CHAPTER 13

ORDER FROM CHAOS

“Like apples in a barrel”

In Berlin, before the ground froze in the autumn of 1946, the methodical Germans dug thousands of graves for their neighbors who would starve to death by spring. By February of 1947, more than nineteen thousand Berliners had been treated for frostbite; on the walls of the bombed-out Reichstag, someone scrawled, “Blessed are the dead, for their hands do not freeze.”

Europe was “a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate,” said Winston Churchill. The German factories that had survived Allied bombing were being looted by the Russians. All across Europe, canals were plugged, bridges broken, rail lines torn up. Farmers were consuming their produce, while city workers starved.

In London, the weather forecast for January 6 was “cold or very cold.” By January 26, England was virtually paralyzed by blizzards, the worst since 1881. Lights flickered on for only a few hours each morning. Factories shut down, unemployment soared, rations fell below wartime levels.

Drained by two world wars, Britain began divesting itself of empire. On February 14, the government referred the Palestinian dispute to the U.N. On February 18, it announced the impending end of the Raj in India. On February 21, a Friday, Britain sought a successor for its traditional responsibilities of preserving stability in Greece and Turkey, a task that required half a billion dollars a year in financial aid and a garrison of forty thousand troops. It turned to the United States.

 

At the State Department that gray Friday, junior officials and secretaries wandered through the hallways, cluttered with packing boxes, making plans for the weekend and grumbling about the move. The department had outgrown its quarters, a marble Victorian pile next to the White House, and was moving to a new building a few blocks away, in Foggy Bottom. James Reston said in The New York Times that the new building had “about as much character as a chewing gum factory in Los Angeles,” and most State Department officials agreed. They would miss Old State’s high-ceilinged rooms, the wainscoting and elaborate moldings, the white-gloved messengers dozing in their swivel chairs in the hallways.

Dean Acheson’s nostalgia for Old State was tempered by his low regard for its heating and cooling system. His office was drafty in the winter and a steam bath in Washington’s oppressive summers. At least New State was air-conditioned.

Shortly before noon, Acheson received word from the British Embassy that the ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, wished to deliver a “blue piece of paper,” diplomatic cant for an important message. The aide-mémoire, he was told, concerned Greece. There was, however, a protocol hitch: the ambassador could be received only by the Secretary of State, and General Marshall had already left for the weekend to make a speech at Princeton’s two hundredth anniversary.

Acheson, who felt that he could not afford to wait until Monday to act, devised a small ruse: he had a carbon of the message delivered to him, so that “staff work” could begin. Within an hour H. M. Sichell, First Secretary of the British Embassy, had arrived with a dispatch case containing two documents. They were “shockers,” Acheson later wrote. One stated: “His Majesty’s Government, in view of their own situation, find it impossible to grant further financial assistance to Greece,” and declared that Britain would pull out of Greece by the end of March, little over a month away. A second told of the same fate for Turkey.

The Greek government was corrupt, repressive, and incompetent, as Acheson knew. It was also on the verge of collapse in a civil war waged by rebels who were, Acheson believed, supplied and controlled by the Soviet Union. The U.S. ambassador to Greece, Lincoln MacVeagh, Acheson’s fellow Grotonian, had told him so; a delegation sent by the State Department to examine the scene cabled back on February 18—just three days before the aide-mémoire arrived—that the “Soviets feel that Greece is ripe plum ready to fall in their hands in a few weeks . . . After having been rebuffed in Azerbaijan and Turkey, Soviets are finding Greece surprisingly soft . . . matter has gone beyond probing state and is now all-out offensive for the kill.”

The Turkish Straits crisis six months before had hardened Acheson’s view of Soviet designs. He believed that the Kremlin was not content to sit on its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, but rather sought to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, if not all of Europe. After wrestling so long with McCloy’s “A-1 priority job,” he had come to a simple, perhaps simplistic, conclusion. He believed that Russia was behaving like a classic empire: expansionist, insatiable, controllable only by force.

The fact that Britain was abandoning the field, no longer able to fulfill its centuries-old role of preserving a balance of power in Europe and opposing Continental aggressors, left no doubt in Acheson’s mind that the United States must move to fill the void. Before the war, he had envisioned a Pax Anglo-Americana. But now a shared hegemony was out of the question. Acheson was not such an Anglophile as to be sentimental about the loss of empire. He knew that the end of Pax Britannica meant the beginning of Pax Americana.

The World War had left the U.S. by far the strongest Western country; indeed, it was the only major power not verging on famine and bankruptcy. With immense natural resources and limitless confidence in the righteousness of its ways, America, Acheson firmly believed, was the natural successor to Britain. Yet, as he was equally well aware, the American republic’s tradition since its founding had been to avoid European entanglements. After saving Europe twice in half a century, most Americans, secure in their monopoly over the atomic bomb, were content to keep the troubled Continent an ocean away. The most powerful military machine in the history of mankind in 1945, the United States by 1947 had almost totally demobilized; its armed forces had withered from twelve million men to fewer than two million. Certainly Americans were in no mood to rescue Greece and Turkey, two countries they associated more with ruins and rugs than shared destiny. These obstacles, however, only heightened Achesons’s sense of urgency.

Most men when they make history are too busy, too overwhelmed, to know it. But there is every indication that Acheson understood precisely the full portent of the British ambassador’s “blue piece of paper.” Acheson’s words and actions at the time show a clarity of vision, a certainty of historic purpose unclouded by the fog of war or the ambiguity of crisis. His country was faced, he believed, with “a task in some ways more formidable than the one described in the first chapter of Genesis.” For Acheson, this was the moment of Creation. His job, and the job awaiting his countrymen, was nothing less than to restore order from chaos.

All week, Acheson had been stirring. On Tuesday, speaking off the record to journalist Louis Fischer, he had said, “What we must do is not allow ourselves to be set back on our heels by [the Russians’] offensive strategy.” So far, the U.S. had merely reacted to the Soviets. “They throw bricks into the window and we push a newspaper in that hole and try quickly to plug another hole, and so on.” Now, Acheson insisted, the U.S. must take the initiative from the Soviets and “keep on the offensive about it.” On Thursday, he had rephrased and strengthened a memorandum entitled “Crisis and Imminent Possibility of Collapse,” authored by the director of Near Eastern Affairs, Loy Henderson, which urged an immediate program for economic and military assistance to Greece. “Unless urgent and immediate support is given,” the memo bluntly warned, “it seems probable that the Greek government will be overthrown and a totalitarian regime of the extreme left will come to power.”

The British aide-mémoire was only the final spur. As soon as he had finished reading it, Acheson assembled his staff in his office. “We’re right up against it now,” he announced. He ordered them to work through the weekend in order to have position papers, arguing for U.S. assumption of aid to Greece and Turkey, prepared for the Secretary by Monday at 9 A.M. His instructions were brief: “Work like hell.”

Only then did Acheson pick up the phone and call the Secretary of State and the President and tell them what had happened and what he had done. Their reaction was the same. Both assented, without comment.

 

It is characteristic of George Marshall and Harry Truman, and of their relationship with Dean Acheson, that they told him simply to carry on. Marshall, to Acheson’s immense relief, had replaced Byrnes as Secretary of State in January. Truman had finally tired of Byrnes’s free-lancing and grown suspicious of his presidential ambitions. General Marshall, Organizer of Victory, was everything Byrnes was not: utterly loyal, self-effacing, ambitious only for his President and his country.

Acheson had served Marshall before. In 1946, Truman had sent Marshall as his special envoy to see if he could bring a peaceful solution to the civil war raging in China between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and the Communist insurgents under Mao Tse-tung. Marshall, in turn, had appointed Acheson to be his “rear echelon,” his agent in Washington to make sure his orders were carried out. Marshall reported directly to Truman, sidestepping Byrnes, with Acheson serving as the go-between to the White House. “A design for living dangerously” was Acheson’s description of the arrangement; it did not bring him closer to Byrnes.

Despite Marshall’s best efforts, the mission was a failure, doomed by mutual mistrust between the warring Chinese factions. The experience confirmed Acheson’s respect for Marshall’s forbearance and wisdom. It also left him with an impression of China as a quagmire to be avoided.

On the morning of his swearing in as Secretary of State, Marshall walked back across the street to Old State with Acheson. “Will you stay?” Marshall asked. Certainly, Acheson replied, but he wanted to get back to his law practice before long. Six months? asked Marshall. Acheson agreed. Marshall told Acheson that he would be his chief of staff—and the only channel to the Secretary of State. Acheson could barely contain a smile. Byrnes had consistently short-circuited State Department channels as he traveled about from one peace conference to another. Now Acheson would not have to guess what the Secretary was up to. Marshall continued: he wanted complete and brutal candor from Acheson. “I have no feelings,” the general declared, “except those I reserve for Mrs. Marshall.”

Marshall was an icon to Acheson, as he was to Lovett, and to Bohlen and Kennan, Harriman and McCloy. Like Stimson, he was as important for what he inspired in others as what he accomplished himself. Acheson described General Marshall entering a room: “Everyone felt his presence. It was a striking and communicated force. His figure conveyed intensity, which his voice, low, staccato, and incisive, reinforced. It compelled respect. It spread a sense of authority and calm.”

Marshall was far from brilliant. His mind was more conventional than imaginative. He was wise, but his judgment was hardly infallible, as Acheson was to discover to his everlasting chagrin in November of 1950. Yet he had about him an aura of absolute integrity.

He had learned self-control by trial: as a cadet at Virginia Military Institute, ordered to squat over a bayonet for hours, he had fainted and nearly lost his manhood. More patience was acquired sitting on dusty posts in the peacetime Army, passed over for promotion. In wartime, he dealt with martial egos with fairness, while utterly suppressing his own.

Marshall held himself aloof. When President Roosevelt called him George, Marshall gently remonstrated that only his wife called him by his first name. Although his only discernible weaknesses were a fondness for pulp fiction and maple-sugar candy, he was not a prig. He enjoyed telling dryly funny stories, and could be caustic and blunt. He rationed his energy and emotions. “I cannot allow myself to become angry,” he told his wife. “That would be fatal. It is too exhausting.”

When Marshall became Secretary of State, he was sixty-six years old, silver-haired, pink-faced, erect. Highly competent at running a war machine, he knew less about peacetime diplomacy. He believed in delegating responsibility, which in practice meant letting Acheson run the State Department. Yet he also had “the capacity for decision,” Acheson noted, a quality that was to Acheson “surely God’s rarest gift of mind to man.” Marshall had little use for “kicking the problem around,” a State Department pastime. Acheson relished quoting Marshall to his subordinates: “Don’t fight the problem; decide it!”

Four days after Marshall’s swearing in, Acheson reported to Henry Stimson—writing to one icon about another—“General Marshall has taken hold of this baffling institution with the calmness, orderliness, and vigor with which you are familiar. We are very happy and very lucky to have him here.” At a dinner party at P Street in March, Acheson “spent a good deal of time bubbling over with enthusiasm, rapture almost, about General Marshall,” a guest, David Lilienthal, noted in his diary. “To work with [Marshall] is such a joy that he can hardly talk about anything else,” Lilienthal continued. “It has made a new man of Dean and this is a good thing for the country right now.”

 

Acheson’s respect for Marshall was matched by his regard for Truman. From the first he had admired Truman’s grit. He had been heartened by the President’s depth and decisiveness ever since the August morning in the Oval Room when the self-taught history buff had displayed his firm grasp of the strategic significance of the Dardanelles. Since then, Acheson had impressed Truman with his own forcefulness and, equally important, with his loyalty.

Truman was a virtual pariah in Washington in the late autumn of 1946. His low standing had been blamed for the Democrats’ loss of Congress in the November elections. After the drubbing, when the President’s train pulled into Union Station from Independence, Missouri, the platform was empty of greeters. Save one: Dean Acheson. Formally dressed in cutaway and striped pants, mustache clipped, homburg in hand, Acheson cut a resplendent figure to the downcast President slinking back into town to sift through the political ruins.

Acheson was there out of dutiful innocence. In FDR’s time, it had been a Cabinet custom to greet the President’s train after elections. Acheson recalled the “triumphal processions” from Union Station up Pennsylvania Avenue, and assumed Truman would at least warrant a procession, albeit a subdued one. He was quite aghast to find himself standing alone in his solemn finery on a dark platform, like an undertaker awaiting delivery of a casket.

Truman never forgot Acheson’s show of loyalty. That evening, he invited the striped-pants Grottie back to the family quarters in the White House, sat him down in his small upstairs study, and asked him his advice about politics. Truman’s aides were urging him to call a lame-duck session of Congress to ram through a last batch of legislation before the GOP took over. Acheson, emboldened by intimacy and Bourbon, counseled against it. A “good sportsman,” he stated in terms that would have pleased the Rector, would face up to defeat and not try to bend the rules. Truman agreed. Acheson even helped him draft a statement graciously accepting the judgment of the American people.

Acheson further impressed Truman with his fealty by exposing the lack of it in James Forrestal, who had taken to holding lunches with other Cabinet members to discuss policy—without the presence or even the knowledge of the President. Though Acheson felt uncomfortable about “tattling” on Forrestal, he strongly believed that these lunches undermined the President’s rightful authority. Truman promptly ordered Forrestal to cease his rump lunches. Acheson’s standing at the White House rose another notch; Forrestal’s fell.

By February, Acheson felt secure in the President’s trust. He felt equally sure of Marshall’s. He did not hesitate to act on their behalf.

 

Early Sunday evening, Loy Henderson arrived at Acheson’s house on P Street in Georgetown to report on the staff work that Acheson had ordered up on Friday in response to the British aide-mémoire. All weekend, the State Department staffers had sorted through policy implications and the costs of taking over from Britain the burden of supporting Greece and Turkey. “Henderson asked me whether we were still working on papers bearing on the making of a decision or the execution of one,” Acheson recalled in his memoirs. He did not hesitate with the answer: “Loy, we’re going to do it. You proceed on that basis.” Mission clear, they sat back in the overstuffed chairs in Acheson’s cozy study and drank a martini “to the confusion of our enemies.”

Acheson handed the recommendation for Greek and Turkish aid to General Marshall at 9 A.M. Monday. He told the Secretary that the papers contained “the most major decision with which we have been faced since the War.” Marshall asked a few questions, and—in an extraordinary delegation of authority—informed Acheson that the responsibility for carrying through the plan would be Acheson’s. The Secretary was leaving in a week for a Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Moscow. Acheson had not expected anything other than approval from Marshall. But he was already worried about selling the plan to Congress, a less trusting authority.

At noon on Monday, journalist Louis Fisher came to Acheson’s office to keep a lunch date. He noticed that Acheson was agitated. The phone rang repeatedly; Acheson seemed very tense. Swearing Fisher, an old friend, to secrecy, Acheson told him what was afoot. The two departed in the Under Secretary’s limousine for the Metropolitan Club. Acheson immediately cranked up the window behind the driver. “The British are pulling out everywhere,” he said, “and if we don’t go in the Russians will.” At the club, Acheson ordered exactly what Fisher did and showed little interest in his food. “There are only two powers left,” he said. “The British are finished. They are through. And the trouble is that this hits us too soon, before we are ready for it. We are having a lot of trouble getting money out of Congress.” Acheson grimaced and threw his hands in the air. “If the Near East goes Communist, I very much fear for this country and for the world.”

Though the polls showed growing awareness of Soviet aggressiveness, most Americans were still not ready to undertake the dangerous, expensive job of opposing Russia. In the last few weeks, Capitol Hill had already repudiated requests by Marshall and Forrestal for increased foreign aid and defense spending; most congressmen were more interested in cutting taxes by 20 percent. The Republicans had gained control of Congress in November by promising a return to normalcy, not an assumption of Britain’s empire.

Acheson was no neophyte at dealing with Congress, despite his distaste for jollying up to hacks and claghorns. As an Assistant Secretary of State for congressional liason during the war, he had manfully tried to be one of the fellows. “This is a low life but a merry one,” he wrote his daughter Mary in the summer of 1945. “I’ve had a fine lunch in the office of the Secretary of the Senate with House and Senate members. A real Texas ham was offered and whiskey. I’m getting to be a real politician.” But one pictures Acheson poking about the halls of Congress like an anthropologist sampling native customs. He had at least learned an essential lesson while selling the British loan to skeptical congressmen: fear of Communism was a better goad than concern for allies.

The first real test for the Greek-Turkish aid package came on Thursday, February 27, when Truman summoned congressional leaders to get their private, informal reaction. Acheson viewed the meeting with tremendous apprehension: “I knew we were met at Armageddon.”

Marshall outlined the case. He mouthed the right words: “It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first crisis in a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. . . .“ But his delivery was flat, uninspired. Joseph Jones, a young State Department official who attended the meeting, later wrote, “He conveyed the overall impression that aid should be extended to Greece on the grounds of loyalty and humanitarianism.” The congressmen listened sullenly. The grumbling began: “What are we getting in for?” one asked. “How much is this going to amount to?” asked another. “Does this mean pulling the British chestnuts out of the fire?”

Acheson fretted silently. Marshall, he later wrote, had “flubbed his opening statement. In desperation, I whispered to him a request to speak.” Marshall assented. In recalling the scene Acheson spared no sense of drama: “This was my crisis. For a week I had nurtured it. These congressmen had no conception of what challenged them; it was my task to bring it home.” Like a bold lieutenant in a wavering charge, Acheson grabbed for the fallen standard and plunged onward. “Never,” he recalled, “have I spoken with such a sense that the issue was up to me alone.”

Acheson’s rhetoric was the product of emotions that had been welling up within him for months. The situation, he declared to the doubting congressmen, was unparalleled since ancient history. Not since Athens and Sparta, not since Rome and Carthage, had the world been so polarized between two great powers. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were divided by “an unbridgeable ideological chasm.” The choice was between “democracy and individual liberty” and “dictatorship and absolute conformity.” What is more, the Soviets were “aggressive and expanding.” If Greece fell, “like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one,” Iran, Asia Minor, Egypt, then even Italy and France would fall prey. Before long, two-thirds of the world’s population and three-quarters of its surface would be Red. This was not an issue of “pulling British chestnuts out of the fire,” but of preserving the security of the United States, of Democracy itself.

A long silence followed. Finally, Acheson recalled, Arthur Vandenberg spoke up: “Mr. President, if you say that to the Congress and to the country, I will support you, and I believe most of the members will do the same.” Loy Henderson recalls Vandenberg putting the message more bluntly: “Mr. President, the only way you are ever going to get this is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.”

Work on such a speech began immediately. At a meeting with State Department officials the next day, Acheson recounted the session at the White House (not omitting his own prominent role) and instructed his minions to begin drafting a presidential message that would stress the “global struggle between freedom and totalitarianism.” The message could not be restricted to Greece and Turkey, or even the Near East. It must stress the “protection of Democracy everywhere in the world.” The speech should not be “provocative” in the sense of accusing the Soviets directly, but rather address the spread of totalitarianism generally. The men listening thought Acheson seemed unusually grave. “There is a great job to be done,” he concluded, and it must be done “with great speed.”

Within a couple of days, the drafters had churned out a report called “Public Information Program on United States Aid to Greece.” The report stated the objective of the United States as broadly as possible: “It is the policy of the United States to give support to free peoples who are attempting to resist subjugation from armed minorities or from outside forces.” At Acheson’s direction, this passage was lifted almost verbatim from the report and put in the President’s address. It became known as the Truman Doctrine.

 

For months, George Kennan had been preaching the doctrine of containment to select audiences at the National War College and other forums. Now Acheson asked him to join the process of implementing it. On the Monday that State Department staffers began working on the Greek-Turkish aid proposal, Acheson summoned Kennan to his office and told him of the crisis. Would he sit in and lend his voice? Kennan accepted with alacrity.

Kennan’s reputation as a seminal thinker was by now well established in the State Department bureaucracy. When he appeared at the meeting at the State Department, Loy Henderson immediately turned over the chair. By midnight, a first draft outlining the need to prop up Greece and Turkey against the Communist threat was completed for the President’s review. Kennan recorded in his memoirs that as he drove home through the streets of Georgetown that night, he was filled with a sense of having participated in the making of history.

Kennan was not, however, asked to participate in drafting the President’s speech. This was a chore to be entrusted to the more politically minded. It was not until March 6, the day before the draft went to the President, that Kennan came over from the War College to the State Department to have a look. He was appalled. He immediately seized on the open-ended commitment to aid “free peoples” everywhere. He protested to Acheson: This was going too far. “The Russians might even declare war!” Acheson listened unmoved.

Kennan repaired to his office and hurriedly cranked out a draft of his own, a much more finely calibrated effort focused on the particular problems of Greece and Turkey. Acheson rejected it out of hand. When another State official asked Acheson if the U.S. planned to bail out every imperiled democracy, Acheson leaned back in his chair, looked across the street at the White House, and replied: “If FDR were alive today, I think I know what he’d do. He would make a statement of global policy but confine his request for money right now to Greece and Turkey.”

At a dinner party at Acheson’s house later in the week, Kennan brought up the matter again. He was anxious about overstating the case and making commitments that the U.S. could not realistically honor. Acheson reiterated the need to convince Congress. A hint of tension crept into the conversation. Kennan, shy in Georgetown society and unable to enjoy argument as sport, backed off. The evening resumed its pleasant course.

But Kennan could not rid himself of his doubts, which poured out in a letter to his old comrade Chip Bohlen. “There is a complete lack of intelligent public liaison here on the Greek question,” Kennan wrote. “Most of Congress and the press are still running around bleating elemental questions which any child could answer.” Kennan felt like a lone voice. As he told Bohlen: “Your presence is badly needed.”

Bohlen too had qualms. He was on his way to Moscow for the Foreign Ministers’ meeting with General Marshall when he saw a cable of the speech draft. “It seemed to General Marshall and me that there was a little too much flamboyant anti-Communism in that speech,” Bohlen later recalled. Marshall and Bohlen sent a cable back to Washington asking that it be toned down. The reply came back from Truman: without the rhetoric, Congress would not approve the money.

There were other, muted voices of concern, even within the White House. Presidential aide George Elsey wrote Clark Clifford, “There has been no overt action in the immediate past by the U.S.S.R. which serves as an adequate pretext for an ‘all-out’ speech.” But Clifford thought like Acheson, only more so. He saw the speech as “an opening gun in a campaign to bring people up to the realization that the war isn’t over by any means.”

Clifford, whose polish and ego were a match for Acheson’s, had been working closely with the Under Secretary for some months. Clifford handled national security matters for Truman; Acheson was the State Department’s day-to-day contact with the White House. Acheson had come to appreciate Clifford’s political savvy and art of persuasion. A few years later, Acheson would try to recruit Clifford for his law firm. They were social friends as well. In 1949, Acheson would second Clifford for membership in the Metropolitan Club.

“I viewed my role as asking, ‘Is the speech saleable?’” Clifford later recalled. He understood that to grip the American people the issue had to be framed as a contest between the forces of darkness and light. Clifford made the speech simpler and more dramatic, as did Truman himself. In fact, the President bounced the first State Department draft as sounding “too much like an investment prospectus.” As he explained in his memoirs, “I wanted no hedge in this speech. This was America’s answer to the surge of communist tyranny.” To the crucial sentence stating the Truman Doctrine, the President changed “I believe it should be the policy of the United States” to “I believe it must be. . .”

Truman stepped to the rostrum to address a Joint Session of Congress at 1 P.M. on March 12, 1947. His voice was flat and high-pitched, but forceful; his speech, as Robert Donovan wrote, “was probably the most enduringly controversial speech that has been made by a president in the twentieth century.” When he finished announcing that the United States was undertaking the role of world defender of democracy, he was greeted not with applause but with stunned silence. Robert Taft, the isolationist Republican leader, took off his glasses, rubbed his face, and yawned prodigiously. The public reaction was equally unmoved, according to Time. The magazine quoted an anonymous Chicago commuter as scoffing, “More sand down the rat hole.”

In later years, the Truman Doctrine would be described as a prescription for tragedy and blamed ultimately for the Vietnam War. At the time, its drafters had hardly an inkling of where it might lead. Clifford recalls that as he rode down Capitol Hill in the President’s limousine after the speech, he felt, “Well, we hit that a good stiff lick.” The only prospect he envisioned was a vacation at the President’s winter getaway in Key West.

Kennan, with his prescience, did worry that the Truman Doctrine was potentially mischievous. But his own narrow and overly detailed speech would not have squeezed a nickel out of Congress for the defense of Greece and Turkey. Acheson did not take the Truman Doctrine literally. He was highly sensitive to the limited resources of the United States, and had no intention of intervening around the globe. He particularly wanted to avoid the China quagmire. At the same time, he genuinely believed the Soviets had aggressive designs on Europe and the Near East, and he wanted to signal U.S. resistance. Overstatement was to him merely a tool for manipulating balky, unsophisticated congressmen into paying for legitimate policies.

The problem was that those unsophisticated congressmen, not to mention the public, took sweeping language literally. Congressman Lyndon Johnson of San Marcos State Teachers College, sitting in the audience that day, had no way of knowing that Truman did not really mean what he said. It was undoubtedly necessary to make arguments “clearer than the truth,” as Acheson later put it, in order to strike a deal with Congress. Unfortunately, the bargain proved Faustian.

Already, the Communist bugaboo was beginning to roil domestic politics. Red-baiting had been a major issue in the 1946 congressional elections. When Congress returned, John Taber, the hulking chairman of the House Appropriations Committee—and thus controller of purse strings on foreign aid—announced that he was bent on getting subversives out of government. Forrestal was not unsympathetic. He wrote to Clifford on January 31 that at a private dinner Taber had told him that he planned to “go after” Communist personnel “hammer and tong.” Kennan sensed the coming darkness. “I look personally with some dismay and concern at many things we are now experiencing in our public life,” he stated in a lecture. “In particular, I deplore the hysterical sort of anti-Communism which, it seems to me, is gaining currency in this country.”

Truman also disdained Red-baiting. But he believed he had to head off the Red-baiters with a concession. He could not very well afford to ask Congress to get “tough” on Communism abroad if he was “soft” on Communism at home. Ten days after he announced the Truman Doctrine, the President promulgated an Employee Loyalty Program. Henceforth, all government workers would undergo loyalty tests.

Acheson would himself become a target of the hysteria. But in March of 1947, he was too preoccupied with cultivating a single senator, Arthur Vandenberg, to notice the still shadowy figure of Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.

It is easy to make fun of Vandenberg, the isolationist turned internationalist. And Acheson did. Son of the American Revolution, thirty-third-degree Mason, and an Elk, Vandenberg craved recognition. He had composed a popular ballad to a movie queen of the 1920s, Bebe Daniels, entitled, “Bebe, Bebe, Bebe—Be Mine.” Big, pink, and lumbering, waving a trunklike arm, he indulged his love of phrase making with such clinkers as “our merific inheritances,” “marcesant monarchy,” “nautical nimbus.”

Vandenberg, Acheson later wrote, “did not furnish the ideas, the leadership, or the drive to chart the new course or to move the nation into it. But he made the result possible.” As a practical matter, in those days before Watergate and congressional reform, “advice and consent of the Senate” meant “consult with Vandenberg.” As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he exercised enormous sway over his colleagues, who knew little about foreign affairs and deferred to his judgment. Vandenberg was a Republican. But since 1945, when he had made a famous speech confessing his conversion to internationalism, he had been a sincere believer in bipartisan foreign policy. In Congress, he was the creator of the internationalist consensus that future Presidents would look back upon with wistful longing.

In the Truman Administration, most Democrats could be counted on to stick with the White House, despite their grumbling about its occupant. If Vandenberg was on board, he would bring along most of the Republicans. His approach to the isolationists and strident right-wingers was to “kill them with kindness.” He would invite them to hearings and let them posture for hours until they had sufficiently ventilated and cooled down.

Acheson’s approach to Vandenberg was large doses of flattery. “Each move and speech you make seems to me the perfect one,” Acheson wrote in one typically effusive note. “I marvel how you maintain your good humor, your strength, and your zest for the fray.” Another tactic was known as “applying the trademark” or “determining the price.” Explains Acheson: “This meant either stamping the proposal with the Vandenberg brand, or exacting from the Administration a concession which he thought politically important.”

It did not take Acheson long to find the Vandenberg brand for the $400 million Greek-Turkish aid bill that the Senate was scheduled to consider in the spring of 1947. In the Administration bill, there was no mention of a role for the United Nations. There had been one in early drafts, but Acheson, who considered the U.N. to be weak and irrelevant, struck it out. Vandenberg, who believed in the U.N. with a convert’s zeal, pounced on the omission and insisted that the bill should provide for the cessation of U.S. aid if and when the U.N. should take charge of the situation. Acheson was sure this would never happen, since the Soviet Union would prevent it, so he went along. It was, he said, “a cheap price for Vandenberg’s patronage.” The change was proposed as the “Vandenberg Amendment.” Acheson wrote: “The brand had been applied.”

Acheson was not quite home free. During the lengthy hearings on the bill, he was asked some awkward questions. Karl Mundt, a literal-minded congressman from South Dakota, demanded to know if the Truman Doctrine was a “first step in a consistent and complete American policy to stop the expansion of Communism.” Acheson hedged. The U.S. was not, he answered, embarking on a “crusade against ideology.” Aid would be dispensed “according to the circumstances of each specific case”—depending on need, American interests, and the likelihood that it would be effective. This was a commonsense approach, but it did not satisfy all his questioners. The China specialists, such as Walter Judd of Minnesota, asked the inevitable: If Greece and Turkey, why not China? Different circumstances, answered Acheson, somewhat cryptically and, to the China-lobby crowd, unconvincingly.

Acheson’s skeptics were not just congressmen he could dismiss as know-nothings. One evening in April, while the Greek-Turkish aid bill was still languishing in committee and Acheson was weary from grinding out testimony on the Hill, he went to a dinner party with Walter Lippmann. The distinguished columnist, sniffing the flaw in the Truman Doctrine, had warned in a column that the U.S. was in danger of violating one of his favorite precepts, the balance of resources and commitments. The U.S. would face the Soviets, Lippmann feared, with “dispersed American power in the service of a heterogenous collection of unstable governments.” The column, widely read, was not helping the Administration’s cause on the Hill.

Fortified by a martini or two, Acheson launched into a fierce defense of the Truman Doctrine. As his passion grew, he turned on Lippmann and accused him of “sabotaging” American foreign policy. The columnist hit back. “Words flew, fingers were jabbed into chests, faces grew red,” Lippmann’s biographer Ronald Steel recounts. The dinner guests delighted in this battle between titans, but Lippmann later described the evening as “very unpleasant.” (His nicotine hangover was so great the next morning that he quit smoking.) Acheson, whose scorn could be quite lethal, called Lippmann before noon to apologize, but the friction between the two men would continue to grow.

Despite such unpleasant moments, the Greek-Turkish aid package passed in April 1947 by more than two to one margins in the Senate and the House. Lippmann ultimately supported the bill in his column; even Bob Taft voted for it. Both liberals and Republicans were trapped: neither could afford to appear soft on Communism.

In the end, American involvement in Greece and Turkey proved effective. By the summer of 1949, the Communist-backed insurgency in Greece was finished; the American-backed government troops had won. No dominoes fell. The engagement eerily foreshadowed Vietnam, except in its outcome. American “advisers,” trained in counterinsurgency, bolstered a corrupt right-wing government against Communist rebels. Napalm bombs were extensively used for the first time.

One major reason for this first great success of America’s willingness to assume global responsibilities was that the rebels did not enjoy quite the Soviet backing Acheson thought they did. Stalin, it later emerged, was ambivalent about the insurgency from the outset, and offered the rebels little support. In early 1948, he angrily told the Yugoslavs, who were providing sanctuaries for the Greek rebels, that the insurrection had “no prospect of success at all.” The Soviet dictator exclaimed to a pair of Yugoslavian diplomats, “Do you think Great Britain and the United States—the United States, the most powerful state in the world—will permit you to break their line of communication to the Mediterranean? Nonsense.”*

Stalin was right, but American firmness was hardly such a foregone conclusion. Had it not been for Acheson’s resolve, and the strong support of Marshall and Truman, the U.S. would have almost surely abandoned Greece to its fate. And regardless of Stalin’s doubts about fomenting rebellion in Greece, he would have moved in an instant to declare the rebels’ victory as his own. Though paranoid, Stalin was opportunistic; he took what he perceived he could get away with. Had the Greek rebels won, there is little doubt that the Kremlin would have quickly folded the country into the Soviet bloc.

 

Deep into a drunken dinner at the Kremlin in early April 1947, Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, turned to General Marshall and asked: “Now that soldiers have become statesmen in America, are the troops goose-stepping?” The U.S. Secretary of State, his eyes icy gray, turned to Bohlen, who was translating for him, and said quietly: “Please tell Mr. Molotov that I’m not sure I understand the purport of his remark, but if it is what I think it is, please tell him I do not like it.”

The Foreign Ministers’ meeting that had begun in Moscow in early March was not going well. There were toasts and more toasts, but no progress toward settling the disputes dividing postwar Europe. As March dragged into April, the proceedings became oddly punchy. The American ambassador to Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith, asked for hair tonic in a Moscow barbershop and got hair dye; his hair turned slightly pink. When the Foreign Ministers decided to give up in mid-April and go home, Britain’s irrepressible Ernest Bevin was so delighted to be leaving Moscow that he warbled a song to Andrei Vishinsky, Molotov’s deputy: “The more we are together, together, the more we are together, the merrier we shall be!” Vishinsky eyed him curiously. “What a jolly man,” he said.

Marshall, trying to glean some indication of what the Soviets really wanted, requested a private audience with Stalin on April 18. In Stalin’s netherworld, day was night. The dictator, who preferred to work after dark, granted Marshall an appointment at 10 P.M.

Through the empty, dark Moscow streets the American limousine sped, through traffic lights synchronized to turn green (the Americans were accorded “Kremlin privileges,” though their hotel rooms were bugged), into the massive stone fortress. Marshall and Bohlen were ushered down a long, narrow corridor, past a high double door, through a succession of reception areas, to a sparsely furnished room. There they found Stalin, with his withered arm, pockmarked face, bad teeth, and calm slow manner.

Bohlen was struck by how Stalin had aged. He was gray and worn. For an hour and a half, he engaged Marshall in desultory conversation. Stalin, who had become Soviet dictator when Marshall was still an assistant commandant of the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, seemed quite unperturbed by the lack of progress. The conference was but an opening skirmish. “We may agree next time, and if not, the time after that.” As he talked, Bohlen noticed, he idly doodled wolves’ heads with a red pen, just as he had done during Harriman’s first visit at the outset of World War II.

On the long flight home to Washington, Marshall laid out the gloomy lessons he had learned in Moscow. Stalin wanted drift. He preferred an unsettled Europe. Chaos, as Harriman and McCloy had both warned, was working to the Soviets’ advantage. Now, said Marshall, it was time for the U.S. to act, without the Soviets if necessary. Bohlen, who had accompanied Marshall as his special assistant for Soviet affairs, did not dispute his new chief’s conclusions. He too believed that diplomacy was not enough; some kind of bold stroke was needed.

Acheson, kept abreast of the Moscow stalemate by daily cables, was coming to the same conclusion back in Washington. “I think it is a mistake to believe that you can, at anytime, sit down with the Russians and solve questions,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early April. Senator H. Alexander Smith asked him: “You are not planning any early participation for settlement of these issues?” Acheson replied: “You cannot sit down with them.”

Then what? If Europe was not to be rescued by talk, then how? “The patient sinks while the doctors deliberate,” Marshall told a national radio audience on April 28, the day of his return from Moscow.

 

James Forrestal had been agitating for the cure for more than a month. He had always seen the face-off against the Soviets as a Manichaean struggle. Now he wanted to pit capitalism against Marxism, our system against theirs. In early March, the Navy Secretary had moved to enlist Clark Clifford in his cause.

Clifford was careful to stay in touch with Forrestal; the two breakfasted every Wednesday at Forrestal’s home in Kalorama. Forrestal, like Acheson, saw Clifford as an invaluable ally within the White House. “Clark continues to be a great help,” he wrote Assistant Secretary of War for Air Stuart Symington in April. “He is the greatest single asset to the White House, both to the President and to the people working for him.”

Forrestal urged Clifford to draft a memorandum that would “bring into focus the central problem, which is: which of the systems currently offered in the world is to survive?”

Forrestal had a prescription: “economic leadership.” He wanted to form a “group of our most competent citizens” to design and push a plan to rebuild the economy of Europe. “Only by an all-out effort on a worldwide basis can we pass over from the defense to the attack.”

General Marshall was his next target. At a Cabinet lunch on April 28—only a few hours after Marshall had stepped off the plane from Moscow—Forrestal cornered the Secretary and delivered his Capitalist Manifesto: the United States had everything it needed to restore the world to strength. The Soviets had nothing, neither capital, nor goods, nor food. Russia could export only anarchy and chaos. But the U.S. had to move quickly; time was on the Russians’ side. It was fortunate, Forrestal went on, that the Secretary was creating a planning staff at the State Department to look into such long-range policy questions.

The next morning, Marshall summoned the chief of this new planning staff, George Kennan, to his office. He had chosen Kennan for the job at the urging of Forrestal, who had taken it upon himself to promote the author of the Long Telegram. In many ways, Kennan was the obvious choice to become the State Department’s chief planner; he was the most creative, penetrating thinker in the department. Acheson too had suggested Kennan’s name, though his explanation was somewhat more whimsical. To Loy Henderson, Acheson said merely, “There’s no one quite like George.”

Kennan’s original arrangement was that he would complete the academic year lecturing at the War College before coming over to State to set up the Policy Planning Staff. The failure of the Moscow conference, however, hastened his move. General Marshall briskly told Kennan that his services were required, that he would have to come over to State “without delay.” Europe was a mess. Something had to be done. If State did not take the initiative, others would, notably Congress. Marshall did not want to be on the defensive. Kennan was to assemble a staff, produce an answer. He had ten days to do it. Marshall had only one piece of advice: “Avoid trivia.”

The staccato commands left Kennan reeling. He had no office, no staff, and three out-of-town speaking engagements on his calendar. The “whole great problem of European recovery in all its complexity,” Kennan confessed, was quite daunting to him.

Management was not Kennan’s forte. But he was able to secure a suite of offices—prime ones, next to Marshall’s own—and an able staff familiar with Europe and its woes. Then he began holding forth, pacing about and expounding, night and day, restlessly and relentlessly. “We’d all gather round the table and George would start talking,” recalled a slightly awed Policy Planning staffer. “Very often none of us would say a word, but we’d just be looking at him. And he, by watching us, seemed to know just what we were thinking.”

The emotional strain was, as ever for Kennan in moments of intellectual ferment, almost unbearable. Late one night he startled his staff during a particularly intense discussion by welling up with tears. He fled the office and walked around the building several times, trying to regain his composure.

Kennan was seized with anticipation. Here was an opportunity both to rectify the excesses of the Truman Doctrine and to rescue Europe. The U.S. should offer massive economic aid to its struggling allies on the Continent. But its avowed purpose, he felt, must be to restore health to Europe’s economy and society, not to “combat Communism.” Washington would put up the money, but the plan itself must come from Europe. While supplying the means, the U.S. must not be seen as dictating the results.

Instead of wide-open military commitments, Kennan concluded, the U.S. should undertake a finite, albeit huge, obligation to help Europe help itself. By this act, the U.S. would help save thousands of lives, indeed an entire society. It went without saying that a revitalized Europe would be an active trading partner for the U.S. and a bulwark against Soviet encroachment.

The idea was simple. It launched the U.S. on what Acheson later described as “one of the greatest and most honorable adventures in history”—the Marshall Plan.

The plan was not Kennan’s alone, by any means. Forrestal, Acheson, Bohlen, McCloy, Stimson, Harriman, and a few others, including General Marshall himself, all share paternity. The members of their insular circle had been talking and thinking about a huge aid plan to restore Europe since the last days of the war.

A precise moment of creation is difficult to pinpoint, though Harriman may have been the first to commit the idea to paper. He had urged massive reconstruction aid for the West in one of his final cables to FDR and reiterated that advice when he flew to Washington to meet Harry Truman. From Potsdam in 1945, McCloy and Stimson had called for a “completely coordinated plan to be adopted for the economic rehabilitation of Europe as a whole.” Even as he drafted the Truman Doctrine, Acheson had warned Truman that Greece and Turkey were part of a much greater problem, that all Europe needed to be restored. In the meantime, the notion of a European Recovery Plan had been nurtured and bruited about within the intimate precincts of Georgetown and Foggy Bottom, at tony dinner parties and in drab government hallways. Individuals added nuance and refinement, but the genesis was collective.

None of this ferment took place on Capitol Hill. To an ordinary congressman, determined to cut budgets, spending billions and billions to rebuild a war-ravaged foreign continent was political madness. Most of their constituents had barely recovered from sacrificing their sons to save Europe; foreign aid was widely viewed as “Operation Rat Hole.”

Yet to a small, tightly knit group of men in postwar Washington the restoration of Europe seemed not only right, but natural, even obligatory. They saw the world differently, and they felt within themselves the duty and power to save it.

To undertake the rescue of Europe was an act of supreme self-confidence. Such boldness has diverse wellsprings; no single source suffices to explain why this particular set of men showed breathtaking initiative, while others, seemingly just like them, sat back. It is true that the social class into which they were born or later assimilated, America’s tiny turn-of-the-century aristocracy, instilled in some a sense of remarkable well-being and certainty. Yet for many more of the gentry it also bred complacency and idleness. Schools and colleges like Groton and Yale tried to imbue a sense of duty and merit, though they succeeded with more of their graduates in inspiring conformity and snobbery.

Those who did choose public service felt a sense of duty that was truly cosmopolitan. It was not just the United States they sought to serve but, in a broader sense, the culture and civilization of the West. Europe was not to them an abstraction, dimly portrayed by high-school history books as an entanglement to be avoided. As children, they had strolled with their parents through Europe’s Edwardian autumn; as young men they had immersed themselves in the tangled economies and politics of the Continent on the eve of its Nazi ordeal. By upbringing and experience they were intensely aware of Europe’s worth.

When the men who created the Marshall Plan came of age, the U.S. was vibrant and raw, poised to touch more of the globe with its power than any nation ever. Yet for another two decades it remained isolationist and preoccupied with its own surges of boom and bust. As individuals, Acheson and Harriman, Lovett and McCloy, Kennan and Bohlen, each had his own blind spots and shortcomings; alone, no single one of them could have guided the country to its new role as world power. Yet collectively, this small group of men, and those who emulated their example, brought to the immense task just the right mixture of vision and practicality, aggressiveness and patience. They came together at one of those moments in history when time and place, upbringing and character, fuse into a kind of critical mass, and give ordinary men the power to forever change the way things are.

It has been argued by revisionist critics that the so-called Establishment’s interest in European recovery was primarily self-interest, that these ardent capitalists sought to rebuild Europe to provide a market for American goods. Charles Bohlen conceded years later that “self-interest” was an “element” of the Marshall Plan. But he spoke as well of a “feeling of duty toward the civilized world.” Such words were not empty or guileful; there is every reason to believe that Bohlen and his colleagues felt morally compelled to save Europe from hunger and the Russian night.

Their aim was not dreamy or hopelessly idealistic. They did not want to save souls or “make the world one,” like earlier, and less successful, American internationalists. Rather, they were intensely pragmatic; they wanted to supply capital, tools, sustenance; they wanted to restore Europe, not change it. Nonetheless, their vision was spectacularly bold; it demanded a reshaping of America’s traditional role in the world and a restructuring of the global balance of power. By seeking change in order to preserve, these men were, in their own way, revolutionaries in the cause of order.

Almost four decades later, the creators of the Pax Americana remain partially obscure figures, semiprivate men who preferred to exercise power discreetly and shunned the glare and tumult of politics. There are fifty-two monuments or outdoor statues in Washington honoring a wide assortment of long-forgotten as well as famous figures, but in the public spaces of the capital there is not so much as a park bench named after Dean Acheson.* Indeed, Acheson is remembered, if at all, as an exemplar of the old Eastern Establishment, a term that is to many not merely descriptive but pejorative.

The motives and wisdom of the old foreign policy elite can be fairly debated, but its impact is undeniable. More than any others, this small group of men made the U.S. assume the responsibility of a world power and defined its global mission. And without doubt the Marshall Plan remains their purest and greatest achievement, power used to its best end.

 

When they wished to communicate with the public at large, the Washington elite often spoke through a small band of like-minded reporters and columnists, men who were often schoolmates or social friends and who could be trusted to grasp nuance and exercise discretion. The High Priest of this journalistic order was Walter Lippmann, the widely read columnist who was such a Washington insider that he was almost a minister without portfolio in government. He willingly lent his pen to causes he endorsed and, not infrequently, helped design. For Administration policy makers, interviews with Lippmann were less question and answer than advice and consent.

Forrestal, the tireless polemicist, sent Lippmann to see Kennan in April. Over a long lunch at the War College, the columnist and the planner, both shy and sensitive men, matched intellects. Lippmann, who had a less severe view of the Soviets than Kennan, would later become a severe critic of the containment doctrine. But at this meeting the two found much to agree upon. They shared a distaste for the overcommitments and stridency of the Truman Doctrine; they both wanted a recovery plan that would not seem like an American bid to dominate Europe or a blatantly anti-Soviet manuever. It was Lippmann who first suggested that the U.S. invite the Europeans to draw up a plan of their own, according to his biographer Ronald Steel. The columnist continued to do his part by pushing hard for a massive economic rescue plan for Europe.

Lippmann’s rival, Arthur Krock of The New York Times, was regularly fed secret cables and memoranda by Forrestal, Krock’s old Princeton clubmate. James Reston, the Times’s star young reporter, was kept informed by Acheson, who was more forthcoming with good reporters than with congressmen. Junior State Department officials began to notice that every time Acheson went to lunch with “Scotty” Reston at the Metropolitan Club, the next day the front page of The New York Times would hint broadly at “big planning at State.” The stories gave Policy Planning staffers, as one put it, the “jimjams.” They were afraid they would be blamed. Kennan, a remarkable innocent in this arena, went so far as to write Acheson in May that he was not leaking to New York Herald Tribune columnist Joseph Alsop. (Actually, Chip Bohlen was; he and Alsop shared the bond of membership in Harvard’s Porcellian.)

 

The Administration’s first formal declaration of intent was a speech delivered by Acheson on May 8 in a hot, crowded gymnasium at Delta State Teachers College in Cleveland, Mississippi. The forum was “a far cry from the conventional setting for striped-pants diplomatic utterances,” Acheson recorded, “but the people in the gymnasium are serious.” Truman was supposed to speak there, but had to bow out in order to avoid getting sucked into a local political squabble involving Senator Theodore (The Man) Bilbo. It was announced that Acheson, his replacement, would make “an important foreign policy speech.” To the Under Secretary, who had appointed himself as chief promoter for European recovery, it was an opportunity to “sound reveille,” he later recalled, “to awaken the American people to the duties of that day of decision.”

With his sleeves rolled up and his jacket off, Acheson played the unfamiliar role of stump speaker. Europe was in its death throes, Acheson told his listeners, who overflowed the gym and sprawled on the grass outside, drinking Cokes and minding their children. Not just subsistence, but “human dignity, human freedom” was at stake. Europe had to become self-supporting again, and it could not do it without the help of the United States.

Whether or not the farmers understood, James Reston did. He asked Acheson at a press conference in Washington after the speech, “Is this a new policy that you are announcing or just a bit of private kite flying?” Acheson grinned. “You know this town better than I do. Foreign policy is made at the White House. You must ask the President.” Reston asked Truman if Acheson spoke for him. “Yes,” the President answered.

In his Senate office, Arthur Vandenberg was reading the newspapers and stewing. Upon digesting the Delta State Teachers College address, he demanded an audience at Blair House, where the President had moved while the White House was being restored. Vandenberg waved the speech at Marshall. Acheson had publicly declared that the U.S. was about to spend huge amounts on foreign aid! What was going on? Things were getting out of hand! Marshall tried to calm him. The Administration would not ask any more money from Congress this session. But sooner or later, yes, there would have to be an aid bill. He reassured him that Congress would not be ignored in the planning. Vandenberg remonstrated to Truman: “Harry, I want you to understand from now on that I’m not going to help you with crash landings unless I’m in on the takeoff.” Acheson just listened. It was a warning to him; Congress would need to be treated gingerly. He thought to himself, he later recalled, that it was time to find the Vandenberg brand.

Truman’s own involvement in the creation of the Marshall Plan was at once minimal yet essential: he simply trusted Marshall and Acheson, and backed them. The one contribution the President made on his own was characteristically shrewd and humble. Clifford, who played the courtier at times, suggested to the President that the plan for European recovery be named the Truman Plan. “Clark,” Truman answered, “if we try to make this a Truman accomplishment, it will sink. It will never see the light of day.” Truman had a better idea: name the plan after Marshall, “the greatest living American.” It would sell “a whole hell of a lot better in Congress.”

The plan needed but one more boost. On May 19, Will Clayton, the big-boned, square-jawed, six-foot-three Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, returned from an inspection trip of Europe. A soft-spoken, courteous teetotaler, Clayton was a hard businessman, a founder of the largest cotton trading company in the world. American cotton was in very long supply in the spring of 1947. Clayton was blunt about it: “Let us admit right off that our objective has as its background the needs and interests of the U.S. We need markets—big markets, in which to buy and sell.”

Clayton painted a horrific picture of the economic collapse of Europe in a memo for Marshall. Distrusting the currency, farmers were no longer going to market. They were feeding produce to their cattle while city workers starved. If anything, Clayton warned, the State Department had underestimated the seriousness of the situation.

The memo moved Acheson, who felt that Kennan’s efforts at Policy Planning had not been phrased forcefully enough. Clayton’s memo also energized Marshall. When an aide asked him if he wanted to confirm a tentative appointment to speak at Harvard’s commencement, Marshall answered yes. The next day he summoned Chip Bohlen to his office, handed him Kennan’s Policy Planning paper and Clayton’s memo, and told him to write a speech that would invite Europe to ask for American aid.

Marshall had inherited Bohlen from Byrnes as his special assistant for Soviet affairs. He was impressed by Bohlen’s professionalism, his steadiness and sound instincts, so much so that he promoted him to the title of State Department Counselor in early summer. The two were well matched. Henry Kissinger later described Bohlen as “quite conventional, quite predictable, and thus quite reliable,” a description that could apply equally to Marshall.

Bohlen revered Marshall. “I have never gone in for hero worship,” he later wrote, “but of all the men I have been associated with, including presidents, George Catlett Marshall is at the top of the list of those I admire.” The two became personally close. “Bohlen was like a son to him,” recalled a State Department colleague. Though Marshall was known for his aloofness, he showed his affection for Bohlen in small ways. When his counselor had been gone for some weeks on a trip to Europe without seeing his two-year-old boy, Marshall summoned little Charlie to his office, sat him on his knee, and directed the State Department photographer to take a picture, so that Bohlen could at least see what the child looked like.

For two days after receiving his speech-drafting assignment, Bohlen closeted himself in his office. His aim, like Kennan’s, was to present the recovery plan not as an anti-Soviet maneuver but as a humanitarian gesture. He wrote that U.S. policy was directed “not against country, ideology or political party, and specifically not against Communism,” but rather “against hunger, poverty, and chaos.” Bohlen thought he was being clever; if the Soviets opposed the plan, he later wrote, they would be perceived as the “partisans of hunger, poverty, and chaos.” This would be an important propaganda point in Western Europe, where the Communists were vying for control of government.

As a diplomat, Bohlen was more concerned with what European allies would think of the speech than how it would play in the U.S., where his subtleties were apt to be lost. His prose was, as usual, bland and stolid. Marshall’s speech, while noble, is hardly memorable for its eloquence.

Marshall, no great draftsman himself, accepted most of Bohlen’s language, but he was still fiddling with the speech as he flew to Boston on June 4. He had not even left an advance text at the State Department press office. Indeed, afraid of the angry reaction of rightwingers and isolationists, he had told the press office that he wanted no advance publicity. He had already ducked a foreign policy speech at the University of Michigan for fear of what Colonel McCormick’s isolationist Chicago Tribune would say about it.

Acheson was not so chary of publicity. He was dubious about the Harvard idea, perhaps because he had sat through too many graduations as a Yale trustee. “No one listens to commencement speeches,” he told his boss. To make sure the press paid attention, he planted a story with Reston revealing that the State Department was considering a four-year, $16 billion program to revive Europe.

The interest Acheson most wanted to arouse was Europe’s. It was essential that European leaders respond positively, and at once. So he decided to have lunch with three influential British journalists: Leonard Miall of the BBC, René MacColl of the Daily Express, and Malcolm Muggeridge of the Daily Telegraph. The date was set for June 4, the day before Marshall’s speech.

That morning, Acheson was badly hung over from an excessively convivial dinner party the night before. On his way out the door to meet the three Britons, Acheson gravely remarked to Lincoln White, a press aide: “If these limeys offer me sherry, I shall puke.” Muggeridge greeted him in a private room at the United Nations Club. “Now,” began Muggeridge, “we won’t have this horrible bad habit of having some strong liquor before lunch.” He turned to Acheson. “Sherry?”

Acheson ordered a dry martini. At lunch, he made his pitch. The Administration had “rather oversold” its case for European recovery in Congress by asking for piecemeal bailouts, individual loans to Britain, France, Italy, and the UNRRA. Now what was needed was “some kind of cooperative and dramatic move from the European side in order to capture the imagination of Congress” which was “in a very economic frame of mind.” Marshall was about to make a major speech inviting such a request. “Don’t waste your time writing about it,” he said to Muggeridge. “As soon as you get your hands on a copy, telephone the whole thing to London. Ask your editor to see that Ernie Bevin gets a copy of the text at once. It will not matter what hour of the night it is; wake Ernie up and put a copy in his hands.”

On the steps of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, under a leafy canopy of elms, General Marshall, dressed in a plain gray suit amidst the brightly colored academic robes, delivered his simple speech on the afternoon of June 5. “Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine,” he said (he had crossed out “Communism” in Bohlen’s draft), “but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. . . . Any assistance that this country should render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative. Before the U.S. government can proceed much further there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation. . . . The initiative, I think, must come from Europe.”

Acheson’s prediction about the interest paid to commencement speeches was correct. The next day, The New York Times led the paper with Truman’s press conference denouncing a Communist coup in Hungary. The Secretary’s speech received a tepid headline (“Marshall Pleads for European Unity”). So “Platonic a purpose as combating ‘hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos,’” Acheson noted, utterly failed to move the public.

Yet to Bevin, listening to Leonard Miall read the address over the BBC shortly after dawn, it was “like a lifeline to a sinking man. It seemed to bring hope where there was none.” Before the U.S had a chance to renege, the British Foreign Minister raced to accept. He cabled the State Department that he was “taking the initiative” by visiting Paris, and hurried off to see what he could hastily put together with the French.

Marshall’s invitation had been open-ended. It was not limited to Western Europe. The Soviet Union and their satellites were free to join in the recovery plan, if they so desired. Inviting Russia was “a hell of gamble,” Bohlen realized; Soviet acceptance would doom the whole exercise. The chances of Congress paying for Soviet recovery were nil, and their participation would mean the kind of endless bickering that had characterized those hopelessly stalemated Foreign Ministers’ meetings.

When Marshall asked Kennan what to do about the Soviets, he had replied, “Play it straight.” Invite them to join. The Soviets, Kennan explained, could not afford to accept. They would not dream of opening up their books to an international recovery plan, or of loosening control over their satellites by letting them trade freely with the West. By participating, the Soviets would have to give up their claims to reparations; instead of draining Germany of resources, the flow would be the other way around. Though the Soviets had been ravaged by war and desperately needed reconstruction aid themselves, Kennan’s plan called on the Kremlin to help restore conquered Europe. But the Soviets must be allowed to discover all this for themselves, Kennan warned. They must not be explicitly cut out. The onus for dividing Europe should not fall on the United States.

Kennan’s reasoning was clever and persuasive. Yet within the inner councils, there was considerable uneasiness about the Soviet response. Forrestal, particularly, feared that Russia would wreck the Marshall Plan by joining it. Even after he had delivered his speech, Marshall himself anxiously asked Kennan and Bohlen whether he should really say yes when asked if the Soviets were included in the offer. “Kennan and I looked at each other,” Bohlen recalled, “and said we were convinced that the Soviet Union could not accept the plan”; they reiterated the reasons Kennan had already outlined.

Another worried voice in the inner sanctum that early summer of 1947 was Robert Lovett’s. Absent from the realm of policy making during the formulative stages of the Cold War, he had been lured back into government from his comfortable niche in Wall Street by General Marshall, who was eager to have his old “copilot” from the War Department. Lovett was to be Acheson’s successor, slated to take over as Marshall’s number two when Acheson returned to his law firm at the end of June. Through half of May and most of June, Lovett served as the Under Secretary’s understudy, shadowing him everywhere, sitting in his office, attending his meetings, and often going home to dine with him at night. In this unofficial capacity, he was a participant in the debate over whether to invite the Russians to join the Marshall Plan.

“I questioned Kennan about it quite a bit,” Lovett later recalled. “How will the Russians react? Will they be tempted? Will they treat it as something aimed at them?” Kennan tried to reassure Lovett, but the Wall Street banker was skeptical of diplomats, particularly egg-headed ones like Kennan. He turned to one of his own kind for further counsel. Flying to New York, he handed a draft of Marshall’s speech to Russell Leffingwell, a Morgan partner and chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. Leffingwell considered for a moment and told Lovett, “You’d make a mistake by not offering the Russians to go in on it. They would never agree to the provisions on inspection.” It is noteworthy that Lovett recalls being convinced by Leffingwell, a private banker, and not by Kennan, the Soviet expert.

Kennan and Bohlen used their diplomatic skills to enlist the British government in their scheme to keep the Russians out. They rather casually dropped in on Lord Inverchapel, the British ambassador to the U.S., to inform him, in gingerly and discreet fashion, of their “expectations” concerning the U.S.S.R. They told Inverchapel that they doubted that the Soviets would want to join, but if the Russians did, they would be expected to contribute money to the plan, not withdraw it. The British ambassador got the message: that night, he cabled London that the Americans were counting on the British to help keep the Russians out.

Kennan’s disingenuous “play it straight” gambit worked. “In a sense we put the Russians over a barrel,” he later recalled. “When the full horror of [their] alternatives dawned on them, they were suddenly left in the middle of the night.” To be encircled by capitalist countries was in fact Stalin’s worst nightmare. He reacted with the usual paranoia, by clamping down the iron curtain a little tighter. Foreign Minister Molotov actually came to the first meeting on European recovery in Paris, and seemed to show a sincere, if skittish, interest in Soviet participation. But his superiors in Moscow were rightly suspicious of Western motives. Molotov was instructed to offer a Soviet plan—that each country submit individual shopping lists to be filled by the U.S. This he did and stalked out, denouncing American imperialism.

To Averell Harriman, watching from the wings as an old Soviet hand and Commerce Secretary, Molotov’s walkout was a blunder. “He could have killed the Marshall Plan by joining it,” Harriman later stated. The fact that he missed this opportunity proved to Harriman that Molotov was “essentially a dull fellow.”

For the Eastern-bloc countries, the Soviet nyet was a tragedy. Poland and Czechoslovakia wanted desperately to accept the Americans’ invitation to participate in the recovery program. Warsaw was in ruins, with thirty thousand of its war dead still buried beneath the rubble of the bombed-out ghetto, while the remaining moderates in the Prague government, trying bravely to maintain their independence from Moscow, were eager to resume trading with the West. After Molotov walked out, however, the Kremlin quickly brought the Czechs and Poles to heel. The Poles abruptly announced that they would not be attending the recovery meeting in Paris; the Czechs were forced to renounce their earlier acceptance when Stalin informed them that participation would be regarded as “an act specifically aimed against the U.S.S.R.”

It was the inevitable but nonetheless unfortunate fallout of the Marshall Plan that it hastened the permanent division of Europe. Western Europe saw the Marshall Plan as a selfless act of humanitarianism, a bold stroke that restored its chances for prosperity and saved it from Soviet domination. But, as Daniel Yergin put it in his Cold War study, Shattered Peace, “the Russians saw [the Marshall Plan] as a declaration of war by the U.S. for control of Europe.” FDR’s vision of the wartime Allies acting in concert to guarantee peace and security was now irrevocably shattered. Though the Marshall Plan was entirely an economic initiative, its long-term result was to further drive East and West into tense and hostile armed camps.

It is tempting to speculate what might have happened if the U.S. had sincerely invited the Soviets to join the Marshall Plan, and Stalin had accepted. Though Kennan and Bohlen pointedly insisted in their discussions with France and Britain that the Soviets would have to be contributors, rather than beneficiaries, under any recovery plan, conceivably a compromise could have been worked out. Russia, after all, had been just as ravaged by war as Western Europe, if not more so. In hindsight, it can be wished that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had tried harder to find a way to cooperate on economic recovery. But to the pragmatists in Washington in the summer of 1947, the prospect of just trying to bring a balky Congress and the historically feuding governments of Europe together was daunting enough, without involving an obdurate and paranoid Stalin. Further isolating and antagonizing Russia was a price Washington was willing to pay to achieve European recovery. Indeed, to isolate Russia was to contain her, which was precisely the point.

Bohlen watched the rift grow with foreboding, if not surprise. “There are, in short, two worlds instead of one,” he stated at a high-level State Department meeting in August, predicting a crisis between the superpowers. “There is virtually no chance of any of the problems between the two worlds being settled until that crisis comes to a head. It is not a matter of several years in the future. It is more likely several months . . . It will obviously contain in it the very real danger of outbreak of hostilities.”

 

At first, Robert Lovett had resisted coming back to Washington. The White House had reached him at home in Locust Valley at 6:45 A.M. one February morning in 1947 as he was trying to rush out the door to catch a commuter train to Manhattan. Lovett thought the White House operator was a crank call. Truman finally came on the line and reassured him, “No, this really is the President. . .”

The President told Lovett that General Marshall had insisted on bringing his “old copilot” to the State Department. Lovett found it extremely difficult to turn down General Marshall, much less the President, yet he worried that it would be difficult for him to disengage from his partnership in Brown Brothers Harriman for a second time in less than seven years. Membership in the Wall Street bank involved a shared ownership with unlimited liabilities for all the partners.

It was Averell Harriman who resolved his doubts. When Lovett called his old partner to discuss the situation, Harriman called him a “damn fool” and told him to go ahead and take the job. Lovett called Truman and accepted with two conditions. He wanted two months in Florida to recover from yet another operation on his “glass insides” (more gallbladder surgery), and a month of “dual instruction” with Acheson before “flying solo.”

Acheson welcomed this unusual intimacy with his replacement. He told Marshall that he had “known Bob since Yale” and was “all for it.” The two stayed in close touch throughout the spring. Acheson took Lovett to meet Vandenberg (“I’ve known Bob since college and I hope you will be agreeable to accept his services,” said Acheson. Replied Vandenberg: “I welcome you to the job of Under Secretary of State and may God have mercy on your soul.”) While ministering to his gallbladder with large doses of paperback murder mysteries and a reduced intake of Lovett Mists, a Bourbon concoction, at Sea Change, his Hobe Sound cottage, Lovett faithfully wrote Acheson every week. “I am sticking to that damned health building regime and, somewhat to my surprise, it seems to be working. I’ve gained a little weight and am almost beginning to feel human,” he said in one letter. “I’m going to work very hard at it because I want to do my damndest to be everything you want me to be when I get back.” On April 5, when Acheson was fencing with the popular press and its mavens such as Walter Winchell over Greek-Turkish aid, Lovett tried to cheer him up with his peculiar childlike whimsy: “Do you suffer from backache?,” he began. “Do you wake up in the morning feeling groggy? You do-o-o? Then try Dad’s Ruin. Just drop one Winchell in hot water, gargle, and forget your troubles. . . . Good evening folks, this is your announcer Turgid D. Pepperwhistle with up-to-the-minute news. . .”

Lovett and Acheson were affectionate friends who immensely enjoyed each other’s company. Yet despite their common schooling and tradition of public service, the two were quite different men who brought contrasting talents and liabilities to the job. Though both were elegant and polished, Acheson was bristling and erect, while Lovett was slouched and somewhat shy. Acheson, with his hauteur, could unintentionally offend by his mere presence; Lovett, gentle and amiable, was more soothing to ordinary politicians. Acheson had the “capacity for decision”; he never hesitated to act, even when patience was called for. Lovett was not one for bold strokes; he was cautious, sometimes overly so. His great strength was in getting others, particularly congressmen, to do what had already been decided.

The timing of their job switch could hardly have been more fortuitous. With the pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, the task became to implement these grand gestures. The transformation of America’s global role took Acheson’s force to create it, but Lovett’s tact to sell it.

Acheson was not happy to relinquish power, even to Lovett, despite the fact that he had told Marshall back in January that he was eager to return to his law firm and make some money. The past six months had been almost giddy. Under Marshall, he had, for the first time in his life, tasted real responsibility in a moment of extraordinary ferment. After wrenching America from isolationism, facing down the Soviets, and launching the rescue of Europe, practicing law began to look pretty pedestrian. “I feel very sad and somewhat panic stricken at going back to the Union Trust Building,” he wrote his daughter Jane. “I like what I am doing and now have some sense of sureness of touch and of a willingness on the part of others to let me drive.” He did not know that his greatest and hardest tour of duty lay ahead.