1950-IQ 63

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THE reader who had sufficient patience to pursue to its final pages the first volume of these memoirs may recall that in the spring of the year 1950, while serving as Counselor of the Deparc-mcnt of State, I became increasingly worried over the growing evidence of difference in outlook between myself and my colleagues there, including the Secretary of State; I realized that many of the points at issue were ones that deserved deeper and more systematic thought on my own part than an active Foreign Service life had permitted them to be given; and I therefore requested, and was granted, a long "leave of absence without pay," to be spent in Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, to which Robert Oppenheimer had kindly invited me. The reader may also recall that this change in status was delayed, over the summer of 1950, by the outbreak of hostilities in Korea. Whether because the initial crisis of policy provoked by that development was now considered to be overcome (if so, this view was decidedly in error) or whether I had by this time contrived to disagree with my colleagues over Korea as extensively as over everything else, 1 cannot recall; in September 1950, in any case, whatever lingering usefulness I might have had in the face of the situation in Korea was considered to be sufficiently exhausted, and I was released from duty in the department and permitted to move to Princeton. There 1 remained, offi-

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cially still on the government's books as a Foreign Service Officer, Class I, but not on active duty, until, at the direction of President Truman, I went to Moscow as ambassador in the spring of 1952.

The family, resembling many another academic family in its peregrinations from one campus to another, arrived in Princeton on September 10, 1950, in a station wagon, with the baby's crib installed in the back. The baby was son Christopher, born the previous year in Washington. Other passengers included myself and my wife; the two older daughters Grace and Joan, of whom the first was about to go on to Radcliffe for her freshman year; and a Russian eviigre lady, Zhenya, who at that time lived with us and did what she could to ease the problems of the household.

The Institute for Advanced Study assigned to us, temporarily, an apartment in a small wooden building on the edge of its extensive fields, then even more open and rural than they are today. The installation was simple. By evening everything was unpacked; the playpen was erected in the middle of the living room; the baby stood in it, leaning his head idyllically on his outstretched arm (belying, in this peaceful pose, I may say, the more frantic tendencies of later years). Outside, on the meadows, the late-summer mists were rising, and there was the soothing, dreamlike drone of the crickets.

It seemed, at that moment, as though I had found both peace and freedom. For just twenty-four years my time, my movements, my decisions, had been at the beck and call of the Department of State. Now, with this burden removed, the hours and days of liberty seemed to stretch forward abundantly into a future too remote to be considered finite. There would now, it seemed, be time for everything. There was no luxury of curiosity that could not now be indulged.

The euphoria lasted through the next day. I went over to the University and wandered, intoxicated with the illusion of freedom,

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along its paths among the famihar buildings: a man of leisure, at last. The mind, I fancied, could now go where its footsteps led it. Entering the University bookstore, I selected from its ample shelves, with regal arbitrariness, a volume of Calvin's bistitutes^ which I had never previously read, purchased it, took it outside, seated myself on a bench, and read in it with pleasure and profit.

Needless to say, things could not long remain that way. The time available was of course not infinite. Within a matter of hours, rather than days, the strains of reality began to demolish the illusion.

These strains were of two kinds. The first was spiritual.

I would not say that awareness of one's own imperfections was any greater in the halls of academe than it had been in the government office; but there was more time — there were more odd moments of solitude — in which to indulge it. The private diaries now began to contain more in the way of self-reproaches, complaints of the vanity of current preoccupations, protests about the aimlessness of one's existence, yearnings for a greater unity and seriousness of purpose. The very expansion of freedom of choice, the absence of the governmental discipline as an excuse for evading personal decisions, compelled a greater measure of this sort of introspection.

It did no good, of course. The coveted unity and seriousness of purpose were never found. Such positive contributions as I was able to make had previously been forthcoming in response to governmental demands. Now they flowed, insofar as they flowed at all, only from commitments frivolously and thoughtlessly accepted, reflecting no system, no singleness of focus, nothing, in many instances, but lack of overriding purpose and an inability to say "no." The life of such a person as myself inevitably had a liberal quota of personal failures, some small, some large, and many moments of discouragement and remorse — but all of this was borne by a temperament too superficial, too unserious, too much the prisoner of moods, too vulnerable to enthusiasms, too buoyant under the stress of external stimuli, to remain for long depressed or reflective. It was

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a life controlled not by any deliberate will but by the requirements of what one had inadvertently let oneself in for.

The second kind of strain that arose to assail the illusion of total freedom and leisure was the problem of the organization of one's life — and particularly its arrangement in such a way as to leave time and space for prolonged concentration. This, it might well be argued, was precisely what the Institute for iVdvanced Study was there for. But it was not the Institute, God bless it, that gave rise to my problem. It was the society in which it was imbedded, the flab-biness of my own will, and the extent of my unpreparedness for the experience of being a semi-public figure.

American society is both competitive and herdlike. It is herdlike even in the objects for which it competes. It seems to be impossible for anyone in America — for anyone, at least, whose interests engage those of the mass media — to be only moderately in demand. The problem, for anyone who would like to make a modest contribution to thinking on major public questions, is similar to the classic problem of the eligible female: either no one wants her or a thousand people immediately do. To have one's name not known at all is to confront a barrier that can be broken through only with much effort and luck. To become known, on the other hand, too widely — to become known, in particular, as having something to offer that a great many people want — is to step out onto the slippery path that leads to fragmentation of effort, hyperactivity and — eventually — sterility. To get one's name on American lists is almost certainly to be lost.

This was my position in the initial period after leaving government. I was reputed to possess something — an expertise on Russia, based on personal experience, and an ability to talk interestingly and not too controversially on problems of international affairs generally — which was much in demand. To several hundred universities, schools, clubs, discussion forums, and what not, all now struggling to recover from the bewilderments and emo-

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tional exaggerations of the wartime period and to orient themselves with relation to a new state of affairs in our relations with the Soviet Union for which nothing in American experience and very little in our governmental statements had prepared them, this seemed the answer to a prayer. The mass media, aware that the so-called "X-article," published in Foreign Affairs in 1947, had gone the rounds, had attracted much attention, and had made money for more than a few people, crowded in with their various offers and importunities. Individuals, too, appeared in numbers, demanding personal interviews: people who wanted jobs, people who wanted me to read their manuscripts, people who wanted to say they had talked with me, people who would have liked me to do anything under the sun other than what I had come to Princeton to be doing. These and similar pressures were to continue unabated, indeed at times in greatly increased intensity, over most of the ensuing twenty years. I never learned to cope with them very well. Ninety percent of the appeals I learned, with time, to decline; but the total number often ran to several hundreds per annum, and the mere de-cHning of the ninety percent was a major burden on one's time. And then there was the problem of the other ten percent: the undeclinables. They were often ones that came from friends, or relatives, or one's children, or one's children's schools, or very important people, or the executive branch of the government, or congressional committees, or foreign governments; or — like the honorary-degree-plus-commencement-speech approach — they involved honors embarrassing to refuse. Most difficult to cope with were the obviously very worthy ones: ones that came from people for whom one's heart bled, people who needed and deserved help, people pursuing causes about which one felt deeply. And finally, there were the really flattering ones: the ones that did, of course, tickle the ego but also gave one to realize that by accepting them one would be enhancing the power of one's own voice and with it one's possibilities for usefulness.

I was under no illusion that this was my problem alone. I recall reading, many years ago, a most perceptivx article by Stephen Spender, the English poet, in which he pointed out that the American writer (and by this he had in mind the writer in the field of belles-lettres — the poet, the novelist, the short-story writer) faced two great and terrible dangers: the one — failure, the other — success; because in America failure was not easily forgiven, whereas success brought down upon the head of him who achieved it so appalling a flood of publicity and commercial pressures that he had only two choices: to emigrate and live abroad or never again to write anything worthwhile at all. Aiv own experience now taught mc that it was not in the field of belles-lettres alone that this dilemma could present itself.

I never found the satisfactory answer; and never, as I say, even after years of experience, did I cope very well with the resulting strains. But for the initial impact of these pressures, in particular, I was completely unprepared. The illusion that the time at my disposal had no limits betrayed me, in those initial years outside government, into the assumption that some way or other there would now be time for everything. Pleased with all the attention, I cheerfully accepted proposals right and left, with the result that I soon came into danger of losing all control over my own life. I reminded myself, many times, of the victim in the game played at the Christmas party, in the Bolshoi Theater's inise en scene of the Nutcracker ballet, where the children form a large circle and the old blindfolded dancing master is pushed, spinning and staggering, from one side of the circle to the other, evincing new bewilderment and helplessness at each push, sent off on one dizzy spin before he can regain his equilibrium from the last one. Within a short space of time I had become, so recollection tells me, an alumni trustee of Princeton University, a consultant to the Ford Fecundation (which at that time meant periodic trips to Pasadena), a cofoundcr and president of an organization set up in New York to assist refugees

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from Soviet power, and a participant, together with Arthur Schle-singer, McGeorge Bundy, Don Price and other agreeable friends, in a study group at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in New York. In addition to this I had agreed, with staggering frivolity, to give individual lectures at several places and entire lecture series at two places (Northwestern University and the University of Chicago). I had also undertaken to write a second "X-article" for Foreign Affairs. Finally, I set out (and eventually gathered around me a group of younger scholars to assist me in the process) to make a study of the domestic background of American foreign policy: of what was happening to the physical resources of our continent, of what sort of society we were becoming, of what demands we would have to place on our world environment in the coming decades. Among the dictates of these various involvements, hitting me at different times and from different sides, I tumbled back and forth like the blindfolded dancing master, equally helpless, equally ridiculous.

There was one other sort of strain to which people were often subjected when they came from more active pursuits to the Institute for Advanced Study. It was the sense of panic and helplessness that could affect you when you were suddenly confronted with a total freedom of authorship. Robert Oppenheimer warned me of it when I called on him, on arrival. "Never forget," he admonished me, "that there is nothing harder in life than to have nothing before you but the blank page and nothing to do but your best."

He could, in my case, have saved his words. This panic never assailed me. The reasons therefor did me no credit. I never found it difficult, as some people do, to make beginnings. An irrepressible intellectual brashness, a feeling that it didn't really matter much just where or how you began, and a love for a certain florid showmanship in prose, made it always easy to find the initial passages. What came later was harder, and sometimes vitiated one's purple beginnings. But then, one could always rewrite.

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There was another bit of advice Oppenheimer gave me that 1 would have done better to heed. Instead of trying to write anything at all, he suggested, I might just settle down for those first few months and read widely and unprogrammatically, to give a broader intellectual and cultural foundation to what was, after all, an intense but narrow educational experience. No sounder advice was ever given me. I did not accept it, of course. I was full of schemes for tackling this and that in the way of concrete projects for study and writing. But I could not have followed this advice anyway unless I had had the fixity of purpose to decline all the external involvements and to regard my presence at the Institute as a total renunciation of every immediate participation, even intellectual, in the public life of my own time.

I would not like to give the impression that scholarship went totally neglected, either in those early postgovernmental years or later. As will be seen below, I did manage to do enough historical research, even in the hectic initial months, to produce a work that continues, twenty years later, to be used in dozens of college courses across the country. Two or three years later, after one further tour of duty in Moscow, I plunged more seriously into history. Setting out to compose what I envisaged as a small historical monograph of perhaps eighty to a hundred pages on the course of Soviet-American relations from 1917 to the present, I found the source materials just for the 1917-1918 period so abundant, so intriguing, and so little explored, that I ended some four years later as the author of two fat volumes, totaling some sixteen hundred pages, on just the first nine months (November 1917 to July 191H) of the relationship in question. After that, the lighthearted acceptance of various invitations to write or lecture on the history of Soviet foreign relations drove me to further major efforts of research and authorship. These undertakings, supplemented by various articles, individual lectures, courses, and reviews, on these and related sub-

jects, were enough to bind me for the rest of my days to a hfe never remote, for any appreciable length of time, from archives and libraries.

Nor could I complain of any lack of satisfaction in this work. To eke the living past out of the hieroglyphics of the dead page — to feel the personalities of a bygone age come to life, achieve plausibility, and respond to the revivifying touch of one's own attention and imagination — to know oneself to be involved in the discovering of new and significant historical truth: all this, surely, if one has the taste for it, is one of the truly great creative experiences of which men are capable.

But it is lonely work. The economic or social historian may be able, at times, to work in partnership with other people. The student of political or cultural history is normally condemned by the nature of his discipline to work in loneliness. Particularly is this true if he feels it necessary (and he usually does) to clothe what he has to say in literary form, in the interests of its communicability. I cannot say that I derived no companionship at all from those dim figures, the historical characters with whom I concerned myself in the course of my researches. They became part of my life, and I see them now in retrospect as though I had known them in the flesh. But they were never able to see me, or to react to my interest. I wandered through their lifeless world like a solitary visitor through a wax museum, observing their costumes, their figures, the frozen expressions on their faces. Sometimes words and phrases, preserved for posterity by the written page, stood out from their lips like the little balloons of utterance that emerge from the characters of a comic strip. Sometimes actions, depicted in the historical record, could be re-created in imagination. But it was a one-sided relationship. iMy concern for them was not matched by any reciprocal concern on their part for me. For that interaction with others that man, as a social being, requires, I had to look elsewhere. And yet, this involvement in the past carried with it challenge, excitement, and

satisfaction. It had, as occupations go, a certain purity and innocence about it. It proceeded at the cost of no one. Yet it tapped the highest resources of mind and imagination; and in this sense it sufficed — or would have sufficed had I been able to devote my entire, undivided strength to it — to make a life's work, if not a life itself.

I could not, finally, complain of any lack of appreciation for my effort. Russia Leaves the War, the first of the two volumes on Soviet-American relations, received just about every prize it could get, including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Benjamin Franklin Award for the year's best work of history as literature. The 1957 Reith Lectures, delivered live in London over the Home Service of the BBC in the course of several successive Sunday evenings, attracted consistently wider listening audiences, I was told, than any in the history of that series to that time, excepting only the initial lecture by the late Bertrand Russell, in 1948. The lectures, similarly, that later went to make up the volumes Realities of Avierican Foreign Folicy and Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin drew record student audiences at Princeton and Harvard, and something very close to that at Oxford.

All this was naturally gratifying; and had I been able to combine a consistent and unbroken application to historical scholarship during the academic year with some contact with nature and the sea on weekends and vacations, I would have felt my capacities for the enjoyment of life as well fulfilled as they were capable of being. Unfortunately, this was not possible. It was the outside pressures — the contemporary ones, the demands for contributions immediately related to the current scene — that continued to make this impossible.

Why did I nor resist all these pressures? Why did I yield to even a fraction of them? I have touched on some of the reasons. But back of them all was the unwillingness to reconcile myself to the

suggestion that I had no further role to play in the events of my time.

It was evident to me, as to every thinking person, that my world, and that of my children, was in serious danger. Was there then nothing I could do about it? I had had many years of experience in government. I was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that had my views on Russia been heeded during the wartime period, a number of our problems and embarrassments of the postwar period might have been alleviated. I felt that the contribution of the Policy Planning Staff to the solution of some of these problems, during the days of my incumbency as its director, had been a positive one. I was still only forty-six years old. It was difficult for me to believe that I had nothing further to offer. The extent to which my voice was sought after, and listened to when used, seemed to me to constitute in itself an obligation. It was an asset that might or might not be deserved, but it existed. Not everyone had it; and, once in possession of it, one had no right to waste it. To these reflections was added, finally, the influence of friends. A lasting impression was left, in particular, when the English historian Veronica Wedgwood — a woman for whose scholarly experience and general good sense I had the greatest respect — admonished me not to make the mistake of permitting a preoccupation with history to cut me off from any and every involvement in the affairs of my own time.

So I struggled along, over those postgovernmental years, maneuvering between the past and the present, giving myself entirely to neither: a semi-historian and a semi-commentator, at times the writer and teacher of history, at times the advisor to governments or the participant in the discussion of public problems and crises, uncomfortable to the point of desperation under the tensions and conflicts engendered by this double life, yet unable to give up either aspect of it, and becoming only belatedly aware (it was the latest of my long-suffering secretaries, Janet Smith, who drew my attention

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to it) that the two seeminglv^ conflicting attractions were actually interrelated and interdependent — that part of my strength as a diplomatic historian came from the fact that I had been responsibly involved with contemporary problems of diplomacy, whereas whatever value I had as a commentator on contemporary aflFairs was derived, in part at least, from the belief on the part of the public that I knew something about history.

This is surely the place to say something about the Institute for Advanced Study, which was the seat of most of this activity. Except for two further episodic tours of Foreign Service duty (in iMoscow and in Belgrade) and several terms spent in Oxford some years later, this institution was destined to be my professional home and center of activity from 1950 down to the present day. From 1950 to 1956 I was there, like most of the scholars who use the Institute's facilities, in the quality of a temporary visitor. Since 1956 I have been a member of its permanent faculty.

The Institute for Advanced Study is unique, among iVmerican institutions of higher learning, for its absence of students and teaching, for the general distinction of its visiting scholars and faculty, and for its single-minded devotion to the highest standards of scholarship. It is almost exclusively a place for individual research: quiet, ascetic, devoid of distracting activities. There are no laboratory facilities. Until recently, higher mathematics, natural science (primarily theoretical physics) and history were the three disciplines cultivated; more recently, a new program has been added, in fields related to the social sciences.

The quality of the work performed at the Institute is assured by the care taken in the selections for membership. Once invited and received, the visiting scholar has complete freedom to pursue his work as he wishes, if he wastes his time, which seldom happens, it is to itself— for the unsoundness of its choice — not to him, that the reproaches of the faculty are directed. Nothing prevents faculty

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members or visiting scholars from getting together, if they are so moved, for lectures, discussions, and seminars; the Institute gladly extends, in this case, the necessary facilities. But it takes no initiative in organizing such activities. It is concerned, as Robert Oppen-heimer once put it to me, "to deprive these people of any excuse for not doing whatever it was that they came here to do."

I can find no adequate words in which to acknowledge the debt I owe to this establishment. The Institute took me, already a middle-aged man devoid of academic credentials, substantially on faith, gambling on the existence of scholarly capacities that remained to be demonstrated. Not only did it give me, then, the possibility to develop these capacities, such as they were, but it provided the examples, and in a gentle way the discipline, without which they could never have been developed.

I stood to gain, and did gain, a great deal over the course of the years from contacts with the many visiting scholars. But the deepest and most lasting enrichment came, quite naturally, from the enduring association with some of the truly great members of the Institute's permanent faculty. Of the living ones I shall not attempt to speak, although there are several who would deserve inclusion under this heading. But there are others, now no longer with us, whom I cannot fail to mention.

It was, I suppose, the rigorous and versatile military-diplomatic historian Edward Mead Earle who more than anyone except Op-penheimer himself was responsible for bringing me to the Institute. It was under his tactful but vigorous guidance that I did my first work there. He died in June 1954, and my debt to him was one that I never had opportunity to acknowledge to him personally.

In scholarship, as in the family, it is primarily by example, not precept, that people influence one another. There could have been no more wonderful example for a person in the early stages of scholarly development than Erwin Panofsky. One of the greatest art historians of all time, "Pan" combined immense erudition with a

rich, warm, engaging humor, endless curiosity and love of subject, and a generosity in communication that was the mark of the born teacher. The impression left on me, as on so many other people, was indelible.

Panofsky was only one of several priceless gifts from Adolf Hitler to American scholarship in general and to the Institute for Advanced Study in particular. Another was the great mediaevalist Ernst Kantorowicz — "Eka," as he was always known to friends and colleagues. A bachelor, an aesthete, and a man of ineffable Old World charm, Eka, cozily installed in his little home on Alexander Street, was an essential feature of the Princeton of the 1950s, as I first knew it; and his passing left a gap that could never be filled.

Let me give an example of what the interest of such a person as Eka could, and did, mean to a younger scholar. When I finished the draft of Russia Leaves the War, I asked him if he would care to look it over. It dealt, after all, with the period of World War I, of which he had vivid memories, he having at that time served in the German army; and we had sometimes talked of the problems and events of that day. It was my first major effort, and I was not quite sure what it was, actually, that I had produced. He took the typescript home and read, at least, great parts of it. Then he asked me to dinner, alone, at his home. Being not only a gourmet but also an accomplished cook, he prepared with his own hands a marvelous meal for the two of us, served it with the best of wines, and then, seating me in the living room over coffee and brandy, took out the typescript and said: "Now, my friend, we will talk about what you have done," whereupon he proceeded to subject the piece, not from the factual standpoint (for he did not pretend to be familiar with the subject matter) but from the standpoint of technique and taste in historical writing, to the most searching, useful, and unforgettable criticism. This, I thought, was the mark not just of a great scholar but of a great gentleman.

Another faculty colleague from whose company I profited over

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most of the years of my residence at the Institute was the former British Foreign Office historian, Oxford professor and Fellow of All Souls, Sir Llewellyn Woodward. English as it was possible to be, tweedy and whimsical, given to long solitary stalking walks around the ample fields and environs of the Institute, Woodward was not an easy man to get to know. On top of the normal English shyness he had the gruffness, the critical skepticism, and the chariness with praise characteristic of the fine workman in any field; for a fine workman — severe, painstaking, exacting in the demands he placed on himself — was precisely what, as a historian, he was. But this scholarly rigor, so essential to the fashioning of the fine volumes of British diplomatic documents published under his coeditor-ship, concealed, as though by another expression of native diffidence, a philosopher, an aesthete, a first-rate, greatly unappreciated writer in the field of belles-lettres, and a very perceptive commentator on the affairs of his own time.

After the death of his sweet and charming wife, to whom my own wife and I were much attached. Woodward was a broken man. His grief was unassuageable. He stopped coming to Princeton, because — he told me — the two of them had been so happy there, and the associations were too numerous and too harrowing to endure.

Woodward was never a demonstrative man. Considering my background and all my peripheral involvements, he must initially have viewed my scholarly potentiahties, I am sure, with the liveliest skepticism. My views on World War I, too, vv^ere far from his own; and this was a subject about which he had deep feelings, having himself served as an artillery officer on the Western Front at that time. But he gradually came to recognize, I think, the earnestness of my admiration for him as well as my readiness to learn from him where I could; and in his lonely final years our relations developed into ones of friendship and even a form of affection.

Also at the Institute during the first years of my residence there

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was, of course, Albert Einstein. He was aware of my identity and my presence. W'e sometimes exchanged friendly notes. But we never met. It is hard for me to explain why. I knew nothing and understood nothing of his scientific concerns. I had nothing to see iiim about, and I was only too well aware of the pressures constantly put upon him by casual visitors, well-wishers, would-be exploiters, and curiosity-seekers of all sorts. I had no desire to add to this burden, and I concluded that the best way of manifesting my respect for him would be to leave him alone. I am not sure, in retrospect, that this was right. But there was much to be said for it. He was old and presumably tired. He was not likely to learn much about Russia, and I was certain to learn nothing about physics or mathematics, from a courtesy visit.

I must mention, finally, the remarkable and unforgettable man who was not only a member of the Institute's faculty but, for the first sixteen years of my own association with the establishment, its director and the man to whom, more than anyone else, I owed my affiliation with it: Robert Oppenheimer.

Could there, I wonder, be anyone harder to describe than he? In some ways very young, in others very old; part scientist, part poet; sometimes proud, sometimes humble; in some ways formidably competent in practical matters, in other ways woefully helpless: he was a bundle of marvelous contradictions. Of his greatness there can, in my opinion, be no question. His mind was one of wholly exceptional power, subtlety, and speed of reaction. He was one of the few people who could combine in one intellectual and aesthetic personality vast scientific knowledge, impressive erudition in the humanities, and an active, sophisticated interest in the international-political affairs of his ow n time.

He was often described as arrogant, and criticized for it. Perhaps, perhaps — though the evidences of it seemed often to me to reflect primarily the influences of people around him rather than the natural impulses of his own personality. The shattering quickness and

critical power of his own mind made him, no doubt, impatient of the ponderous, the obvious, and the platitudinous, in the discourse of others. But underneath this edgy impatience there lay one of the most sentimental of natures, an enormous thirst for friendship and affection, and a touching belief — such as I never observed in anyone else — in what he thought should be the fraternity of advanced scholarship. He would have agreed with Bukharin, I think, that intellectual friendship was the deepest and finest form of friendship among men; and his attitude towards those whose intellectual qualities he most admired — Niels Bohr, for example — was one of deep, humble devotion and solicitude. The greatest tragedy of his life, I often suspect, was not the ordeal to which he was subjected over the question of his loyalty, though this — God knows — was bad enough, but the fact that the members of the faculty of the Institute were often not able to bring to each other, as a concomitant of the respect they entertained for each other's scholarly attainments, the sort of affection, and almost reverence, which he himself thought these qualities ought naturally to command. His fondest dream had been, I think, one of a certain rich and harmonious fellowship of the mind. He had hoped to create this at the Institute for Advanced Study; and it did come into being, to a certain extent, within the individual disciplines. But very little of it could be created from discipline to discipline; and the fact that this was so — the fact that mathematicians and historians continued to seek their own tables in the cafeteria, and that he himself remained so largely alone in his ability to bridge in a single inner world these wholly disparate workings of the human intellect — this was for him, I am sure, a source of profound bewilderment and disappointment.

For the charges brought against him and the harassments to which he was subject in the early 1950s in connection with the question of his loyalty, I can find no patience whatsoever. The actions on his part which served as their pretext were peccadillos — foolish actions, as he himself soon recognized, but not ones involv-

ing the passage of any information to any foreign government and not ones that could have served to justify any suspicion of disloyalty. They were known to the United States government years before that government entrusted him with the chairmanship of the Scientific Advisory Committee; and for the revival and the formal levying of these charges against him in the 1950s, I can conceive of no motive other than personal vindictiveness and shameless, heartless political expediency. The United States government, if it is to realize America's possibilities as a great power, will have to learn that even our country is not so rich in talent that it can afford to proceed thus brutally and recklessly with that which it has.

I remember Oppenheimer primarily by certain episodes of our acquaintance.

I remember him, first of all, as he was when I saw him for the first time. It was in the fall of 1946. He had come to the National War College to lecture. He shuffled diffidently and almost apologetically out to the podium: a frail, stooped figure in a heavy brown tweed suit with trousers that were baggy and too long, big feet that turned outward, and a small head and face that caused him, at times, to look strangely like a young student. He then proceeded to speak for nearly an hour, without the use of notes — but to speak with such startling lucidity and such scrupulous subtlety and precision of expression that when he had finished, no one dared ask a question — everyone was sure that somehow or other he had answered every possible point. I say "somehow or other," because, curiously enough, no one could remember exactly what he had said. The fascination exerted by his personality, the virtuosity of tlic performance, and the extreme subtlety of expression had actually interfered with the receptivity of the audience to the substance of what he was saying. This was a phenomenon that was to dog him throughout his life whenever it fell to him to address any other than a scientifically specialized audience.

I recall, again, the scene at his house one rainy Sunday morning

when I asked him (it was during the ordeal of the public hearings on his fitness to continue as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee) why he remained in this country at all in the face of such harassment. He was at home, I pointed out, in other parts of the world: he had taken his doctorate in Holland; he had many friends in the European academic world; there was not a university anywhere across the globe that would not welcome him with open arms.

He stood there a moment, tears streaming down his face. Then he stammered, with a corniness of which he was as well aware as I was but the very helplessness of which increased the forces of the statement: "Dammit, I happen to love this country."

It was true. For all his discouragements with his own people, for all the misunderstandings he met with on the part of his own government and sections of the American public, Oppenheimer was, and always remained, a profoundly American figure.

I remember him, finally, as he was on November 22, 1963, when the two of us, standing in his office at the Institute, both shattered by the early incomplete reports of the assassination, received over the radio the confirmation of Jack Kennedy's death. He said nothing, nor did I — there was no need. But I saw — and shared — the quick, terrible stab of anguish and disheartenment that came over his eyes. Neither of us knew Jack Kennedy intimately, but we were both aware that it was more than just that one life that had been obliterated: that the world we cared about had been grievously diminished, together with our own ability to be in any way useful to it. For Oppenheimer, with his great imaginative insight, it was a dreadful blow; and I wonder if I am wrong when I ascribe to that moment, as I instinctively tend to do, the beginning of his own death.

I mention all of these deceased colleagues not just because they taught mc a great deal but because their generosity towards myself

Meinoirs: 1(^^0-1(^6^

was such that 1 can never today do less than I am capable of doing, as a writer and a scholar, without feeling myself guilty of a sort of betrayal of the confidence they placed in me — a betrayal even shabbier and more painful to the conscience now that they are dead than it would have been had they been still alive.

This, I suppose, is the way people help each other — perhaps the only way they can ultimately help each other — in the lonely, rarefied life of the mind. It constitutes the reason why those who are conscious of having been well and generously taught have an obli-e^ation, at some time and in some way, to teach.

Korea

THERE was one involvement of those hectic first months out of government that was not of my doing: it was, in fact, a carry-over from recent responsibilities in government. This was the problem of Korea.

I had approved from the start our decision to resist by force of arms the incursion by the North Koreans into South Korea that began on June 25, 1950. But I had done so on the assumption and understanding that our action was only for a limited purpose: namely, the restoration of the status quo ante on the Korean peninsula, and that our forces would not, even if mihtary successes permitted, advance beyond the former demarcation line along the 38th parallel. I saw in the North Korean attack adequate reason fox us to undertake military operations for this limited purpose; I did not see in it justification for involving ourselves in another world war. Even in the event that a major war might develop, contrary to our wishes, out of this limited one, it was not at all clear to me that the Korean peninsula would be the place on which we would choose to fight it. I was greatly concerned, therefore, to assure that a decision to resist North Korean aggression in South Korea should not be permitted to grow imperceptibly into something more than it was meant to be.

I made it clear as early as July 1950, in the internal discussions of

our government, that I was opposed to any advance beyond the 38th parallel. That this view did not fail to register was evident from the fact that Mr. John Foster Dulles cited it (most improp-crl\-, from the standpoint of governmental security) to a journalist as evidence of a dangerous waywardness of opinion on my part. 1 continued to press this view down to the time of my departure from Washington in September. On August 8, for example, I wrote, in a memorandum for my superiors in the department:

As Bohlcn emphasized when he was here, w hen the tide of battle begins to change, the Kremlin will not wait for us to reach the 38th parallel before taking action. When we begin to have military successes, that w ill be the time to watch out. Anvthing mav then happen — entrv of Soviet forces, entrv of Chinese Communist forces, new strike for UN settlement, or all three together.

l\v() w ecks later, just before leaving the department, I reiterated this view in an off-the-record press conference with a number of Washington journalists. Asked about Russian reactions in the case of a North Korean defeat, I gave it as my belief

that the Russians will not be inclined to sit bv if our forces or United Nations forces ... of any sort pusii the North Koreans bevond the 38th parallel again. . . . Thev mav . . . rcoccupv North Korea, or they might introduce other forces which w ould be nominallv Chinese Communist forces . . . (goodness knows who would be reallv controlling them). . . . ObviousK, they are not going to leave the field free for us to sw eep up the peninsula and place ourselves fortx or fift\ miles from X'ladivostok.

iMy anxieties on this whole subject were heightened by the diffi-cultv we in the State Department experienced in getting any satisfactory explanations from the Pentagon about our bombings of the port of Rashin on the eastern coast of North Korea. This had caused me to doubt that (jcneral MacArthur was under any very effective control by anybody in Washington, or that anyone really knew precisely what he was doing. It seemed to me that official

Washington had in effect, for domestic-political reasons, consigned the fortunes of our country and of world peace to an agency, namely General MacArthur's headquarters, over which it had no effective authority. "By permitting General MacArthur," I wrote on August 21 to Secretary Acheson (to whom it would scarcely have been a revelation),

to retain the wide and relatively uncontrolled latitude he has enjoyed in determining our policy in the north Asian and western Pacific areas, we are tolerating a state of affairs in which we do not really have full control over the statements that are being made — and the actions taken — in our name.

It will be understood, against this background, that it was with something more than a lack of confidence or enthusiasm that I watched, after removal to Princeton in early September, the further course of the Korean War: the crossing of the parallel by our forces in the first days of October; the growing evidences in October and November of preparations for Chinese intervention; the arrival of American forces at the Manchurian border on November 21; General MacArthur's inauguration on November 24 of a "win the war" offensive; the sudden entry of the Chinese in force the following day; and finally — on November 26-28 — the overwhelming of American units along the Yalu by superior Chinese forces, and the beginning of the American retreat. Living away from Washington, I naturally did not know that my misgivings about an advance towards the Manchurian border had now come to be shared by a number of highly placed people in Washington, and to some extent even by the Joint Chiefs of Staff themselves; nor did I know that General MacArthur had twice given assurances, once personally to the President at Wake Island and again in reply to a direct query from Washington in the first days of November, that a Russian or Chinese intervention was nothing to be feared.* I was

* Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Volume II, Years of Trial and Hope, 1946-19^2, chap. 24. Garden City: Doublcday, 1956.

also unaware that the Chinese Communists had told the Indian ambassador in Peking, iMr. K. M. Panikkar, on October 3, 1950, that China would enter the war if American forces advanced beyond the parallel, and that the United States government had knowledge of this.* Had I known these things, I would have been even more disturbed. But what was in the press was enough to cause my heart to sink.

The final days of November, in particular, were dark ones. The papers were full of the disaster that had befallen us. On December I, I received a long-distance call from Charles E. Bohlen, then serving as minister at our embassy in Paris. He was greatly disturbed, he said, not just over the news from Korea, but, precisely in conjunction with it, over the impression he had gained that there was at that moment no one among the senior advisors of our government present in Washington who had any great experience in Russian affairs or any deep knowledge of Soviet policy and psychology. "I am calling to implore you," he said, "to go down to Washington and insist on seeing General Marshall, who I know has high regard for your views, and also the Secretary of State, and to try to impress upon them the real considerations which undoubtedly underlie the Russian and Chinese reactions and on which you and I have been consistently in agreement."

In response to this question I offered to the department — through the intermediation of friends in Washington — whatever help I could give. Word came back the following day that my presence would be welcome, and the result was that at ten on Sunday morning, December 3, I reported once more to the office of the Secretary of State.

Alarming news had just come in that morning from AlacArthur. He now saw no chances for further success, and even — over the long run — little chance for effective defense "unless ground rein-

• Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Departfnent, p. 452. New York: Norton, 1969.

forcements of the greatest magnitude are promptly supplied." * Washington had no such forces available, had no desire to involve itself in a major war, and could not have carried out any escalation of the conflict on this scale without incurring a complete break with its UN allies. The situation was therefore dark in the extreme.

The Secretary himself was absent at the time of my arrival, conferring with the military leaders and with the President on the situation in the light of MacArthur's telegram. I first sat in on the military briefings for the Under Secretary of State, Mr. James Webb, and then talked with the latter personally. The picture that emerged from these discussions was confused but alarming. Mr. Webb, my diary records, was

obviously in a state of considerable agitation. He said that the military leaders felt that a complete withdrawal from Korea was the only alternative to the loss of what was practically our entire ground establishment. They thought that we had perhaps 36 hours for a decision as to an orderly withdrawal. If that decision was not made, the result might be complete disaster and effective loss of the entire force. He said discussions were in progress concerning the attitude we should adopt in the United Nations and in the conversations with Attlee [the British premier], who was expected to arrive the following morning. No course would be decided on until we had talked with the British. One of the variants that would be discussed with the British would be a direct approach to the Russians with a view to bringing about a cease-fire in Korea. What they wanted from me, he said, was a view as to the prospects of negotiation with the Russians on this problem at this time.

The Secretary, returning to his office after lunch, confirmed this assignment. What was wanted from me was an opinion as to the prospects for direct negotiations with the Russians, as a possible escape from our military embarrassment. I accordingly withdrew and set about, with the help of John Paton Davies and the late G. Frederick Reinhardt (also an old Moscow hand, later to serve long and

* Truman, Me?fioirs, vol. II, p. 392.

with distinction as our ambassador in Rome) to write such an opinion.

What wc produced, in that memorandum of December 3, 1950, were four pages, single-spaced, of the bleakest and most uncomfort-ing prose that the department's files can ever have accommodated. We could do no other.

There were, it was clear, only two conceivable frameworks in which diplomatic discussions could be conducted with the Russians about the Korean situation: either we talked about it as an isolated problem, declining to bring it into connection with the broader problems of the Far East as a region; or we took it up as part of the w hole range of Far Eastern problems, including such delicate ones as the question of a Japanese peace treaty and our policy towards Communist China.

For this last, plainly, we were wholly unprepared. This was at the height of the AlcCarthyist hysteria. The China lobby, in particular, was in full cry. There were violent differences in Congress over Far Eastern policy. No attempt could be made to give any final definition to that policy, and especially to discuss it with the Russians, without blowing the domestic political situation sky-high. So delicate was the situation that we could not even discuss it intelligently with our allies.

But the alternative — an attempt to discuss the Korean situation with the Russians as an isolated problem, without relation to the many wider questions it obviously affected — was still worse. "Any approach to the Russians," we wTote,

. . . simply asking for an immediate cease-fire in Korea and not connected with anv political agreements about the future of Korea or other Far Eastern problems wouki probahlv be taken bv the Kremlin leaders as a bid for pence by us on w hatcvcr terms \\ c can get.

They would regard this as confirmation that w c \\ ere faced with the alternative of capitulation, on the one hand, or complete rout and military disaster on the other, hi such a situation their main concern would

be to see that the maximum advantage, in terms of damage to our prestige and to non-Communist unity, should be extracted from our plight. This being the case, they would see no reason to spare us any of the humiliation of military disaster. They would not be interested in promoting a cease-fire unless it were on terms at least as damaging to our prestige as a continuation of military operations might be expected to be. . . .

The present moment is probably the poorest one we have known at any time in the history of our relations with the Soviet Union for negotiations with its leaders. . . . The prerequisite to any satisfactory negotiation about the local situation in Korea is the demonstration that we have the capability to stabilize the front somewhere in the peninsula and to engage a large number of Communist forces for a long time. If we are unable to do this, I see not the faintest reason why the Russians should wish to aid us in our predicament. . . . Any approach we make to them without some solid cards in our hand, in the form of some means of pressure on them to arrive at an agreement in their own interest, may simply be exploited by them for purposes of spotlighting our weakness and improving their own position in the eyes of other peoples. . . .

The prerequisite to any successful negotiation on political subjects would be a posture of unity, confidence and collected strength on our side.

When I took this paper into Secretary Acheson's office it was already seven o'clock in the evening. He, for whom in those times there were no weekends or days of leisure, was obviously tired, and was just leaving for home. I did not have the heart to prolong his exhausting Sunday with so wretchedly unhelpful a paper, and forbore to hand it to him until the following morning. He, however, kindly asked me to come home and have family supper with Mrs. Acheson and himself, and this I gratefully did.^

* These pages, and all other references in this book to the late Dean Acheson, were written before his death. I regret that they could not have been subjected, as I supposed they would be when writing them, to the test of his inimitable, critical reaction. I can only give them as written and ask the reader to bear in mind that Mr. Acheson's memory might well have been different from mine, as his views were certain to have been.

I have no memory and no record of what, specifically, was discussed that evening. 1 remember, in addition to Mrs. Acheson's great charm, only the Secretary's characteristic spirit and wit, which no crisis and no weariness seemed ever to extinguish; and I recall a feeling of sympathy and solicitude for him which not even the public disagreements of later years were able to dim. Here he was: a gentleman, the soul of honor, attempting to serve the interests of the country against the background of a Washington seething with anger, confusion and misunderstanding, bearing the greatest possible burden of responsibility for a dreadful situation he had not created, yet having daily to endure the most vicious and unjust of personal attacks from the very men — the congressional claque and other admirers of General MacArthur — who, by their insistence on this adventurous and ill-advised march to the ^'alu, had created it. I had often disagreed with him — our minds had never really worked the same way; but never for a moment could I deny him my admiration for the manner in which he bore this ordeal. And I was aware that this particular evening — with our Korean forces in full retreat, with many of our military leaders in near-panic, and with the British Prime Minister arriving tomorrow to demand an accounting from us in the name of our UN allies — must have been for him one of the blackest moments of a career not poor in trials and discouragements.

I tried, as I recall it, to spare him further talk about the problem of decision to which his day had been devoted; but we must, I think, have spoken about the obvious erraticism in General Mac-Arthur's judgments and conduct and the jittery reactions and wild counsels that were now popping up all over Washington, particularly in military and congressional circles. I took my leave that night, in any case, depressed at the thought that my host was sure to find himself surrounded, the following day, by people who seemingly had no idea how to take a defeat with dignity and good grace.

In the early morning, therefore, in the hope of strengthening his hand as he faced the trials of the coming day, I sat down and wrote him a longhand note of the following tenor (he himself included it in his Present at the Creation^ but I reproduce it here again, because it is part of the story):

There is one thing I should like to say in continuation of our discussion of yesterday evening.

In international, as in private, life w hat counts most is not really what happens to someone but how he bears what happens to him. For this reason almost everything depends from here on out on the manner in which we Americans bear what is unquestionably a major failure and disaster to our national fortunes. If we accept it with candor, with dignity, with a resolve to absorb its lessons and to make it good by redoubled and determined effort — starting all over again, if necessary, along the pattern of Pearl Harbor — we need lose neither our self-confidence nor our allies nor our power for bargaining, eventually, with the Russians. But if we try to conceal from our own people or from our allies the full measure of our misfortune, or permit ourselves to seek relief in any reactions of bluster or petulance or hysteria, we can easily find this crisis resolving itself into an irreparable deterioration of our world position — and of our confidence in ourselves.

This I handed to him, when we met in the morning, together with the official paper Davies and Reinhardt and I had written the day before. Both documents were then discussed at the Secretary's regular morning meeting with his chief advisors. There was no dissent to the tenor of the official paper. It was generally accepted that no useful purpose could be served by any attempt to negotiate with the Russians about Korea, as an isolated problem, at that moment.*'

But there still remained the question of military policy. I was unable to conceive that a total and abrupt military withdrawal from

* Mr. Achcson said to the British Prime Minister, Mr. Attlcc, the following day, that the moment seemed to him to be "the worst one for negotiation with Jie Russians since 1917." The Russians, he added, "saw themselves holding the cards and would concede nothing" (Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 482).

the peninsula was the only answer; and Dean Rusk,* among others, shared this opinion. He, niv notes record,

introduced the question as to whether we were really ohligcd to abandon Korea altogether and w hcthcr it might not he a good thing for us to attempt to hold some sort of a beachhead, particularly in the light of what I had said about negotiations with the Russians. I took occasion to reinforce the point he had raised. I was afraid, I said, that perhaps our military leaders were not sufficiently aware how similar our position had become to that occupied by the British for a long period in the past and how necessary it was for us, on occasion, to hold stubbornly, on the basis of sheer political instinct, to positions which by military logic might appear to be useless. One could never know about these things. I recalled the battles in North Africa during the recent war and the drastic and repeated changes in military fortune which carried the front hundreds of miles back and forth along the North African littoral. Had the British not stubbornly clung to a position just short of Cairo, in the face of discouraging odds, they would never have w on their final victory. If we could prove, I said, that we could hold some sort of line or beachhead in central or southern Korea, which would pin dow n a large number of enemy forces, I was not sure that the prospect of continuing such a contest in the face of air attacks on their lines of communications would prove attractive to the enemy.

I cannot recall that there was any disagreement with this view at the morning meeting. Our problem, obviously, was not there, in the State Department; it was on the other side of the river. Rusk, Matthewst and I therefore left directly from this meeting, at the Secretary's request, and drove over to the Pentagon to see General George Marshall, who had just recently taken over as Secretary of Defense. Here we found, as we were sure we would, a calm, wise and steady ally. The General expressed, my notes record,

his complete agreement w ith us in principle. It was impossible, he said, to determine at the present moment whether any line or beachhead

• Dean Rusk, future Secretary of State, was then Assistant Secretary of State for Far I",astern Affairs.

I H. Freeman Matthews, tlicn Deputy Under Secretary of State.

could be held. What was essential was the security of the Command, which must not be jeopardized. We had first to see whether the forces on the east coast could be evacuated, and in what condition and with what equipment. Then we had to determine what was the situation in the Seoul-Inchon area. At present the situation was obscured by the fog of battle, and we had no adequate information.

Referring to the point of principle we had raised, the General recalled his experiences in the past in the case of Bataan and Corregidor, and cited this as an example of the virtue of hanging on doggedly for reasons of prestige and morale.

Before we completed our talk with General Marshall, we were joined by Mr. Robert A. Lovett, then serving as Deputy Secretary of Defense, who had just come from Capitol Hill, where he had been briefing the members of the House Armed Services Committee and discussing the situation with them. The prevailing feeling there, he reported, was that our entire entry into Korea had been a mistake and that we ought to pull out as rapidly as possible. I received this news with consternation; but the General took it in his stride. This sort of fluctuation in congressional opinion was not, he said, a new thing. The present mood might not last for very long.*

By midday, the matter was settled. On returning to the Department of State, we lunched with Secretary Acheson. He had just been talking with President Truman. The President's decision was, as always in the great crises, clear, firm and unhesitating. He had no patience, Mr. Acheson told us, with the suggestions that we abandon Korea. We would stay and fight as long as possible.

The British Prime Minister, Mr. Clement Attlee, arrived that afternoon; and the discussions between him and our governmental leaders began the following morning. With relation to these discussions my own advice was not needed. I was in agreement with the

* This summary of General Marshall's reaction, while almost identical with that which appeared in Mr. Acheson's memoirs {Present at the Creation, p. 477), comes from my own personal notes, written at the time.

President and the Secretary, I believe, in feeling that the British should be satisfied with our assurance that we proposed neither to abandon South Korea nor to push the conflict there to the point of a new world war, and that there was no necessity for going beyond that and attempting to reconcile our respective views at that time on the thorny subject of China. And so, indeed, the matter was allowed to rest. After remaining in Washington, therefore, only long enough for an effort (apparently successful) to stop some of the department's senior UN enthusiasts from attempting to drive through another UN resolution, this time condemning the Chinese Communists as aggressors (an undertaking that would have forced the issue of our differences with the British and others over China), I took my leave and returned to Princeton. The greatest danger — that of a panicky abandonment of the entire efl^ort in Korea — had, through the stoutness of the President and the good sense of his secretaries for State and Defense, been momentarily overcome. But the general situation was such that it was with a sense of near despair that I boarded the train for Princeton that afternoon. Washington, it seemed, was in the greatest and most disgraceful disarray. "You were right," I wrote to Bohlen, that day,

in vour anguished conviction about the need for another outlook in Washington. But it is much too late today to do anything but pick up the pieces. We are the victims mainly of an absolutely unbelievable and stupendous military blunder; but even this could not have placed us in dilemmas as bitter as those that arc rending us t()da\' if the basis of our political policy in the past weeks and months had been a realistic, rather than a legalistic, one. You may blame me for not having done more to correct this situation; but remember that there is a real ceiling on the usefulness of any one of us, and that is the point at w hich he becomes so importunate with his views that thev cease to be listened to with any respect at all. My absence in recent w ceks has prevented mc from passing into that area, but I am sure that I would have ended up there had 1 continued in the department in mv former capacity. I would end up there verv soon right now if I continued to drift around too long in the

capacity vou once magnificentlv described as that of a "floating kidney."

The stabiHzation of a front along the middle of the peninsula proved, of course, to be an entirely feasible undertaking. The Chinese, by the time they arrived at that point, began to feel the length of their supply lines; and a reasonable balance of forces was soon restored. With this, the groundwork was laid for the sort of negotiations for an armistice which I had opposed in the unfavorable situation of December 1950. A political basis was now also provided for these negotiations, not only by the readiness of our government to recognize at long last that it was unwise for us to attempt to liberate all of North Korea by force of arms, but also by President Truman's courage in relieving General MacArthur of his command and thus bringing our policy in Korea for the first time under Washington's control. The question now posed itself, however, in the late spring of 1951: How could we, without inviting or risking humiliating rebufi^s, ascertain whether the Russians were disposed to go along with such negotiations and to give them their support? A public initiative on our part that produced only an insulting North Korean rebuff could be much worse than no initiative at all.

On May 6, 1951, Mr. Stewart Alsop, writing in the Neiv York Herald Tribune on the consequences of an advance beyond the parallel, compared favorably my own known views on the dangers of such an advance with certain public statements recently made by General MacArthur. General MacArthur had said, according to Mr. Alsop: "I do not believe that anything that happens in Korea, or Asia for that matter, would affect the basic decision [of the Kremlin] whether to intervene openly in the Korean War." This was, of course, directly contrary to my own view that the Russians were extremely sensitive to the security of their own border in the Far East and of the Manchurian border as well, and would cer-

tainly react militarily before permitting us to establish ourselves militarily in that region.

"Kennan believes," Alsop then added, "that a real political victory in Korea may soon be possible, if we do not again make the fatal mistake of demanding 'unconditional surrender.' If not, war may come anyway. But Kennan is reported to believe that before edging into a world war by the back door, we should make a final effort, by the secret processes of diplomacy, to reach at least some temporary settlement with the real masters of the situation, the men in the Kremlin."

This report was not inaccurate nor, apparently, was it without effect. Twelve days later, I was called to Washington and was asked whether I would make an effort to get into touch privately with the Soviet representative on the United Nations Security Council, Air. Jacob Malik, with a view to explaining to him our government's position and inclinations and learning something, if possible, about the position and inclinations of his own. I was to make it clear that our discussions would be purely informal and exploratory, that neither government would consider itself committed by their results, and that nothing would be made known publicly of either the fact of our meeting or the tenor of our discussions. I was, perhaps, fitted for this task in a way that most others would not have been, insofar as, knowing the Russian language, I was able to speak with iMr. Alalik tete-a-tete, without the presence of interpreters, which avoided the necessity of numerous protocols and simplified problems of security.

Dean Acheson described well and accurately in his memoirs the background of these talks, as well as the degree of success that they may be said to have had.* They took place on June i and June 5, 1951. They were successful insofar as they provided the background, unknown to the public at the time, for Malik's statement on June 23, made on a UN radio program, to the effect that

• Frese?n at the Creation^ pp. 532-533.

the Soviet government believed the Korean conflict could be settled; that the first step would be discussions among the belligerents (of whom the Soviet government, formally, was not one); and that there was a possibility for the success of such a step "if both sides really wished to stop the fighting."

Stimulated by this Soviet initiative, formal talks were, as everyone knows, soon inaugurated. They were long, wearisome, and — from the American and United Nations standpoint — exasperating almost beyond belief. It must have been hard for the American negotiators, at times, to believe that their Korean opposite numbers were animated by any motive other than to drive them from the negotiating table and reopen hostilities. There was, as Mr. Acheson observed, a possibility that things might have gone better had we, for our part, been content to talk in terms of a line of division lying once again along the 38th parallel, instead of one somewhat to the north of it. But here again, for better or for worse, military considerations were allowed to prevail over political ones. Whether for this reason or for others, the talks were sticky and often, from our standpoint, infuriating. Some of our negotiators, had they known of my part in making them possible, would have cursed me for the effort, and I could scarcely have blamed them.

The fact is, however, that the talks did take place. Fighting, for the most part, stopped. Eventually, a new line was established — more favorable, actually, to the South Koreans than the one that had existed before the Korean War began. And while the subsequent maintenance of this line was never for anyone on the non-Communist side a pleasant or easy task, the heavy and largely useless bloodshed that marked the unhappy years 1950-1951 has not yet, mercifully, been renewed.

My own role in all this was, as has been seen, relatively minor. What it amounted to was simply that it fell to me, after unsuccessfully opposing the advance of MacArthur's forces beyond the 38th

parallel in 1950, to take a small but not negligible part in steadying down the military \\ hen this folly had produced its predictable consequences, and then, once the results of this reverse had been absorbed and the situation stabilized, to take a similar part in easing the transition from open hostilities to a tense and uneasy, but generally workable, armistice. This armistice has endured, with painful strains and stresses, to the present day. It seems to me to have been, despite all the attendant difficulties, preferable to the alternative with which we were then confronted: to press on with hostilities on the Korean peninsula in the pursuit of military and political objectives which, to the extent their realization was approached, would almost certainly have brought the Russians in against us and would probably have assured the outbreak, then and there, of World War III.

If this tale has its morals, they arc two. The first is merely the further emphasizing of a lesson that flows from all the other literature surrounding this particular episode in our national history; namely, the terrible danger of letting national policy be determined by military considerations alone. Had the military been given their head (and this goes for the entire combination of MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington) — had they not been restrained by the wise discipline exercised, in the face of unprece-dentedly savage political opposition, by President Truman, Secretary of State Acheson, and General Marshall — disaster would almost certainly have ensued.

The second moral, illustrated in this case only by Mr. Acheson's memoirs and my own, is the great and sometimes crucial value — so seldom heeded, so difficult perhaps to heed, in American statesmanship — of wholly secret, informal and exploratory contacts even between political and military adversaries, as adjuncts to the overt and formal processes of international diplomacy.

The Far East

BEFORE one leaves the subject of the Korean War there is one more aspect of it that deserves mention, particularly because it serves to illustrate the connection between that conflict and the wider problems of American policy in the Far East, as they presented themselves at that time. It is a question not of what happened, or what we should have been doing, during the course of the hostilities in Korea, but rather of the motives and calculations which may have led the Soviet leaders to sanction and support the North Korean attack in the first place.

In the first volume of these memoirs, I included among the various considerations that might have impelled Stalin to authorize this action "our recent decision to proceed at once with the negotiation of a separate peace treaty settlement with Japan, to which the Russians would not be a party, and to accompany that settlement with the indefinite retention of American garrisons and military fa-ciHties on Japanese soil." *

In evaluating this statement, it is necessary to recall that in urging, as I had done in 1948 (see pages 393-394 of the first volume of these memoirs), "that no decision be made at that time regarding the possible stationing of American forces in Japan in the period following conclusion of a treaty of peace," I was acting on the

* Memoirs, 192^-19^0, p. 498. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1967.

hope "that we would eventually be able to arrive at some general understanding with the Russians, relating to the security of the northwestern Pacific area, w hich would make this unnecessary." Once internal conditions in Japan had been stabilized, and once the country had been provided with forces adequate to protect against subversion and assure internal security, we might be able to afford, it seemed to me, "to offer to the Russians in effect the withdrawal of our armed forces from the Japanese archipelago (about Okinawa I was not so sure) in return for some settlement that would give us assurance against the communization of all Korea." * With this in mind, I had hoped that we would not press the question of a Japanese peace settlement, and particularly a separate one that would involve the indefinite retention of American bases there, before exploring with the Russians the possibilities for some arrangement to which they could give their assent.

These, as I say, were the hopes I had entertained in 194H, when General Marshall was at the State Department. It would be misleading to say that Dean Acheson, when he became Secretary of State, disagreed with them: he had, I am sure, never heard of them, and I very much doubt that any of the gentlemen in the department's Far Eastern Division was moved to bring them to his attention. I expressed, in the earlier volume of memoirs, my doubt that thoughts so unusual as these ever entered the mind of anyone in the department but myself in those busy months of 1949 and 1950 when the Korean War was in the making;t and to this, Dean (with a twinkle, 1 am sure, in his eye) cordially assented when he wrote his own reminiscences.t

It was, then, in consultation with his advisors from the Far Eastern Division and with the British, certainly not with me, that Mr. Acheson came to the conclusion in the autumn of 1949 that it was

• Ibid., p. 394.

1 1 hid., p. 395.

X Dean Aclicson, Vrcsciit at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, pp. 429-430. New York: Norton, 1969.

both desirable and urgent to press for the early conclusion of a treaty of peace with Japan regardless of the objections of the Russians and, if necessary, without their consent and participation. The fact that it took nearly a year to bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the acceptance of this undertaking changes nothing in the fact that it was the desire and policy of the State Department, in the last months of 1949 and the first months of 1950, to move in this direction.

Dean Acheson took me severely to task in his memoirs (pp. 429-430) for those of my views that I have just described, and particularly for the suggestion that our decision "to proceed with a peace treaty designed to win Japan as an ally" might have had anything to do with the Soviet disposition to unleash their North Korean proteges. The final decision to proceed to such a treaty was not taken in Washington, he pointed out, until three months after the outbreak of hostilities in Korea. How, in these circumstances, could the Russians have anticipated it? And why, he further asked, should anyone have supposed that Soviet policy could be influenced by such "unilateral concessions" as I, implicitly, had advocated?

Each of these points calls out, it seems to me, for an answer. I regret that these answers could not have been given while Dean Acheson was alive, so that they could have had to meet the test of his sharp, skeptical eye and his telling pen. I must give them, nevertheless, asking the reader to bear in mind that this was a test to which they could not be submitted.

I find it hard to accept the suggestion that the Russians should have waited for the final denouement of the State Department's differences with the Pentagon over the timing of our renewed approach for a Japanese peace treaty before drawing their own conclusions as to what was cooking in Washington. I would submit that by the middle of February 19^0^ at the latest (I stress here the element of time), it was clear to all responsible people in Moscow (i) that the treaty for which the State Department was angling

was to be a separate one (unless the Russians wished to adhere to something they had never approved and to which they had not been invited to adhere); (2) that this treaty was to mark, or be accompanied by, an arrangement that would turn Japan into a permanent military ally of the United States; (3) that the arrangement would provide for the continued use of the Japanese archipelago by the American armed forces for an indefinite period to come; and (4) that the remaining differences of opinion within the official American establishment in this matter were ones that might at best delay, but would not prevent, the ultimate realization of such a program. The Japanese press was replete in the first months of 1950, as the columns of just the Nippon Tivics will show, with stories that made all this evident. And in his own speech before the National Press Club (January 12, 1950), Air. Acheson had said that

the defeat and the disarmament of Japan has placed upon the United States the necessit\- of assuming the military defense of Japan so loni^ as that is requiredy both in the interest of our security and in the interests of the security of the entire Pacific area, and, in all honor, in the interest of Japanese security. ... I can assure you that there is no intention of any sort of abandoning or weakening the defenses of Japan and that "whatever arrangements are to be made either through permanent settlement or other^ivise, that defense ??nist and shall be ifiaintained *

This language left nothing to be desired in clarity; and there is no reason to doubt that the Russians got the message. "Translated into concrete terms," Fravda asserted on January 24, 1950, these words of Mr. Acheson meant "that the American imperialists have settled dow n in Japan and have no desire to leave it."

A day or so after this Fravda statement, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff set out in a body on a tour of American military installations and bases in Japan. That this visit stood in connection with the intention to place many of these facilities on a permanent basis was widely noted in the press, and not ignored in Aloscow. In

• Italics added bv GFK.

Stalin's day, foreign news stories did not appear in the Soviet press unless there was a specific purpose to be served thereby. It was not by accident, therefore, that the Soviet papers carried, on February 4, a Tokyo story on the visit of the Joint Chiefs, specifically citing, as an example of the significance of that visit, the statement of Admiral Decker, commander of the Yokosuka base, to the effect that the US Navy would require that base permanently.

In mid-February 1950, U.S. News & World Report carried a two-page spread on the subject of American bases in Japan. The American Chiefs of Staff, it was said here at the outset, had "just left Tokyo with plans for permanent U.S. bases in Japan. At least three air bases, a naval base and an Army headquarters are wanted." The bases in question were then described in detail, and their location was illustrated on a large map which, incidentally, showed South Korea (understandably, in the light of statements made repeatedly by American governmental leaders, of whom Mr. Ache-son happened to be one) as lying outside the American defense perimeter. The Yoshida government, it was further stated, was "prepared to cede bases to the U.S. in exchange for a permanent American-Japanese military agreement." In this, to be sure, Yoshida would be faced with heavy internal opposition; but, it was pointed out, the question of "what to expect in Japan" was one that depended, after all, "on decisions made in Washington, not in Tokyo." *

Once again, the Russians were not slow to get the point. The appearance of this article coincided closely in time with the conclusion in Moscow, on February 14, of the Sino-Soviet treaty: the first basic and formal agreement between Soviet Russia and the new revolutionary China, and the fruit of A4ao's two-month negotiating sojourn in the Soviet Union. There is good reason to believe that the wording of x\rticle I of that treaty, binding the parties to take measures "for the purpose of preventing aggressive action on the

* U.S. News & World Report, February 17, 1950, pp. 26-27.

part of Japan or any other State which should unite with Japan, directly or indirectly, in acts of aggression,''' * was drawn up precisely with a view to the prospect that the status of the United States with relation to Japan was soon to change from that of an occupying power to that of an ally. However that may be, when Pravda, two days later, laid down the official Soviet hne of interpretation of the Sino-Soviet treaty in a major front-page editorial, it printed significantly in its news columns for the same day a detailed report on the U.S. News & World Report story just mentioned, and it included in the editorial comment on the treaty a passage for which the news item was clearly intended to serve as the illustrative basis. Reiterating the charge that the United States was turning Japan into a platform for its own military purposes, the editorial went on to say: "Precisely with this in mind, ruling circles in the USA are delaying the conclusion of a peace treaty with Japan while they search for means of concluding with Japan a separate treaty of such a nature as to give them the possibility of continuing the occupation for an indefinite period and keeping their armed forces there for a longer time." t The very fact of the inclusion of this reference in an editorial of so solemn and important a tenor is adequate proof, for anyone familiar with the practices of the Soviet press, that the question of a Japanese peace treaty was not without relation to the provisions of the Sino-Soviet treaty under discussion. And we may be sure, in turn, that the provisions of that treaty were not without their relevance to the behavior of both of the contracting parties in their policies towards Korea during the decisive months that ensued. In the weeks that intervened betw ccn the conclusion of the Sino-Soviet pact and the outbreak of war in Korea, the Soviet reader was

• Italics added by GFK. Note that the word used was "preventing," not "repelling." This should not be lost sight of in judging the motivation of the North Korean attack.

1 In talking about the US government's "delaying" conclusion of a treaty, the paper meant, of course, delaying the conclusion, in the Council of Foreign Ministers where the Soviet government was insisting that negotiation of a peace treaty ought to take place, of a general treaty, to which the Soviet government would be a party.

not allowed to forget that the United States was moving towards a military alliance with Japan. On March 19, commenting on Mr. Acheson's reference to the Japanese peace treaty question in his recent Berkeley speech (March 16), and particularly on his charge that it was the Soviet Union that was blocking progress toward such a treaty, Pravda pointed out that "it would not be difficult for Mr. Acheson, presumably, to recall his recent statement to the effect that independently of whether there would or would not be signed a treaty of peace with Japan, the USA would not leave Japan in any case."

How it can be suggested, in the light of such statements, that the Russians had to wait until September 1950 to become aware that the United States government was going to make Japan a permanent feature of its own military deployment, is indeed difficult to understand.

It would also be hard for me to agree that what I had in mind, in suggesting the exploration with the Russians of the possibilities of agreement with them on the security problems of the northwestern Pacific region, could properly be defined as "unilateral concessions." I put my views on this point to Mr. Acheson in a memorandum (he referred to it in his book*) of August 21, 1950, three weeks before the President was finally brought to approve the peace settlement that was ultimately concluded. "Our best bet," I wrote,

would be to establish real diplomatic contact with the Russians (this means contact along the lines of the Malik-Jessup talks of last year) aiming at the achievement of something like the following state of affairs: we would consent to the neutralization and demilitarization of Japan (except for strong internal police forces) whereas the Russians would agree to a termination of the Korean war involving withdrawal of the North Korean forces and of our forces and a period of effective United Nations control over Korea for at least a year or two, the UN

* Present at the Creation, pp. 445-446.

utilizing for this purpose the nationals and forces only of other x\sian countries.

It will he seen that what was being demanded of the Russians under this concept, as a quid pro quo for our ow n consent to Japan's neutrahzation and demilitarization, was nothing less than the realization of our maximum objectives in the Korean War. That this might have been regarded as an insufficient quid pro quo, I could understand; but that it could be viewed as of such total insignificance that any concessions made by us to achieve it could be properly classifiable as "unilateral," * is difficult for me to accept.

Taken as isolated phenomena, these differences of opinion would have little importance today, and would scarcely deserve mention in this account. But they were indicative of matters far more important than the views of any two individuals; and this, I believe, will readily be seen if one proceeds to an examination of the larger issues of American Far Eastern policy with which they were connected.

My own appreciations about the history of American policy in the Far East were actually to be considerably deepened after I left government by the reading done for the lectures at Chicago, and particularly by study of the admirable work of the late president of Yale University, Professor A. Whitney Griswold: The Far Eastern Policy of the United States. But even before leaving government, I had given a bit of attention to the history of international relationships in the Alanchurian-Korean region and had formed certain views that were destined to be refined, but not essentially changed, in future years.

In the nineteenth century, down to tiie 1880s, the international position, and indeed the very integrity, of Korea had rested on a very fine and delicate balance of power between the Chinese and the Japanese, which found its expression in both the effective neutralization and isolation of the country. It was an American, Com-

• Sec above, p. 41.

mander Robert W. Schufeldt, who, with the complacent tolerance, if not the blessing, of the United States government, took a major part in shattering this fragile equilibrium by forcing the "opening up" (as the phrase went) of the country to American trade. In doing so, he opened it up in no smaller measure to foreign political penetration and intrigue. Such was the delicacy of the arrangement he helped to destroy that the total number of Chinese officials in Korea, in the period before his action, was exactly one, and of Japanese — none at all. Within a few years after his exploit, the country, being now a political vacuum, aroused both the ambitions and the anxieties of surrounding powers, and became overrun with foreign political agents of one sort or another. Of these, initially, the most numerous were the Japanese. But by the end of the century, the Russians had also emerged as a strong power in the Far East, the Chinese-Eastern Railway was being built across Manchuria to Vladivostok, and Russians now edged out the Chinese in the role of prime competitors to the Japanese for control of Korea.

For some decades to come, this Russian-Japanese struggle would continue, marked by a progressive weakening of the Russian position. This was a consequence of the unfavorable outcome of the Russo-Japanese War, the effects of World War I, and the Russian Revolution. By the 1930s, Japan was supreme and the Russians were in effect expelled as competitors. But as a consequence of China's weakness, the alternative to Japanese power in this region was never — down to World War II — Chinese power, it was Russian power. American statesmen refused to see this. They were legalists; and China was legally the proprietor of Manchuria, even if her power there was a fiction. They were sentimentalists; and China, pictured as poor, noble, grateful for American patronage and admiring of American virtues, was their darling. For forty years, therefore, they exerted themselves to dig the Japanese out of their positions on the mainland, stubbornly convinced that the absence of the Japanese would mean the installation of the Chinese as

masters of the situation, believing that this would facilitate an expansion of American opportunities for economic penetration and trade, never consenting to recognize that to get the Japanese out was to let the Russians in.

In the years prior to the Second World War, these efforts related primarily to Japanese positions in Manchuria and China proper. The martial fervor of the war in the Pacific, however — that strange weakness of understanding that causes Americans, once at war, to idealize their associates, to make inhuman demons of their opponents, and to become wholly oblivious to the long-term requirements of any balance of power — impelled us to exploit our victory as a means of removing the Japanese from Korea as well, thus leaving that unfortunate country, insofar as we would not protect it ourselves, at the mercy of the Russians and — within three or four years — of the Russians and Communist Chinese together. Having self-righteously expelled the Japanese from their positions in Korea, we now found ourselves, in the postwar period, faced with the necessity of shouldering the burden they had long borne of containing rival mainland power — once Russian, now Russian and Chinese-Communist combined — on that peninsula.

It was ironic and revealing, I often reflected, that the line which I wished us to try to hold — the 38th parallel — was precisely the line that had been proposed to the Russians by the Japanese special representative at the coronation of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, in 1896, as a demarcation of the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence on the peninsula. Challenged in a military way by Communist puppets in 1950, we had accepted, and borne, the burden of keeping South Korea out of Communist hands. As the Korean War progressed, it became evident that we would be successful, if precariously and uncomfortably so, in holding some line across the center of the peninsula, for at least the time being. But what of the future? Could we, and should we, remain there forever? I did not think so. It was, for us, an unnatural effort, and one that — as the

events of 1950 had shown — was not without danger. What, then, could we do?

The first nostalgic thought, of course, was to reintroduce the Japanese. But this was now no longer possible. Japan was demilitarized. The Japanese had been asked, and required, by no one more insistently than by ourselves, to repent of all their previous positions of domination over other peoples. The feeling against them in Korea was so violent as to make their return, even in the role of an ally, unthinkable. And the Korean people deserved, if it could possibly be arranged for them, control over their own affairs.

The ideal, of course, would have been some sort of neutralization of the territory, both political and military. A complete political neutralization, however, was unlikely. For this the Korean Communists were too strong and too well organized as a political faction. They could be driven out of North Korea only by the device General MacArthur, against the warnings of Bohlen and myself, had attempted: i.e., conquest and occupation of the entire country, right up to the Yalu, by American forces. But this, as had now been demonstrated, was bound to affect the vital interests of both Russians and Chinese and bring them both in as military opponents.

One was left, therefore, with the possibility of a military neutralization — a state of affairs, that is, in which political forces might be left to find their own level, even if this had to be by armed strife, but all outside parties, ourselves included, would agree not to occupy portions of the territory or to make use of any of it for their own military purposes. If this could be achieved, even the existence of a Communist regime within the country might not — as the Yugoslav example had shown — be wholly disastrous.

But this, obviously, was something that stood a chance of being considered by the Russians only in the event that we ourselves were not to remain in occupation of Japan. It was idle to expect the Russians not to make whatever military use they could of Korea if we insisted on retaining Japan indefinitely as an extension of our own

military deployment. Any understanding on the military neutralization of Korea would have to include a similar neutralization of Japan.

Was this unthinkable? It was, ostensibly, what had been American policy. It was what General MacArthur had always previously asked for. It was not necessary for us, he had told me in 1948, to have bases in Japan, provided we could be sure that the Japanese islands would continue to be demilitarized and not armed against us. And if so: well, was there not the possibility of a deal here — at least between ourselves and the Russians? That they were sincere, if misguidedly and unnecessarily so, in regarding the presence of our forces in Japan as a threat to themselves, could not be doubted. Surely they would be willing to pay some price to assure our military departure from those islands. Should we not at least explore with them, then, the question as to whether the price they were willing to pay was large enough to include, or to consist of, the agreed demilitarization of Korea as well as Japan?

Dean Acheson would have said, surely: How could you trust the Russians? Their "breaches of inter-allied agreements" had already, as he has observed in his book, begun. How could you be sure that they would not someday come storming back and suddenly reoc-cupy Korea, and perhaps Japan as well?

These questions, raising as they did issues of a most fundamental nature, were ones destined soon to throw me into conflict not just with Mr. Acheson but with the entire United States government and most of the NATO governments as well, and not just over Pacific problems but even more importantly, over European ones. This is not the place to undertake an exhaustive discussion of these issues. But I might just say this much by way of explanation as to why these counterarguments never commended themselves to me. The reasons were three:

(i) For the Russians, and for Stalin in particular, there were agreements and agreements, just as there were negotiations and ne-

The Far East

gotiations. Highly specific agreements, relating to military dispositions and control over territory, were more likely to be respected by them than vague subscriptions to high moral principles. Agreements founded in an obvious and concrete Soviet interest of a political and military nature were more likely to be respected than ones based on an appeal to international legal norms or to the decisions of multilateral international bodies. Agreements negotiated quietly and privately, representing realistic pohtical understandings rather than public contractual obligations, were more apt to be respected by Moscow, so long as the other party also respected them, than were agreements arrived at in negotiations conducted in the public eye (the Russians called these devionstrativnye negotiations) where the aim was, or appeared to be, to put the other party in a bad light before world public opinion.

(2) I saw no evidence at that time, and have seen none since, of any Soviet desire to assume the burdens of occupation over any extensive territories beyond those that came under their occupation or control as part of the outcome of World War II. Particularly was this true in the Far East. Sanction of the use of puppet forces was another thing, particularly if and when their operation could take place within the framework of a civil rather than an international, conflict. The Russians, after all, were careful to keep their own forces out of the Korean War. This was not by accident. One could not understand Soviet policy there or anywhere else unless one was ready to recognize and to respect the distinction, as they saw it, between the armed forces of the Soviet Union itself and those of other Communist countries, and the distinction between the use of Soviet forces in an international conflict and of puppet forces in a civil conflict. I had never supposed, or claimed, that the Soviet leaders would be reluctant to permit or encourage the latter, if they thought their political interests could be thereby advanced; and what they did in Korea was not, in principle, surprising to me. But this was precisely what was not involved in the specter of a

sudden Soviet armed attack on Japan. The likelihood of anything of that sort seemed to me then, and has seemed to me ever since, to be very small indeed.

(3) The sanction against any Soviet military return to Korea could and should have consisted in the possibility of our replying to such a move by the immediate return of our own forces to Japan. Was this militarily impossible? I think not, unless we wished to regard it as so. I had pleaded as early as 1947 for "the maintenance of small, compact, alert forces, capable of delivering at short notice effective blows on limited theaters of operation far from our own shores." * It might someday be necessary, I had pointed out, "on very short notice to seize and hold other . . . outlying island bases or peninsular bases on other continents, if only for the purpose of denying them to others during the period required for further military preparations." t

The American military very much disliked this idea. They abhorred the concept of limited warfare and were addicted to doing things only in the most massive, ponderous and unwieldy manner. Had we followed this suggestion, however, we would have been far better situated than we actually were to meet the challenge in Korea when it came; and such a force would have had its uses, similarly, as a guaranty of the inviolability of any agreement on the demilitarization and neutralization of Japan.

Another reason why I was opposed to the indefinite retention of our bases and forces in Japan was the strain I thought it would eventually impose on American-Japanese relations. I have repeatedly expressed the distaste with which I viewed large American military establishments in other countries. This distaste was no doubt exaggerated, but the anxiety over the long-term effects of maintaining such establishments abroad was not wholly unfounded. I expressed this anxiety again, in 1950, in connection with the problem

• McDioirs, i<j2S~i(^$o, pp. 311-312.

11 reiterated tliis recommendation in my memorandum of August 21, 1950, to the SccTetar\' of State.

of the future of Japan. We could not indefinitely, I wrote in the memorandum of August 21,

continue successfully to keep Japan resistant to Soviet pressures by using our own strength as the main instrument in this effort. The only adequate "main instrument" for this, in the long run,* will be the enlightened self-interest of the Japanese people, as translated into action by a Japanese government. If we insist on keeping troops in Japan, their presence there will inevitably be a bone of political contention, and the Communists will vigorously make capital of it.

As I look at this statement in the light of what has happened over the intervening twenty-one years, I see that it was exaggerated. We have, just barely, contrived to squeeze through, in the sense of keeping American forces there and preserving the mihtary alliance with Japan without wholly or decisively disrupting the equilibrium of Japanese political life. But the strain has been great. Our military presence has played a major part in polarizing opinion in Japan, and particularly in alienating Japanese youth in the most serious way from moderate and democratic political institutions. One has only to think of the repeated fearful street disorders, and the forced cancellation of the Eisenhower visit, to realize what a strain this has placed on Japanese democracy during this early trial period of its existence. What the consequences will be of this alienation of the youth, in the further development of Japanese political life, is difficult to say; they could scarcely be good ones.

I have dwelt at length on Korea and Japan. This was the complex of problems that was, in those years of the Korean War, most prominently on my own mind, at any rate, and was the cause of most of the agony of official decision. But views held on Korea and Japan were of course only part of a wider pattern of views on American relations with the Far East generally, and a word is due

* Italics added later by GFK.

about the subjects, even then hotlv debated, of China and Southeast Asia.

The triumph of the Chinese Communists on the mainland of China was then only two to three years old, and we were still struggling with the problems of policy this development posed for us and the international community. I have described in the first volume of these memoirs the reasons why, though devoid of enthusiasm for the entry of the Chinese Communists into the United Nations, I thought it unwise on the part of our government to oppose their admission. I also shared with my friend John Paton Davies the feeling that it was a great mistake on our part to permit the Chiang regime to establish itself on Formosa. My views were summed up in a memorandum which I drafted (and never used) in September 1951, attempting to define my differences with the Department of State over matters of policy. "As for China," I wrote,

I have no use for either of the two regimes, one of w hich [that of Chiang] has intrigued in this countrv in a manner scarcelv less disgraceful to it than to ourselves, while the other has committed itself to a program of hostilitv to us as savage and arrogant as anvthing we have ever faced. The tie to the Chiang regime I hold to be both fateful and discreditable, and feel it should be severed at once, at the cost, if need be, of a real domestic-political showdown. After that, the less we Americans have to do with China the better. We need neither covet the favor, nor fear the enmitv, of anv Chinese regime. China is not the great power of the Orient; and we Americans have certain subjective w eaknesses that make us ill-equipped to deal with the Chinese. ... I could never sec anv^ justification for returnincr Formosa to China in the first place, nor, once China had been plunged into civil war, anv further obligation on our part to do so; and I recommended in 1949 tiiat we reassert the authority of SCAP (i.e., AtacArthur's headquarters) over the island and hold it until more satisfactorv arrangements could be made.

These views rested on certain impressions about China which need, perhaps, elucidation.

I did not, in the first place, see China as a great and strong power.

Her industrial strength was minimal compared with that of any of the real great powers. Her military strength was formidable only in the immediate vicinity of her own frontiers: she had no amphibious capability. Her ability to accumulate capital was small. Her problem of overpopulation was appalling. Her vast numbers were a source of weakness, not of strength. Time and again I pleaded with my colleagues to believe that, faced with the choice of having as an ally and associate either Japan or China, the Soviet leaders would instantly have chosen Japan: the only place in the Orient where modern weaponry of the most sophisticated sort could be produced in massive quantities, and the only country that had great quantities of industrially trained and highly educated manpower.

Secondly, I looked for no good to come of any closer relationship between the United States and China, even if the existing political antagonism could be overcome. This was why I had no more enthusiasm for the development of our relations with Chiang than I did in the case of the Chinese Communists.

This view reflected no disrespect for the Chinese. On the contrary, I regarded them, and still do, as probably the most intelligent, man for man, of the world's peoples. What inclined me to this outlook was what I had been able to learn of Chinese nationalism and the Chinese tradition of statesmanship from reading in the history of China's international relations.

Three things seemed to me to be reasonably clear. One was that the Chinese were, as a people, intensely xenophobic and arrogant. Their attitude towards the foreigner and his world, based as it was on the concept of China as the "Middle Kingdom" and the view of the foreigner as a barbarian, was essentially offensive to other peoples and did not provide a basis for satisfactory international relations, other than ones of the most distant sort.

Secondly, it was clear that the Chinese, despite the highly civilized nature of their normal outward behavior, were capable of great ruthlessness when they considered themselves to be crossed.

Admirable as were many of their qualities — their industriousness, their business honesty, their practical astuteness, and their political acumen — they seemed to me to be lacking in two attributes of the Western-Christian mentality: the capacity for pity and the sense of sin. I was quite prepared to concede that both of these qualities represented weaknesses rather than sources of strength in the Western character. The Chinese, presumably, were all the more formidable for the lack of them. This was a reason to hold them in a healthy, if wary, respect. It was not a reason to idealize them or to look for any sort of intimacy with them.

Thirdly (and this is in a sense a return to the question of the Chinese view of the outside world) I observed, or thought I did, that while the Chinese were often ready to make practical arrangements of an unwritten nature, and usually ones that could be reversed at will if this suited their purposes, they were never prepared to yield on matters of principle. They would occasionally consent, under pressure, to let you do certain things in practice, but only provided they were permitted to insist that you had no real right to do them at all. They, accordingly, were always theoretically in the right, and you in the wrong. This, too, seemed to me a form of arrogance that augured badly for really good relations with any outside power.

Finally, I was dismayed to note both the skill and the success with which the Chinese had, over the decades, succeeded in corrupting a large proportion of the Americans who had anything to do with them — and particularly those who had resided for longer periods in China. I do not mean to imply that this corruption was always, or cvxn usually, financial. It was far more insidious than that. The Chinese were infinitely adept at turning foreign visitors and residents, even foreign diplomats, into hostages and then, with a superb combination of delicacy and ruthlessness, extracting the maximum in the w ay of blackmail for giving them the privilege either of leaving the country or remaining there, whichever it was

that they most wished to do. In their exploitation of the situation of the American missionaries and merchants of the prerevolutionary period, not to mention the success of the Chiang regime in building up a violent political claque in this country, the Chinese had made fools of us all — a thousand times. We, in our sentimentalities, our bumbling goodwill, our thirst for trade or converts, our political naivete, and the ease with which we could be both flattered and misled by the obsequiousness of talented servants who hated our guts behind their serving-screens, were simply not up to them. Reading the history of our relations with China in the last century and in the first half of this one, I found myself welcoming the Chinese Revolution for the effect it had in bringing about the expulsion of Western foreigners from China. For the first time in more than a century, I thought to myself with satisfaction, the Chinese now had no American hostages. They could now neither make fools of us through the corruption, nor put pressure on us by the mistreatment, of Americans who had rashly placed themselves in their power.

For this reason, opposed as I was to obstructing Communist China's entrance into the United Nations if others wanted it there, I never favored the conclusion of formal bilateral diplomatic relations between the United States and China. I could never see the assurance that American diplomats would be treated in Peking with the respect necessary to make their missions successful. I saw nothing to be gained by putting people into the power of the Chinese leaders if we had no assurance that they would not be humiliated and made sport of for the gratification of the insatiable Chinese thirst for "face" and prestige. To understand these thoughts one has only to imagine what would have happened during the so-called Cultural Revolution — at the time, that is, when the British charge d'affaires was being made to stand up in the midst of a screaming street mob and have his head yanked down by the hair in a forced gesture of obeisance before the little red book of Comrade Mao —

what would have happened in such a time to an American representative in Peking, had there been one. Yet at no time did I have any desire to see us "ignore" the existence of Communist China. I was well aware that there would be times and occasions when we would have to deal with its leaders. Warsaw, in later years, would strike me as an admirable place for doing just that.

I recognized that the admission of Communist China to the United Nations would create a problem for the Chinese regime on Formosa. I favored the use of our fleet to protect that island (not the regime) from attack by the mainland Chinese. But I never favored our adherence to the view that the Chiang regime was the rightful government of China. My position, even in those early days, was that we should express our readiness to abide by the results of a properly conducted plebiscite offering to the people of the island a choice between submission to the regime on the mainland, return to Japan, or independence — provided only that we could be assured that the island would remain demilitarized, that it would not be armed as a platform for amphibious power in the Pacific, and that, whatever solution was arrived at, those who were opposed to it would be granted an amnesty and an opportunity to emigrate if they so wished. This, in essence, has been my position ever since.

There remains the question of Southeast Asia. This, too, was on our minds, even in 1950 and 1951, though primarily in connection with the question as to the amount of support, if any, that we should give to the French, who were then fighting much the same sort of fight, and against much the same adversary that we, in the years following 1964, found ourselves fighting.

Here, at least, I agreed wholly and unreservedly with Walter Lippmann. Wc had, I felt, no business trying to play a role in the afl"airs of the mainland of Southeast Asia. The same went for the French. They had no prospects. They had better get out.

"In Indo-China," I complained to the Secretary of State in the memo of August 21, 1950,

we are getting ourselves into the position of guaranteeing the French in an undertaking which neither they nor we, nor both of us together, can win. . . . We should let Schuman [Robert Schuman, French Foreign Minister] know . . . that the closer view we have had of the problems of this area, in the course of our efforts of the past few months to support the French position there, has convinced us that that position is basically hopeless. We should say that we will do everything in our power to avoid embarrassing the French in their problems and to support them in any reasonable course they would like to adopt looking to its liquidation; but that we cannot honestly agree with them that there is any real hope of their remaining successfully in Indo-China, and we feel that rather than have their weakness demonstrated by a continued costly and unsuccessful effort to assert their will by force of arms, it would be preferable to permit the turbulent political currents of that country to find their own level, unimpeded by foreign troops or pressures, even at the probable cost of an eventual deal between Viet-Nam and Viet-Minh, and the spreading over the whole country of Viet-Minh authority, possibly in a somewhat modified form. We might suggest that the most promising line of withdrawal, from the standpoint of their prestige, would be to make the problem one of some Asian regional responsibility, in which the French exodus could be conveniently obscured.

This judgment with regard to the folly of a possible intervention in Vietnam rested, incidentally, not just on the specific aspects of that situation as we faced it in 1950, but on considerations of principle, as well. In a lecture delivered earlier that year (May 5) in Milwaukee, I had said — this time with reference to the pleas for American intervention in China:

I wonder how many of you realize what that really means. I can conceive of no more ghastly and fateful mistake, and nothing more calculated to confuse the issues in this world today than for us to go into another great country and try to uphold by force of our own blood and

treasures a regime which had clearly lost the confidence of its own people. Nothing could have pleased our enemies more. . . . Had our Government been carried away by these pressures, ... I am confident that today the w hole struggle against world communism in both Europe and Asia would have been hopelessly fouled up and compromised.

Little did I realize, in penning these passages, that I was defining, fifteen years before the event, my own position with relation to the Vietnam War.

J

Re-encounter with America

IN the midst of such preoccupations with places and problems on the other side of the globe, I was enjoying, in these initial months and years of release from government, the unaccustomed experience of life and travel in parts of the United States other than the District of Columbia. Except for a Wisconsin boyhood, the undergraduate years at Princeton, and the daily peregrinations between home and office in Washington, I had seen little of this country at any time, and had been absent from it over most of the past quarter of a century. The impressions, therefore, were vivid; and impinging, as they did, on the characteristic longing of the expatriate to find something with which he could identify himself, they struck deep. But I find it difficult to generalize about them or to compress them into any analytical system. Dates, scenes and events become chronologically indistinct and swim in memory. The thoughts and reflections then aroused tended in the ensuing years to flow, like tributaries of a river, into that broad stream of curiosity, wonderment and concern about the state of one's own country that has dominated the consciousness of every thoughtful American in recent years; and I find it impossible, except where some record of the moment has survived, to distinguish between what I then thought and what I think today.

I can do no more, therefore, than to recall certain disconnected episodes that remain in memory with special vividness — either because of their novelty or because some record of them has survived, and leave it to the reader to distill from them, if he can, an idea of what it was like to rediscover bits and pieces of one's own country in circumstances of this nature.

Before mentioning these episodes, I should, I suppose, say something about the places where, after the retirement from government, we lived. During the years of official service the family had inhabited only a succession of temporary quarters, sometimes provided by the government, sometimes rented by ourselves. Now, for the first time, it fell to us to live in places that we owned; and these places came to play, like long-term friends, an enduring role in our lives. There were two of them: a house in Princeton and a farm in Pennsylvania, and since both still exist and continue to play a part in our lives, I must speak of them in the present tense.

The Princeton house is a sturdy, spacious turn-of-the-century structure standing, amid ample grounds, on one of those shady, sycamore-lined streets, once quiet and still beautiful, that are peculiar to Princeton. Battered and neglected when we bought it, this house has responded gratefully to the attentions of the years, and has afforded us a comfortable, reliable and pleasant shelter. Having evidently experienced, over the seventy years of its existence, only the normal vicissitudes of family life, it is devoid of ghosts and sinister corners. To us, personally, it is friendly and receptive in a relaxed way, but slightly detached, like a hostess to a casual guest — as though it did not expect us to stay forever.

The place in Pennsylvania is a large, rich river-valley farm in what was, when we first came there, unspoiled farming country, a hundred and fifty miles from Princeton, west of the Susquehanna. It forms, almost to the mile, a part of the western border of the magnificent Pennsylvania Dutch farming country that stretches, to

the east of it, nearly to Philadelphia. Just west of it begin the foothills of the Appalachians, orchard country, not so fertile as that which lies to the east, and no longer populated by Germans — these latter knew too well where the good land lay. Standing on the higher rises of our fields, on a fine summer day, one can see in the distance the shadowy outlines of the mountains: the northern outrunners of the Blue Ridge, reaching up from Virginia and Maryland.

The place was, and still precariously remains, a proper farm. To reach it, you take a turn south off a secondary hard road and drive straight on for nearly a mile along a gravel lane, between tilled fields, but with hills and patches of woods in the distance. Finally, there is a little stone bridge beyond which the road turns left and runs, now lined with willows on one side and sycamores of my own planting on the other, for a hundred yards or so along the side of a small stream, dry in summer. Then it turns right again and proceeds, up a slight rise between two houses, to a large circle, rimmed with farm buildings. The house on the right is a standard two-story wooden farmhouse of twentieth-century vintage. There the farmer and his family live. The structure on the left is something quite different: a three-story edifice, studded with balconies and sleeping porches, looking, particularly from that angle, like nothing more than a summer hotel.

It is indeed a house like none other, not exactly ugly, but large for that region with its eighteen rooms and eighty-odd windows, and enigmatically, engagingly, almost apologetically, absurd. Once, long ago in the dusk of a winter evening, a local inhabitant, who had given me a lift on the road, kindly undertook to drive me all the way home. Startled to see this structure suddenly looming up in the shadows, he practically stopped the car in his astonishment and, being unaware of where we were, turned to me in wonderment and said: "Now tell me, who in the name of hell would want a house like that?"

Well, we did, and still do. Turning its backside to the circle where everyone arrives, decorated with portico and columns on the side where nobody normally ever goes in and out, entered customarily by a wholly unembellished side door which leads — for no reason at all — directly into the dining room, the house is indeed an absurdity. Yet imbedded in all these incongruities is still the corpus of a hundred-and-sixty-year-old farmhouse; and its interior, once one gets there, is of a coziness, a harmony, and a natural sociability that is the mark of a real, well-worn, intimate home. Never, I think, has any of us, arriving there from anyplace else, entered the house without pleasure. And never, even on the grayest, darkest, sloppiest days of winter, have I had occasion to say to myself, while there: "Oh, what a dreary place."

Across the circle from the house lies the great barn, built in the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch style, a hundred and ten feet by forty, with the usual overhang (the "foreshot," to the natives) covering a brick walk along the southern side, by the barnyard. In the dim recesses of the ground floor of this building, divided into a number of aisles and stalls, there resides — in amicable harmony for the most part — a dense population of animal and wild life: cows, steers, young stock, the bull (referred to by the farmer's family, in a marvelous bit of country understatement, as "cross"), cats, kittens, mice and rats, often a dog or two, sometimes a horse or pony (the place once harbored sixteen mules), and occasionally a huge, parturiating sow, not to mention the barn swallows that swoop in and out when the doors of the milking stable arc left open. The barn envelops all these beings in its strong and sheltering arms; and the deep cushion of fresh straw that covers all its floors accommodates agreeably and without offensiveness, by the very power of its bacterial balance, the manifold functions and products of their daily lives. Above all this is, of course, what is called the "barn floor": a vast, lofty chamber, entered by the banked driveway. Here, too, it is dark; but when your eyes get used to the dim light

you see that stacks of baled straw and hay reach mountainously upward, to the roof; and in the spaces between them slivers of sunlight, striking down from cracks in the wall or the roof, give to the dusty air the quality of the interior of a cathedral. There is the pungent, life-giving smell of hay and manure; and it is cozy and reassuring to hear the rustling and stomping and munching of the cattle, in their pens below.

Around this cluster of buildings stretch, of course, the fields, heavy in summer with their crops of grain and grass, wet, fallow, often partly snow-covered, in the winter months. On summer nights there is a thick pageant of fireflies over the meadow, the steady, soothing and faintly mysterious ringing of the crickets, a croaking of bullfrogs from the nearby pond and stream, and occasionally the harsh cry of a startled pheasant. In winter, when snow is in the air, crows — thousands and thousands of them — move in seemingly endless procession from northeast to southwest, their flapping figures silhouetted against leaden skies.

These, then, were the points of departure and return for many journeys to other places in the country; and it was from these journeys that the most vivid impressions were gained.

In the late winter of 1950 I made a journey to Latin America. It was an official journey; but departure from government was imminent; inwardly, I already had a foot out of Washington. I began the journey by traveling from Washington to Mexico City by train. (A few of us, in those days, still did that sort of thing.) I have notes of that leg of the journey, written at the time. Let the reader picture the author of these notes, if he will, as a middle-aged man, a bit weary from three hectic years in the Washington bureaucracy, somewhat depayse and sensitive to the impressions of his native land as only such a person can be, longing for familiarity and reassurance, gulping down every drop of it, in fact, as a thirst-struck wanderer in the desert might gulp down water suddenly encoun-

tered, but wincing, as though struck by a blow, under every small discouragement.

Saturday, February i8, 1950 The train pulled out of the Union Station into the early darkness of the February evening, carrying a traveler who felt slightly silly to be embarking, at his age, on so long and spectacular a voyage — to be abandoning the solemn legitimacy of the routine of the department — to be leaving his family for so long — to be imagining that he could see anything or learn anything in the course of such a tour which others had not seen or learned before him.

A couple of hours later, the train was passing through York, Pennsylvania. The traveler's farm home, he reflected, was only sixteen miles away, off there to the west, across the winter darkness. It would be quiet there, now. Annie and Merle would have finished the evening chores, and had supper. It being Saturday evening they would probably have gone to town. No lights would be on about the place. The night would be cold, for the sky was clear. No domestic animals would be out. Even the cats would have crept into the barn for comfort. Only the old drake would be standing, motionless, on the concrete water trough in the barnyard, his white silhouette gleaming ghostlike in the darkness, a tragic, statuesque figure, contemptuous of the cold, of the men who neglected him, of the other birds and beasts who basked in the warmth of human favor — contemptuous even of the possibility for happiness in general, human or animal. He would be standing there through the hours of darkness; and the crisp silence of winter night would be about the place; and there would be only the crunching and stomping of animals in the barn behind him, the rustling of some wild thing down in the meadow, the drone of a distant truck, and perhaps the sudden and thunderous rumbling occasioned by mv^ neighbor B's car, as it rattled — homebound — over the loose planks of the little bridge in the valley below.

Well, the train was moving on, now — increasing with every minute the distance betw een us, soon destined to become so great. Might God help us all, I thought. . . .

Sunday, February 19 I woke up early, raised the curtain in the berth, and looked out. We were crossing a river. It w as just the beginning of a Sabbath dawn. The

half-light reflected itself in the oily scum of the water, left in kindly obscurity a desolation of factories and cinder-yards and railroad tracks along the shore, but caught and held, in its baleful gleam, the cold mute slabs of skyscrapers overhead. It was the business district of some industrial city: what city I did not know, nor did it matter.

And it occurred to me that for cities there is something sinister and pitiless about the dawn. The farm, secure in its humility and its submission, can take it. It can even welcome it, joyously, like the return of an old friend. But the city, still sleeping, cowers restlessly under it, particularly under the Sabbath dawn. In this chill, calm light, the city is helpless and, in a sense, naked. Its dreams are disturbed, its pretense, its ugliness, its impermanence exposed, its failure documented, its verdict written. The darkness, with its neon signs, its eroticism, and its intoxication, was protective and forgiving — tolerant of dreams and of delusions. The dawn is judgment: merciless and impassive.

The train was moving through the approaches to St. Louis, just east of the Mississippi: a grim waste of crisscrossing railroads, embankments, viaducts, junk lots, storage lots, piles of refuse, and the most abject specimens of human habitation.

A tall and youthful individual, nattily dressed, with a thin neck, big ears, and an obvious freedom from inhibition, calmly inspected the labels on my suitcases and launched on an interrogation beginning: "Say, are you the fellow who . . . ?" To that beginning, he tacked on a series of confused associations, too close to reality to be wholly denied, too far from it to be flatly admitted. Having finally extracted from me enough to satisfy his surmises, he started in with questions about foreign affairs — China in particular.

I took refuge in counter-questions, and discovered that he was a politician: a member of the iMissouri State Legislature. He had just been to Washington for the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. He was a veteran, and had been encouraged by friends to enter politics \\ hen he returned from war service. I tried to get at his views and interests, but failed to find that he stood for anything in particular except himself, or that he held any particular convictions about how life ought to be lived, as distinct from the way it is lived now, in the State of Missouri. One had the impression of a certain bewildered complacency, and of a restless, vacuous curiosity about people w ho got their names in the papers.

I tried to find out what he knew about regional planning. He had heard of the Missouri V^alley Authority project, as a political issue; but when I asked him \\ here the iMissouri entered the Mississippi, he was stumped, and thought, in fact, that it was the Missouri we were about to cross. With difficulty, I explained to him why it would not be possible for us to cross the jMissouri before we had crossed the Mississippi, and he thought he understood.

In the Fred Harvey restaurant of the St. Louis station there were nostalgic murals of old river scenes. Canned music ( The Rustic Wedding) mingled with the clatter of dishes, the shrill cries of waitresses, and the murmur of a cross-section of that rich stream of oral exchange which embellishes and characterizes the life of the Midwest: ''Yessir, the President of our company is only forty-four. . . . We got five o' the best girls in the business. . . . They put him in the hub-nut division, an' he warn't there more'n a month before the others went to the old man and said if he stayed there they'd all quit. . . . I'm goin' to eat kinda light, today. . . . Eleanor'll run for President, sure as you know. . . . The Hub Ice Fuel Company is a big company; you move at a fast pace over there. . . . First time I ever seen a \\ oman walkin' along tow in' a cat; the cat ain't used to it, don't know what to make of it. . . . Now w hat on earth d'ya suppose he's goin' to do with that nightgown? . . ."

Outside the station, a pale winter sunshine — Sunday afternoon sunshine — fell on the blank fronts of the station-district joints: Pop's Pool Hall; Hotel Rooms $1.50 and up; Danny's Tavern; Pressing and Cleaning While-U-Wait; Julio's Place.

I caught a bus in the direction of the river. Infected b\' the customs of the nation's capital, it also sported canned music (Rose Marie).

The last tw o or three blocks had to be covered on foot. There were solid rows of saloons and rooming houses, and seedy-looking men slouching in front of the w indows of the closed stores, leaning against the walls, in the sunshine, waiting. (What are they waiting for? What are they looking for? What is it they expect will happen in this died-out street in downtow n St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon in winter? That a girl will pass? or that there w ill be a fight? or that some drunken bum will get arrested? Could be, could be . . .)

Here was the Court House — mid-XIX Century style: heavy stone, tall blank windows. In it, the placard said, the Dred Scott case was tried. Beyond the Court House — parking lots, and the great cobbled

incline toward the river. The lower part of it, near the water, was covered with mud which looked dry but was really slimy; and there was an occasional stick of driftwood.

On this particular afternoon, the riverbank was inhabited by six stray dogs, a bum who sat on a piece of driftwood and held one of the dogs in his lap, two small colored children with a bag of popcorn, and a stranger from Washington who sat on another piece of driftwood and sketched a cluster of four abandoned craft tied up by the shore: to wit, one scow with gasoline drums, one dredge, one dirty motorboat, and one genuine old showboat, still in use but slightly self-conscious. The colored children hovered over my shoulder, chattering pleasantly and dropping popcorn down my neck as they watched the progress of the drawing. The faint sunshine slanted in upon us, across the rooftops. Railroad trains clattered along both sides of the river and across the high bridge upstream. A gull came ashore to dabble in the slime between the cobblestones. And the river moved lazily past: a great slab of dirty-gray water, gleaming here and there in the sunshine, curling and eddying and whispering quietly to itself as it went along.

I walked back through the old business district: a district of narrow, dark streets, of sooty, fortress-like bank buildings, and hotels which once were elegant. (The trouble with American cities is that they have grown and changed too fast. The new is there before the old is gone. What in one era is functional and elegant and fashionable survives into the following era as grotesque decay. These cities have never had time to clean up after themselves. They have never had time to bury their dead. They are strewn with indecent skeletons, in the form of the blighted areas, the abandoned mansions of the Gay Nineties, the old railroad and water-front vicinities, the "houses by the railroad tracks.")

On the train from St. Louis to Texas the lounge car had canned music {Ave Maria) emerging from somewhere in the roof. We used to say: "The customer is always right." But what of the man, today, who doesn't like The Rustic Wedding or Rose Marie or Ave Maria, or who has heard them too often, or who doesn't like music at all through loudspeakers, or who doesn't like music? I raised this question in my mind, as I fled back to the sleeping car; and the wheels of the train, which used to clatter in so friendly and reassuring a way on the railroad voyages of my boyhood, seemed to be clicking off the words: "That-to-you; that-to-you; that-to-you."

yo Memoirs: i(^^o-ip6^

Monday, February 20 On the sleeping car from San Antonio to Mexico City, I was seated across from a gentleman from Indiana, with spouse. Feeling deeply disloyal to my own Midwestern origin, I found that I could take no pleasure in any of my neighbor's characteristics. Neither the penetrating voice which boomed relentlessly througii the cars in the service of an unquenchable loquaciousness, nor the toothpick which never left his mouth except at mealtimes (I'm sure he slept with it), nor his breezy curiosity about the rest of us ("What-cha carryin' that ink around fur?"), nor the incessant talk with fellow Indianians about things back home ("Yeah, I remember him; he used to run the bank at New Cambridge; and his uncle had a real estate business over at Red City"), nor the elaborate jokes with said fellow countrymen about marriage ("Now I'll tell you what you want to do: you and your wife git in that there berth with your clothes on, and then when she kicks you out, you ain't in such a fix, he, he, he.") — none of these characteristics excited my local pride. Why, I found myself muttering, did he come to Mexico if all he wanted to talk about was Indiana? And why, in general, do people have to act like caricatures of their own kind?

About one year after this visit to Latin America it fell to me to deliver a series of lectures in Chicago. It was, as I recall it, at just the time of General Douglas MacArthur's recall and dismissal — an event which fell with special traumatic effect on the Chicago of that day, with its congenital isolationism, its anti-Europeanism, and its strong immersion in the anti-Communist hysteria of the time. All of this heightened, for me, the poignancy of the experience.

To explain how I came to give these lectures, I have to return for a moment to the ideological problems of American foreign policy.

I had been struck, in my work as head of the Planning Staff, by the chaos that prevailed in official Washington circles when it came to such things as concept and principle in the formulation of foreign policy. No two people had the same idea of what it was that we were trying to achieve, and such assumptions as the various individuals entertained on the subject tended to be superficial, emotionally colored, and inspired by a desire to sound impressive to

other American ears rather than by any serious attention to the long-term needs of our own country and the world community. In such casual reading on American diplomatic history as I had had occasion to do while in government, I had been struck by the contrast between the lucid and realistic thinking of early American statesmen of the Federalist period and the cloudy bombast of their successors of later decades. I wanted now to leaf through the annals of American diplomacy and to try to ascertain on what concepts of national interest and national obligation, as related to foreign affairs, the various American statesmen had operated.

Pursuing this quest at Princeton, I was surprised to discover how much of our stock equipment, in the way of the rationale and rhetoric of foreign policy, was what we had inherited from the statesmen of the period from the Civil War to World War II, and how much of this equipment was Utopian in its expectations, legalistic in its concept of methodology, moralistic in the demands it seemed to place on others, and self-righteous in the degree of high-mindedness and rectitude it imputed to ourselves. I set out, then, to spell all this out in a series of essays addressed to the various undertakings and initiatives in which these tendencies had manifested themselves: notably, the inordinate preoccupation with arbitration treaties, the efforts towards world disarmament, the attempt to outlaw war by the simple verbiage of the Kellogg Pact, and illusions about the possibilities of achieving a peaceful world through international organization and multilateral diplomacy, as illustrated in the hopes addressed to the League of Nations and the United Nations. I endeavored to show how successive statesmen had sought, in these ostensibly idealistic and pretentious undertakings, a concealment for our failure to have a genuine foreign policy addressed to the real problems of international relations in a changing world — how all these vainglorious and pretentious assertions of purpose, in other words, had served as unconscious pretexts for the failure, in fact the inability, to deal with the real substance of international affairs.

Rough drafts of these essays were completed during the year and a half that I spent in Princeton immediately after leaving government — they repose in my files today in a thick black binder marked, with exaggerated modesty: "Notes for Essays." But many of the ideas evolved in this way did eventually find expression of a sort, as a rule by the acceptance of lecture engagements for which one had to find, at the last moment, something to say. It was in this way that 1 was launched on the prolonged, and to this day unfinished, polemic about the role of morality in foreign policy.

Before leaving government, and in fact nearly a year in advance of the event, I had been asked by the University of Chicago to deliver, in the spring of 1951, the series of lectures given annually there under the sponsorship of the Charles B. Walgreen Foundation. It was the first time I had been thus approached with such a suggestion, and knowing that by the spring of 1951 I would be on leave of absence from government, I lightheartedly accepted and put the matter, for many months, quite out of my mind.

When the time approached for the journey to Chicago and I was compelled to reflect on what I should talk about, I decided I would base the lectures on the subject of my incompleted essays about American diplomacy and discuss a few episodes in the annals of our diplomatic history that would illustrate some of the conclusions at which I had arrived. I therefore sat down and batted out some thoughts on the Spanish-American War, as an example of superficiality in concept as well as of the power of chauvinistic rhetoric and war hysteria; on the Open Door episode, as an example of the gap between public understanding of our statesmanship and the reality of its achievements; and on our Far Ivastcrn policy of the first half of the present century generally, as an example of the application of legalistic and moralistic concepts in the judgment of other peoples' affairs; I also set down some preliminary notes on American diplomacy in the First A\V)rld War, as an example of the lack of consist-