The wilderness years
Though Douglas MacArthur himself quickly faded away, the general’s impulse to take on Communism, to not merely restrain it but smash it, had touched a public nerve. Many ordinary people were impatient with containment, a strategy that required half measures, patience, steadiness, endurance. Kennan’s prescription for fencing in the Soviets with vigilance and care, but without provocation, did not sit well with an American public that demanded unconditional victories.
The Republican platform for 1952 reflected these reckless sentiments. The next administration, it vowed, “will mark the end of the negative, futile, and immoral policy of ‘containment,’ which abandons countless human beings to despotism and Godless Communism . . . the policies we espouse will revive the contagious, liberating influences which are inherent in freedom.”
The champion of this new policy was John Foster Dulles. He had written the foreign policy plank of the GOP platform, and he would carry it out as the next Secretary of State, assuming, as most correctly did, that Dwight Eisenhower would defeat the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson, in November.
On the surface, Dulles seemed the perfect member of the eastern foreign policy Establishment. His résumé could not have been more impeccable: Princeton and the Sorbonne, senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, Council on Foreign Relations, the Century and Piping Rock. He had been both a “symbol and an agent” of bipartisan foreign policy, writes his biographer Townsend Hoopes; he worked with Vandenberg to maintain Republican support for the postwar policies of the Truman Administration.
But in fact he did not fit in well with the inner circle of postwar foreign policy makers, and was regarded by its members with distrust and personal dislike. Suspicious, preachy, and righteous, Dulles was not a very agreeable man. He had Kennan’s sensitivity without his insight, Acheson’s coldness without his wit, McCloy’s simplicity without his wisdom, Forrestal’s dogmatism without his self-honesty, and very little of Lovett’s or Bohlen’s grace and charm. “He gave the impression that he had a direct line to the Almighty,” Lovett later recalled. “He had no humor or lightness. He was all pontifical and actually sounded as though he was delivering the Sermon on the Mount.”
As a boy growing up in upstate New York, Foster Dulles had been fed large doses of A Pilgrim’s Progress; as a Princeton student, he was a shy grind and social outcast. His ambition was to be a “Christian lawyer,” which, after a fashion, he became. A stolid, relentless practitioner, he built a large international practice for Sullivan & Cromwell, one of Wall Street’s best law firms. Many of his clients were German. When Hitler’s persecution of Jews became undeniable in 1935, Dulles came under great pressure from his partners to drop his German clients. He resisted and finally capitulated in tears; he regarded Hitler, Thomas E. Dewey later recalled, as a “passing phenomenon.” McCloy later recalled, “I was always puzzled to see where Foster stood with the Nazi business, and what his feeling was about the oncoming menace from Germany. I rather gathered the impression that he was not particularly concerned about it.”
Though a closet Sybarite who liked Cognac and cigars, Dulles did not cultivate the stylishness of his predecessor as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson. He stirred whiskey with a thick forefinger, his socks drooped, his suits were green-hued, his ties were indifferent, and his breath was chronically bad. Hunched forward as he talked, he droned on in a flat voice, pronouncing Anthony Eden “Ant-ny.”
He was sincerely devout. He had “rediscovered” religion in 1937, and applied it to his anti-Communism. In a famous Life article in May 1952, he defined the Cold War as a moral rather than an economic or political crusade, a struggle that pitted Christianity against Godless Communism. His speeches had titles like “Spiritual Bases of Peace,” “Christian Responsibility,” and “A Diplomat and his Faith.” He carried around a well-thumbed, heavily underlined copy of Stalin’s Problems of Leninism, which he regarded as an atheist tract.
To Dulles’s credit, he had worked to maintain a bipartisan foreign policy after the war, going as a Republican observer to various Council of Foreign Ministers’ meetings and behaving in a generally responsible and supportive manner. Brought into the State Department in 1950 as a consultant to help insulate Foggy Bottom from the Republican right, Dulles had performed admirably in working out a sensible peace treaty with Japan, a last bit of unfinished postwar business.
But as the 1952 elections approached, Dulles became bitterly partisan. Attacking the “treadmill” policies of Acheson, he called for a “policy of boldness,” declaring that the U.S. should seek not to merely contain but “roll back” Communism. He wanted to “liberate” areas under Communist dominance, like Stalin’s Eastern European satellites. How this was to be accomplished, he did not say.
In a characteristically bold, if unrealistic gesture, Averell Harriman tried to run for President in 1952. He was drawn into the fray in March, on the night Harry Truman announced at the Democrats’ annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Washington that he would not seek a third term. In the confused uproar that followed Truman’s declaration, New York Democratic Chairman Paul Fitzpatrick grabbed Harriman, who was seated at the head table, and pleaded, “Averell, you’ve got to be a candidate to hold New York together.” Harriman assented on the spot to be his state’s favorite son.
Harriman was, as usual, lured by his twin mistresses of duty and ambition. He felt obliged to carry on Truman’s programs, particularly the Administration’s commitment to a strong Western Alliance, and to accept the bidding of New York Democrats, who had already urged him to run for Governor. At the same time, he felt perfectly suited to be President of the United States, even though he had not been elected to anything since Skull and Bones.
Despite a total unfamiliarity with the hustings, Harriman plunged right into the campaign that spring, to the bemusement and mild horror of Acheson, Lovett, and other friends. He dropped the “W.” before Averell and picked up a corny nickname, “Honest Ave” (reporters took to calling him “Available Averell”). Gamely, he rode on a jolting buckboard escorted by fifty cowboys and Ute Indians through Salt Lake City, declaring, “This is the nicest time I’ve had since becoming a candidate.” His platform was predictable: he “clung closely to the Fair Deal party line,” according to Time, and bluntly reminded voters that if the U.S. wanted security, the taxpayers would have to pay for it. “Foreign and domestic politics are indivisible,” the old internationalist told a $1oo-a-plate testimonial dinner at the Waldorf in April. “If the voice of hesitation prevailed, we would destroy what we have built and we would be on the road to World War III. . . . The Republicans never change. They voted against everything that has made this country strong for twenty years.”
As he crisscrossed the country in his private railway car, Harriman began to fancy himself as more than New York’s favorite son. “I am the Democrat to beat,” he declared. But dull, stumbling and stolid on the stump, he could not hope to match the popular appeal of Adlai Stevenson, who was still pondering whether to run, and waiting coyly to be drafted.
Harriman did have some support from Truman, but the President described Harriman’s fatal image in a diary entry in June: “He is the ablest of them all. But he has been a Wall Street Banker, is the son of one of the old-time pirates of the first years of this century. . . . Can we elect a Wall Street Banker and railroad tycoon President of the United States on the Democratic ticket?” At Truman’s request, Harriman withdrew from the race in favor of Stevenson at the Democratic Convention, guaranteeing the Illinois governor the nomination.
Harriman had to content himself with the knowledge that he would finally realize his ambition to become Secretary of State if by some miracle Stevenson defeated Dwight Eisenhower in November.
“Averell hates Dulles and thinks he is ambitious and dishonest,” Cy Sulzberger wrote in his diary on August 21, 1952, after a chat with Harriman. That night Harriman debated Dulles over national television with typical bluntness:
DULLES: The first thing I would do would be to shift from a purely defensive policy to a psychological offensive, a liberation policy, which will try to give hope and a resistance mood inside the Soviet empire. . . .
HARRIMAN: Those are very fine words but I don’t understand the meaning of them. . . . There can be nothing more cruel than to get people behind the Iron Curtain—I have been there and I know what it is—to try to revolt and have a tragedy and a massacre. . . .
The moderator, Walter Cronkite, asked Dulles if the Republicans supported such an insurrection. Dulles replied that he did not want to start a massacre but that he had written “quite a little piece in Life . . .” Harriman cut in, “I read it twice, but I couldn’t understand what you meant.” Dulles: “You should have read it a third time.” Harriman: “I did. I still didn’t understand it. . . .”
Harriman was frustrated. He knew that Stevenson had little chance in November and that he, as a staunch Democrat, was about to be out of power.
Acheson’s contempt for Dulles was, if anything greater than Harriman’s. To a pragmatist like Acheson, Dulles’s moralism was offensive. Like Harriman, Acheson also thought Dulles dishonest. Though Dulles had been among the first to urge ground troops for Korea in June of 1950, when the war turned sour in December he began publicly declaring that he had always opposed sending in the troops. Worst of all, perhaps, Acheson believed that Dulles was a coward who would cave in to the primitives.
Acheson so loathed Dulles that he resigned as Secretary of State one day early in order to avoid having to sign Dulles’s commission. From under a palm tree in Antigua, where he had gone on an extended vacation, Acheson watched Dulles permit the destruction of the Foreign Service, just as he had feared. As he wrote Harry Truman that spring: “The studied appeasement of the Hill which is now going on at the expense of the best civil servants we have—certainly in State—is not only criminal but frightening.” To his former special assistant Lucius Battle he wrote: “Dulles’s people seem to me like Cossacks quartered in a grand city hall, burning the paneling to cook with.”
For Acheson, as well as the other architects of America’s role in the postwar world, these would be years of exile. After seven years of extraordinary global power, these men suddenly found themselves engaged in lonely scholarship or attending to the narrow concerns of private clients, a lucrative but not altogether rewarding existence.
In part, they were victims of a revolution of the Outs against the Ins. Excluded from power for two decades, the Republicans understandably wanted to start fresh. That meant purging even the most resolutely nonpartisan appointees, apolitical diplomats like Kennan as well as Truman’s cronies.
Yet in this twisted era, Acheson and his kind found themselves not only rejected but scorned. Incredibly, these men, who were the first to warn against the Soviet threat and were themselves the sturdiest pillars of capitalism, were cast as Communist sympathizers. Jack McCloy’s career as president of the World Bank and High Commissioner of Germany, for instance, was luridly described by McCarthy as “the unbelievable, inconceivable, unexplainable record of the deliberate, secret betrayal of the nation to its mortal enemy, the Communist conspiracy.” The demagogue’s remarkable success at peddling this Big Lie can be explained only by resentment not just against what McCloy did but against who he was and what he stood for.
To many ordinary people, Wall Street itself was a conspiracy. Especially in the South and the West, poor farmers and common workers suspected that their hardships were inversely proportional to the life of ease enjoyed by the tycoons and fat cats of the East Coast. A long line of demagogic politicians preyed on this resentment, darkly accusing the “malefactors of great wealth,” in the phrase Teddy Roosevelt once used to describe E. H. Harriman, of greed and self-interest. McCarthy just took the old conspiracy notion and gave it a sinister new twist.
At first the Achesons and McCloys could not take these allegations seriously; later when they found themselves back in private life with a slight case of leprosy they were hurt and indignant. Years later, Paul Nitze still marveled that McCarthy attacked him—successfully—not for his policy views, or even as a Communist appeaser, but rather simply because he was a “Wall Street operator.”
John Foster Dulles did not want just loyalty; as he told State Department employees in a memo on the day he took office, he wanted “positive loyalty.” Anything less was “not tolerable at this time.” In his maiden address he announced that department policy would be based on “simplicity and righteousness.”
As Under Secretary for Administration, Dulles hired Donald Lourie, a manufacturer of breakfast cereal. “A few years ago he was an all American quarterback,” Dulles explained at a mandatory meeting of department employees, “and I think that is the kind of thinking and creative action we’re going to see.” Lourie hired as his Special Assistant for Internal Security Scott McLeod, a former reporter for the Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader and an investigator for Senator Styles Bridges, an extreme right-winger. Vindictive and shrewd, McLeod hired 350 inexperienced but zealous investigators who quickly went to work ferreting out Foreign Service officers deemed drunkards, homosexual, incompetent, or “incompatible,” a flexible category. They were replaced by true believers. To run the Far Eastern Affairs division, Dulles picked Walter Robertson, a Richmond banker and protégé of Congressman Walter Judd, who was devoted to Chiang Kai-shek. When the CIA estimated that the Chinese Communists had increased steel-making capacity, Robertson told the agency briefer that he was wrong—“no regime as malevolent as the Chicoms could ever produce five million tons of steel.”
Dulles moved quickly to finish off the old China experts. He simply dismissed the Hand commission established by Acheson to look into John Carter Vincent’s case and forced Vincent to resign. When the Loyalty Boards still could not find “reasonable doubt” about John Paton Davies, Dulles fired him for “bad judgment.”
For the department’s leading Soviet expert, George Kennan, Dulles could find nothing at all to do.
The moralizing Dulles had long distrusted the pragmatic Kennan. He had told journalists in the summer of 1950 that Kennan was a “very dangerous man” because he advocated the admission of Red China to the U.N. and warned against crossing the 38th parallel. Dulles’s suspicion of Kennan deepened further when the career diplomat made a rather impolitic speech in mid-January, just before Dulles took office, attacking the new Secretary’s liberation doctrine as imprudent and futile.
In his self-imposed exile on his farm in Pennsylvania, still horrified by the blunder that had cost him the Moscow embassy, Kennan waited anxiously to learn his place in the new order. He was particularly worried because under the Foreign Service rules an ambassador not reassigned after ninety days is automatically retired. Kennan had little savings and could not afford to be jobless. (When his daughter Grace, a Radcliffe student, applied for a scholarship, she listed her father’s income as “0.”)
“With regard to my reassignment,” Kennan wrote his sister Jeannette on January 26, “there simply hasn’t been any.” He had “not even an inkling of what is in store for me.” Anxiously, he added that “meanwhile the McCarran committee has stumbled over me in its pursuit of Davies, and there is plenty of trouble ahead for me there. . . . McCarthy and McCarran will do a job on me in this coming period, and whenever they’re through, whatever reputation I had will be pretty well shattered.” Kennan was unsure of his standing even with old colleagues. “I find myself treated with the elaborate politeness and forbearance one reserves for someone who has committed a social gaffe too appalling to discuss,” he moaned to Jeannette.
Dulles’s hand was forced when The New York Times began pointedly wondering whatever had become of the former ambassador to the Soviet Union. Summoned to the Secretary’s office in late March, Kennan was matter-of-factly informed by Dulles that the department had “no niche” for him. Incredibly, as Dulles fired Kennan, he picked his brain, asking his opinion of the current mood in the Kremlin. “You know, you interest me when you talk about these matters,” Dulles blithely observed as he ushered Kennan out the door and out of the Foreign Service. “Very few other people do,” the Secretary prattled on. “I hope you’ll come in from time to time to let us have your comments on what is going on.” That night a hurt and bewildered Kennan wrote his wife that Dulles’s parting solicitude was as if a husband had said to his wife, “You know, I’m divorcing you today, and you are to leave my bed and board at once. But I love the way you cook scrambled eggs, and I wonder if you’d mind fixing me a batch of them right now, before you go.”
On a warm spring day a few weeks later, Kennan cleared out his office and walked sadly down the halls, looking at the new faces, impassive, guarded, coldly polite. Unable to find anyone to say goodbye to, he finally bade farewell to the fifth-floor receptionist and left the department he had served for twenty-seven years.
President Eisenhower was not a zealot like Dulles, and was not quite so cowed by the Republican right. As Supreme Commander of NATO he had admired Chip Bohlen’s diplomatic skills at the Paris embassy, and he wanted Bohlen to be his ambassador to Moscow.
Dulles opposed the appointment and worried about it. When Congressman Judd called him with reservations, Dulles quickly assured Judd that the appointment was “not a promotion,” that Bohlen would be “removed from policy making” and would be “merely a reporter.” Dulles was unamused by Bohlen’s irreverent humor, especially after Bohlen “half jokingly” said, and Dulles overheard, that the State Department had become like a wagon train in hostile Indian territory, circling at night and posting guards.
Bohlen was not about to equivocate at his confirmation hearings to suit Dulles. He told the Secretary that he would not be able to go along with the Republican platform’s charge that at Yalta Roosevelt had sold out Europe and China to the Russians. Dulles asked wishfully if Bohlen could just pretend that he had been a translator at Yalta and had no views of his own. Bohlen declined.
Meanwhile, the resourceful Scott McLeod, the State Department’s new security man who had an autographed photo from Joe McCarthy on his desk (“To a great American”), was digging. He at first told Dulles that he could find no security reasons to oppose Bohlen, but then told his former mentor, Senator Bridges, that Bohlen’s personnel folder contained “derogatory information.” On March 13, Bridges held a press conference to say that “top officials” in the Administration opposed Bohlen’s nomination and that he would face heavy opposition in the Senate. Knowland, Wherry, and McCarthy joined the pack. Dulles squirmed; he dreaded a confrontation with the Right. Eisenhower, however, refused to back away from his choice.
Dulles summoned Bohlen to his office. Was there anything in his record that could possibly be used to embarrass him? Bohlen answered that there was not. “I’m glad to hear this,” the Secretary responded. “I couldn’t stand another Alger Hiss.”
Bohlen was at first a little taken aback to be a target. He guessed that Dulles was unnerved because Alger Hiss had once worked for him in the U.S. delegation to the first U.N. conference in San Francisco, and Dulles had even recommended Hiss for a job as head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Bohlen knew that Dulles had been aware all along of Whittaker Chambers’s allegations against Hiss because both Dulles and Bohlen had been shown the same file on Hiss by Jimmy Byrnes. At the time, both men had dismissed the allegations as preposterous. Now, Bohlen figured, Dulles was deathly afraid that the press would find out that the new Secretary of State had been soft on Alger Hiss.
This was all vaguely amusing to Bohlen. But his chuckles turned to outrage when Dulles’s henchmen pilloried Bohlen’s old friend and brother-in-law, Charlie Thayer. McLeod’s intrepid investigators had discovered that Charlie had been a Lothario in Moscow. To spare his mother the embarrassment of a public controversy over his morals, Thayer resigned from the Foreign Service.
The weekend before his confirmation hearings, Bohlen sat at home, quarantined with German measles. As he lay on the couch in his living room, recuperating, he tried to make light of his predicament to his family. “It’s a good thing I have the German measles,” he joked, “and not the Red ones.” But he was slowly realizing that his case was becoming a matter of principle, a test of whether the yahoos were going to be able to ride roughshod through the Department of State. He became, he recorded in his memoirs, “exhilarated.”
On Monday night, Dulles called Bohlen at home and told him that Eisenhower wanted to stand by him, but that he, Dulles, did not want Bohlen to do anything that would embarrass the President. Did Bohlen intend to quit? Bohlen said he had no intention of quitting, “none whatsoever.” The next day, the day of his hearing, Bohlen went to Dulles’s office to ride with him to Capitol Hill. Dulles uneasily informed him that they should ride in separate cars. He added that it would be better if they were not photographed together.
Bohlen could be twinkly and charming, and he could be chillingly correct. He was a discreet and obliging staff man, but he brooked no condescension. He fixed on the Secretary with ice-blue eyes. “I have no desire to be photographed at all,” he said coolly, “but I’m not sure I understand you.” Dulles said nothing and walked out the door.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee proved no obstacle, sending Bohlen’s nomination to the floor by unanimous vote. But the McCarthyites were agitating hard to see Bohlen’s file with its supposed “derogatory information.” On March 21, McCarthy rose to say that he had obtained sixteen “closely typed pages” of damning allegations from the file, though he declined to offer any specifics. The rumors picked up. From his farm in Pennsylvania, George Kennan had already felt compelled to write his sister Jeannette on March 20, “No matter what you read or hear on the radio, you can take it from me that Bohlen is not a homosexual, nor is he disloyal. That these things can be seriously suggested fills me with horror and foreboding.”
McCarthy ranted and raved, whined that Bohlen’s is “an ugly record of Great Betrayal,” and linked him with “that elusive statesman of the half world whose admiration for everything Russian is unrivaled outside the confines of the Communist Party”—Averell Harriman.
But then McCarthy went too far. He began attacking the new Administration as well, insinuating that Dulles had lied to Congress and demanding that the Secretary be put under oath. This was the sort of self-inflicted wound that would eventually doom McCarthy, and the effect this time was to anger the Senate majority leader, Bob Taft.
Taft decided to put an end to the nonsense. He and Senator John Sparkman of Alabama were permitted to see Bohlen’s file. They found a charge by someone claiming to have a “sixth sense for moral turpitude” that Bohlen was guilty of same and a report that Bohlen sometimes entertained left-wing houseguests. The report was stuffed with testimonials to his honor and morality from a variety of Republican eminences, ranging from Douglas MacArthur to Henry Cabot Lodge (who said that he had known Bohlen since he was twelve years old and that “there is no one about whom any question of morals is less probable in my whole acquaintanceship”).
The truth about Bohlen is that his marriage was remarkably strong. A very handsome man with no shortage of opportunities to stray, he felt the pull of temptation but resisted. Even alone in Eden—in Paris after V-E Day—he reached out to his wife for moral support: he wished she were there, he wrote, because “we could have lots of fun and you could keep me out of trouble. I am frightened of all these pretty corrupt French babes.”
Bohlen was confirmed by a vote of 74 to 13. Reston, Lippmann, and the Alsops, his friends in the press elite, gave him a victory lunch at the Metropolitan Club, at which he pretended to be embarrassed and could barely conceal his exultation and feeling of triumph over cowardice and paranoia. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote Avis, “You must let me tell you how exhilarating it is to have Chip’s forthrightness pierce through the nacht und nicht of Washington’s ‘prudence’ and cowardice.” Only J. Edgar Hoover, who refused to give Bohlen a full security clearance, and Donald Lourie, who told Dulles over the phone that “those who study this sort of thing feel he is one of them [meaning homosexual],” continued to hold out in opposition to Bohlen.
Dulles himself remained uneasy. Before Bohlen left for Russia, he dropped by Dulles’s office and told the Secretary that he planned to stop over in Paris for a few days before joining up with Avis, who had to wait until the children finished school in Washington. Dulles responded, “Don’t you think it would be wise for you and your wife to travel together?” Bohlen snorted, “For God’s sake, why?” Dulles went on awkwardly, “Well, you know there were some rumors in some of your files about immoral behavior and it would look better if your wife was with you.” Bohlen icily replied that he would do no such thing.
On April 4, Bohlen left for Moscow, well pleased with his victory, feeling that McCarthy had finally been put in his place. The victory for the Administration, however, was Pyrrhic. Taft, though he had defended Bohlen, disliked controversy. He said to Dulles: “No more Bohlens.”
Dulles summoned Paul Nitze to his office the afternoon of Eisenhower’s inauguration. He was cordial; he told Nitze that he approved of his work. He was sorry to say, however, that he could not afford to keep on Dean Acheson’s chief planner. It would not look right. In a letter to Harry Truman, Acheson described Dulles’s treatment of Nitze as “plain cowardice and utter folly.”
As a consolation prize, Nitze was allowed to work for the new Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson, the former president of General Motors. Nitze started up the Pentagon’s Office of International Security Affairs, ISA, its “little State Department,” to ponder the broader national security implications of military planning. But then McCarthy moved in, charging that Nitze was a “Wall Street operator,” while Senator Knowland claimed that Nitze was one of “Acheson’s architects of disaster.” In June, Charlie Wilson sheepishly told Nitze that he was sorry but that his presence at the Pentagon made it difficult for the Defense Department to win appropriations from Congress. He had, he went on, received his orders from the White House: “No more Bohlens.”
Nitze was forced out of government. He established a “PPS in exile” at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, but he was quickly bored by the theorizing of academicians. After visiting Groton one weekend in 1954, he confided to Acheson that the “thought and talk” of the Groton sixth formers was “infinitely better” than what he had heard “at meetings of political scientists.” His bitterness at being sacrificed to the primitives was only slowly assuaged. He recalls not quite feeling right until he had ridden in a steeplechase in Maryland in the autumn of 1953 and looked back, as he crossed the finish line in first place, to see mud splattered all over the also-rans.
President Eisenhower had had misgivings about choosing Dulles as his Secretary of State. He rather preferred John McCloy, whom he had known well since McCloy was Assistant Secretary of War and he was Supreme Commander of allied forces in Europe. McCloy was much more easygoing and pragmatic than Dulles, more Ike’s sort. Eisenhower’s advisers, however, had warned that McCloy was too closely tied to Acheson and his crowd (it did not help McCloy that Harriman was telling reporters that McCloy was his choice to be Secretary). McCarthy, meanwhile, was roiling about, ranting at McCloy’s “unbelievable, inconceivable, unexplainable record of deliberate, secret betrayal.”
Eisenhower tried another idea: He would make McCloy Under Secretary and then, after a year or so, bring Dulles over to the White House as his National Security Adviser and make McCloy the Secretary. Dulles, after all, did not want to be bothered with administration or personal diplomacy; he was more interested in policy making.
Dulles volunteered himself to broach this idea to McCloy. Dulles was at first oblique (he began by asking whom McCloy would recommend), and McCloy was reluctant. He told Dulles that he was broke and wanted to make money. McCloy was also suspicious. “What are you going to do, Foster?” he asked. As he listened to Dulles explain, he got the feeling that Dulles would remain as policy maker, leaving McCloy to “act as caretaker and do dirty jobs.” McCloy refused.
Years later, after talking to Eisenhower and his longtime aide Walter Bedell Smith, McCloy was convinced that Dulles had intentionally misrepresented Eisenhower’s true desires. Both men indicated that McCloy’s role was to have been larger than Dulles described it. McCloy became convinced that when Dulles got wind of Eisenhower’s scheme, he had said to Ike, “Let me handle it,” and in his own fashion, he had.
McCloy returned to Wall Street. He would never hold public office again, save for a brief tour as Kennedy’s special assistant for disarmament. Yet in many ways, he would wield more power out of government than in. As chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, he became a kind of private statesman, an emissary of American capitalism. At the bank itself, he was characteristically disarming, starting on the first floor and working his way up, introducing himself to every employee (“Hello, I’m Jack McCloy”). At the same time he aggressively pushed the bank into international markets, lending billions of dollars and picking up myriad IOUs. Fortune gushed that the “Chase Chairmanship—vast, varied, statesmanlike—symbolizes the something more in commercial banking.” He had total access, not just in Washington but in European and Middle Eastern capitals. Foreign leaders, when they came to the United States, paid homage to him, as if he were a sovereign in his own right. McCloy leveraged his power by joining boards; he became a director of, among other companies, Westing-house, Allied Chemical, United Fruit, each with its own vast international empire; he also became chairman of the Ford Foundation, the richest dispenser of philanthropy.
He became a sage. In 1953 alone, McCloy took honorary degrees from Princeton, Columbia, Smith, Dartmouth, and New York University. That year he published The Challenge to American Foreign Policy, based on the Godkin lectures he had given at Harvard; the tract was straightforward containment, but the emphasis was on management, on making bureaucracy work, on the need for pragmatism over philosophy. He became chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, the incubator of foreign policy ideas and a farm club for policy makers. In 1956, it was McCloy who picked Henry Kissinger, then an obscure Harvard government professor, to chair a study on Soviet-American relations. For Kissinger, this was his first break into the foreign policy elite; McCloy later helped Kissinger get a job on Nelson Rockefeller’s payroll as a speech writer.
McCloy never lost touch with government. He assumed the role of elder statesman, advising Eisenhower and Dulles from time to time on foreign policy questions. On the eve of the Suez crisis, for instance, Dulles phoned McCloy in the middle of the night and asked him to call the heads of every major bank to determine if there was an unexpectedly large flow of funds to Europe or Israel that might signal a buildup for war.
McCloy was disturbed that Dulles seemed so panicky and uninformed. But in fact, Dulles’s ignorance about developments in the Middle East was not so surprising. Ever since World War II, the U.S. government had preferred to leave Middle East diplomacy to the oil companies and the bankers who financed Big Oil—now chief among them John McCloy.
Washington was torn by conflicting aims. An abundant supply of cheap oil was essential to the economy and national security. Friendly relations with the Arabs were necessary to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. Yet no Administration could politically afford to offend American Jews by appearing to help Israel’s mortal enemies in the Middle East. The solution: Let the oil companies take care of the Arabs, with the discreet aid or at least noninterference of the U.S. government.
Acheson had been perfectly frank about the oil companies’ role. “American oil operations are, for all practical purposes, instruments of our foreign policy towards [Middle Eastern] countries,” he declared before leaving office in 1953. Eisenhower and Dulles simply maintained the Truman Administration’s benign hands-off policy toward the oil companies. The U.S. continued to regard royalties paid to Arab countries by the oil companies as income tax, saving the oil companies billions in U.S. taxes. This so-called “golden gimmick,” first conceived in 1950 and kept secret for the next six years, allowed the U.S. to in effect funnel foreign aid to Arab countries without admitting it.
The only real dissent came from the trustbusters at the Justice Department, who charged that the oil companies were joining to arbitrarily fix prices and production levels to guarantee profits. The Justice Department initiated a criminal action against the oil companies in 1952, but Acheson was able to intercede with Truman and head off the investigation.
As the Rockefellers’ banker, McCloy was heavily involved in financing oil production in Arab countries. The Rockefellers held a controlling interest in the Chase; three of the so-called Seven Sisters (Esso, Socal, and Mobil) were offshoots of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. McCloy regularly found himself shuttling back and forth between New York and Middle Eastern capitals, handling multibillion-dollar oil deals and hobnobbing with the Shah of Iran, the king of Jordan, and various Arab sheiks.
Eisenhower and Dulles were only too happy to make McCloy their unofficial emissary to the Arab world. When the British worried that Arab oil money was being used to foment revolution in Iraq, for instance, it was McCloy who was dispatched to implore King Ibn Saud to not finance Iraqi dissidents. In 1957, after the Suez crisis, it was McCloy who was asked to head the U.N. mission to negotiate the salvaging and reopening of the Canal. Along the way, McCloy added Nasser to his list of friendly Arab potentates.
McCloy was perfectly suited to his public-private role. The U.S. government felt it could trust him to look after the national interest as well as the Rockefellers’, and in fact the two seemed perfectly congruent. By maintaining close personal relationships with Arab rulers, McCloy helped guarantee stability, a steady supply of cheap oil, and a buffer against the Soviets. It was the sort of practical diplomacy that McCloy could practice better than anyone. At the time, it was still possible to conduct business in the Middle East face-to-face, by reasoning and bargaining with leaders who had developed a taste for certain Western temptations, like Rolls-Royces. Though the forces of nascent nationalism could be felt, they could be dealt with, smoothed over, contained. The really tempestuous revolution—the rise of Islamic fundamentalism—had not yet stirred. In the late 1950s, OPEC was not even an acronym; Muammar Qaddafi was an impoverished Libyan teen-ager; Ruhollah Khomeini was an obscure middle-aged mullah praying quietly in Iran.
Determined to cut spending for conventional forces and rely almost totally on the Bomb, the Eisenhower Administration had no place for Bob Lovett, the Defense Secretary who wanted to spend more, not less, on overall preparedness. Lovett was not entirely unhappy to leave his ulcer-inducing responsibilities behind, however, and take his “glass insides” back to Wall Street.
Lovett’s advice and experience were too valuable for the New Administration to lose altogether. Like McCloy, he became an elder statesman. He advised Dulles on disarmament, and at Eisenhower’s request joined the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities in 1956.
His principal task was to look into the covert operations of the CIA. The agency, run by Foster Dulles’s brother, Allen, was in the 1950s in its freebooting heyday. It organized the overthrow of the governments deemed to be pro-Communist in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954; helped install supposedly pro-Western governments in Egypt in 1954 and Laos in 1959; tried and failed to overthrow the government of Indonesia in 1958; infiltrated refugees to disrupt Soviet-bloc governments in Eastern Europe and ran sabotage operations against China from Laos and Burma; plotted assassination attempts against Chou En-lai of China, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Rafael Trujillo of of the Dominican Republic.
Lovett was disturbed by the agency’s interventionism. In 1956, Lovett and David Bruce, Acheson’s former ambassador to France, wrote a report to Eisenhower sharply denouncing “King Making” by the CIA. It warned that all those bright young men being recruited by the CIA out of Yale were becoming freewheeling, well-financed buccaneers. Lovett and Bruce cautioned Eisenhower that the agency was out of control, that it needed formal oversight and asked, “where will we be tomorrow?” In 1960, Lovett particularly objected to the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, then in the planning stages, and demanded a total reassessment of covert policies. His recommendations were resisted by Allen Dulles and ignored by the Eisenhower White House. The Kennedy Administration heedlessly plunged ahead with the harebrained scheme to land fifteen hundred Cuban exiles on the Cuban coast in April of 1961; lacking air cover or reinforcements, they were quickly driven into the sea by Castro’s army. After the Bay of Pigs, Lovett angrily demanded before a board of inquiry: “What right do we have barging into other people’s countries, buying newspapers and handing out money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this or that office?” Lovett was too discreet to take the one step that might have reined in the CIA before it was too late: leaking to the press. Actually, the editors of The New York Times knew of the Bay of Pigs, but, as faithful members of the Establishment themselves, printed nothing.
Bohlen arrived in Moscow as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union on April 11, 1953. He found the city “grim, brooding, and drab,” the neo-Stalinist architecture rising over the city “a rather bad combination of classical and Moorish and some indefinable elements.” Unlike Kennan, the more ebullient Bohlen was not depressed by the ambience. Among his first official acts was to bring in a French chef from the American Embassy in Paris; Bohlen’s dining room was thereafter the best in Moscow.
Washington badly needed accurate reporting from Moscow. While the U.S. Senate had been trading rumors about Bohlen’s moral turpitude and tying up the appointment of the American ambassador, Stalin had died. He had ruled Russia with absolute authority for nearly three decades. Without his iron grip, the direction of Russia was a huge and essential mystery.
Except that he should travel with his wife, Bohlen had been given no instructions by Dulles upon leaving for Moscow. Eisenhower told him only, “Watch your stomach and don’t let them get you.” Bohlen did not even attempt to see the new Premier, Malenkov; Dulles disapproved of personal associations with Soviet officials. The U.S. ambassador was never invited to a private home in Moscow, and, like Kennan before him, he was followed everywhere by four KGB agents, or “angels,” as they were known by embassy staffers. In the new chancery under construction that spring the Soviets installed forty-three listening microphones in rooms that were thought by the Americans to be “secure.” (They were years later discovered by the CIA.) Bohlen just assumed his office was wired by the Soviets and wrote all his analyses in longhand.
According to the Times’s Harrison Salisbury, Bohlen arrived “bruised, shaken and spooked” by his confirmation ordeal and hardly dared to report what he saw. Actually, Bohlen could see significant change in the Kremlin’s mood, and he did report it. Upon Stalin’s death, the Hate America campaign was abruptly dropped and the purges ended. The cult of personality that had deified Stalin was denounced in Pravda; Malenkov seemed more moderate than his predecessor (Bohlen took to calling him Warren G. Malenkov; his return to normalcy à la Warren G. Harding included doing business by day, rather than at night as Stalin had demanded). Bohlen wrote Dulles on July 7 that he was convinced that these moves could not be dismissed as “simply another peace campaign designed solely or even primarily to bemuse and to divide the West. The events that have occurred here cumulatively add up, in my opinion, to something considerably more important, offering on the one hand more opportunity and on the other considerably more danger than the standard propaganda gestures which we have seen since the end of the war.” He said that he believed the Soviets were interested in using diplomacy to further their interests, especially preventing German rearmament and averting a general war.
Dulles did not even bother to respond. Then, a few days later, Beria, the chief of police, was arrested. Dulles’s interest suddenly perked up; Bohlen was summoned home to report. At the airport he was taken directly to Dulles’s house and ushered into the Secretary’s study.
Dulles was convinced that the Kremlin was on the verge of a bloody power struggle that would lead to the downfall of the regime. Bohlen disagreed; he said that Beria had been arrested because the new man wanted to put the police under collective leadership. Dulles ignored him. He picked up his copy of Stalin’s Problems of Leninism, lying open on the desk, and began reading underlined passages about seizing power. Bohlen remarked that Stalin’s writings bore little relevance to the Soviet Union now that Stalin was dead. Dulles dismissed him.
Bohlen had hoped to have some influence on Eisenhower. Ike liked to play golf with Bohlen. He was rarely interested in discussing the Soviet Union in any depth. The President’s seeming indifference could be deceiving; he was more alert, more in charge, than his bland, amiable style let on. But Dulles stood between Bohlen and the President. The ambassador could barely abide the Secretary, but he had too much respect for Dulles’s office to try to go behind his back to the White House. Bohlen’s lost opportunity to educate Eisenhower on the intricacies of the Soviet Union is history’s loss. A chance to truly ease the Cold War was lost as well.
In later years, Bohlen would regret that he had not done more, that he had not tried harder to make Washington warm up to the Soviets after Stalin’s death. In particular, he rued that he did not urge the Administration to heed Winston Churchill’s call for a “meeting at the summit” when Malenkov succeeded Stalin in 1953 (the first time the phrase was used). Dulles probably would not have listened; still, Bohlen would muse in later conversations with friends that Stalin’s death had offered a last chance for a real breakthrough—a reunified Germany: an arms control agreement?—at least an opening to start talking.
Later thaws were regarded with suspicion by Dulles. When the Soviets agreed to a Foreign Ministers’ meeting in 1954, Dulles employed a Russian-speaking lip-reader to watch the Soviet delegation; he hoped to spy on the Soviet “huddle.” Bohlen was delighted when Eisenhower, pressed hard by England and France, agreed to a summit meeting with the Soviets in 1955, overriding Dulles’s objections. On the eve of the Geneva summit, Bohlen advised Dulles that the Kremlin genuinely wished to relax tensions, that the Soviets feared that an arms race would strain their economy, and they they might even be interested in arms control. Dulles again paid little heed, though he did ask Bohlen to stay in Washington to help him prepare for the summit. Bohlen by now was quite cynical; he wrote Avis at the end of June, “His Nibs in telling me his wish said, ‘You better stay. There might be something you could help me out on,’ which for him to me is almost gracious.” The summit itself was a disappointment, doomed by mutual suspicion.
Bohlen began letting his disgust with Dulles show during Sunday-night poker games or drinking bouts with reporters he trusted. (It was at one such affair that Bohlen dubbed the Secretary with an enduring nickname: “dull, duller, Dulles.”) Inevitably, word got back to the Secretary. When Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief aide, asked Dulles in April of 1956 if Bohlen should address the Cabinet, Dulles replied that the Cabinet “might enjoy it but rather not—it would build him up too much—he is not working with us.”
Dulles informed Bohlen by letter in December of that year that he was relieving him as ambassador to Moscow “knowing your desire to take up writing as a profession.” Bohlen was flabbergasted; he had not “the foggiest idea” where Dulles had gotten the notion he wanted to write; the Secretary’s letter just seemed to him a dishonest way of removing a diplomat from his post. When Bohlen said he had no intention of retiring to write, Dulles offered him Pakistan. Bohlen refused. The Philippines? Bohlen, in a quandary, called on Acheson and Lovett for advice. They urged him not to leave the Foreign Service, but to stay on and simply outlast Dulles.
Reluctantly, Bohlen accepted the Philippines, a country he knew very little about. Dulles promptly leaked that Bohlen had been trying to leave Moscow for four years and that he, Dulles, had only reluctantly agreed to let him. Before leaving for Manila, Bohlen stopped by to see Eisenhower. The President said he was sorry to see Bohlen leave Moscow, that he had debated a long time before agreeing to his request to transfer, but that since it was Bohlen’s wish to leave Russia, he had reluctantly accepted. Bohlen said he had no desire to leave Moscow at all. Eisenhower exclaimed, “Oh, is that true?”
From Manila, Bohlen was asked by Dulles to comment on developments in the Soviet Union. Bohlen responded that it was impossible for him to do so “at this great distance.” Bohlen’s golf game improved markedly in Manila, but he caught an intestinal disease and had to go on the wagon—for the first time ever. “You can imagine what that means,” he wrote Avis. Financial problems gnawed; he could not cover embassy entertaining with private funds and fell five thousand dollars short, forcing him to borrow from friends. He began to regard Manila as his last tour, and to think of retiring to make money. At times, he felt that he wanted nothing more to do with public life. If her husband were to quit, Avis wrote her brother, Charlie Thayer, in April of 1958, “we shall certainly not do anything that means any connection with foreign affairs or Washington, and preferably will have some connection with some DOUGH.”
Kennan had considered fleeing the U.S. altogether after his forced resignation from the State Department in 1953. “There is nothing much that any of us can do to oppose the McCarthyite trend or to escape it,” Kennan wrote Thayer, who was himself living abroad in Majorca after being purged by McCarthyites. “And in these circumstances I can imagine that life might be pleasanter or more productive somewhere else.”
Rather than become “in effect an exile,” however, Kennan retreated to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Robert Oppenheimer’s oasis for gifted thinkers. From his cloister, Kennan peered out into the dark age. His heyday—the first two years after the war—he regarded as a rare moment of integrity in foreign policy. Thereafter, he said, “normalcy took over.” He came to believe that he would have been compelled to resign even if the Democrats had won in 1952. His different views on how to handle the Soviets now set him apart not just from John Foster Dulles “but the entire ruling establishment of American political life.”
Still, Kennan could not stay out of public life. One night late in the winter of 1954, he answered his door in Princeton to find a farmer and his wife standing outside. They had driven 150 miles in the hopes of seeing him. Would he, they asked, consider running for Congress? Kennan gaped. “Which party?” he asked. “Democratic,” they answered. (He added in his memoirs that “it would have made no difference to me if it had been the other one.”)
“I was really rocked by this approach,” he wrote his sister Jeannette, “partly for its sincerity and ingenuousness, partly because I realized that having spoken out critically in so prominent a way about the shortcomings of our government, I had no right to decline such an offer, if it were genuine.” So Kennan said yes. After some debate among the party elders (“Why he ain’t even registered as a Democrat!” “Yeah, but his wife is.”) he received the party nomination. But when he returned to Princeton he was “horrified” to discover that the Institute for Advanced Study could not continue to pay his salary if he were to run for Congress. Lacking independent means, unwilling to turn to “some big dairy owner or other local tycoon,” and “feeling an awful fool for it,” he withdrew his name from the race. The experience left him believing that congressmen should all be “men of means” and thus “above petty corruption.”
Britain’s pre-Reform Parliament was closer to his ideal of enlightened government than the U.S. Congress of the 1950s. A self-described “natural-born antiquarian,” Kennan harbored nostalgia for England’s eighteenth-century ruling aristocracy. In 1957, he was offered the opportunity to indulge his Anglophilia as Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford for a year.
He was disappointed. Oxford seemed to him a grim industrial town, its elegance tarnished by automobile fumes and the working classes. At the same time, Kennan felt socially insecure among the residual gentry. He confided to Isaiah Berlin that he would “never fit into an Oxford common room: the people there would be too urbane, too witty, too quick in repartee; I was only a gloomy Scot.” Berlin tried to reassure him, in a British sort of way: “Think nothing of it. Balliol’s full of gloomy Scots.”
Kennan was invited that year by the BBC to give the Reith Lectures, a prestigious, widely heard annual series of six radio addresses. He was panicked to be alone (“alone as I have ever been”) before a radio microphone for twenty-eight minutes, but he settled down and spoke lucidly with a kind of controlled passion. His lectures caused a sensation, not just in England, but in the U.S. as well. Life declared: “The unofficial words of a retired U.S. diplomat have become a major political issue throughout the Western world.”
Kennan had urged publicly what he had suggested privately within the State Department eight years earlier: that the U.S. and Soviet Union disengage from Germany and leave a demilitarized, unified country. But he had added, significantly, that all nuclear weapons should be withdrawn from Europe. His rhetoric was vivid, if at times slightly contorted (“until we stop pushing the Kremlin against a closed door, we shall never learn whether it will be prepared to go through an open one”). And his timing was propitious. The Soviets had just launched Sputnik, causing fear throughout the West that war could come raining down from the heavens.
To hear Mr. “X,” the author of containment, plead for disengagement shocked many who knew nothing of his quiet evolution at the State Department. (And startled even some who did: “Dear George sure has gone off the deep end,” Avis Bohlen wrote Charlie Thayer upon reading about the lectures.) Kennan’s words were heartfelt, and they reached beyond ruling circles to common people; Kennan was astonished to see a radio technician, a small Cockney woman, pounding the table in approval as he spoke from the glass broadcasting booth. The acclamation had its predictable effect on Kennan: he collapsed with ulcers and an acute sinus infection.
Dean Acheson was outraged by Kennan’s Reith Lectures. He put out a press release explaining that Kennan had “never grasped the realities of power relationships” but instead had taken a “rather mystical attitude towards them.” Acheson followed that swipe with a long article in Foreign Affairs warning that without American military might, Europe would be a prime target for the Soviets, that unless Europe and the United States teamed up, Soviet tanks would roll and West Germany would fall.
Acheson was fond of Kennan, though he did not usually agree with him, and he softened this public assault with private reassurances of friendship. “We have differed on this subject for too long for it to affect my deep regard and affection for you,” he wrote Kennan, enclosing the proofs of the Foreign Affairs article. “I hope the same is true for you, although I am more accustomed to public controversy and criticism than you are. So you are entitled to a few earthy expletives.” Kennan responded a week later, “No hard feelings . . . a very good article; rarely if ever have I seen error so gracefully and respectably clothed.” The ability of gentlemen to remain close while carving each other up in public debate was a revelation to Kennan’s daughter Grace. She later recalled, “Even though I got very upset by the things he said about my father, I remember that the Achesons were invited to my wedding and sent me a present. I didn’t write them a thank-you note, even though I knew it was rude. I was too young to realize that you can disagree bitterly on policy and still be friends.”
Yet others began to notice that Acheson’s invective was getting more bitter, more cruel. This was especially true when aimed at those he did not like, particularly John Foster Dulles.
To Gerhard Gesell, his law partner at Covington, Burling, he repeatedly referred to Dulles as a “coward.” Acheson positively enjoyed Dulles’s fiascoes. In 1956, after Dulles had precipitated the Suez crisis by driving Egypt’s Nasser into the arms of the Soviets, Acheson wrote his son, David, “Dulles really got his comeuppance there, didn’t he?” After Dulles told Life magazine that “the ability to get to the verge of war is the necessary art . . . if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost,” Acheson wrote the Lovetts a New Year’s card: “Our love to you both, and stay away from Foster’s verge.” Lovett joined in the fun. He sent Acheson a photograph of Dulles in a cub scout uniform that had appeared in a New York paper. Acheson responded, “Oh, God! I can’t bear it. I’m too old to stand shocks like the one you just gave me. What in the world do you think the man—if that’s what he is—was thinking of?” A few days after Dulles died of cancer in May 1959, Acheson silenced a dinner party at Harewood by announcing “Thank God Foster is underground.”
Acheson wrote acerbic notes, practiced law, devoted days of his time to Yale, where he was a trustee (among his causes was resisting the introduction of sherry to university functions. “I have bitterly opposed it in favor of the coarser but quicker cocktail,” he wrote a friend). And he fretted over his loss of influence. “Thanks for the note,” he wrote Joe Alsop, whose hard-line views Acheson shared. “It has cheered me out of the frustrated feeling I sometimes have that I am talking only to myself.”
Acheson knew that he was earning a reputation as a curmudgeon. “They tell me in the press that I am getting rigid. Perhaps they are right,” he wrote a Yale friend in 1959. “At any rate I still believe that we are not going to get very far in our dealings with the Russians unless they realize that the Free World has a basis of power to which they have got to adjust themselves.”
He longed to return to power himself. In the late fifties he became increasingly involved in building a shadow government, in generating new ideas to challenge the Republicans. In 1957, he read with great interest a new book by McCloy’s discovery at the Council on Foreign Relations, Henry Kissinger, called Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Acheson was a bit unnerved by Kissinger’s argument that limited nuclear war should be considered a strategic option, but he was struck by his attack on Dulles’s massive retaliation doctrine. In part to save money by skimping on conventional forces, the Eisenhower Administration relied on the Bomb (“more bang for the buck”) as virtually its sole deterrent to the Soviets. Kissinger perceived that it was foolhardy to “go to the brink” at every international crisis, that the U.S. needed to be able to calibrate its response. The book, among several others, nurtured the germ of a new idea that would become the policy of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations—“flexible response,” the capacity to fight small, limited “brush-fire” wars. Kissinger’s book “has shaken me,” Acheson wrote a friend. “It is a hard book to read because of its repetitive Germanic style and the first section is infuriating because of its academic superiority. But the damned cuss has brains and has thought a lot.” Acheson was so impressed by Kissinger that he tried to recruit him to formally declare himself a Democrat. Kissinger, preserving his options, declined, though his letters to Acheson in this period spare no flattery.
Acheson was also impressed by another comer, General Maxwell Taylor, whom he had admired since meeting him in Germany in the early fifties. When Taylor resigned as Army Chief of Staff in 1959 in opposition to the diminished role massive retaliation gave to the Army, Acheson was among the first to ask him to lunch.*
Acheson’s fomenting was formalized and given direction by the creation of the Democratic Advisory Council in 1956, a sort of government-in-exile for the party out of power. Acheson chaired the Foreign Policy Committee; his chief planner, out of government as in, was Paul Nitze.
Nitze had forever endeared himself to Acheson by a small gesture of friendship. A couple of months after the change of Administrations, he called Acheson and asked him to lunch at the Metropolitan Club. Acheson told him, “You know, you’re the first person in Washington who has asked me to have lunch since I was Secretary of State.” For the next two decades, the pair ate lunch together every week at the same table reserved in the Metropolitan Club dining room.
Together, Nitze and Acheson wrote the foreign policy plank of the Democratic platform in 1956. Neither was enamored, however, with the party’s nominee, Adlai Stevenson. They considered him brilliant, but fatally indecisive and too “soft.” Acheson and his cohorts shared a mean little joke about Stevenson, that as he was about to give a speech, he asked an aide, “Do I have time to go to the bathroom?” Assured that he did, he would ask, “Do I want to go to the bathroom?” Acheson was equally caustic about Stevenson’s liberal foreign policy advisers, particularly Chester Bowles, a former advertising executive who had served as ambassador to India and became a congressman from Connecticut in 1959. He thought Bowles was a garrulous windbag and an ineffectual do-gooder. “Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity, like the Chinese habit of footbinding,” Acheson wrote Eugene Rostow about Bowles in 1958.
Stevenson’s admirers, in turn, thought that Acheson was too rigid, too hard line. Bowles, along with John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, and other members of the liberal wing, believed that Acheson had been made more rigid by right-wing attacks. Though Acheson denounced Dulles for selling out to McCarthyism, the liberals were convinced that McCarthy’s attacks had made Acheson and his cohorts overly afraid of appearing “soft” on Communism. The Achesonians would never come out and say this, recalls Galbraith. Rather, they would say, “We’ve got to maintain our credibility.”
Only one figure in the Democrats’ inner council was able to “maintain credibility” and still insist that it was possible to reason with the Soviets. Averell Harriman, recalls Galbraith, would begin discussions by talking about “what a bunch of bastards the Soviets were” but then he would say, “but we’ve got to deal with them.” Like his tutors in Kremlinology, Kennan and Bohlen, Harriman believed that the Soviets were paranoid, dangerous, yet ultimately conservative and not eager to start a war by invading Europe. Harriman argued that it was possible, by diligence and patience, to negotiate agreements with the Soviets, especially if he was the negotiator.
There was nothing “soft” about Harriman, and Acheson, at first, trusted him to brace up Stevenson, to “keep him pointed close to the wind and not let him fall off with phrases like ‘the relentless pursuit of peace,’” he wrote Truman in November of 1955. Harriman, however, was becoming irritated with Acheson. He felt that his old schoolmate was becoming fixed and dogmatic in his old age, and he let his disenchantment show. “You know, Dean,” he would growl at meetings of the Democratic Advisory Council, “I don’t agree with your declarations of war.” He would tell friends how fortunate it was that his own mind had not aged so.
There was some real truth in this arrogant remark. Harriman was thought of as a stolid man, not particularly creative or bright. But the truth is that he retained all through his life the capacity to change, to grow and adapt. He was able to change careers, change political parties, change his point of view. He was never dogmatic and often restless. The only real constant was his desire to fulfill his father’s wish that he “be something and somebody.”
To his friends, Harriman’s ambition had always been a source of bemusement. But they had difficulty accepting the latest turn in a career that had spun from business tycoon to statesman and now to politician.
After his abortive attempt to run for President in 1952, Harriman returned to Europe, where along with Jean Monnet he beefed up NATO by building a European Defense Community. But he had been bitten by politics. In 1954, he decided to run for governor of New York.
A wooden speaker, graceless at small talk, and about as far removed from the common man as it is possible to be in a modern democracy, Harriman was an unlikely politician. Caustic, socialite Marie was an even more unlikely politician’s wife. Harriman had actually been approached about running for governor of New York in 1950 by Carmine De Sapio’s Democratic machine, “told that he could have the nomination if he wanted it,” but Marie had balked. She told her husband that she would “jump off a bridge” if he ever ran for elective office. “How do you think Marie would fit in in Albany?” Harriman asked Cy Sulzberger with a smile in November 1951. “We both agreed that it was not her type of town,” Sulzberger recorded in his diary.
Marie, who did not like to rise before noon, found herself giving morning teas for the ladies of Albany as of January 1, 1955. A driven worker (he awakened one aide before 7 A.M. and grumbled, “I see you’ve taken to snoozing before breakfast”), Harriman was a conscientious governor. He ordered his staff to move to Albany from New York City and dutifully cut ribbons, kissed babies, and wrangled with the legislature. His agenda was ambitiously liberal in that pre-Great Society era; he pushed programs for the elderly, mental health patients, and minorities. As a tightwad, however, he did not want to spend heavily to pay for social programs, and his were rather modest.
Harriman’s real aim was the White House. The 1956 presidential race found him far from Albany, whistle-stopping in his private railway car. He had Harry Truman’s support, but at the convention Stevenson had Mayor Daley’s, which counted for much more. “You know,” one of Harriman’s floormen told Theodore H. White, then covering his first convention, “I hear you can buy all the delegates from the Canal Zone, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands in one package, all twelve of them, but you have to deal with a fellow named Benitez.” He went off in search of Benitez, but Daley’s operatives got there first. Stevenson won 905½ delegates (including the Caribbean contingent) to Harriman’s 210.
Harriman did not enjoy the heartfelt support of his old friends in these endeavors. Acheson, despite his impatience with Stevenson and his deep ties to Harriman, supported Stevenson for President in 1956. Most of Harriman’s old colleagues—including Lovett, Acheson, McCloy, and Nitze—felt that he was cheapening himself, letting hubris compromise his principles. They believed that his moderate views on the Cold War came not from a sophisticated understanding of Soviet behavior but rather out of a desire to win over the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Years later, discussing the evolution of Harriman’s views, Nitze’s face took on a sour expression, as if he had bitten into a clove. “He picked up crazy ideas when he started to run for office,” said Nitze. McCloy attributed a “definite change in [Harriman’s] attitude” on the Cold War largely to “political ambition.” He had been dubious about Harriman’s political integrity ever since hearing him boast that he had contributed to both parties in 1932 to be sure of getting into government. Lovett, determinedly apolitical himself, was privately contemptuous of his old friend’s desire for elected office. “Averell’s a Democrat,” he would say, “and a fool.” Acheson would tease Harriman about his career in politics, but, recalls his son-in-law Bill Bundy, there was a slight edge to his voice.
In 1958, Harriman was stunned by Nelson Rockefeller in his race for re-election as governor. Harriman’s leaden campaigning was no match for Rocky’s flamboyant blintzes-and-pizza, “Hihowaya?” juggernaut. He lost badly, by four hundred fifty thousand votes.
Harriman was sixty-seven years old, and finally slowing. He had quit taking cold baths in the morning, thereby shedding a last bit of Groton asceticism, and quit smoking, on a dare from his family doctor and John Kenneth Galbraith. He began nodding off after dinner, though friends noticed that he woke up quickly when the ladies left and the male conversation turned to politics or foreign affairs. His hearing, ruined by too much flying on unpressurized airplanes to remote spots around the world, began to deteriorate noticeably. After losing to Rockefeller he seemed downcast, as if he had tried everything that private and public life had to offer, and could think of nothing else. Even his close friends began to think he was all done in. They underestimated him.