AS TRUMAN AND VANDENBERG gazed across the Atlantic in the spring of 1947, they feared the same nightmare.
A full two years after the Nazis had surrendered, Europe remained ravaged, its economy in disarray. Millions were starving, freezing, or sick, and many roads, rails, and ports were still damaged and unusable. The harsh winter of 1946–47 had killed millions of animals and destroyed millions of acres of cropland, causing severe springtime shortages of milk, eggs, butter, meat, fish, oils, fats, wheat, bread, flour, cereal, beans, potatoes, and other vegetables and driving food prices sky high. Even with millions of tons of U.S. food aid, Europeans survived on daily rations that fell far short of recommended minimums. Tuberculosis returned as Europe’s number one killer, while typhus raged across the Balkans. Meanwhile, as the Washington Post reported in April, “doctors still are few, hospitals scarce, housing inadequate and fuel almost nonexistent.”1 Across Europe, frustration boiled over. In Germany’s British-controlled zone, hundreds of thousands of people across several cities protested food shortages in the largest mass demonstrations since Hitler’s rule, smashing windows and overturning vehicles. In Vienna, protestors squared off with police in front of the Federal Chancellory.
“It took almost two years for Europeans and Americans to realize,” journalist Theodore White wrote from the continent, “that Europe was not only incapable of resistance to the Russians, but that she was engaged in a desperate ordeal of survival that had nothing to do with the Soviet Union. The tides of trade in which Europe lived had vanished. Like a whale left gasping on the sand, Europe lay rotting in the sun.”2
Aid alone could not rescue Europe because its economy was not functioning. Businesses weren’t operating, workers weren’t working, factories weren’t producing, farmers weren’t harvesting, and nations weren’t trading. A continent that was still struggling to survive would have to rebuild the architecture of a working economy if it hoped to address the needs of its people. The more Europe struggled, the angrier its people grew—and the more endangered its governments became.
“But what is Europe now?” Winston Churchill asked in a speech at London’s Royal Albert Hall in May of 1947. “It is a rubble-heap, a charnel-house, a breeding-ground of pestilence and hate. Ancient nationalistic feuds and modern ideological factions distract and infuriate the unhappy, hungry populations. Evil teachers urge the paying-off of old scores with mathematical precision, and false guides point to unsparing retribution as the path to prosperity. Is there then to be no respite?”3
It was, as Truman and Vandenberg recognized, a situation ripe for exploitation, with Soviet-led Communists plotting to overthrow Western democracies through the niceties of electoral ballots or the violence of bloody coups.
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Truman understood the challenge and focused intensely on Europe’s suffering almost from the moment he assumed the presidency, describing the situation in graphic terms and pushing relentlessly for America to respond.
“Europe today is hungry,” Truman told the nation by radio after returning from the Potsdam Conference with Soviet and British leaders in August of 1945. “I am not talking about Germans,” he said, recognizing that Americans had little empathy for them.
I am talking about the people of the countries which were overrun and devastated by the Germans, and particularly about the people of Western Europe. Many of them lack clothes and fuel and tools and shelter and raw materials. They lack the means to restore their cities and their factories. As the winter comes on, the distress will increase. Unless we do what we can to help, we may lose next winter what we won at such terrible cost last spring. Desperate men are liable to destroy the structure of their society to find in the wreckage some substitute for hope. If we let Europe go cold and hungry, we may lose some of the foundations of order on which the hope for worldwide peace must rest.
At that point, Vandenberg was less certain than Truman that the United States should come to Europe’s rescue. When, after months of discussion between top U.S. and British officials in late 1945, Truman proposed a $3.75 billion loan to Britain, Vandenberg expressed his uncertainty in a December 19 letter to Dulles. “The British loan is a tough conundrum for me and for my Republican colleagues,” he wrote. Vandenberg worried that a U.S. loan to Britain would invite a request from Moscow—and, if Washington rejected the latter due to its growing unhappiness over Moscow’s global aggressiveness, that that, in turn, would end all cooperation among Washington, London, and Moscow. Further, he took offense at British complaints that Washington was offering only $3.75 billion. “We are notified in advance that we are going to get no good will out of this largesse,” Vandenberg observed, asking Dulles, “If we are not going to get good will what are we going to get?”
Vandenberg eventually came around, however, lending his support to the legislation that reached Truman’s desk in July of 1946. He was swayed by Europe’s growing struggles and Moscow’s brash efforts to exploit them. On the Senate floor, Vandenberg told his colleagues that the United States must seize “the economic as well as the moral leadership in a wandering world which must be stabilized just as necessarily for us as for others.” 4
With isolationist sentiment running high in the isolationist Midwest, Vandenberg received lots of mail from unhappy constituents.
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Truman was particularly concerned about Europe’s food crisis, and his efforts to alleviate hunger on the continent were frequent, creative, and increasingly urgent. While deploying governmental resources, he also tapped the private sector. In May of 1945, he ordered the heads of his war-related agencies, such as the War Production Board, to make European relief a priority. In June, he urged Americans to conserve food “in every possible way” so the United States could send surpluses to Europe.
Truman intensified his efforts in 1946. In February, he ordered emergency measures to conserve food and ship it overseas—including a “vigorous campaign” to convince Americans to conserve bread and other food; the discontinued use of wheat to produce alcohol and beer; inventory controls for wheat and flour; and preferences to move wheat, corn, meat, and other foods by rail for shipment to Europe.
“We in this country,” he told the nation that month in a statement, “have been consuming about 3,300 calories per person per day. In contrast, more than 125 million people in Europe will have to subsist on less than 2,000 calories a day; 28 million will get less than 1,500 calories a day and in some parts of Europe, large groups will receive as little as 1,000 calories. Under these circumstances it is apparent that only through superhuman efforts can mass starvation be prevented. In recognition of this situation Great Britain only yesterday announced cuts in rations of fats and a return to the dark wartime loaf of bread.” In April Truman told the nation by radio, “America is faced with a solemn obligation. Long ago we promised to do our full part. Now we cannot ignore the cry of hungry children. Surely we will not turn our backs on the millions of human beings begging for just a crust of bread. The warm heart of America will respond to the greatest threat of mass starvation in the history of mankind.”
In the ensuing months Truman created a committee of leading citizens to craft a public campaign of voluntary food conservation; appealed to Americans by radio to cut their food consumption two days each week to what the average person in “hungry lands” eats; urged individuals and groups to send food packages through the private Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (which later became CARE); threatened to seize control of the railroads if striking workers didn’t return to work not only because the strike was hurting America’s economy, but because it was jeopardizing bread supplies for forty-five million people in Europe; and appointed former top federal official Granville Conway to serve as coordinator of emergency export programs and ensure that Washington met its goals for food exports.
By the middle of 1947, the United States had provided more than $15 billion in postwar relief, mostly for Europe. Congressional critics suggested the figure was even higher.5 The enormous sums raised questions: Why did Europe’s needs remain so great? Was the money doing any good? Was Europe wasting it? Should Washington provide more?
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In the spring of 1947, Truman and Vandenberg recognized that the United States needed to try a new approach.
At Truman’s direction that spring, the administration was a flurry of activity in pursuit of a new goal—systemic change. Rather than continue distributing aid to address this particular need or that, administration officials came to see that the United States needed to help rebuild the foundation of Europe’s economy. It was a monumental challenge, one that Truman telegraphed publicly and on which many of his top aides contributed significantly.
“Everywhere on earth, nations are under economic pressure,” Truman said at Baylor University in March. “Countries that were devastated by the war are seeking to reconstruct their industries. Their need to import, in the months that lie ahead, will exceed their capacity to export. And so they feel that imports must be rigidly controlled. Countries that have lagged in their development are seeking to industrialize. In order that new industries may be established, they, too, feel that competing imports must be rigidly controlled.
“Nor is this all,” the president continued. “The products of some countries are in great demand. But buyers outside their borders do not hold the money of these countries in quantities large enough to enable them to pay for the goods they want. And they find these moneys difficult to earn. Importing countries, when they make their purchases, therefore seek to discriminate against countries whose currencies they do not possess. Here, again, they feel that imports must be rigidly controlled.”
Truman’s views were reinforced a month later by Marshall, who had returned from Moscow after attending a Council of Foreign Ministers meeting. There, Marshall and his aide, Charles Bohlen, had met privately with Stalin. As the Soviet dictator brushed off concerns about mounting U.S.-Soviet disagreements while unnervingly doodling wolves’ heads in red pen, Marshall concluded that Stalin wanted more European chaos that he could exploit, helping Communists to seize power across Western Europe. On his flight home from Moscow, Marshall spoke to his aides about a systemic approach to Western Europe’s troubles. Addressing the nation by radio after his return, he said of Europe, “the patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate.” Marshall summoned George Kennan, the new head of his new Policy Planning Staff, and ordered him to craft a plan to address Europe’s economic crisis within two weeks. When Kennan asked Marshall whether he had any further guidance, the general replied, “Avoid trivia.” 6
Around that time, Truman also heard from Will Clayton, a top State Department official whom the president had sent to Europe to study the problems up close. Clayton, who drafted Truman’s Baylor speech, had developed a deep understanding of economics through a lifetime of private sector success. Born on February 7, 1880, in Tupelo, Mississippi, Clayton was a multimillionaire cotton trader before he was forty. He believed in free trade and stable money, aligning himself with FDR in the 1930s when Republicans tilted toward protectionism and delivering speeches across the country to promote his free-market views. Reflecting his prominence, Time dubbed him “King Cotton” on its cover. After working for the War Industries Board’s Cotton Distribution Committee during World War I, Clayton returned to government in 1940 as a “dollar-a-year” man with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He then moved to the Export-Import Bank before Roosevelt brought him to the State Department in 1944 as its first assistant secretary for economic affairs; Truman later promoted him to undersecretary. Clayton was tall and powerfully built, with white hair and dark eyebrows that sloped toward his nose. He wore pin-striped suits over a matching vest, a handkerchief in his breast pocket, and a stern expression on his face. A man of great discipline, he walked several miles to work every morning for exercise and didn’t drink until he was fifty-eight, doing so then only because his doctor said that sweet sherry would be good for his health. He was beloved at the State Department for his mild manner and long hours; no one there worked harder. As much as anyone, Clayton was the intellectual force behind the Marshall Plan.7
“It is now obvious that we grossly underestimated the destruction to the European economy by the war,” Clayton wrote in a May 27 memo to Marshall.
We understood the physical destruction, but we failed to take fully into account the effects of economic dislocation on production—nationalization of industries, drastic land reform, severance of long-standing commercial ties, disappearance of private commercial firms through death or loss of capital, etc., etc. . . . Europe is steadily deteriorating. The political position reflects the economic. One political crisis after another merely denotes the existence of grave economic distress. Millions of people in the cities are slowly starving. More consumer goods and restored confidence in the local currency are absolutely essential if the peasant is again to supply food in normal quantities to the cities . . . Without further prompt and substantial aid from the United States, economic, social, and political disintegration will overwhelm Europe.8
Around the same time, Vandenberg, too, was sensitized to the threat of a European collapse. The State Department had sent Dulles on a clandestine mission to Paris to assess chances of a Communist takeover or civil war. Alarmed by the mounting strikes and threats of violence, Dulles briefed Vandenberg by phone.
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On May 8, 1947, Truman was supposed to be in Cleveland, Mississippi. He had accepted an invitation to speak at Delta State Teachers College, fulfilling a promise to friends from the area. But as the date neared, Truman wanted to avoid entanglement in a local political fight. So he stepped aside and announced that Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state, would speak in his place.
Rural Mississippi was hardly the ideal place for a top Washington official to make news, particularly about U.S. foreign policy. But, the timing was propitious. Acheson recognized an opportunity to deliver a call to “reveille” that would awaken the American people “to the duties of that day of decision” and to float some ideas that were surfacing at the White House and State Department. “I am going to throw up a ball,” Acheson told Truman before heading south on an air force DC-3, “and it’s going to have to come down somewhere.” Thus, the northeastern aristocrat who was most comfortable in Washington’s halls of power and New York’s corporate boardrooms traveled enthusiastically to a remote town in the Deep South.9
“The devastation of war has brought us back to elementals,” Acheson said after removing his jacket and rolling up his sleeves in the hot, crowded gymnasium, “to the point where we see clearly how short is the distance from food and fuel either to peace or to anarchy.” He reviewed some “basic facts of life with which we are primarily concerned today in the conduct of foreign affairs”—Europe and Asia’s “physical destruction or economic dislocation, or both”; Germany and Japan’s inability to rebuild in the absence of final peace settlements; and severe winter storms and summer droughts of the prior two years that had devastated European crops and fuel production. The United States would have to provide more assistance to Europe, but concentrate it “where it will be most effective in building world political and economic stability, in promoting human freedom and democratic institutions, in fostering liberal trading policies, and in strengthening the authority of the United Nations.” In other words, the United States must turn from episodic relief to systemic rebirth.
The implications of Acheson’s remarks skipped past many in the crowd, but they didn’t escape the notice of top international and national media. Acheson had teed up the speech in off-the-record discussions with leading British reporters, and they gave it a big splash when Acheson delivered it. The White House announced beforehand that it would be “an important foreign policy speech,” and the State Department briefed the top wire services and influential syndicated columnists. Asked later by the New York Times’ Reston whether the speech represented administration policy, Acheson directed him to the White House where Truman confirmed that it did.
Nor did the implications escape the notice of one Arthur Vandenberg. Sitting at his desk in Washington, he grew livid as he read about the speech. Once again, the administration was telegraphing a costly new initiative that would demand Vandenberg’s collaboration and legislative skills to steer through Congress—and once again the president and his team hadn’t brought him into the planning process. After demanding a meeting with Truman, and with Marshall and Acheson in the room for it, Vandenberg unloaded, waiving the speech around in his hand.
“I want you to understand from now on,” the senator told the president, repeating one of his favorite expressions, “that I’m not going to help you with crash landings unless I’m in on the takeoff.”10
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Vandenberg’s anger was rooted in both personal pique and political reality. Just two days before Acheson spoke, the House approved the first installment of the Truman Doctrine—the $400 million aid package for Greece and Turkey. It had been no easy sell in the Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress, for which tax cutting at home and isolationism abroad were strong themes. A robust plan of the kind that Acheson sketched out in Mississippi would invite far bigger legislative battles.
Months earlier, Truman had anticipated the coming clash between America’s growing global role, which would demand more federal resources, and countervailing Republican sentiments. In his “Budget Message to the Congress” in January, the president declared, “There is no justification now for tax reduction.” He urged lawmakers to retain the higher wartime excise tax rates that were due to expire on July 1. Although his Budget Message of January predated the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan of March and June, respectively, Truman clearly envisioned by then that the costs of America’s overseas obligations would rise. “We have to carry our proper share of the expense of building world organization,” he said. “We must make effective provision for national defense.”
When, in June, Congress sent Truman a bill to cut tax rates, he vetoed it, saying that it was both economically unnecessary and fiscally irresponsible in light of government’s needs for foreign-related resources. “We are still meeting heavy obligations growing out of the war,” the president explained. “We continue to be confronted with great responsibilities for international relief and rehabilitation that have an important bearing on our efforts to secure lasting peace. We are still in a transition period in which many uncertainties continue. In the face of these facts, common prudence demands a realistic and conservative management of the fiscal affairs of the Government.” That legislation would have cut tax rates on July 1. After the veto, Congress sent Truman an identical bill except that it would have cut tax rates six months later. He vetoed that one as well.
A loyal Republican on domestic issues, Vandenberg voted for the tax cuts and supported GOP efforts to override Truman’s veto. But his heart wasn’t in it. He knew that tax cutting could threaten the resources needed to fund America’s global role. He didn’t speak on behalf of either bill when it came to the Senate floor. Thus, he could express fealty to Republican principles on the domestic side while knowing full well that Truman would stop the effort in its tracks.
Republican tax cutting reflected the party’s deep-seated predisposition for smaller government, and it showcased one of the biggest hurdles that Vandenberg would have to overcome when the Marshall Plan came before Congress.