George Marshall served as secretary of state during the momentous postwar realignment of international relations. They were not personally his best years. He was now in his late sixties, and time and health problems had exacted a toll, draining his strength and imposing a reduced work regimen. Never a workaholic, the secretary of state included in his daily schedule an afternoon nap and departure for home at 4:30 p.m. As he noted in a July 1948 note to Stimson, he also assigned the “principal burden” of the office to his second in command, Robert Lovett, and continued to insist, as he had as chief of staff, that subordinates not trouble him with minutiae but reach conclusions on their own.1 This arrangement could be seen as an efficient managerial style—one much needed in a red-tape-encumbered office. But whatever its advantages, in his new post, some observers believed, it impaired his ability to perform at the highest level.
Marshall’s experience seemed clearly to fit him as the administration’s top foreign policy adviser. A dozen international conferences where the vigorous thrust and parry of military leaders differed little from the debates of foreign ministers and heads of state over treaties were no bad preparation for his new post. Yet, as he admitted at the outset, he was not current on many foreign policy issues. In February, before leaving for an important foreign ministers’ meeting in Moscow, he told reporters at a press and radio conference that he still had “a mass of information of transactions and discussions regarding the various problems that I have to absorb here in a very brief time.”2 But Truman had not chosen him for his profound diplomatic knowledge or, for that matter, for his skills as a negotiator with foreign leaders or ambassadors. Like many other Americans, the president had fallen under Marshall’s spell of unrivaled rectitude. Also in February, shortly after Marshall was sworn in, the president noted: “The more I see and talk to him the more certain I am that he’s the great one of the age.” On another occasion he called him “a tower of strength and common sense.”3 But it was his talents as a lobbyist, before both Congress and the American public, that truly counted with the president. As Truman later noted in his memoirs, “his many years in wartime Washington had endowed Marshall with a knowledge and appreciation of the role of Congress.”4 And the president had good reason to believe he would need Marshall’s skills on Capitol Hill. It is no accident that Marshall’s tenure at the State Department coincided almost exactly with the reign of the Republican-dominated Eightieth Congress, the infamous “Do-Nothing Congress,” that sought to frustrate every domestic initiative of the administration and at times would threaten to subvert its transformative foreign policy actions as well. And in the defense of the administration’s international and defense positions the president would get his money’s worth. Marshall’s dignity, rectitude, nonpartisanship—his very austerity—commanded respect from Congress. Except for a small circle of erstwhile isolationists and professional red-baiters, his views were usually accepted as disinterested and irreproachable.
His skill as a lobbyist notwithstanding, Marshall was probably less suited temperamentally for his new role than his old. His two-year incumbency at State had a military stamp not always appropriate for the job. Clearly he brought to his office at Foggy Bottom—the department’s brand-new Washington location—many of the habits and practices he had pursued as army chief of staff. At times War Department precedent served the State Department well. He succeeded in reducing the department’s endless duplication of effort and its descent, over the years, into a version of what Charles Dickens had called the “circumlocution office.” One of his earliest innovations was creation, soon after being sworn in, of a Policy Planning Staff, a version of the army’s War Plans Division that he himself had briefly headed. The new division would be charged with detecting emerging foreign relations problems and proposing long-term solutions. Out of its deliberations would come some of the department’s most important initiatives.
But there were also drawbacks to the military style. Dean Acheson, the debonair undersecretary of state, described his chief’s management approach as that of “the commanding officer.” “He said to me,” Acheson later reported, “that I was to be the chief of staff and that I was to run the Department and that all matters between the Department and the Secretary would come to the Secretary through me with my recommendation, whatever it might be, attached to the action proposed.” Even Acheson, who believed the secretary’s directive clarified the lines of department authority, thought the process “had its drawbacks.”5 For one thing, too many decisions for his personal comfort devolved on him. But beyond Acheson’s own convenience, at times it also led to weak guidance and poor results.
Marshall could count on talented help in his new post. Besides Acheson, who left in July 1947 to repair his tattered family finances and then returned after a brief hiatus, he had as his chief lieutenant Robert Lovett, a former corporation lawyer who had served Stimson as assistant secretary for air and would be Marshall’s alter ego in many of the department’s most difficult negotiations. Others included Will Clayton, another business executive, as undersecretary of state for economic affairs; Dean Rusk, a Georgia-born lawyer and wartime reserve army colonel, as chief of the department’s United Nations “desk,” and Charles “Chip” Bohlen, a foreign service officer with Russian experience and Russian-language skills whom Marshall kept on at State as a close adviser and translator. To head the new Policy Planning Staff he chose George F. Kennan, the knowledgeable—though volatile and temperamental—foreign service officer who in February 1946 had sent from Moscow the incisive “Long Telegram” about Russian policies and characteristics that Marshall had received while in China, and was now back in Washington lecturing at the National War College.
The international landscape during Marshall’s months as secretary of state would be defined by two pivotal realities of the immediate postwar world. First was the overwhelming economic primacy of the United States. America had been the richest country on the globe since at least the early twentieth century, but before the war, with its puny army, its isolationist aversions, and its parochial citizenry, it had counted for little (the Western Hemisphere excepted) in the broad affairs of the powers. Now, after 1945, physically intact; its annual output of goods and services almost equal to the rest of the world’s combined; its people, and especially its elites, at least partially enlightened by the experience of World War II, the United States was a colossus among the nations.
America’s wealth and power conferred on it world leadership, or at least leadership of what would later be called the First World—that is, the non-Communist industrial countries of predominantly European-derived culture. But there was one major impediment to deploying American power in the immediate postwar years: the nation’s military impotence. To his great dismay, Marshall was forced to witness the chaotic disintegration after 1945 of the American military. Under enormous pressure from families, politicians, and rebellious servicemen themselves to “bring the boys home,” the military services had virtually collapsed after VJ-Day. Between May 1945 and June 1947 the size of the American army, including the air corps, shrank from eight million to under one million—troops largely equipped, moreover, with outdated, outworn equipment. The navy and marine corps suffered equally damaging cuts in budget, equipment, and personnel. Marshall, with Truman’s somewhat reluctant support, sought to persuade Congress to create a system of peacetime universal military training (UMT) to avoid the crises of unpreparedness that had afflicted the nation in both 1917 and 1940. To some, on the political left, the UMT proposal seemed another effort to confront the Soviet Union and a further expansion of the emerging Cold War. But the effort failed primarily because Americans were unwilling to bear the expense of a large peacetime army and navy. Congress did extend the wartime draft, though insisting on drastically cutting military appropriations. When considering military spending in the months after August 1945, American policy makers would invoke the atom bomb as part of the nation’s arsenal. But America’s sole possession of the bomb lasted only until September 1949. Nor could the U.S. advantage in atomic weapons be readily brandished in international relations thereafter. Using the new destructive weapon was simply too fraught with serious moral and strategic implications. And besides, the bombs were scarce. In the critical year 1947 the United States had fewer than fifteen.
But Marshall faced a second new international reality and the only real challenge to American ascendency: the growing power and assertiveness of the Soviet Union. Just emerging from the war with human losses of as many as twenty-five million citizens and incalculable physical damage, it also had been the primary savior of Europe from German hegemony and had reaped a harvest of respect and gratitude from many of the Continent’s people, particularly its intellectuals. With its immense army, still formidable after 1945, it easily dominated the lands in Eastern Europe formerly under Hitler’s rule or allied with the Third Reich. Given its age-old envy and suspicion of the West, as well as its acquired Leninist conviction that ultimately capitalism and socialism could not coexist, Russia would emerge as the powerful international rival of the United States. Growing tensions between the former anti-Axis partners had begun emerging as the war wound down. But by early 1947, as Marshall took up the reins of office, the strains between the Soviets and the Western Allies were reaching a critical point.
In recent years revisionist historians have sought to even the balance of blame for the Cold War between the two great international rivals, but Marshall, like most of his countrymen, had little doubt that Soviet expansionist zeal sufficiently explained the conflict. Influenced perhaps by FDR’s optimistic view of Soviet-American relations, for a time he retained crumbs of hope that, as during the war, the Soviet Union was amenable to negotiation and compromise. He would soon be swept up in the Cold War consensus, however, and seldom thereafter questioned the conventional American premise that the effort to hedge in the Soviet Union was a struggle for a freer world, one that fulfilled universal human aspirations. Yet unlike the Soviets’ allies, and many Western intellectuals, he never perceived U.S. foreign policy as a campaign for American hegemony. In a mid-1947 talk to the Women’s National Press Club he expressed indignation at the charge. “There could be no more malicious distortion of the truth,” he declaimed, “than the frequent propaganda assertions . . . that the United States has imperialist aims or that American aid has been offered in order to fasten upon the recipients some sort of political or economic dominion.”6 In their quest for mid-American support, Marshall and his internationalist Cold War colleagues were not averse to underscoring the economic advantages to American business and agriculture of generous public funding of defensive measures against the advance of foreign Communism. But the secretary of state himself had no ulterior capitalist motives. His goal of bolstering the devastated European nations after 1945 combined sympathy for human suffering and sincere concern for preservation of free, autonomous government. It had little to do with expanding American commerce and international economic advantage.
While on his failed mission in China, Marshall had lost touch with evolving postwar U.S. European policy. Like many high American officials he had read George Kennan’s eye-opening Long Telegram, asserting the inevitable antagonism toward the West of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, analyzing the sources of Soviet suspicion and intransigence, and proposing that the United States and the American people confront the “malignant parasite” of international Communism by active diplomatic and cultural combat.7 As secretary of state he later read Kennan’s famous “Mister X” article in Foreign Affairs reiterating the embedded Soviet hostility and proposing patient but resolute “containment” as the way to check Soviet and Communist expansionism. For months, however, he remained uncertain of the inevitability of East-West conflict, for during the war Russia and the Western Allies had managed to resolve differences and develop successful strategies to defeat the common enemy. Why, he wondered, could this cooperation not be sustainable in the postwar era?
A cascade of jarring events would soon transform his outlook. Among the first was the crisis that erupted in late February 1947 when Britain informed the United States that it no longer could financially underwrite the governments of Greece and Turkey, both struggling against growing Soviet pressure for territorial and other concessions. The message from London jolted the foreign policy establishment in Washington. Few decision makers denied that something must be done to prevent Russian expansion into a region hitherto outside the Soviet orbit. Marshall agreed with his colleagues. On February 27, in a White House meeting called by Truman with congressional leaders and foreign policy advisers, the new secretary read a proposal assembled by his staff laying out a plan to meet the crisis. The Marshall-approved scheme was limited in scope and moderate in tone. Without question the United States must take over from Britain, it read. But warning that failure to provide American financial aid to Greece and Turkey would open the door to Soviet expansion in Europe and into the Middle East and Asia was not being “alarmist,” he insisted. And, in fact, there was nothing in the statement about defending democracy everywhere or mounting an anti-Communist world crusade that other “Cold Warriors” had pressed for. And Marshall seemed uncomfortable even with this restrained proposal. In Acheson’s words, he “flubbed” the statement he read to the representatives and senators, prompting Acheson to restate the administration’s case more forcibly to the assembled bigwigs.8
Marshall left Washington for Moscow soon after this meeting to attend the scheduled Foreign Ministers’ Council meeting. The fourth in a series of Allied ministerial conferences initiated by the Big Three leaders at Potsdam, its preliminaries fully occupied his mind and he had little input into President Truman’s formal request to Congress in early March for $250 million for Greece and $150 million for Turkey, which announced that the United States must “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” and “assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”9 Critics attacked this “Truman Doctrine” as an open-ended commitment to confronting the Soviet Union and its allies everywhere in the world. To many informed contemporaries the Greco-Turkish aid bill, signed into law in May, marked the end of hope that the wartime cooperation with Russia could be preserved. Yet as he and his staff left for Europe. Marshall still remained unconvinced that the doors to compromise had slammed tightly shut.
In Moscow, Marshall would be driven to a more intransigent anti-Soviet position in what was now being widely called the Cold War. The secretary, his staff, and colleagues arrived in Moscow by plane on March 9 after brief stopovers in Paris and Berlin for consultation with French leaders and with Gen. Lucius Clay, the military governor of the American occupation zone in Germany. The Soviet capital still revealed the awful depredations of the war. Though the Soviet authorities had sought to burnish its appearance for the foreign visitors, beyond the major avenues the city was decrepit, squalid, and cold, with few people visible on its grimy, snow-covered streets.
The chief items on the conference agenda were peace treaties for Germany and Austria along with the subordinate issues of German reparations, future German self-government, and German unification and economic revival. The participants—France, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—were at odds on many of these subjects. Britain, represented by Ernest Bevin, generally agreed with the United States. Both English-speaking nations, having already merged their occupation zones politically, supported a self-governing future German state, but one limited in power; they opposed a united Germany with a strong central government as a potential danger to Europe’s peace. Rejecting Treasury Secretary Morgenthau’s plan to strip Germany of its heavy industry and convert it into a giant farm, they strongly favored its accelerated economic revival to spare their own nations the need to provide extended support. For that same reason they also endorsed a lenient interpretation of the extent and timing of German reparations. France’s foreign minister, Georges Bidault, fearful of a revived aggressive Germany, agreed with the British and American negotiators regarding German unity, but was chiefly concerned with detaching the coal-rich Ruhr from the future Germany to make its resources accessible to impoverished France. As for the Soviet Union, its case, presented by Marshall’s old sparring partner, the dogged Vyacheslav Molotov, was overtly focused on collecting immediate reparations from Germany out of current German output, but sub rosa, Bevin and Marshall came to believe, the USSR ultimately intended to convert the former Nazi state into a Soviet dependency. The Russians supported a fully unified Germany with a strong central government. To achieve this, they knew, would take time and, they hoped, would provide the local Communists with an extended opportunity to impose a stranglehold on the occupied country, converting it into another Soviet satellite.
In the end little was accomplished by the conference. For six dreary weeks and forty-four frustrating meetings the negotiators wrangled over details, with stalemate facing them at every turn. But Marshall was not yet prepared to concede defeat, and as the negotiators prepared to adjourn, he requested a personal interview with Stalin, a man he believed had been willing in the past to compromise and whose word, once given, could be trusted. On the evening of April 15, accompanied by Bohlen as translator, Marshall was admitted to Stalin’s private office in the Kremlin. For an hour and a half, while the Soviet dictator doodled wolfs’ heads on pads of blue paper, Marshall expressed his concern and depression at “the extent and depth of misunderstandings and differences which had been revealed” at the still-ongoing conference.10 He described the American people’s wartime esteem for the Soviet Union and their growing dismay over recent Soviet behavior. He recounted his differences with Molotov over Germany’s future governance, emphasizing the dangers of the revived German power that would accompany centralized unification as the Soviet Union preferred. Foreshadowing later policies, he told Stalin that the American government “was frankly determined to do what [it could] to assist those countries which are suffering from economic deterioration which, if unchecked, might lead to economic collapse and . . . the elimination of any chance of democratic survival.”11 He ended his discourse with an upbeat picture of wartime Soviet-Allied cooperation and expressed hope that it might be restored.
Still wearing his wartime generalissimo’s uniform, Stalin assured Marshall “that current differences between the two sides should not be taken too seriously.”12 After all, he said, these were only the first skirmishes in what would surely be a drawn-out set of negotiations. The participants must be patient. Despite the conciliatory words, as the Americans left the Kremlin they concluded that Molotov’s obstinacy had derived from the chief himself and they now had little reason to expect progress in the stalled negotiations.
The remaining few days of the conference were as pointless as the earlier ones. On April 24 the ministers held their final meeting, capped by the usual opulent, bibulous Soviet banquet. Two days later Marshall and his colleagues flew home in an atmosphere of gloom and grim failure.
It is generally assumed that Marshall performed well in Moscow, and that disappointment was inevitable given the underlying Soviet agenda. Perhaps. But not all contemporaries, even supporters of the Truman administration’s foreign policy, agreed. The prestigious New York Times diplomatic correspondent, James “Scotty” Reston, who had praised Marshall’s appointment to head the State Department, in a caustic piece on April 30 reviewed Marshall’s performance at Moscow in less than glowing terms. Reston had an unusual grasp of Marshall’s personality, including his limitations and strengths. Like so many others, he was taken in by Marshall’s pose as a “Virginian,” though in his case to the secretary’s detriment: “The overall impression [Marshall] seems to have conveyed [at Moscow] is one of moral grandeur,” Reston conceded. “He was severe and aloof, courteous in manner, but with none of the Virginian’s love of people and capacity for humor,” he wrote. “Inevitably,” he was being compared unfavorably with his predecessor, James Byrnes, “a warm, happy man with a rare capacity for political manipulation and a wonderful stock of illustrative anecdotes.” By contrast, in the entire six weeks in Moscow, Marshall “did not unbend.” He “was as rigid as the Washington Monument.” He was also an enigma. The other Americans at the conference were still “trying to define what manner of man he is.” Removed from his colleagues and fellow ministers, Marshall had also seemed strangely indifferent to results. As Reston described them, his work habits resembled those depicted by Acheson in Washington. Each day he met briefly with his staff at Spaso House, the American Embassy building, to listen to their advice and suggestions. These he accepted “without significant changes,” and then retreated to his room until it was time to drive to the daily ministers’ meetings. When these concluded “he was usually first out of the Conference chamber.” Apparently, wrote Reston, he avoided opportunities to discuss informally major issues with both the Russians and the British. To some observers at Moscow, the Times correspondent concluded, Marshall’s behavior “represented an admirable tidiness of mind,” but “to others . . . a lost opportunity.”13
Not every observer agreed with Reston’s take, nor does it precisely fit the description of the Moscow sessions by Col. Marshall Carter, an aide assigned to take notes on the meetings.* As usual most of the media praised the secretary’s performance. One favorable view is especially interesting for its estimate of Marshall’s personality by a high-level American participant in the conference. The economist Charles Kindleberger, the State Department’s chief of German and Austrian Economic Affairs, in later years expressed great admiration for his boss and his performance in Moscow. He was an “odd man,” a “humorless man,” Kindleberger acknowledged, but—in words that would have pleased Marshall—he was also “a great . . . man who was Olympian in his moral quality, a man of who [sic] one stands in awe,” a “man apart from most men.”14
Two days after arriving home Marshall reported to the nation on the Moscow Conference in a radio broadcast. The brief talk was upbeat. The conference had dealt with the “very heart of the peace for which we are now struggling,” he told his listeners. He described the specific issues at stake and in each case acknowledged little or no progress. But he refused to end on a sour note. He repeated Stalin’s observation that “compromises were possible” between the West and the Soviets, and it was “necessary to have patience and not become pessimistic.” He concluded that “despite the disagreements . . . and the difficulties encountered possibly greater progress towards final settlement was made than is realized.”15 But this final affirmative rhetoric was hooey. In fact Marshall was deeply discouraged. As he later reported, he now realized that the Soviet Union “could not be negotiated with.”16 Something more was required to check Russian ambitions. Other observers gave the failure at Moscow even more weight. Robert Murphy, Lucius Clay’s adviser in Germany, would write that it was the event “that really rang down the Iron Curtain.”17
If nothing else, the experience in Europe underscored the connection between the Continent’s economic recovery and a successful response to the Soviet challenge. In May 1945 Winston Churchill had famously described Europe as “a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground for pestilence and hate.” By 1947, some scholars believe, recovery was already under way—there was no need for American intervention—and they ascribe the American response to Europe’s postwar plight to expansionist American economic policies dating back to the 1920s. But to contemporaries the prostrate nations of Europe did not seem in much better economic shape in mid-1947 than they had on VE-Day. But beyond the purely humanitarian realities, by the time Marshall moved into his new Washington office the political fallout of cold, hunger, lawlessness, and despair had grown ominous. Everywhere within the still-free nations, but particularly in France, Italy, and the Western occupation zones of Germany, the Communists and their allies, playing on desperation and drawing on Soviet prestige, were making deep inroads into the support of conservative, centrist, and even socialist parties, with their goal of converting the free societies into subservient Soviet allies if not de facto Soviet puppets. In early March, before he left with Marshall for Moscow, Will Clayton had sent an urgent memo alerting the State Department to the consequences of failing to grapple with Europe’s predicament. “Feeding on hunger, economic misery, and frustration,” he wrote, attacks to undermine independence were multiplying, and these “had already been successful in some of the liberated countries.” They were imperiling America’s security and must be countered with generous American largesse.18
The roots of the European Recovery Program (ERP) in the political dangers of Europe’s slow postwar rebound are clear. But was George Marshall its father? It is called the Marshall Plan, of course, but it was so named in part for political reasons.
In fact the plight of Western Europe and the need to remedy it were very much in the national air in the early months of the Truman administration. It was, as Kindleberger wrote, “widely discussed during the winter of 1946–47.”19 As he and others have noted, the topic of Europe’s dire needs and their likely political consequences was debated by the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations and considered in prominent articles by the pundit Walter Lippmann and the syndicated columnists the brothers Joseph and Stewart Alsop.
One prominent claimant to authorship of ERP was Dean Acheson, and his role was indeed significant. The undersecretary of state had little doubt that without substantial American aid in these difficult months, European democracy could collapse. But he also knew that after three and a half years of war, Americans were weary of further obligations to Europe and reluctant to pay for its seemingly endless needs. His task, then, as he conceived it, was to make the nature of the growing crisis comprehensible to ordinary Americans, and he found the occasion in a talk he delivered in early May 1947 to an influential Southern business group, the Delta Council of Mississippi.
Acheson’s remarks at Cleveland, Mississippi, were in fact tailored to the interests of American businessmen, specifically those who managed the extractive agricultural exports of Dixie. He laid out the economic difficulties being experienced by Europe, with emphasis on the devastated Continent’s need for American supplies of food, fuel, fiber, and raw materials generally, but without the means to pay for them. With a severely unfavorable balance of trade, the damaged European economies would need large American loans or gifts to make up the deficits—funding beyond the sums for relief already expended or lent through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Export-Import Bank. Such new grants, he told the Mississippi planters, bankers, and merchants in his audience, would make up for Europe’s dearth of American dollars and revive markets for American exporters. But Acheson did not ignore the humanitarian, political, and ideological benefits of American generosity. Human beings, he concluded, existed “on narrow economic margins,” but so too did “human dignity, human freedom, and democratic institutions.” It was “one of the principal aims of [American] foreign policy today to use our economic and financial resources to widen these margins.” It was “our duty and our privilege as human beings.”20
Acheson believed his words to the Delta Council were a “trumpet note” that awakened complacent Americans to the crisis in Europe.21 He exaggerated their importance, however. The perceptive Kindleberger, for one, doubted their significance. “I have had a hard time,” he wrote in a July 1948 memo, “seeing how the Acheson speech at Delta . . . was the midwife to the Marshall plan [sic].”22 Nonetheless their impact, especially on an important economic sector of the public, cannot be dismissed.
Meanwhile, Clayton and Kennan were making their contributions to Europe’s revival. In late May, in a second memo to his colleagues at State, Clayton proposed a six- to seven-billion-dollar three-year grant from the United States with the specifics to be drawn up by the principal European nations themselves. “Without further prompt and substantial aid from the United States,” he warned, “economic, social, and political disintegration will overwhelm Europe.” But, he emphatically cautioned, “the United States must run the show.”23 Kennan’s offering, in the form of PPS/1, the State Department’s first important Policy Planning Paper, was, like Kennan himself, both professorial and inspirational. It called for “effective and dramatic action” to demonstrate that “we mean business, to serve as a catalyst for their hope and confidence, and to dramatize for our people the nature of Europe’s problems and the importance of American assistance.” Though it lacked specific economic details, PPS/1 also recommended that the beneficiaries themselves be charged with drawing up the plans. But, differing with Clayton, it also prescribed, significantly, that they, rather than the United States, administer it. The “formal initiative,” it stated, “must come from Europe; the program must be evolved in Europe; and the Europeans must bear the basic responsibility for it.” Kennan also suggested that any rescue plan include the Soviet Union to avoid blatant, and incendiary, anti-Communist partisanship. The paper ended with a plea that the United States eschew the open-ended commitment of the Truman Doctrine to confront the Soviets’ challenges, even when no vital American interest was at stake.24
In late May Marshall entered the debate, though rather feebly. On the twenty-fourth he convened a meeting of State Department officials, including Acheson, Clayton, Bohlen, and Kennan, to consider PPS/1. He listened carefully to the discussion, but apparently said little beyond asking Kennan what would happen if the Russians accepted the invitation to join the plan. PPS/1 had already noted that if the Soviets rejected it the onus would be on them. Now, responding to Marshall’s query, Kennan pointed out that the United States could put the Russians on the defensive by asking, as a major raw material producer themselves, that they contribute resources to the shared pool. Marshall expressed no overt conclusions. His last advice was a warning to the group against information leaks.
Acheson always felt that his Delta Council address had received less attention than it deserved when first delivered. But the same could be said of the talk by Marshall at Harvard University’s 286th commencement, where, along with Gen. Omar Bradley, the poet T. S. Eliot, the atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and other prominent Americans, he came on June 5 to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree.
His brief speech, of course, would become famous. There, on a sunny Cambridge morning, following the traditional academic procession, the audience of graduates, faculty, dignitaries, and friends and family watched as university officials conferred degrees on two thousand Harvard seniors and graduate students and listened to selected students deliver the time-honored Harvard commencement addresses in Latin. President James Bryant Conant next awarded the honorary degrees, with suitably florid language. Marshall could not have been more pleased with the citation to him—a validation of his own lifelong personal quest—that Conant made in his award. In both Latin and English, Conant intoned: “An American to whom freedom owes an enduring debt of gratitude, a soldier and statesman whose ability and character brook only one comparison in the history of the nation.”
After the conferring ceremonies the dignitaries, honorees, and new graduates and their guests adjourned for a catered lunch followed by a round of brief speeches. It was here that Marshall sought to alert Americans to Europe’s quandary and their government’s need to cope with it. The text of the ten-minute speech was still incomplete when the secretary left Washington for Cambridge. He had not told the president of his intention, nor had he provided the State Department with a copy of its final form. The address, Marshall later said, drew on the thoughts of Kennan and Bohlen, plus his own ideas, and was hastily cobbled together while he was on the plane from Washington.
Marshall’s actual words had little passion or music. (The distinguished diplomatic historian Bradford Perkins, then a fresh-faced new Harvard graduate in the commencement audience, later told his diplomatic history students at Ann Arbor that at the time the speech had not made much of an impression on him.) The “world situation” was “very serious,” Marshall declared, but then, borrowing from Clayton, he described the circumstances of Europe’s plight primarily as an imbalance between city and country: The city factories were not producing the goods that farmers wanted and so they would not provide the food that urban dwellers needed. He then noted Europe’s dearth of dollars to buy necessities from the United States. “Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all.” Adopting the Kennan view that American policy should avoid overt attack on the Soviets, he suggested that it should “not be directed against any country or doctrine but against hunger, desperation, and chaos.” Marshall also agreed with the consensus, Clayton perhaps excepted, that the United States must not act “unilaterally. The beneficiaries of American aid must agree among themselves as to the requirements of the situation and the part these countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this government.”25
Though the New York Times printed the speech on its front page, the American public scarcely noticed the occasion. For Acheson and others in Washington, however, it was an opportunity to start the process of rallying the European nations themselves to the planning process. Acheson had already alerted British diplomats and journalists in Washington and New York of American plans for Europe’s rescue. In London, the brief address caught Bevin’s immediate attention. Described to him by a BBC journalist as a speech that proposed “a totally new continental approach to the problem of Europe’s economic crisis,” a scheme that recalled “the grandeur of the original concept of Lend-Lease,” Bevin “grabbed the offer with both hands,” as he later told an American audience.26 Joining with France’s Bidault, he and his fellow foreign minister summoned a conference in Paris of other interested European nations to consider how to comply with the American proposal.
The Committee of European Economic Cooperation (CEEC), composed of sixteen nations, set to work in Paris in mid-July to design a program that met the American criteria. Though invited, the Soviets and their allies refused to join the meetings. Several of the satellite nations were initially bedazzled by the American proffer of aid but, bullied by the Russians, joined them in denouncing the meetings as an anti-Soviet maneuver intended to promote American hegemony. The State Department sent Clayton to Paris as observer and adviser; Kennan and other State Department officials visited the conference to contribute to the deliberations. Marshall himself kept in touch with the proceedings by telegram. But the secretary of state played little direct part in the late summer meetings, where the European nations hammered out their detailed response to the American proposal for reconstructing the continent’s economy. Once the European nations had drawn up and submitted a recovery proposal, however, his role in persuading Congress to appropriate the necessary funds became vital.
The CEEC plan, completed on September 12 and formally delivered to Washington on October 9 by a small European delegation, followed the general outlines provided by the American planners. It laid out a four-year program costing $22 billion and called for a limited integration of the European economies that foreshadowed the later multinational European Economic Community and the European Union. The CEEC delegation in Washington discussed the plan with State Department officials, specifically with Lovett substituting for Marshall, who was then busy with meetings of the UN in New York and preparing for another foreign ministers’ conference in Europe scheduled for the later fall. One of the chief stumbling blocks between giver and takers was the size of the financial request. Twenty-two billion dollars was far more than Congress would approve, and the White House and State Department quickly cut it to $17 billion to be doled out over four years. Another problem was the pressing need for immediate emergency aid to tide the Europeans, especially the French and the Italians, over the interval until the planned assistance could arrive. To meet the crisis, in late October, Truman called Congress into special session. Marshall temporarily dropped his other activities and, testifying before a joint House-Senate committee, urged passage of the interim rescue measure as part of the larger proposal. The president himself appeared before a joint session to push adoption of the emergency appropriation. Despite the high-powered support, congressional Republicans fought the legislation and mauled the State Department for its supposed past multiple sins. The attacks foreshadowed the dissent ahead when authorization of the full plan was brought up for debate. Yet despite the rancor, just before the Christmas recess, Congress appropriated $522 million for distressed Italy, France, and Austria.
Shortly before this the administration introduced the bill to authorize the full European Recovery Program. As Forrest Pogue notes, it was at about this time that Truman began calling the ERP the “Marshall Plan.” The name was frankly expedient. Truman was running for president in his own right, and his ratings with the public were low. He sought to avoid too close a personal connection with the scheme. As the president told his friends: “Can you imagine [the bill’s] chances of passage in an election year in a Republican Congress if it is named for Truman and not Marshall?”27
Marshall’s major contribution to the plan that acquired his name came with his return from the fifth Council of Foreign Ministers’ meetings in mid-December. The conference, held in London between November 25 and December 16, was, as Marshall later reported, “a dreary repetition of what had been said and re-said at the Moscow conference.”28 Once again virtually nothing was accomplished. The secretary spent the Christmas holidays, as usual, with his family, but returned to Washington in early January to add his voice to the debate in Congress that soon swirled around final passage of ERP. Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 8, he made his case for the measure. He and the committee chairman, the Republican Arthur Vandenberg, had long worked together on issues of foreign policy. A late convert from Midwestern isolationism, the intellectually ponderous, bespectacled Michigan senator had been instrumental in forging a bipartisan internationalist postwar foreign policy. Now, once again, he came to the aid of a law to involve the United States in the affairs of the overseas world. The precise details of the collaboration of the two men are not known, but Marshall would later recount frequent meetings with Vandenberg at Blair House, near the White House, to plot strategy. He would later tell Pogue that Vandenberg “was just the whole show when we got to the actual movement of the thing.”29
Actually Marshall himself now contributed substantially to the “show.” His testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 8 was widely viewed as effective. This time, Scotty Reston of the Times gave him high marks: “He was clear. He was calm. He was patient and courteous. And yet,” Reston wrote, “he acted like a man who was determined to get substantially the Marshall Plan he wanted or, as already rumored in the capital, retire at last to Leesburg.”30 In his testimony Marshall noted the careful studies made of Europe’s needs and of available American resources to meet them. He promised that the government would guard against waste and make the programs work effectively. In the question period following his presentation he sought to reassure the senators that the State Department could manage the program by itself; there was no need for a separate group to oversee it. He denied that the Europeans would use their recovery to injure American business interests. And, he assured the senators, Congress would be frequently consulted in the day-to-day operations of the program. His biggest problem, perhaps, was overcoming congressional parsimony. Seventeen billion dollars, after the many billions of the war itself, seemed outrageous to many frugal Republicans. Marshall defended the size and timing of the requested appropriation.
In his appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee several days later Marshall shifted ground. If to the Senate he had emphasized prudence, before the lower chamber he deployed fear, his words reflecting his now-full-blown certainty of Communist evil and aggressive Soviet intentions. “Left to their own resources there will be,” he pronounced, “no escape [by Europeans] from economic distress so intense, social discontents so violent, political confusion so widespread, and hope of the future so shattered that the historic base of Western civilization . . . will take a new form in the image of the tyranny we fought to destroy in Germany.”31 The European nations had done what they could to restart their war-devastated societies, but they now urgently needed dollars that the United States alone could supply. To administer the recovery program he urged an executive agency with a single administrator. In response to questions from skeptical representatives, he also played the economic-benefits card. If Europe collapsed the United States would confront serious trade barriers abroad and would also be compelled to spend far more than otherwise on national security.
By mid-January, Marshall and the other high-level supporters of ERP had effectively presented their case to Congress. But in a presidential election year it was vital that the American voters also be convinced. There already existed a national committee under former secretary Stimson, formed to rally public opinion in favor of the recovery program. But Marshall’s participation in the selling job was indispensable, and, setting aside his infirmities, he campaigned for ERP as vigorously as a much younger man. Marshall toured the entire country spreading the ERP gospel, with special emphasis on places where the “opposition” was expected to be strongest, including the Chicago area, where the archconservative publisher Robert McCormick and his isolationist, xenophobic Chicago Tribune reigned supreme. The secretary spoke before scores of groups: the Federation of Women’s Clubs, university faculties at Berkeley and UCLA, the National Association of Manufacturers, the CIO, Pittsburgh industrialists, Iowa corn farmers, Southern cotton and tobacco planters. Even more than before he focused on the dangers of Communist triumph in the weakened nations of Western Europe. His words at times invoked an almost Manichaean battle between good and evil: “This is a world-wide struggle between freedom and tyranny,” he told a California audience, “between the self-rule of many as opposed to the dictatorship of the ruthless few.”32 But he was also more pragmatic, often emphasizing the economic gains for America of a recovered and prosperous Europe. Generally, he later reported, he was well received, but it was often “a hard fight.”33
The definitive bill incorporating the Economic Recovery Program—the Economic Cooperation Act—was officially introduced in Congress in late 1947. During the debate over its passage, it encountered opposition from both the political Left and Right. Midwestern Republicans, with Ohio’s scholarly and dour Robert Taft their leading spokesman, fought to cut the funding and even to replace the whole bill. Outside Congress, former vice president Henry A. Wallace, a man of the idiosyncratic Left, who had been fired from the cabinet by Truman in 1946 for his pro-Soviet views, attacked the legislation as a sellout to American big business and a provocative act against America’s former Russian allies. Fearing its warlike consequences, Wallace labeled the program the “Martial Plan.” His views, of course, were seconded in the country at large by other domestic partisans of the Soviet bloc. The long debate in Congress was overshadowed in late February by the Communist seizure of power in hitherto democratic Czechoslovakia, abetted by the suspicious death of the pro-Western Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk. Raising new fears of Soviet expansionist goals, the coup communicated a new urgency to the debate that helped the plan’s supporters.
As passed by Congress in April 1948, the ERP measure authorized a total of $13.3 billion to be doled out, in the form of loans and gifts (often of commodities rather than cash) in yearly installments, the first one of $5 billion. Though some critics have demurred—claiming its size was too small to have jump-started Europe’s economy and that the physical repair of Western Europe had already been achieved by the time of its passage—its effects, both economic and political, have generally been applauded. During the years when American funds and goods were crossing the Atlantic the aggregate output of Western Europe leaped by 32 percent, with agriculture up from prewar levels by 11 percent and industrial levels by 40 percent. The Marshall Plan, it is said, also checked incipient European inflation, helped modernize European economic accounting systems, and launched the Continent’s process of economic unification. Most prominently, defenders of the West’s liberal capitalism have celebrated its political effects. Its psychological impact, they say, probably checked a potential Communist victory in Italy’s parliamentary elections that May. In the longer view, everywhere outside direct Soviet control, though it remained a formidable force in European political life, Communism as a threat to democratic institutions retreated, with the shift most visible in Germany, France, and Italy. In brief the Marshall Plan, according to mainstream Western opinion, was an extraordinary achievement that checked the Communist threat and solidified the West’s struggle to prevail in the Cold War.
It has been said that “success has many fathers.” Clearly, in this case, George Marshall was one. In most of the liberal Western world, he would be acclaimed for the plan. His presumed parental role would inspire Time’s second occasion to proclaim him “Man of the Year.” The European Recovery Program would also be the basis for his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in October 1953. Moreover, as the present authors have personally observed, in the twenty-first century, even among well-educated Americans, Marshall’s historical reputation rests almost exclusively on his association with ERP; virtually all his other roles and accomplishments have been forgotten.
And, of course, he deserves kudos for the program that took his name. He hired George Kennan to plan for the State Department and encouraged him to express his views frankly on the European recovery issue. He absorbed the contributions of Acheson, Clayton, and Bohlen and melded them into a roughly coherent whole. Most important, however, he placed his reputation for objectivity, integrity, and independence behind the program both before Congress and the American public. Still, putting it bluntly, he did not author the Marshall Plan. Marshall acknowledged the contributions of many in Congress to the final result. He was particularly generous in his praise of Senator Vandenberg, who worked undauntedly for ERP’s passage. But he never claimed personal authorship of the plan and always refused to call it by its common name. Yet he was proud of his labors to get ERP enacted into law. “I worked on that as hard as though I was running for the Senate or the presidency,” he later told Pogue. “That’s what I’m proud of, that part of it.”34
But there was other important business besides the fate of Western Europe clamoring for the secretary of state’s attention. One of his most challenging, if unexpected, dilemmas was the future of Palestine and the fate of Europe’s surviving Jews.
This ancient people, stateless and widely dispersed since the Roman-Jewish wars of the first Christian century, had a long, calamitous history of persecution and lethal abuse by their gentile neighbors, whether Christian, Muslim, or pagan. After 1945 thousands of Jewish survivors of the European Holocaust—part of the vast contingent of postwar “displaced persons” who roamed the Continent desperately seeking safe, permanent homes—looked to Palestine for refuge. But for Jews the quest was often for more than an immediate secure haven. Over the centuries, for many in the world Jewish Diaspora, a return to the land of their forebears, to “Zion,” was a yearning that transcended immediate problems and even when not overt, often lay beneath the surface of consciousness.
For many of Europe’s Jews the political and intellectual revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had provided an alternative to Zion. Rejecting the narrow bigotry of both traditional Catholicism and Protestantism, the apostles of the secular Enlightenment sought to end the many civil and economic disabilities imposed by the churches and governments of Europe on the Jewish minorities. In Western and Central Europe, though not in benighted imperial Russia, Jews became full citizens in this period, for the first time able to vote, own land, choose their occupations, live where they pleased, marry whom they wished, and attend universities. The lifting of past burdens unleashed a wave of Jewish secular creativity that produced a disproportionate number of men of talent and genius in science, government, business, and the arts.
And yet, even in the post-Enlightenment world, hatred of Jews remained, especially in Eastern Europe but also to lesser degrees in Germany, France, and Austria. Even democratic Britain and the United States were not entirely free in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of disdain for, and suspicion of, Jews and of humiliating half-hidden social and economic discrimination that hung like a pall over Jews’ lives and hopes.
The continued scorn and bigotry of Christians disillusioned a segment of Jewish intellectuals with the new liberal regimes. Some turned to socialism as an alternative. But others turned to Zionism. The Jews, Zionists claimed, would find their salvation not in a state supposedly founded on egalitarian social principles, but in a nation of their own established on the sacred soil of ancient Judaea, now part of Palestine, a province of the Ottoman Empire. There Jews could finally become a majority and be transformed into a “normal” people with the full range of modern social and cultural life that had been denied them even in post-Enlightenment Europe.
The father of the modern Zionist movement was a charismatic Austro-Hungarian journalist, Theodor Herzl, whose 1896 book, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), awakened the dormant Zionism of Jews around the world and led to the creation in 1897 of the World Zionist Organization. The movement appealed initially to the oppressed Jewish masses of Eastern Europe though it also won adherents among German and Western European Jewish intellectuals. It even attracted a group of gentile philo-Semites, especially those whose Christianity was strongly imprinted with Old Testament biblical culture. In 1917, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour—prodded by the eminent Russian-British scientist Chaim Weizmann and seeking the support of world Jewry for the Allied cause in World War I—declared in a public letter to Baron Walter Rothschild of the eminent Jewish banking family that the British government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This “Balfour Declaration” contained an important qualifier, however. “Nothing shall be done,” it declared, “which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities” in the then-part of the enemy Central Powers. In 1920, after the dissolution of the Turkish empire, Britain accepted trusteeship of Palestine as a League of Nations “mandate,” with authority to govern the land until it was ready for self-rule. For some years afterward the Palestine mandate included the territory east of the Jordan River, the region that eventually became the independent Arab nation of Jordan.
What followed was a substantial migration of zealous working-class Jews, and a sprinkling of Jewish intellectuals and idealists, to Palestine determined to create a new society that would provide refuge for Jews, fulfill the prophets’ predictions, and refute the stereotype of Jews as parasites on gentile society. In the 1930s they were joined by thousands of German Jews driven out of their homeland by Nazi persecution. By the eve of World War II the Yishuv—the Jewish community of Palestine—had grown to almost half a million and had won broad international admiration for creating egalitarian agricultural communities and flourishing modern towns and cities in an impoverished land long neglected under Turkish sovereignty. Speaking for the community’s relations to Britain, the mandate authority, was the Jewish Agency, a body established in 1929.
But there were daunting obstacles in the way of the Zionist dream. The non-Jewish Arab population of mandate Palestine, initially twice the size of the Yishuv, supported by Muslims throughout the Middle East, strongly resisted the Jewish intrusion into what they perceived as their nation. During the 1920s and 1930s Arab Palestinians launched numerous savage attacks against Jewish settlements. Jews fought back. In response to the turmoil, in 1939 the British government issued a White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine to a total of 75,000 during 1940–45. Thereafter the Arab majority would determine the number of new Jewish immigrants, a sure formula for zero. The paper also limited the rights of the Jews to buy land from Arab owners. Soon after the document’s issuance, World War II, with its catastrophic impact on Europe’s Jews, enveloped the European continent. At the very moment the Jewish community of Europe most needed a safe refuge, it was denied all but a trickle of opportunity to escape the disaster. It did not take long for Zionist and Yishuv leaders to defy the mandate authorities and organize ways to smuggle refugees into Palestine. The mandate authorities in turn imposed a harsh blockade to keep them out, a response that undoubtedly worsened the evolving humanitarian disaster in Europe.
The fate of the Jews in Europe and Palestine inevitably concerned their American coreligionists. In the twentieth century the American Jewish community, with more than four million members by the late 1930s, was the largest in the world, but on the question of Zionism it was divided. Many assimilated German-American Jews dissented from the notion of separate statehood for Jews. It would, they felt, raise the uncomfortable issue of divided loyalties. They were, they insisted, Americans of the Hebrew faith, not just Jews who happened to live in America. The Zionist appeal was especially strong among the more recent, and much larger, cohort of Eastern European Jews predominantly from former czarist lands, the Balkans, and Austria-Hungary.
The Holocaust, the systematic mass murder by the Germans and their allies during World War II of more than six million of Europe’s Jews changed the picture of Palestine’s future dramatically. At the war’s end almost a million Holocaust survivors, physically and emotionally broken by their horrific ordeal, remained in Europe. Few Jewish displaced persons from Eastern Europe wished to return to their former home countries, where in many cases their gentile neighbors remained hostile and even homicidal toward them. Few Western nations, including the United States, suffering either from lingering anti-Jewish feelings or concerned with their own limping postwar economic recoveries, wished to admit as residents more than a trickle of these beaten people.* In 1947 many thousands were still cooped up in squalid camps, barely surviving on Allied or UN largesse. The only hope, it seemed to many Jews and their gentile friends, was for them to join the Yishuv in Palestine, now six hundred thousand strong.
But the Palestinian Arabs and the far larger Middle Eastern Muslim community remained bitterly hostile and promised to fight every attempt to foist the Jewish problem on them or their coreligionists. And though disunited, and still without the political clout of later years, they could not be ignored in the calculations of Western leaders. First there was the emerging Cold War to consider. British and many American policy makers feared that supporting the Jews would propel the Arabs of the Middle East into the arms of the Soviets. Moreover, the Zionists’ Middle Eastern Arab enemies sat on the largest pool of underground oil in the world, a cornucopia that gave them enormous influence. Recognizing this asset, on the way back from the Yalta Conference in early 1945, President Roosevelt had met with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia to consider issues of mutual American and Arab concern and asked the king what should be done about the plight of the surviving Jews of Europe. Saud answered that the refugees should be forced to return to their homelands and that the defeated Germans should pay the costs of their presence. In fact Ibn Saud harbored even harsher views of the Zionist enterprise than he expressed to FDR. At one point, according to a later American ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the king had told him that “if America should choose in favor of the Jews who are accursed in the Koran as enemies of the Muslims until the end of the world, it will indicate to us that America has repudiated her friendship with us.”35 In any case Roosevelt promised Ibn Saud to do nothing that “prove[d] hostile to the Arab people.”36
Americans of many persuasions, religious and political, disagreed with Saud about the postwar “Jewish problem.” The Republicans Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey, as well as many Democrats—southern conservatives as well as northern liberals—sympathized with the brutalized Jews of postwar Europe, as did most American Christians, especially, perhaps, those of conservative Protestant faith. But this did not mean they invariably favored nationhood for the Jews in Palestine. Many saw the problem as essentially one of providing a haven abroad for Jewish refugees; nationhood was another matter. As for American Jews, few doubted that the survivors of the death camps must be helped and, by 1945, most favored Jewish autonomy or nationhood status for the Yishuv. Especially adamant on statehood was a group of American Jewish religious leaders, including Rabbis Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver, and prominent and influential secular Jews such as Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Louis Brandeis, and the world-renowned scientist Albert Einstein.
Within the Truman administration the Zionists could count on White House aide David Niles and Clark Clifford, the president’s trusted legal counsel. But these men were outnumbered in administration and executive circles by the doubters and dissenters. Especially skeptical of Zionism, and even of Jewish refugee concerns, was a group of officials within the State Department, particularly those responsible for overall planning for specific Middle Eastern matters. These included, most prominently, chief planner Kennan, Loy Henderson of the Near Eastern and African Affairs Division, and Dean Rusk at the department’s UN desk. The anti-Zionists of State were seconded by many officials in the newly formed Defense Department and the armed forces, including the secretary, James V. Forrestal.
Zionists would often accuse these men of anti-Semitism—of disliking Jews as a race or as members of a religious community.
But it was not that simple. Indeed they were not philo-Semites; as a group they did not share the emotional identification of Christian Zionists with the Jews as the onetime “chosen people,” and perhaps among themselves they may even have displayed the casual anti-Semitism of the upper-class WASP society of the day. But their opposition to the Zionist agenda derived primarily from their view of America’s interests in the Middle East. As a Joint Chiefs of Staff paper of 1948 noted, the creation of a Jewish state would certainly trigger violence between Arabs and Jews, curtailing American influence in the area and requiring American military intervention to prevent disaster. The Joint Chiefs and others also worried about the loss of the oil resources of the Middle East if the United States offended the Arabs. Others in the administration feared that supporting the Jews would benefit the Russians, who would opportunistically rush to the Arabs’ defense. It was therefore of “great strategic importance to the United States,” concluded the Joint Chiefs’ paper, “to retain the good will of the Arab and Moslem states.”37 These feelings were echoed in several State Department policy-planning papers and in Kennan’s diary in late January 1948. There Kennan concluded that Americans could not afford to be “the keepers and moral guardians of all the peoples of the world.”38 In short, favoring the Jews would offend the Arabs and their millions of Muslim supporters and create dangerous risks and turmoil in a part of the world where the United States had a substantial stake.
Marshall himself was free of the casual disdain for Jews that colored the attitudes of his class and was strong as well among the professional military caste. As noted, Bernard Baruch was one of his closest personal friends and later, as secretary of defense, he would resolutely defend Anna Rosenberg, his choice for assistant secretary of defense for manpower, when her nomination came under fire in the Senate and in the press from right-wingers and anti-Semites. Yet, though he recognized the humanitarian aspects of the Palestine issue, Marshall did not share the sentimental affinity for Zionism of the avid Christian Bible readers. To him, as to the pro-Arab officers of the State Department, the Palestine issue ultimately boiled down to expediency: The United States must choose what was best for the United States; the rest was irrelevant.
But in the end it was the president who really counted. As a liberal humanitarian, Truman deeply sympathized with the plight of Europe’s displaced Jews. As senator, in 1943, even before the worst horrors of the Nazi genocide had been revealed, he declared that everything “humanly possible” must be done to provide a safe haven for Europe’s Jews.39 He was also a traditional Midwestern Protestant who read and knew his Bible. He was, then, by and large a Christian philo-Semite who admired not only Moses and King David and Isaiah, but also the venerable Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and American Zionist moderates like Reform rabbi Stephen Wise. As a senator, even before his elevation to the presidency, he had joined fellow members of Congress in support of free immigration of Jews to Palestine and the eventual establishment there of a Jewish homeland. And whenever his resolve slipped, American Zionists could often rely on the president’s good Missouri Jewish friend and former Kansas City haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, to stiffen his back. Yet Truman was capable of losing patience with zealous Jews and their barrage of importunings. Early in his administration, exasperated by a raft of Zionist petitions opposing a compromise plan for Palestine, he burst out at a cabinet meeting: “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on earth so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?”40 At one point in the long international debate over Palestine he confided to his diary: “The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Yugoslavs or Greeks got murdered or mistreated as DPs as long as the Jews get special treatment.”41 Yet to the end he remained the Zionists’ best and most powerful friend and, on the Palestine issue, resented the “career officials” in the State Department who believed that it was they, not the “elected officials,” who “really make policy and run the government.”42
The policy struggles within the Truman administration to ease the plight of Europe’s Jewish survivors and cope with the Zionist dream for postwar Palestine proceeded in a series of small contentious, controversial steps. The first was the effort to rescind the restrictive British immigration policy and allow large numbers of Europe’s displaced Jews entry into Palestine. In August 1945 Truman read the State Department report compiled by Earl G. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, vividly describing the sordid, oppressive refugee camps where many Jews were lodged. The report, he said, sickened him. The situation there was “practically as bad as it was under the Germans.” The solution, he concluded, was to improve the way the American military was running the camps and then open the doors of both the United States and Palestine to the afflicted people.43 At the end of August, Truman sent a copy of the Harrison Report to British prime minister Attlee along with a letter asking him to lift the immigration quota for Jews and admit one hundred thousand refugees to Palestine. But meanwhile the president took care to inform zealous American Zionist leaders that their demand for a Jewish state was “not in the cards now.” Its creation, he warned, might “cause a Third World War.”44
Truman’s letter and the Harrison Report angered British officials. Palestine was a British mandate. The American government and president, they said, were putting their noses into other people’s business. Although previously friendly to Zionism, the Labour Party also balked at further offending the Arabs. In October, British foreign minister Bevin proposed a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry as a way of directly involving the United States in the resolution of the Palestine issue. Truman and Secretary of State Byrnes accepted, though Chaim Weizmann, now ailing and elderly, along with other Zionists, denounced the further delay. Several of the most militant, including Rabbi Silver, a Republican ally of Robert Taft, attacked Truman for reneging on his earlier position on statehood. Truman responded by repeating his reservations. He did not intend, he told a friend, to go “to war for Palestine.”45
The joint Anglo-American committee formed following Bevin’s suggestion, after extensive hearings and careful investigation in Europe, the Middle East, and in Palestine itself, submitted its report in April 1946. It proposed major changes in the anti-Zionist mandate policies: The British authorities, as Truman had suggested, should immediately admit one hundred thousand Jewish DPs to Palestine and repeal the White Paper’s restrictions on Jewish land purchases and the overall limit on immigration. On the issue of statehood, however, the committee held back. Having encountered adamant and militant Arab protests in the course of its investigation, it recommended against either a Jewish or Arab state, proposing instead an eventual binational entity where both groups could express their legitimate national aspirations.
Truman found the report praiseworthy. But the British government and the ardent Zionists did not. By now, desperate Jewish extremists in Palestine—members of the Stern Gang, the Irgun, and other militant Zionist groups—had begun violent attacks on British targets, including mandate property and British military personnel. The mandate authorities in return imposed harsh punishments, including arrests of Yishuv leaders and hangings of captured terrorists to reestablish order. The violence disturbed Truman, who now worried that the United Stares would be forced to send troops to Palestine to help Britain, and requested the Joint Chiefs to consider the issue. Their June 1946 report decried any use of American soldiers in the Middle East. Such a move might induce the Soviet Union to increase its presence in the region, and that in turn would vitally affect the Western nations’ access to its oil resources. Marshall was, of course, no longer an active member of the Joint Chiefs, but their views undoubtedly influenced his own thinking on the subject of Palestine.
With Britain and the Arabs still adamantly opposed to admitting a substantial number of Jewish refugees to Palestine, the debate shifted to its partition into two political entities, one Jewish, one Arab, with Britain either abandoning the mandate entirely or continuing as trustee in a loose federation of the two autonomous statelets. In October 1946, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy Day of Atonement, and only a few weeks before the midterm U.S. elections, Truman issued a statement supporting a version of partition, excluding the unsettled southern Negev Desert, as the solution of the Palestine problem. The proposal got nowhere. Britain refused to accept partition, and spokesmen for the Arabs were even more intransigently opposed, King Ibn Saud sending two royal princes to Washington to protest personally to Truman. On the other side the most militant Zionists rejected any plan to surrender any part of the Holy Land, including the desert area, but the more moderate Jewish Agency, the voice of the Yishuv, accepted it as promising Jewish sovereignty, however limited, to a part of Palestine. Meanwhile, battered by widespread violence in Palestine and admitting its inability to settle the question, on April 2, 1947, Britain requested that the issue be put on the general agenda of the United Nations, then holding its sessions at Lake Success on Long Island. The UN General Assembly quickly appointed an ad hoc committee (UNSCOP*) made up of eleven member states, chosen to represent all continents, to consider the status and future of Palestine and to submit its report on September 1.
The administration welcomed the development; if nothing else the UN’s intervention would provide a needed breathing space. Meanwhile, the president and Marshall believed they should avoid any attempt to influence the General Assembly’s decisions. When ardent American supporters of the Zionist position protested against this hands-off policy, Marshall replied that the United States wished to avoid hobbling the General Assembly investigation and deliberations. But, he promised, the United States would respond when the committee made its report. One development that the Americans could not have anticipated was the abrupt change in attitude toward the Palestine issue announced by the Soviet delegate to the UN in mid-May. Until then the Russians, seeking to court the Arabs, had been hostile to the Zionists. Now, however, they saw the advantage of a split between Britain and America, their two major Cold War adversaries, to be achieved by endorsing Truman’s position and defying British opinion. Accordingly, in his May 14 UN statement, the Russian representative, Andrei Gromyko, announced that the Soviet Union considered the British mandate bankrupt and favored Jewish aspirations for statehood. If a united Arab-Jewish state could not be created, then the USSR would endorse a partition of Palestine into two autonomous countries.
Though Marshall agreed with the president on avoiding U.S. pressure on the General Assembly, he disagreed with Truman on the partition issue. One explanation for his stand is that he was seeking to blunt Gromyko’s strategy of dividing Britain and America. We know that he was deeply concerned about the anti-American effect in Britain of the flood of pro-Zionist views and propaganda by prominent and influential Americans and wished to tamp it down. But the influence of his colleagues at State was even more potent. According to Jewish Agency spokesman Eliahu Epstein, the fault lay with the rabidly anti-Zionist Loy Henderson. Marshall, he pointed out, was still new to his job and inexperienced. This made him particularly vulnerable to views flowing from the veteran hands at Foggy Bottom, and also receptive to the positions of the War and Navy Departments where the large American oil companies, he noted, wielded enormous influence.
UNSCOP began its work in mid-June 1947, conducting hearings and investigations in both Europe and Palestine. Hostile Arab groups either boycotted the committee or demonstrated against it; by contrast, wherever the UN delegates went they were wooed and cheered by the friendly local Jews. The committee’s report, submitted on August 31, presented the General Assembly with two proposals, both written by Ralph Bunche, an American UN official of African descent. Both agreed that the British mandate should be ended and Palestine be given autonomy. The minority scheme, however, endorsed by delegates of three nations, rejected partition and suggested instead a federal state with separate Jewish and Arab divisions. The majority plan, signed by delegates of seven nations, proposed creation of separate, fully independent Arab and Jewish states—the partition version favored by the Jewish Agency and even those ardent Zionists who had reluctantly abandoned their plan for a Jewish state coterminous with all of mandate Palestine.
The proposal came before the second meeting of the UN General Assembly in mid-September 1947. During the six weeks of debate that followed, American Zionists, backed by the Jewish Agency, strongly endorsed the majority partition scheme. As for the Yishuv, as the U.S. consul ceneral in Palestine reported to Marshall, they were “elated.” By contrast, Arab leaders denounced both reports virtually without exception. The Arab Higher Committee, the Arab counterpart of the Jewish Agency, insisted that their people “would never allow a Jewish state to be established in one inch of Palestine.” Any attempt “to impose any solution contrary to the Arabs’ birthright,” they threatened, would “only lead to trouble and bloodshed and probably to a third World War.”46
During the weeks that followed the UNSCOP report, Zionists, both in America and abroad, worried about the American response. Despite all the indicators, the State Department’s official position remained in doubt, yet American approval was essential to the success of partition plus statehood. At the UN the American delegation, headed by former senator Warren Austin and including Eleanor Roosevelt, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, and John Foster Dulles, kept in close touch with the president and Secretary Marshall over the issue before the General Assembly. On September 15 Marshall came to New York to speak to the General Assembly. Before the speech he consulted members of the U.S. delegation on the Palestine issue. The secretary still seemed uncertain where he stood. He listened to differing views regarding the position the United States should take on the majority report. He told the American delegates that the Zionists were pushing him hard, but he feared that if the United States adopted the majority report the Arabs would react with violence. The United States must avoid provoking the Arabs and “precipitating their rapprochement with the Soviet Union,” as would happen if he took a clear stand in favor of the partition proposal. Yet Marshall was uneasy with his own equivocation. If he avoided a clear position, he acknowledged, he would be accused of “pussyfooting.”47 Marshall left the meeting without expressing his decision, and the evasiveness was reflected in his speech to the General Assembly two days later. The United States, he said, gave “great weight” to both reports but would await the outcome of the General Assembly’s debate before deciding how to vote its final recommendations.48 In effect, whatever his discomfort, he was indeed “pussyfooting.”
On November 29, 1947, by direct order of the president and to the dismay of Henderson and Kennan, the U.S. delegates voted with a majority of the General Assembly, including the Soviet Union, to accept the partition plan. In the end Marshall had apparently acquiesced in the decision to establish two separate entities in mandated Palestine, though with serious misgivings.
Meanwhile, the president wavered. In February of the new year, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Warren Austin, delivered a speech that seemed to withdraw American support for partition in favor of a trusteeship arrangement for Palestine. Truman, in turn, seemed to acquiesce. Zionist were horrified and vehemently protested. Annoyed by what seemed like endless Zionist importuning, until fervently implored by his old Kansas City friend Eddie Jacobson the president initially refused to see Zionist elder statesman Chaim Weizmann who, in an earlier visit to the White House had persuaded the president to support the Zionist inclusion of the undeveloped Negev Desert in the Jewish portion of the partition. Now Weizmann clearly sought to change Truman’s mind on the trusteeship issue. The soft-spoken scientist apparently got Truman to modify his view and so to instruct the U.S. delegation to the UN. Unfortunately, however, Ambassador Austin did not get the message. To the president’s dismay, on March 19 Austin spoke to the Security Council proposing that the partition resolution be suspended in favor of a temporary trusteeship. The president took no blame for the gaffe; the “striped-pants boys” at the State Department, he insisted, were to blame. As for Marshall, he was now firmly on the side of the State Department’s core members who favored a trusteeship over independence and wished the Zionists would just go away. Besides fearing that America might be dragged into a Middle East war, he deplored the political pandering to the Jewish vote, which he believed governed much of the administration’s pro-Zionist posturing.
By now violence had replaced diplomacy as the decisive factor in Palestine’s fate. Within hours of the UN vote Arab forces attacked Jewish settlements in Palestine; Jewish paramilitary forces counterattacked. In December the British announced that they would be abandoning their mandate in mid-May, leaving the contending forces in Palestine to fight it out for themselves. With Palestine now a battleground, Marshall thought the Jews’ position hopeless. As he would tell the Jewish Agency’s Moshe Shertok on May 8, his people were surrounded by millions of hostile Arab neighbors and had their backs to the sea. As a military man he must warn Shertok to avoid false optimism even though the Jews seemed initially to be repelling their attackers. The State Department having the previous December embargoed all arms shipments to the Middle East, if the Jews thought that the United States would come to their rescue, they were mistaken, he added. They had chosen a risky course.
But if the United States would not provide military aid, would it support the Jews diplomatically? Would the administration recognize an independent State of Israel, whose declaration of which the Yishuv was about to announce? Would it support the new nation in its expected application for diplomatic recognition and admission to the UN? In the world’s view American recognition seemed essential to establishing both Israel’s de facto and de jure statehood, the latter presuming the formal exchange of ministers.
On May 12, two days before the final British departure from Palestine, Truman assembled his foreign policy advisers, including Marshall and Lovett, in the White House to consider the crucial recognition issue. The meeting was essentially a performance. The president had already made up his mind: He would support recognition in some form and had instructed his counsel, Clark Clifford, to come to the meeting prepared to defend his position. The handsome, debonair Clifford was a willing presidential agent. He was a Zionist, not by birth but by education, with Federal Judge Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s adviser on Jewish matters, his chief mentor. The brash young lawyer, like the president himself, had little respect for the State Department’s regulars, who, he believed, constantly sought to undermine the White House. He sometimes felt, he later wrote, that the Loy Henderson group “preferred to follow the views of the British Foreign Office rather than those of their president.”49 But would Marshall support the anti-Zionist Henderson faction of his department? Truman thought he knew in which direction the secretary would tilt. In a note to Clifford before the meeting he had observed of the recognition issue that “General Marshall is probably opposed to it.”50 The president was right, except there was no need for the qualifier.
As Clifford later described it, the White House meeting on May 12 was like the famous confrontation at the “OK Corral” in Western history: a “Showdown in the Oval Office.”51 Foreseeing an angry exchange if Henderson and Rusk were present, the State Department had them replaced by two less controversial junior representatives. But the attempt to keep a lid on the discussion did not work. Starting calmly with Undersecretary Lovett’s neutral report on the recent conversation with Shertok, and a brief interruption by Marshall confirming his own warning to Shertok, the discussion became heated. As Clifford recalled, it evolved into the most “confrontational and hostile” meeting he had ever attended during the years he spent in the Truman administration.52
Marshall’s response to Lovett’s report set the tone. The Jews could not win militarily no matter how well the early skirmishing was going, he declared. He warned about the dire economic consequences of encouraging the Zionists. America needed oil lest, in Forrestal’s recent vivid phrase, it be forced to accept only “four-cylinder cars from Detroit.” And there was also the possibility that, deprived of a stable oil supply, the U.S. Army would be unable to carry out its missions around the globe. Clifford replied bluntly. He dismissed State’s effort to achieve a military truce between the adversaries. It had been tried and had failed, as had State’s recent proposal to establish a trusteeship in a divided Palestine. Turning to the president, seated at his desk, he pleaded with Truman as if he did not already know his preference: “I strongly urge you,” he said to his chief, “to give prompt recognition to the Jewish state immediately after termination of the British mandate.” This step should be taken before the Soviets got there first. Clifford went on to invoke the moral dimension of the Zionist case. He recounted the baleful distant and recent history of the Jews. Recognition of the Jewish state would be an act of humanity, “everything this country should represent.”53 He continued: “The Jewish people the world over have been waiting for thirty years for the promise of a homeland to be fulfilled.” There was no reason “to wait one day longer.” The United States had “a great moral obligation to oppose discrimination such as that inflicted on the Jewish people.”54
As Clifford spoke Marshall’s face grew redder. The secretary deeply resented Clifford’s very presence at the meeting. Addressing the president, he exclaimed: “I thought the meeting was called to consider an important and complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic policy adviser, and this is a foreign policy matter.”55 When Truman confessed that Clifford was in the Oval Office at his behest, Marshall shifted to more substantive matters. Clifford’s arguments were political in their implications, he insisted, a view that implied that the moral plea was intended to appeal to the American voters, presumably Jews and philo-Semites. To use American support of the Zionist position for this purpose, he would note later that day, would seriously diminish “the great dignity of the office of President.”*56 But whether it was the presumed intrusion by this young untried lawyer onto the State Department’s turf, or what seemed his base appeal to domestic political concerns that incited his wrath, Marshall lost his temper. Addressing the president directly, “with barely contained rage” he exclaimed: If he followed “Clifford’s advice, and if I were to vote in the election, I would vote against you!” Shocked silence followed Marshall’s point-blank statement. It was an extraordinary rebuke of the president. It was also a serious threat to Truman’s already shaky chances for nomination and election as president. As Clifford later wrote, everyone present understood that if the secretary’s position became public it “could virtually seal the dissolution of the Truman Administration” as well as jeopardizing the president’s November bid for another four years.57 Before they left the room Truman sought to appease Marshall: “I understand your position, General,” he remarked, “and I am inclined to side with you in this matter.”58 But as they filed out, in a whispered aside to his counsel, he also praised Clifford for his presentation. “That was as rough as it gets,” he acknowledged. “But you did your best.” He urged Clifford not to assume that he had “lost it.” But “let the dust settle,” he urged. He still wanted to recognize Israel’s statehood, but they must be careful. “I can’t afford to lose General Marshall.”59
Though their paths often crossed in later years, Marshall never spoke another word to Clifford; apparently he never mentioned Clifford’s name again. Yet over the next few days both sides sought to avoid a public rupture. The evening of the Oval Office meeting Lovett phoned Clifford to tell him how worried he was that Truman and Marshall might “have an open break.” Clifford agreed that such an outcome would be dangerous and came to Lovett’s home to consider possible options to prevent a political disaster. Might the president be persuaded to change his mind if Clifford presented State’s views to him? Lovett asked. Clifford said that there was simply no chance that he would. If anybody was “going . . . to give in” it would “have to be Marshall.”60
Some observers privy to the confrontation feared that Marshall had made up his mind to resign. But calmer feelings quickly took over. Truman agreed to postpone the announcement of his intentions regarding recognition until the Jewish Agency officially requested it. On the other side, Marshall and his department allies realized that to allow a public clash between the president and his highest-level official adviser in the midst of an emerging crisis over access to Berlin would be disastrous. A more composed Marshall now relented. On May 14 Marshall called the president and promised that while he could not support Truman’s intention to recognize the new nation, he would not oppose it. His motive here was loyalty to the civilian authority as befitted an American soldier. According to Dean Rusk, when asked whether he intended to quit if the president went through with his plan, Marshall responded: “No, gentlemen, you don’t take a post of this sort and then resign when the man who has the constitutional responsibility to make decisions makes one you don’t like.”61
On May 14, the day before Britain officially abandoned the mandate and withdrew its troops from Palestine, the State Department issued a press release, drafted by Clifford and Lovett, announcing that the United States intended to recognize the Jewish state. The next day at 10:00 a.m. Washington time, the Yishuv leaders declared the independence of the State of Israel.* A few minutes later the White House announced that the United States was according de facto recognition to the new entity.
In the months that followed, during the heat of the presidential campaign, relations between Marshall and Truman, roiled by the Palestine issue, remained somewhat distant. The president respected Marshall’s aversion to the bitterly partisan politics of the moment, and when necessary to consider the political implications of foreign policy, called at times on Undersecretary Lovett, rather than his boss, for advice. The months—and years—following recognition would show that the struggle of the Jews of Palestine for secure nationhood was far from over. Further steps to independence included the UN General Assembly’s vote, supported by the United States, that Israel be admitted as a member nation, and a fierce drawn-out struggle to survive the military assault launched against it by powerful Arab enemies. During the final UN discussion of the new nation’s boundaries, Marshall favored the conciliatory proposal by the Swedish UN mediator, Folke Bernadotte, which was protested by the Israelis for giving away the Negev to the Arabs. He fretted over what he considered the blatant political pandering over the Jewish state during the 1948 presidential campaign. But Truman and Clifford now largely ignored him, and he would have little further influence on the Palestine issue during his remaining weeks as secretary of state. On January 31, 1949, the United States finally agreed to exchange ambassadors with Israel.
When all is said, Marshall had failed to mold the Palestine issue to his liking. But it is difficult to deny his insight. Truman’s and Clifford’s compassionate views on Jewish statehood had prevailed, and the United States would have to live with the long-term unsettling results.
And there was the still-unfinished business of China. The final scenes of the China tangle were played out during Marshall’s tenure at the State Department. In those two years the government of Nationalist China, its currency debased, its people disillusioned and rebellious, fell apart. The country descended into full civil war, with the Communist forces under Mao, better organized and motivated, gaining both territory and popular support. By mid-1947 the Truman administration was fast losing faith that Chiang and his regime could survive. But not the powerful members of the China Lobby. During the debate over the ERP they had managed to induce Congress to include some $400 million in technical and military support to the Nationalists as part of the aid bill. Marshall himself was reluctant to repudiate the Kuomintang and remained personally cordial toward Chiang and his charming wife. For a time, in fact, Madame Chiang stayed as a guest at Dodona Manor, waiting for a chance to plead her Nationalist cause to President Truman. But Marshall’s confidence that the Kuomintang government could survive was waning. Responding to a request in early 1947 for increased arms for the Nationalists from Wellington Koo, Chiang’s ambassador to the United States, the secretary retorted that Koo’s chief was “the worst advised military commander in history” and that he was already “losing about 40 percent of his supplies to the enemy.” If the proportion should reach 50 percent the United States would have to consider cutting off further military aid. In June, in response to a recommendation by the Joint Chiefs for continued aid to Chiang, he confessed his inner conflict: “I have tortured my brain and I can’t see the answer.”62 Soon after, he radioed the American ambassador in Nanking: “We are keenly aware of China’s needs,” but “in the final analysis the fundamental and lasting solution of China’s problems must come from the Chinese themselves.”63 This self-help formula would be successful for ERP; it would fail for China.
The continued China Lobby pressure compelled the president and Marshall, despite their serious doubts, to make a final gesture to save the Chiang regime. In early July Marshall asked General Wedemeyer to head a fact-finding mission to the fast-faltering regime at Nanking. The mission was a stopgap that would give the administration some political breathing space to consider how much additional support to give Chiang and his circle. Probably neither Truman nor Marshall any longer believed there was much hope for the Kuomintang government.
The choice of Wedemeyer is a puzzling one. He had already been passed over as ambassador to China in favor of John Stuart and had become identified with the pro-Kuomintang position. Perhaps his selection was a concession to the China Lobby partisans, who respected him more than did the State Department regulars. In any event, after a month of travel, talks, and interviews throughout China, while proposing broad reforms of Kuomintang policies and behavior, in his official report Wedemeyer attacked Soviet-aided Communist subversion and recommended allotting significant additional funds and material backing, as well as moral support, to the Chiang regime. In his conclusions the general warned against allowing the Communists to prevail in China and noted that “a program of aid, if effectively employed, would bolster opposition to Communist expansion and would contribute to a gradual development of stability in China.”64
One recommendation of the report—a proposal to sever Manchuria, China’s loosely held northern province, from Nationalist control and give it either to a “guardianship of five nations including the Soviet Union” or to a UN trusteeship—was certain to offend the government in Nanking. Marshall and the president accordingly decided to keep the report secret. This was a mistake. The zealous spokesmen for the China Lobby immediately charged that the administration was arranging a cover-up to avoid an endorsement of the Nationalists. The accusation would become an item in the indictment for “losing China” that would soon be leveled against both Marshall and Truman.
The end of the Kuomintang’s reign in mainland China now came quickly. On January 1, 1949, Chiang resigned as president of the Chinese Republic, supposedly in the interests of peace. Nationalist troops, poorly led though professionally advised by American military officers and bolstered by superior American equipment, were soon in headlong retreat. By April 1949 the southward-sweeping Communist army had crossed the Yangtse River and were advancing on major Nationalist cities. On April 24 they occupied Nanking; on May 16, Hankow; on May 25, Shanghai. In October the surviving Nationalist government, along with two million civilians and remnants of the Nationalist army, abandoned the mainland and fled to the offshore island of Formosa, soon renamed Taiwan. (Many Nationalist officials carried with them caches of U.S. dollars from the $275 million extracted from Congress by the China Lobby as part of the Marshall Plan appropriations.) There, in their new home, Chiang and his colleagues would claim to be the legitimate government of the Republic of China and promised someday to return to the mainland to oust the Communist usurpers. Refusing to recognize reality, until 1978 the United States would accept the regime in Taiwan as the legal government of China and deny the legitimacy of the Communist People’s Republic in Beijing.
It is difficult to see in these months of Nationalist retreat and final exile any sign that Marshall had accomplished much good for his nation or for its friends in China.
During Marshall’s twenty-four months at State no issue raised such frightening prospects of military confrontation between the Soviet and American superpowers as the status of Berlin. In a shambles after the Soviet forces had crushed its Nazi defenders, the city was deep in the Soviet sphere of occupation, detached geographically from the Western zones. Like the rest of Germany initially, it was divided into four districts, each under the jurisdiction of one of the victorious powers of World War II, including liberated France. To the Russians, Berlin seemed an ideal hostage in the struggle over the eventual fate of Germany, for they alone controlled land access to the city—and therefore the food and fuel needed by its 2.3 million Western zone inhabitants.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1948, U.S.-Soviet tensions elsewhere in Europe escalated. In February, the Soviet leaders consolidated their ascendency in Eastern Europe by instigating a political coup in Prague that converted the government of Czechoslovakia, the one remaining democracy in the region, into another Soviet puppet regime. Like other Americans, Marshall was alarmed at this further evidence of Soviet aggression. But as so often, he urged a cautious response. When, in March, Truman’s speechwriters prepared a bellicose address for the president to deliver to Congress on recent Soviet iniquities, Marshall strongly objected. The president’s language was “too tough,” too warlike, too belligerent, he declared. He should be calmer, more businesslike in stating the facts. While in Pinehurst for the weekend he composed a more restrained alternative and submitted it to Bohlen and Clifford for their comments. The two advisers were not impressed. Clifford rejoined that the president’s message, to be effective, had to be blunt. At a later session of the foreign policy group George Elsey, Truman’s Harvard-educated speechwriter, rudely reported that all those present thought Marshall’s draft “stank.”65 Truman himself rejected Marshall’s proposal as too timid, and on March 17 delivered a tough network-broadcast speech to a joint session of Congress that accused the Soviet Union of destroying “the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe” and deliberately sabotaging all efforts to achieve international peace. The president also used the occasion to plug the ERP, still working its way through Congress and—to underscore American resolve to defend “the free nations of Europe” from “communist control and police-state rule”—recommended enactment of UMT for the United States.66
The Prague coup was soon followed by a much more incendiary Soviet provocation. For months the Russian military governors in Berlin had been tightening access to the Allied zones of the city, stopping Western trains, inspecting freight shipments, closely checking the credentials of personnel. But the decision to force the Western powers out of Berlin completely by shutting down all surface traffic into and out of the city was triggered by the American-British-French decision in early June 1948 to unify their German occupation zones as a step toward creating a future West German state. The new “Trizonia” would become the nucleus of that state, while simultaneously, to help revive the German economy, there would be a new German currency to replace the existing devalued and distrusted prewar reichsmark.
The Soviets saw these moves, understandably perhaps, as threats to their status in Germany and their continued domination of Eastern Europe. They reacted decisively. After warning that they would apply economic and administrative sanctions to force exclusive circulation in Berlin of their own Soviet-issued currency, on June 24 they halted all passenger trains and all motor traffic on the autobahn into the city, leaving untouched only the air corridors, which they considered incapable of supplying its people with sufficient food and coal.
What should the Western powers do? Faced with the growing Soviet truculence over Berlin, Marshall was initially resolute, more resolute than in March. In late April, as the Russians began to tighten the noose, he and Lovett announced publicly: “We intend to stay in Berlin and will meet force with force.”67 The full stoppage of Allied traffic into the city in late June caught Marshall during a health crisis. In a visit to Walter Reed Hospital for a medical checkup the doctors discovered a greatly enlarged right kidney and recommended its removal. Marshall refused the operation but was out of action for several days while Lovett served as his voice at the urgent meetings at the Pentagon and the White House that followed the full Russian ground blockade.
Despite his initial resolve, during the course of the evolving Berlin crisis Marshall played a secondary role. Since war was a possibility, his military experience counted, of course, but the major players were the president himself and Gen. Lucius Clay, military governor of the American occupation zone. One option for the Western powers—the choice favored by General Clay—was to defy the blockade and send supplies by road to the city under military escort. The questions were: Would the Russians meet the convoy with blazing guns, and would the confrontation be the trigger for World War III?
In the course of the blockade crisis Marshall’s was again the voice of caution and prudence. He dismissed the dire predictions of imminent war by Secretary Forrestal and other alarmists. He was painfully aware of U.S. military weakness following the precipitous post-1945 demobilization and doubted the country’s preparedness for a full-scale war if one should erupt. Besides the manpower dearth, the United States, though still the only nation possessing atom bombs, lacked the ability to deliver them to an enemy target. Yet when, at a White House meeting in early May the nervous and excitable Forrestal proposed a whopping increase in the defense budget to meet the escalating crisis, Marshall supported the president’s negative. The policy “of this country,” he told the group, “was based on the assumption that there would not be war and that we should not plunge into war preparation which would bring about the very thing we are taking these steps to prevent.”68 Yet the secretary was not totally opposed to a little saber rattling himself, giving his approval to sending two squadrons of B-29 bombers to Britain and Germany to show that the Western powers meant business, but stipulating that these not be equipped to carry atom bombs. As for Clay’s proposal of the military convoy option, Marshall strongly advised the president against it, and Truman took his advice.
Despite his caution Marshall fully supported the massive Allied airlift of food and fuel to the Western sectors of Berlin devised as an alternative to an armed challenge on the ground. On June 30 he issued a press release announcing that the United States was in Berlin as the result of agreements with the occupying governments and “we intend to stay.” He added that “maximum use of air transport would be made to supply the civilian population.”69 In mid-July, with the air traffic system under way, he told a cabinet meeting that refusing to yield to the Soviets had been essential to prevent “the rest of our European policy” from “failure.”70 And, of course, he was right. The heroic Berlin airlift (“Operation Vittles”) would last almost a full year and save the city from starvation at an easily tolerated cost. Meanwhile, the Americans would win the lasting gratitude of millions of former German enemies.
During these jittery days, when a clash with Soviet forces—whether accidental or deliberate—still seemed a real danger, Marshall and his State Department assistants and overseas diplomats conducted earnest negotiations to conclude a peaceful settlement of the crisis. In mid-July, Marshall’s attention was drawn away from pressing international concerns to memorialize his revered mentor John J. Pershing, who had died at Walter Reed Hospital at the age of eighty-seven. Marshall’s eulogy reflected his own values as a military man. “A great soldier, devoid of political and personal ambitions,” he intoned, “his influence went far toward shaping the destinies of our Armies in two great wars.”71 Pershing had asked that Marshall make the funeral arrangements at his death, and the secretary dutifully followed his chief’s orders with a state funeral with all the trimmings and interment at Arlington National Cemetery.
Meanwhile, the negotiations with the Russians over Berlin produced scant results. In late July, Soviet foreign minister Molotov agreed to see the American, French, and British ambassadors to discuss the Berlin situation. Stalin himself met with them two days later. The Russian leaders seemed interested in a settlement, Walter Bedell Smith, now U.S. ambassador in Moscow, cabled Marshall soon after. Both Stalin and Molotov, he said, were”literally dripping with sweet reasonableness and desire not to embarrass.”72 Stalin denied that he had ever intended to eject the Western powers from Berlin but then made it clear that lifting the blockade required the end of Western plans to establish a West German government and the adoption by all Berlin of the Soviet-backed “Ostmark” currency. Smith was inclined to a compromise on both issues; the French and British seemed receptive. But Marshall and the president both demurred. To yield even minimally to Soviet conditions, they believed, was a form of appeasement that would alienate non-Communist Europeans and encourage further Soviet aggression. Smith, Marshall cabled, should remind the Russians that the Allies were in Berlin by right, not sufferance, and that they would not suspend their plans for Germany, economic or political, as preconditions for negotiation.
The Berlin issue remained unsettled by the time the third meeting of the UN General Assembly convened in Paris in mid-September. By now the airlift was performing well. Supported by streams of British and American C-47s and C-54s arriving, with bare minutes of clearance, at Tempelhof and Gatow airfields, the people of Berlin were managing to survive. But winter was coming, and the burden of meeting the increased fuel needs of Berliners threatened to severely tax the already strained delivery system. At the Paris UN meeting Marshall prepared to confer with America’s partners as well as the Soviets on how to resolve the dispute peacefully and, if the Russians remained adamant, to ask for a UN Security Council resolution condemning the blockade.
The new negotiations with the Soviets at Paris proved no more successful than those that had preceded them. Yet Marshall remained hopeful about America’s effort to restrain Russian aggression. Speaking to the French and British foreign policy leaders at the Quai d’Orsay, he remarked that everywhere the Russians were in retreat. American policies had “put Western Germany on its feet” and the Western powers could now “really say that we are on the road to victory.”73 Soon after, the Western Allies submitted a statement to the Security Council condemning the Soviet action on Berlin “as a threat to international peace and security” and asking for a UN censure resolution against the Russians.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, while Lovett and Kennan were urging the Western powers to avoid too precipitous an action that might further provoke the Soviets, Truman was losing patience. Hoping to fend off his left-wing opponent Henry Wallace’s charges of “warmonger,” he decided to end the Berlin deadlock before the approaching presidential election by bypassing the State Department and intervening directly in the negotiations. On October 5 he informed the department that he would send Chief Justice Fred Vinson to see Stalin in person to explain to him his deep desire for a peaceful settlement of the Berlin issue. Seeing disaster ahead, Lovett rushed to the White House to interdict the scheme. If he proceeded, he told Truman, he risked Marshall’s resignation. Marshall himself directly intervened. He had discussed the Vinson plan with the president by teletype while in Paris for the UN meeting on Berlin and managed to get Truman to reconsider the move. The press, however, reported that he and the president were at loggerheads and that Marshall might indeed resign rather than approve the Vinson ploy. Marshall returned to Washington both to reinforce the president’s new resolve and to disavow the rumor that he and the president remained at odds. In an off-the-record press conference he told the reporters that he had advised Truman from Paris to avoid any appearance of U.S. unilateral action on Berlin as certain to offend our airlift allies. In any case, by the time Marshall returned to Paris the uproar had subsided; the Vinson mission never took place.
Thereafter the Western powers’ resolution wended its slow way through the UN with no action taken. In fact the Berlin airlift crisis would not end until early May 1949, when the Russians, convinced that they could not starve the city out, finally agreed to lift the land blockade. Marshall undoubtedly cheered, but four months earlier, as he had planned, he had submitted his resignation as secretary of state and was not at Foggy Bottom to celebrate the victory with his colleagues.
One of Marshall’s contributions to the diplomacy of the early Cold War was his role in launching the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Linking the United States and ultimately twenty-eight European* countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and several lesser powers, in a treaty of mutual defense and military cooperation, it would be a cornerstone of American foreign policy for more than sixty years and, with modifications, still is today. Its adoption was a momentous break with the “no entangling alliances” precedent established by Washington and Jefferson more than a century and a half previously and confirmed America’s leadership of the anti-Soviet “free world” bloc.
Marshall was not NATO’s father; Ernest Bevin of Britain fits that role far better. But he had, during the war, contributed to the principle of Western military cooperation that it epitomized. He also helped undermine the wall that the United States had erected around itself from the days of Washington more than 150 years before when, in September 1947, at an inter-American conference in Rio, he supported a mutual defense pact with the Latin American nations of the Western Hemisphere. Yet if the Rio agreement violated the Washington-Jefferson precedent, it did not violate the Monroe Doctrine of U.S. hemispheric defense, and was an allowable exception to it. Not so the NATO treaty, which extended the American protective cover primarily to Europe and committed the United States to the ultimate “entangling alliance.”
NATO’s germ was the mutual defense treaty, aimed primarily against a future resurgent Germany, that Britain and France signed with the smaller Benelux nations at Brussels in March 1948. Instigated by Bevin, both Marshall and Truman gave it their verbal support. But it still left the British foreign secretary dissatisfied. The United States, he felt, must be drawn into the collective defense of Europe against the greater Soviet threat now looming. After the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, a resurgent Germany no longer seemed the most serious danger to the free world.
The State Department was of two minds on the issue of American participation. On the side of caution was Kennan. Whatever his role in launching the Cold War, Kennan now opposed any action that further encouraged it or, rather, threatened to turn it into a hot war. A military alliance with the Western European nations would mean, he wrote, “a final militarization of the present dividing-line through Europe.” It would, he said on another occasion, make the division of Europe “insoluble by any other than military means.”74
Marshall and Lovett were more receptive. At first skeptical of Bevin’s proposals, but egged on by John Hickerson of the department’s Office of European Affairs, they soon embraced the need for a joint American-European military commitment against Soviet aggression. But they had reservations about too visible an American sponsorship. As in the case of the European Recovery Program, the initiative must come from the European nations themselves, not the United States.
In the succeeding months—the closing stretch of Marshall’s State Department tenure—exploratory talks among the Western nations on a mutual defense treaty proceeded apace. Marshall and Lovett played leading roles in the discussions but, acknowledging the American public’s aversion to permanent overseas promises, avoided publicity. In October the conferees agreed on a basic outline for a mutual Western defense treaty to include the United States. During this interval, inflamed by the Berlin blockade and the Prague coup, Marshall—though not publicly—made one of the most heated attacks on the Soviet Union of his career. Discussing with the foreign minister of Sweden that traditionally neutral country’s possible membership in the pending agreement, he called the Soviet Union “utterly ruthless and devoid of all the basic decencies of modern civilization.” It “had seized and used every expediency to serve its particular ends without regard for ethics.” If not “opposed,” this “ruthless force” could lead to “a gradual establishment over the world of police states.” The United States believed, he forcefully stated, that it “must be met by a unity of such states as are willing to accept the challenge.”75
Marshall’s participation in these and other department negotiations was limited by his growing infirmities. In late July he wrote to the retired Stimson: “The fact of the matter is that Lovett bears the principal burden as I get away whenever possible . . . on the weekends in order to get a little relaxation so that I can be clear-headed for the difficult days that are constantly developing and will be with me I suppose until my retirement in June.”76
Marshall was not present as the NATO conferees hammered out the treaty’s final provisions in Washington. He was staying at the U.S. Embassy in Paris with Katherine for meetings of the UN General Assembly and Security Council to consider the Berlin crisis and other matters. On October 9 he flew back to Washington to help Lovett stop the president from sending Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow to confer with Stalin over Berlin. He returned to Paris soon after, when Truman abandoned his lame-brained plan. Though busy with international issues, he and Katherine took time off in Europe for tours of U.S. military cemeteries and sightseeing in France, Italy, and Greece. One of their trips was to Anzio, where Katherine visited Allen’s grave. They were pleased to find the cemetery and the town itself, both badly damaged in the war, well along in the repair process. On October 19 the Marshalls met Pope Pius XII at his country estate outside Rome. The secretary was pleased with the pontiff’s favorable view of ERP.
He was still in Paris when, defying all the negative polls, Truman won election to a full presidential term over Dewey and brought with him Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Marshall cabled Truman his congratulations: “You have put over the greatest one man fight in American history.” He graciously added: “I am thinking more of Mrs. Truman’s and Margaret’s [the president’s daughter] pride and joy than of your own satisfaction.”77
The Marshalls returned to Washington in late November. The secretary went immediately to Foggy Bottom, Katherine to Leesburg. They had Thanksgiving dinner in the private car of the vice president of the Southern Railroad near Roanoke, where they had gone to see VMI’s football team play Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Soon after, Marshall entered Walter Reed for his postponed kidney operation. The procedure went well. The lesion was a benign cyst, and the surgeons removed the right kidney to play it safe. Recuperation was slow, however. Marshall was not released from the hospital until the very end of December and missed the traditional Christmas festivities with his stepchildren and their families. He was still in pain when he finally got to Pinehurst, his North Carolina winter home, and recovered his strength only gradually. Hoping to accelerate the healing process, Truman arranged for him to spend time in warm and sunny San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the headquarters of the wartime Caribbean naval command. Marshall’s recuperation was further assisted by a stay during Mardi Gras week at the guesthouse near New Orleans of his old VMI classmate Leonard Nicholson, now owner of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Marshall’s absence from the foreign policy stage in late 1948 had political as well as medical sources. From the beginning he had decided to leave office after the presidential election. He had signed on for a limited term, understanding that he was to serve as an advocate for Truman’s foreign policy in a politically divided nation. Though the conclusion to resign was independent of who won the election in November, it was clearly made easier by Truman’s remarkable upset victory and the return of Congress to more internationalist control. In Marshall’s view he had served his allotted time and purpose and could now return to private life. Most Washington insiders knew of the secretary’s plans, but when they were announced at the UN meetings just after the election returns reached Paris, the foreign delegates were taken by surprise.
Three days into the new year Marshall submitted a short letter of resignation to Truman. It thanked the president for his personal kindness and expressed his “affectionate regard and great respect.”78 He would leave office on January 20, the day Truman was inaugurated for his full term. The usual flood of congratulations poured in to mark the end of Marshall’s foreign policy career and what was assumed to be his working life in general. British foreign secretary Bevin paid generous tribute to his American ally as one of the great American secretaries of state. “I personally, and the British people, will not forget all that you did for victory and in your present office for peace and world recovery.”79 Dean Acheson, already Marshall’s designated successor, marked the occasion with a handwritten note. Significantly, Secretary of State Acheson emphasized his predecessor’s persona, not his accomplishments. Among the men he had personally known, he wrote, Marshall ranked with the revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court as a man endowed with “greatness,” which Acheson described as “a quality of character,” not “the result of circumstances.” It had “to do with grandeur and with completeness of character.”80
Expressions of rhapsodic esteem from colleagues, friends, and professional supporters are inevitable on the occasion of retirement from prominent public life. But the less sentimental historian must bluntly ask: Was Marshall’s tenure as secretary of state a successful one? What had he accomplished? Had he been a strong motive force in the events of the early Cold War? Had he helped lead the nation along wisely chosen paths?
First, it has to be said that it was not Marshall who had driven U.S. foreign policy during his two years in office: Truman himself was chief motor force. As clearly shown by his aggressive response to the crisis in Greece and Turkey and the decision to support the strong Zionist position on Palestine, the president had been the pivotal figure. In both cases Marshall had advised cautious action. One might argue that the consequences for the world if his voice had been heeded would have more desirable than the actual outcomes, but that is another matter. Truman’s aggressive activism had prevailed over his secretary’s caveats. But what about the Marshall Plan, probably the most important policy achievement during his months in office? He had not conceived it; he was not its parent. Its naming had been virtually fortuitous.
And another issue: Had he managed his department effectively and efficiently? As in the case of the army, he has been praised for his tenure at Foggy Bottom as an antibureaucratic reformer. But it is known from both Dean Acheson and Scotty Reston that he often seemed more interested in conserving his own time and energies than in making the agency’s workers more productive.
Marshall’s most effective role as secretary of state had been as the Truman administration’s chief foreign policy lobbyist. Confronting dangerous political uncertainties for internationalist foreign policy initiatives, Truman had hired him for the job of selling them to Congress and the public, and he had done so successfully. Standing above the bitter partisan political fray of those years, in collaboration with Senator Vandenberg he had helped forge an American foreign policy consensus that, for good or ill, would last through the rest of the century. In the most important instance, though he had not fathered the Marshall Plan, his defense and support before Congress and at venues around the nation had been essential to its final adoption and funding.
And now he could leave public life and literally cultivate his private garden in the Virginia countryside. Or could he?