words the change that had occurred: "Foreign affairs are now our most intimate domestic concern."140