AFTER BUFFETING HEAVY SEAS off the Chesapeake capes, the cruiser Quincy glided into Newport News on February 27, 1945, bringing the Commander-in-Chief back from Yalta. Two days later Roosevelt was wheeled into the well of the House of Representatives and seated in a red plush chair in front of a small table. Apologizing for speaking while sitting—“it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs”—he reported optimistically on Yalta but warned that whether it was entirely fruitful or not lay in the hands of “you here in the halls of the American Congress.”
Those looking down from the packed galleries—Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting royalty and dignitaries—watched the President with concern. It was uncharacteristic of him to refer to his disability. Slightly stooped over the table, he spoke in a flat tone, slurring his words and stumbling a bit over his text. The resonant voice of old had lost its timbre; it was the voice of an invalid. Friend and foe noted his gaunt face and trembling hand. Yet his flagging voice rose to a note of desperate urgency at the climax of his address.
“Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive, again.” Yalta “ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.” He called once again for a universal organization of peace-loving nations.
Almost the whole of his fourth term apparently lay before the President—plenty of time to organize the new United Nations, finish off Hitler, throw the full weight of Allied power against Japan, and strengthen his working partnership with Stalin. In fact only eight short weeks remained to Roosevelt, and in half that time relations with Moscow turned sour.
Again Poland was the main engine of conflict, just as it had been in 1939 and before. Within the loose framework of the Yalta agreement, Stalin was absolutely determined to install reliable communists as rulers of Poland. He was already operating on a bald sphere-of-interest basis: the Anglo-Americans were to have a free hand in Greece and points west, and the Russians in Poland and the Balkans. Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom?” He might have to reveal in Parliament, Churchill added, a British-American “divergence” unless the Allies confronted the “utter breakdown of what was settled at Yalta.”
The crisis in the “Rainbow Coalition” became even more acute when Stalin suspected that Anglo-American talks with the defeated Germans in Italy were the first step toward a negotiated separate peace—a violation of the Big Three pledge to require an unconditional surrender to all three Allies jointly. Angry messages flew back and forth between Moscow and the Western capitals. Stalin, once again facing the old bogey of German troops being released in the West to fight in the East, accused the West of not merely a “misunderstanding but something worse.” Roosevelt cabled Stalin that he bitterly resented Stalin’s “informers” for their “vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.” The President perhaps was even more upset when he learned that not Molotov but only Ambassador Gromyko would head the Soviet delegation to the San Francisco UN organizing conference. If this reflected Stalin’s downgrading of the UN, it was a serious blow to Roosevelt’s high hopes for postwar unity.
Still, Roosevelt’s spirits seemed to brighten by April, when events reached one of the great climacterics of history. The whole German defense structure was crumbling west of the Rhine. The Red Army was across the Oder and grinding its way westward against last-ditch resistance. After a bloody struggle, a huge amphibious task force that in February had launched a massive invasion of Iwo Jima was mopping up the tiny island. On April 1 Nimitz’s men invaded Okinawa and made rapid progress during the first days ashore, while the invasion fleet stood guard offshore and beat off hundreds of suicide attacks by Japanese aircraft.
Relations with Stalin seemed to ease a bit in early April. On the afternoon of April 11 the President dictated the draft of a speech for Jefferson Day: “… Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world at peace.…
“The work, my friends, is peace. More than an end of this war—an end to the beginnings of all wars. Yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples.…
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”
Franklin Roosevelt died April 12, 1945, at his second home in Warm Springs, Georgia, among greening trees and flowering dogwood and wild violets. He died in the company of women he held dear—his secretary Grace Tully, his cousins Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano, and his friend Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Eleanor Roosevelt, notified at the White House, arrived in time to accompany her husband’s body on the funeral train that next day rolled slowly north through Georgia and the Carolinas into Virginia. Glimpsing the weeping faces and solemn crowds at the little depots and crossroads, she remembered:
A lonesome train on a lonesome track,
Seven coaches painted black.…
A slow train, a quiet train,
Carrying Lincoln home again.…
Following the obsequies in Washington, the funeral train once again headed north, now pulling seventeen cars filled with officials and politicians. The train passed through New Jersey and Manhattan and up the east bank of the Hudson. At Garrison, across from West Point, men removed their hats just as men had done when Lincoln’s funeral car passed eighty years ago that spring. At the little siding at Hyde Park cannon sounded twenty-one times as the coffin was moved from the train to a horse-drawn caisson. Behind the bier another horse, hooded and with stirrups reversed, led the little procession as it toiled up the steep slope to the rose garden on the bluff above. There stood Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna, and one son who could be freed from war duty, along with President Harry Truman and his cabinet, and a phalanx of six hundred West Point cadets.
The aged rector prayed as servicemen lowered the body into the grave. Cadets fired three volleys. A bugler played taps. The soldier was home.
The death of any President leaves Americans in shock and grief. The passing of Roosevelt left them also empty and disoriented. Millions of Americans in their teens and twenties had never really known another President. For them Roosevelt was the presidency. And for many he would continue to be. More than any President since Jefferson, FDR dominated his times; more than any President since Lincoln, his ideals and policies would influence the presidencies to come.
The man people most vividly remembered in their mourning was the FDR who had electrified the nation on entering the White House hardly more than a dozen years before. That Roosevelt had touched their hearts and minds and bodies with a reassuring immediacy; the enduring effects of FDR’s leadership in peace and war remained to be tested. The New Deal laws and programs had virtually transformed major aspects of American life—economic security, agriculture, labor relations, banking, welfare, conservation, and much else. FDR had bequeathed the powers and structure of the modern presidency, its penetrating impact on people’s lives, an expanded and rejuvenated federal government. He had mobilized millions of new voters and partially realigned the balance of parties. And as William Leuchtenburg later made clear, he would cast his shadow over future presidencies by setting the agenda of policy, establishing the standards for measuring presidential leadership, leaving a federal government filled with his people and his ideas.
Roosevelt’s greatest service to mankind, Isaiah Berlin wrote from a British perspective, was proving it possible “to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human”; that “the promotion of social justice and individual liberty” did not necessarily mean the end of effective government; that “individual liberty—a loose texture of society”—could be reconciled with “the indispensable minimum of organizing and authority.”
It was harder to assess the man than the presidency. “Great men have two lives,” Adolf Berle said in a tribute to his old boss, “one which occurs while they work on this earth; a second which begins at the day of their death and continues as long as their ideas and conceptions remain powerful.” But the more Roosevelt’s “second life”—his heritage of ideas and decisions, examples and innovations—was examined, the more fragmented it appeared to be. For not only did Roosevelt conduct multiple and sometimes clashing policies at any one time, he shifted from plan to plan, from program to program, with such nonchalance as to leave his friends perplexed and his adversaries aiming at a moving target.
He started off as a crisis manager who simultaneously economized in order to balance the budget, pushed through a socialistic venture in the Tennessee Valley, tightened and expanded the regulation of banking and agriculture, and sought to concert the interests of workers and industrialists under the NRA. Soon he gave up on economizing, began to spend lavishly on emergency relief projects and later on the WPA, built and restored bridges, dams, roads, and other public services while diverting funds to construct aircraft carriers, went in for major relief expenditures as he approached the 1936 election, reverted to economizing after it, then turned back to heavier spending in the recession years of 1938 and 1939. Meantime FDR experimented with such imaginative ventures as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, rural electrification, soil conservation, housing subsidies.
He held mixed views about private and public centralization. The New Deal monopoly policies, economist Ellis Hawley concluded, were a study in “economic confusion,” as Washington shifted from government-sponsored cartelization under the NRA, marketing agreements, and coal policy to trustbusting rhetoric and antimonopoly measures such as the Wheeler-Rayburn utility holding company act. New Deal economic planning, according to Hawley, came in a “disjointed, almost haphazard manner, in response to specific pressures, problems, and needs, and without benefit of any preconceived plan or integrating theory.” Herbert Stein summarized the first four years as “fiscal drift.” That term and the next left an ambiguous heritage to later administrations.
Juggling economic policies from day to day amid his own Tocquevillian void, Roosevelt did not always exhibit grace under pressure. During the economic crisis in spring 1938 he had angry meetings with Morgenthau, whom the President evidently felt he could safely rebuke as an old friend and neighbor. The Treasury Secretary for his part grumbled in his extensive diary about Roosevelt’s “helterskelter” planning and his lost sense of proportion. A year later, with unemployment still ranging up toward 10 million, the President and the Secretary were still wrangling, Morgenthau was still talking about resignation, Eleanor Roosevelt was still talking him out of it. When Morgenthau asked for an appointment to present a statement on taxation—two hours, he thought, would be needed—his boss asked him instead to leave it so that he could “read it a little bit at a time at my bedside.”
Seeking some intellectual order in the disarray of Roosevelt’s economic programs, historians identified a first and second New Deal, but there were in fact several New Deals as the President groped for the key to full recovery. Historians discerned a third New Deal late in Roosevelt’s second term that emanated from his effort to find institutional solutions to faltering economic strategies. Thwarted in his efforts to build an executive-legislative-judicial team, he sought to improve presidential planning by creating the National Resources Planning Board under a Delano uncle, establishing more presidential control over “independent” regulatory commissions, enlarging the White House policy staff, proposing the “Seven TVA’s bill” that would establish regional planning authorities in the Missouri and other great riverbeds. Most of these efforts failed in the face of bureaucratic inertia and congressional fears of “fascist type” concentration of power that would destroy state and local authority.
It would remain for World War II to supply Washington with the authority, the planning and enforcement tools, and the purposefulness that earlier New Deal efforts had lacked. Massive doses of “war Keynesianism” and military manpower drafts finally enabled the “fourth New Deal” to realize its supreme aim of ending unemployment. In the mushrooming of federal agencies and personnel, the huge military planning agencies, the centralization of authority, the subordination of courts and Congress, the New Deal found the firm linkage of ends and means that had eluded it during Roosevelt’s first two terms. The irony of war prosperity was inescapable.
The domestic New Deal ended up as a lavish policy feast, which later Presidents and Congresses could use as precedents and learning experiences, especially in the realms of economic reform and social welfare. The New Deal recruited a brilliant corps of innovators, planners, and dreamers who invigorated later administrations, Republican as well as Democratic, for decades. The tragedy of the domestic New Deal was that it failed to fashion an effective economic strategy and stick with it. Conceivably a rigorous and sustained budget-balancing effort from the start would have encouraged, as in past economic cycles, a sharp recovery of investor confidence, but Roosevelt for reasons both humanitarian and political soon rejected this harsh policy. Conceivably the NRA could have been reorganized after its voiding by the High Court and converted into a comprehensive venture in industrial rationalization and economic planning, but the President gave up on it. He favored somewhat redistributionist tax policies, but not to the extent where they might have served as a decisive step toward a more egalitarian society. He played with antimonopoly policies, regionalization, encouragement of local initiatives without ever surrendering his strong reliance on national action. Above all he failed to carry through the one strategy that was politically the most feasible and economically the soundest for a depressed economy—broad fiscal planning encompassing monetary, investment, pricing, interest rate, public works, and welfare policies, a strategy based not on occasional “pump priming” but on the heavy and continuous deficit spending that later fueled the war economy.
If the New Deal domestic heritage was mixed at best, the image of the head New Dealer remained clear and vibrant in the people’s memory—that of a cheerful, buoyant, warmhearted man absolutely committed to his goals of economic recovery and social justice, a very political man who could strike deals and manipulate men and win elections, an orator who could touch people’s hearts as they sat by a fireside, a man who always seemed in motion despite the polio-wasted legs of which, at least in public, he never complained and never explained. He had his bad days when he was negative and critical and even spiteful but he always bounced back, causing Morgenthau or Ickes or some other complainer to put his resignation statement back into his pocket and hearken anew to his boss’s uncertain trumpet.
A dozen years later Holmes’s perception could be both affirmed and extended—a first-class temperament and second-class intellect, yes, but also, throughout the presidential years, superb intelligence and rarely failing insight.
As a war leader too, Roosevelt was a deeply divided man—divided between the Soldier of the Faith, the principled leader, the man of ideals, crusading for a spacious and coherent vision, and the man of Realpolitik, Machiavelli’s Prince, the leader intent on narrow, manageable, short-run goals, careful always to protect and husband his power in a world of shifting moods and capricious fortune. This dualism not only cleft Roosevelt but divided his advisers within themselves and from one another. And it reflected central dichotomies within the American people, who vacillated between the evangelical moods of idealism, sentimentalism, and utopianism and traditions of national self-protection, prudence, and power politics.
Roosevelt demonstrated his purposeful, principled, steady, and coherent leadership most strikingly as Commander-in-Chief and war propagandist. He brilliantly articulated the ideals of freedom for which the nation fought and he provided ample and steadfast support to the men and women who were fighting for those ideals. For a leader who had intervened almost promiscuously in the decisions of his domestic agencies he was remarkably self-restrained in dealing with his generals and admirals. Even when he might have exploited some incident for his own political gain—as in the case of General George Patton’s slapping two soldiers in Sicily—he was silent. For a highly political man, he left selection of his generals to the top command; even Stimson acknowledged his “scrupulous abstention from personal and political pressure.” He overturned few sentences after courts-martial.
As an old navy man the Commander-in-Chief offered numerous suggestions and queries to the armed services, but he largely left them alone. Only when it came to political matters did he exert close authority. He insisted on the principle of unconditional surrender, arousing misgivings among some in the Pentagon even though it flowed directly out of the American military tradition. Roosevelt recognized the political significance of the doctrine, which had been fully vetted in the State Department, for maintaining unity among the Rainbow Coalition, discouraging divisive surrender offers by the enemy, and setting things straight for postwar peacekeeping efforts. Robert Dallek concluded that Roosevelt was the “principal architect” of the basic strategic decisions that brought the early defeat of the Axis.
Roosevelt the Prince, the global politician, the Machiavellian leader, lived uneasily with Roosevelt the Soldier of the Faith. FDR dealt not only with Churchill behind Stalin’s back but with Stalin behind Churchill’s. He misled the American people on his aggressive posture in the Atlantic. He failed to communicate to Polish leaders—or to the American people—the full gravity of Soviet intransigence about their western borders. He did not share atomic secrets with his Russian ally. Remembering talks with Roosevelt during wartime, de Gaulle was to write of FDR’s “light touches,” made “so skillfully that it was difficult to contradict this artist, this seducer, in any categorical way.” In numberless other political decisions—or in military decisions involving politics—Roosevelt manipulated, dissimulated, horse-traded, always on the grounds that this was the prudent or practical or realistic way to act.
He appeared to combine the most striking qualities of his two great presidential mentors—the martial vigor of Theodore Roosevelt and the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. But just as both those qualities were evident in both those men, FDR appeared to embrace principle and Realpolitik almost indiscriminately. Part of his strength lay in this; it was hard to know what Roosevelt one was dealing with. William James had spoken of the “once-born,” those who easily fitted into the ideology of their time, and of those “divided selves” who went through a second birth, seizing on a second ideology. Raised in a stable and secure home, comfortable in his self-identity despite some injuries to his self-esteem, Roosevelt in many respects was the classic once-born leader. But he shifted so widely in his priorities of political leadership during his long career that he appeared at least thrice-born—not only as Dr. New Deal and Dr. Win-the-War but ultimately as Dr. Win-the-Peace.
Both Roosevelt’s idealism and his Realpolitik were effective; the problem lay in the linkage between the two. He often failed to work out the intermediary ends and means necessary to accomplish his purposes. Thus he could proclaim unconditional surrender but practice some kind of deal with Darlan and later the Italians. The more he preached his lofty ends and practiced his limited means, the more he widened the gap between popular expectations and actual possibilities. Not only did this derangement of ends and means lead to crushed hopes and disillusion at home; it would help sow the seeds of cold war later. The Kremlin contrasted Roosevelt’s coalition rhetoric with his Britain-first strategy and falsely suspected a bourgeois conspiracy to destroy Soviet communism. Indians and Chinese contrasted his anticolonial words with his military concessions to colonial powers, and falsely inferred that he was an imperialist at heart and a hypocrite to boot.
Like most of the more effective Presidents, Roosevelt made his White House years a magnificent learning experience for himself and those around him. Like the great teaching Presidents in the early years of the republic—notably Washington, Jefferson, Jackson—he educated the American people in the uses of government to achieve great national purposes. Like the other world leaders of his time, he aroused people’s hopes, converted them into expectations and entitlements, and then responded to the demands that his followers—now become leaders—put on him. Like the stronger Presidents of the past century—notably Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson—he moved broadly to the left of the political spectrum in which he operated. But if his commitment to liberty and equality—to freedom—was realized most fully and paradoxically in the war years, he ended up in this posture as the result not of a steady evolution but rather of a series of jumps from role to role, as in the case of Dr. New Deal shifting suddenly to Dr. Win-the-War.
This capacity to compartmentalize his presidency and even his personality over time, and at any one time, gave him political advantages. It also helped explain the greatest moral failure of his presidency—a failure even greater and far more disastrous than his authorization of relocation camps for Japanese-Americans. This was his inaction in the face of the Holocaust. For years Roosevelt, like other Western leaders, had denounced Nazi persecution of the Jews. During the months after Pearl Harbor, reports began to reach the White House that something unspeakably more horrible was taking place—the “final solution of the Jewish question”: calculated, mechanized, bureaucratized murder on a colossal scale. Reports came too of people by the hundreds and thousands buried or burned alive, of infants swung by the heels and dashed against walls, of boxcars groaning with their loads of sick, freezing, starving, suffocating, dying “passengers.”
The totality of this holocaust was matched by the near-totality of failure on the part of everything that was supposed to stand guard against barbarism—press, church, public opinion, government itself. Newspapers became so inured to the reports, or found them so “beyond belief,” that an authentic account of the murder of tens of thousands of Jews might be put on an inside page next to marriage announcements. Leaders of the Christian churches within the United States and outside were almost silent. The public, misled by atrocity stories about the Germans during World War I, wondered if it was being bamboozled again. State Department officials, irresponsibly slow to react to anguished pleas and demands for help, appeared to reflect the moral lethargy and the endemic anti-Semitism among the public and Congress.
The President was not wholly passive. Persuaded by Morgenthau and others that Hull’s people were hopelessly inadequate to the situation, he established the War Refugee Board under his direct supervision. He authorized hostage deals and other specific operations that saved a number of Jews. He periodically denounced the slaughter in the strongest terms. But between his word and his deed lay a void. Urged to disrupt the shipment of human cargo by bombing the rail lines to the extermination factory of Auschwitz in Poland, he reverted to his role of Dr. Win-the-War, contending that all resources must be directed to the military destruction of Nazism and that such diversions would postpone that day. Yet even as that day approached, even as American bombers overflew the rail lines, overflew Auschwitz itself, European Jewry fell as steadily to its destruction as sand through an hourglass, until only three million, then only two million, then only one million, and finally only a handful of Jews remained alive, and these physically and psychologically devastated. On this ultimate crime against humanity the President never displayed—never sought to display—the consistent and compelling moral leadership that would break through bureaucratic callousness, legislative resistance, popular ignorance and apathy.
So Franklin Roosevelt left a highly divided legacy to a people themselves classically devoted on the one hand to lofty global ideals and on the other to narrow isolationist self-protection, with weak linkage between. But he left also a living legacy—living on in the unquenchable memories of his own leadership, living on also in the persons to whom he immediately passed on the legacy. One was his Vice President, a practical politician. The other was his wife, an impractical politician. They would become both allies and antagonists, politically and symbolically, in the nation’s postwar leadership. Isaiah Berlin spoke of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “greatness of character and goodness of heart.” She possessed much more than this, including some of the militance and tenacity of her Uncle Theodore—but character and goodness of heart would not be the least of the qualities she would bring to the struggle for peace.
So swiftly did the cold war envelop the Rainbow Coalition during 1945 that for decades historians would search for the sources of this early and acrimonious falling-out between Moscow and Washington. Two comrades-in-arms, who had come together from opposite sides of the globe to beat down the most murderous and monstrous threat the modern world had known, appeared suddenly to turn on each other in a new war of words and weapons. The turnabout seemed to defy conventional explanation. These two great nations had no common land borders to fight over, no heritage of ancient rivalries, no dire economic conflict, no clashing territorial ambitions. For a century before 1917 their main contact had been a mutually satisfactory real estate deal over Alaska.
American visitors to the Soviet Union noted how the two countries appeared to resemble each other: huge continental nations with comparable populations, both boasting revolutions to celebrate and world-famous leaders—Lincoln and Wilson, Lenin and Trotsky—to glorify or denigrate. Visitors from the American Midwest felt at home when they observed the immense, gently undulating plains, the seasons suddenly changing from the deep snow of winter to the bottomless mud of spring to blinding summer light and drought, the “deep, mournful, yet mellifluous and muted bellowing” of the huge steam locomotives as they rumbled across the flat plain. Russians, when you got to know them, seemed a lot like Americans—friendly, talkative, boastful, fascinated by new cars, machines, household gadgets.
Most of these appearances were deceptive. Russian history, society, psychology, culture were profoundly different from the American. The flat plains that for Americans were havens of peace and isolation—at least since the dispersion of the Indians—were for Russians avenues of attack from neighboring countries. The vast majority of Soviet citizens were peasants—religious, fatalistic, isolated in their remote and scattered villages, tending to suspicion toward outsiders. The Russian temperament, far more than the American, appeared to be at odds with itself—a popular craving for authority, leadership, and collective controls clashing with a tendency to be “independent to the point of anarchy,” in Edward Crankshaw’s words, “and expansive to the point of incoherence.” Although both peoples apotheosized common values in their sacred documents—freedom, justice, equality, human rights—American children in their families and schools and churches had been taught to abhor communism, Soviet children to abhor capitalism and the fascism it allegedly spawned. Each side not only hated the other’s ideology but feared it. The “reds” were seeking to arouse the world proletariat against the democratic—the American—way of life; the American warmongers sought to encircle and crush the Russian Revolution—had they not tried to stifle it in its cradle in 1919?
A quarter century after the Russian Revolution, each nation grotesquely misperceived the other’s “plot” for “world domination.” United States propagandists and press quoted Marxist predictions of inevitable war, not bothering to point out that Lenin had preached the inevitability of war among the capitalistic nations rather than between communism and capitalism. Soviet propagandists seized on the more extreme statements of American leaders—notably that of a then obscure American senator named Harry S Truman, who had said during the frightful summer days of 1941, as the Nazis were rolling across the Russian plains, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible,” though he added that he did not want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.
Many on each side misperceived the other side’s wish for world communism or world capitalism to become the global way of life as an elaborately blueprinted plot for world conquest. These fears persisted throughout World War II, certainly among Americans and probably among Soviet citizens as they were continually reminded of the West’s “perfidious” failure to mount the cross-Channel invasion. Even during the euphoria of wartime collaboration, polls showed that many Americans were not counting on the Russians to “cooperate” after the war.
Was any reality perceivable through the mists of ideology? Patterns of behavior were discernible to those who looked for them, but the patterns were mixed. The Bolsheviks had waged ideological warfare against the West ever since winning power, but the trumpet calls were rarely more than bombast. In Finland and Poland and elsewhere, Moscow had shown a ferocious determination to exert control over border countries, but its aim seemed far more to prevent these nations from serving as stepping-stones for invading armies than to make them bases for Red Army moves against Western Europe or Japan. The Kremlin subsidized Communist parties around the world, but invariably subordinated those parties’ interests to its own state interests when they collided. And the West had some knowledge of Stalin’s massive party purges, in which thousands of old comrades perished, and of his “de-kulakization” and forced collectivization campaigns, in which millions of peasants were executed or sent to Siberian labor camps or died of starvation—but these were “internal matters.”
For its part, the West had waged an abortive hot war and then a long cold war against the Soviet Union. The United States had a monopoly on nuclear arms for years following World War II, while the Soviets were still militarily depleted and economically devastated, but Washington did not use the ultimate weapon. State and Defense Department officials adopted a series of carefully considered position papers, culminating in 1950 with NSC-68, which pictured the Soviet Union as “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own,” and as seeking to “impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world,” but Washington did not back up this dire assessment with military action. Above all, the Americans and British had followed their own national interests in the timing of the second front, as postwar revelations of Lord Beaverbrook and others made clear, and had left Moscow feeling deceived and millions of Russians without the sons, fathers, and brothers who had taken the brunt of the Nazi onslaught, but the Kremlin realists could not have doubted that, had the situation been reversed, they would have done exactly the same.
The cold war, in short, had started early and had never ended, not even during the war. The conflict was far too deeply rooted to be quickly or easily eliminated, but it could be managed or overridden by strong and purposeful leadership. That was the kind of leadership Roosevelt and Churchill had supplied throughout most of the shooting war, in collaboration with Stalin. During both 1942, the year of shocking defeats, and the planning year of 1943 the two Western leaders and their staffs had hammered out the shape of final victory in tandem with the Russians. After five years of doubt and agony men had mastered events, at least for the moment. Now with Hitler gone as a unifying force, could Harry Truman and his Administration offer the same kind of leadership after the war? The issue was not long in doubt.
Harry Truman would never forget his meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt after he was suddenly summoned from the Capitol to her study on April 12, 1945. “Harry,” she had said quietly, “the President is dead.” Speechless for a moment, he had asked her if there was anything he could do.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” she had replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.” The widowed First Lady knew well the toll exacted by the presidency. Within a few months the new President was lamenting that being Chief Executive was like “riding a tiger,” as he desperately sought to keep on top of events before they got on top of him.
Rarely had a new President appeared so poorly prepared for the job. The Missourian had never visited Europe since shipping back from his World War I service as an artilleryman in France. A decent, hardworking New Deal senator, Truman had been chosen as FDR’s running mate largely because, of all the hopefuls, he would “hurt the President least.” Roosevelt barely knew him, and made little effort to see him or keep him informed—even about the A-bomb—during the months after their November victory. The last of the Vice President’s few messages to the President concerned a patronage matter. Politically Truman traded on his plain manners, blunt speech, and I’m-from-Missouri skepticism toward Senate windbags and Washington pundits. Behind the heavy spectacles and homespun features, however, lay a tangle of incongruities—a jaunty self-confidence along with feelings of inadequacy; a calm and sometimes stubborn resoluteness along with sudden flaring rages when he was crossed; a rustic morality that still accommodated itself easily to the unsavory Pendergast machine. He was a high school graduate moving in a world of college-educated men, but he took pride in his wide reading in American history.
Along with these ambivalences the new President inherited FDR’s divided legacy of principled, idealistic leadership and short-run Realpolitik manipulation. The organizational meeting of the United Nations, opening two weeks after Truman took the oath of office, symbolized both the high ideals and the political pragmatics of the new President and of the nations’ representatives who assembled there. In a brief, simple address piped in by direct wire, Truman urged the delegates to “rise above personal interests” and “provide the machinery, which will make future peace, not only possible, but certain.” But Poland’s seat at the conference lay empty, for Washington and Moscow were still at odds over the composition of the new Warsaw leadership. Also roiling the San Francisco assembly was Stalin’s insistence that one power could not only veto a move to use force but veto even discussion of the question. Happily, Harry Hopkins, in his last major mission to Moscow—he would be dead of hemochromatosis in nine months—persuaded Stalin to withdraw Moscow’s position on the veto. But even Hopkins could make little progress on Poland.
Overwhelmed by events, irked by the old Roosevelt hands in his cabinet who he felt shared little of FDR’s greatness, immersed in paperwork as he tried feverishly to brief himself on the hard decisions facing him, Commander-in-Chief Harry Truman at least had the satisfaction of presiding over the last battles of the European war, as Allied spearheads stabbed into Germany from east and west. Late in April, American and Soviet soldiers met and clasped hands at Torgau, on the Elbe, while British forces were taking Bremen. Within a few days all ended for the Axis in a leaders’ Götterdämmerung, as Mussolini and his mistress were shot to death by Italian partisans in a town on Lake Como, Dr. and Frau Goebbels killed their six young children and themselves, and Hitler and his bride of thirty-six hours committed suicide in their bunker as the Russians closed in. The German command—what was left of it—unconditionally surrendered on May 7, 1945.
Japan now fought on alone. American forces completed the conquest of Okinawa late in June, in what historians optimistically called the “last battle,” but losses on this Ryukyu island were so staggering—over 11,000 GIs, marines, and sailors dead, over 33,000 wounded—combined with those earlier on Iwo Jima, as to boost Allied estimates of the human cost of invading the home islands. From the Potsdam Conference in Berlin late in July, the Big Three issued an unconditional surrender ultimatum to Tokyo.
This conference was a most remarkable affair. It was the first and only wartime summit meeting attended by Truman, and the last for Winston Churchill, who during the proceedings was replaced by Labour’s Clement Attlee as Prime Minister. At times the conferees appeared more like future adversaries than victorious allies, as the Anglo-Americans tussled with the Russians over the future of Germany, reparations, and—more and more bitterly—Poland. Asserting that Poland must never again be able to “open the gates to Germany,” Stalin was adamant that the “London Poles” have no more than token representation in the communist-dominated government. Most remarkable of all was the virtually unmentioned fact hanging over the conference, the fact of American development of the atomic bomb—fleetingly mentioned by the Americans because they thought they had kept the secret from the Russians, unmentioned by Stalin because he knew the “secret” but did not want Truman to know that he knew it.
Of all the legacies Truman received from Roosevelt, the A-bomb was at once the most constricting and most liberating, the most Utopian and most deadly. Truman was “restricted politically, psychologically, and institutionally from critically reassessing” Roosevelt’s legacy of the bomb, in Barton Bernstein’s judgment. The bomb that had been developed as a military weapon in response to fears that the Germans would have it first was now—after a successful test in the Alamogordo desert of New Mexico—ready for use against Orientals.
Months before Stimson informed Truman of the “most terrible weapon ever known in human history,” however, the Secretary of War had been contemplating its future political uses as well. The atomic bomb would give the United States “a royal straight flush and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it.” This kind of talk pleased the poker-playing President. The “cards” were in American hands, Truman claimed, and he meant “to play them as American cards.” On the other hand, some scientists and Administration officials hoped the bomb might be a weapon for world peace or at the very least might gain the “liberalization of Soviet society” as a precondition for postwar cooperation. But would Stalin join in the poker game or even higher pursuits? Truman was disappointed at the Potsdam Conference when he mentioned the mighty weapon in vague terms to Stalin and the dictator showed only casual interest.
Typically, American planners were thinking more in short-run military terms than in geopolitical. All available forces were now concentrated in the western Pacific. American bombers, stepping up their attacks from ever nearer bases, incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in Tokyo and other cities. While Japanese diplomats felt out Soviet officials on a deal with Russia, the Anglo-Americans approached their momentous decision about using the atomic weapon, with Moscow unconsulted. The American leaders were divided, some arguing that the dreadful weapon was not needed at all, others that a demonstration would be enough, still others that the time-honored American strategy of heavy direct military assault would work again. Whatever his private doubts, Truman took the line that it was a purely military decision, that he did not want to disrupt the enormously costly atomic effort underway, and that a “one-two” punch would knock Japan out of the war, averting hundreds of thousands of American casualties and possibly millions of Japanese. As no one could authoritatively predict how strongly the Japanese would fight on their own soil, the simple, short-range, “practical” strategy of using all available weapons overcame any concerns about long-range consequences.
The Japanese climax surpassed even the German. So powerful was the will to resist that even after two bombs obliterated much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Soviet troops smashed into Manchuria, Japanese civilian and military leaders argued for days whether to capitulate. Assured that the throne would be protected even under the terms of unconditional surrender, the civilian leaders won out after narrowly averting a palace revolt by officers determined to fight to the finish. On September 2, 1945, MacArthur presided over the Japanese capitulation in Tokyo harbor on the steel decks of the battleship Missouri.
Long before the hot war ended against Japan, the cold war between the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans was becoming more and more frigid. If the main reason for unleashing the atomic holocaust on Japan was short-run military, the Americans were not unhappy that they could demonstrate the A-bomb to the Russians. The Russians, however, appeared not to be intimidated by the awesome new weapon—partly because they had not been surprised by it. At Potsdam, just after Truman had told Stalin vaguely about the big bomb, Stalin had passed the “news” on to Molotov. “Let them,” his Foreign Minister had said, adding, “We’ll have to … speed things up.” Did he mean speed up work on their own bomb—or prepare for war against Japan?
In the atmosphere of rising hostility, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, launched even earlier than the Yalta agreement had called for, won few plaudits in Washington. The Russians simply wanted to be in on the kill—and the booty. Still, some American officials were hopeful and even conciliatory. On his trip home from Potsdam, Truman had told the officers of the Augusta that “Stalin was an SOB but of course he thinks I’m one, too.” Stalin was like Boss Pendergast, Truman told a friend later, a man who would size up a question quickly and stand by his agreements. He even mused that Stalin “had a politburo on his hands like the 8oth Congress.”
Even more hopeful and conciliatory, for a time, was Truman’s Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes. An old Senate hand, briefly a Supreme Court justice and then wartime economic czar, “Jimmie” believed that friendliness, old-time horse-trading, lengthy talk, and perhaps a spot of bourbon could thaw out any adversary, even a communist. When Japan surrendered, Byrnes looked forward to the first meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers that had been set up to carry forward Allied collaboration. That conference, in London shortly after V-J Day, Byrnes found frustrating and a bit baffling. Preach though he might about the need for “free elections” and representative government in Poland and the Balkans, he could make no dent in the adamantine resolve of Moscow to control its spheres of interest.
As for the bomb, at a cocktail party, Molotov suddenly raised his glass and said, “Here’s to the atom bomb—we’ve got it!” At this point another Russian took Molotov by the shoulder and led him from the room. Byrnes stood there perplexed. Was Molotov bluffing? Had he had one glass too many of vodka? Was the whole thing staged? Or—God forbid—did the Russians “have it”?
“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” the soldiers had sung on barren atolls and in sweltering jungles, and by the end of 1945, millions of men and women had returned from the wars to their white and green Christmases at home. The joyous family reunions were hardly marred by thoughts of war; the world was at peace. Few could have believed that the next five years could be as crucial and traumatic, if less lethal, a period in world history as the previous five, that those years indeed would end in another hot war.
Nor could the men in Washington so imagine. By the end of 1945 the leaders who had inherited FDR’s dual legacy were themselves even more ambivalent about the best posture toward Russia. Some saw Moscow pursuing traditional “stale” interests—protecting her borders, establishing control in her own spheres of interest, pursuing old-fashioned bargaining and balance-of-power politics. Others saw “imperial Bolshevism” embarked on global conquest. This ambivalence both fostered and reflected a dualism among the American people, who were divided between a conciliatory and a get-tough policy toward Moscow. Most Americans favored holding on to the “secret” of the bomb, according to polls in late 1945, but most would also turn the United Nations into “a kind of world government” with the power to restrict the use of the atomic weapon.
Few Americans considered that the Kremlin also might be divided, in part because they perceived Soviet rule as far more monolithic than any Western regime. Yet Stalin too had to heed hard-liners like Andrei Zhdanov, who preached ideological war and revolution to communists abroad, yet also give ear to the many officials and diplomats who had worked with the Anglo-Americans during the war and favored collaboration. Number One blew hot and cold; he certainly had his own reservations about using communist centers abroad, “leaving them in the lurch whenever they slipped out of his grasp,” the Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas noted; but he was not slow to meddle abroad when he saw a Soviet advantage. The Russians talked tough but hardly seemed to be preparing for a war—they labeled 1946 the “Year of Cement.” And somewhere in the background lay the Russian people, taught to hate and fear the imperialists but holding wartime memories of Anglo-American collaboration against the Hitlerites—and broken promises about an early second front.
After Stalin spoke in the Bolshoi Theater early in February 1946 on the eve of a Soviet “election,” American perplexity about the Russians mounted. Despite praise of the Big Three’s “anti-Fascist coalition” during the war, and a heavy emphasis on Soviet reconstruction through another Five-Year Plan, the speech was ambiguous enough in its foreign policy implications to arouse a new debate in Washington. Was Stalin talking conciliation, isolationism, or remilitarization? Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas privately said it was a “Declaration of World War III.” The State Department queried its most seasoned Russian expert in Moscow, George Kennan, who responded with an 8,000-word telegram.
Clattering in through State’s tickers, the “long telegram,” as it came to be called, had a quick and lasting impact. Kennan described Soviet official policy as based on the premises that Russia lived amid antagonistic capitalistic encirclement, that capitalist nations inevitably generated wars among themselves, that to escape from their inner conflicts capitalist nations intervened against socialist governments. Hence Moscow’s official policy was to strengthen the Soviet state by any means possible, advance Soviet power abroad wherever feasible, weaken Western ties to colonial peoples, take part in the United Nations only in order to protect and advance its own interests. Russia’s unofficial or “subterranean” policies were even more baleful: to “undermine general and strategic potential of major Western powers” by a host of subversive measures, to destroy individual governments that might stand in the Soviet path (even Switzerland), to do “everything possible” to “set major Western powers against each other.”
“In summary,” Kennan telegraphed, “we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our state be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”
Kennan’s telegram brought the thrill of vindication to Washington hardliners and, coming from a diplomat in the field, impressed waverers. The ideas were not all that novel; it was Kennan’s dramatic and apocalyptic presentation of them that galvanized Washington officialdom. Above all, it was Kennan’s imputing of vast skill and incredible efficiency to a regime that had so often seemed incompetent. Not only did the Kremlin have “complete power of disposition over energies of one of the world’s greatest peoples and resources of the world’s richest national territory,” cabled Kennan breathlessly, but it had “an elaborate and far-flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.”
If this secret telegram sharpened Administration fears of Soviet power, the most famous Anglo-American in the world helped harden attitudes toward the Russians among a far wider public. Winston Churchill, introduced by President Truman, told a Missouri college audience that from “Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Communists and fifth columnists constituted a “growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” Wanting not war but only the fruits of war, the Russians admired nothing so much as strength. Hence Americans and British must form a permanent military alliance, centered on their combined military forces and atomic monopoly.
The speech caused such a storm that American officials, including the President, discreetly but distinctly distanced themselves from the former Prime Minister. But these subtleties eluded the men in the Kremlin. Denouncing the Anglo-American in a Pravda interview for plotting against the Soviet Union’s right to exist, Stalin called Churchill a Hitlerite racial theorist, stoked memories of the 1918 intervention in Russia, and castigated his wartime ally for his “call to war with the Soviet Union.”
For almost a year after Kennan’s cable and Churchill’s speech the spiral of hostility slowly mounted. The Kremlin tightened its grip on Poland and the Balkans, save for Yugoslavia, while the Americans extended their guard over Greece and Turkey. Meetings of Foreign Ministers erupted in quarrels over “free elections” in Stalin’s buffer states, the disposition of Germany, and reparations. Zhdanov demanded a crackdown on the “putrid and baneful” influence of bourgeois culture in the Soviet Union, and the American public, still divided and uncertain, became more and more drawn into the spiral. But the spiraling slowed at times. The Foreign Ministers finally agreed on a host of postwar treaty settlements; the Administration urged control of atomic energy through an international agency, though one dominated by Washington; Stalin withdrew his troops from Iran after a sharp confrontation in which Washington tried out, within the framework of the United Nations, its strategy of “get tougher”; Truman, despite deepening suspicion and fear of the Soviet Union, did not yet openly support Churchill’s hard line.
Then, late in 1946, the spiral of confrontation began to quicken. A number of forces converged. As Moscow appeared to become more intransigent, perceptions and misperceptions of Soviet behavior narrowed and hardened among Truman lieutenants who had to deal daily with the Russians. Navy Secretary James Forrestal, former head of the investment firm of Dillon, Read, not only worried about the dangers of communism but inundated his colleagues with hundreds of copies of anti-Soviet reports and warnings—most notably, Kennan’s long telegram. Slowly Forrestal’s worry was becoming an obsession. Dean Acheson, after finding his natural niche in the State Department, took increasing leadership there even as he held decreasing hopes of dealing with the Russians.
Kennan’s telegram became more and more influential—especially after it was offered to the public in a Foreign Affairs article by “X”—even as Kennan worried more and more about overreaction to it. A clear omen was seen in the fate of Secretary of State Byrnes, whose efforts at conciliation with the Soviets had fared less well than his give-and-take with senators. After Truman became increasingly critical of Byrnes’s soft approach to Moscow, the secretary took a harder line, but by now he and his boss were drifting apart.
Increasingly the President, so lacking in broad executive experience or in FDR’s ability to manipulate and stay on top of his advisers, was becoming a prisoner of his staff. An even more important cause of the President’s hardening, however, was clearly political. In the congressional elections of November 1946 the Republicans ran a skillful negative campaign. Their slogan “Had enough?” promiscuously fused grievances over inflation, strikes, price controls, meat shortages—and fears of communism at home and abroad. The Republicans swept the Senate and House for the first time in sixteen years. The Chicago Tribune called it “the greatest victory for the Republic since Appomattox.” Harry Truman had lost his first election as President.
Now controlled by Republicans, the House Un-American Activities Committee early in 1947 planned a dramatic effort to “expose and ferret out the communists and communist sympathizers in the federal government.” The election had brought into Congress the “Class of ’46,” which included such anticommunist militants as Richard Nixon of California, William Jenner of Indiana, and Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Truman, responding to the political currents, tried to play their game and beat them to the punch. Proclaiming that the presence in (he government service of “any” disloyal or subversive person constituted a “threat to our democratic processes,” he created a Federal Employee Loyalty Program that, operating through scores of loyalty boards at lower levels, was empowered to sack employees for “membership in, affiliation with, or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization” that might be designated by the Attorney General as “totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.” The Attorney General’s “little list” was compiled without giving a hearing to named organizations or specifying the nature of the threat they posed.
Worse was to come. Employees under investigation were granted a hearing and the right to appeal, but the burden of proof was on them. They had in effect to prove their loyalty. They need not know the accusations; the specification of charges, according to Truman’s executive order, was “to be as complete as security provisions make possible.” Nor could they hope to confront their accusers, for in almost all cases the FBI, intent upon protecting its informants, withheld the sources of derogatory information. Loyalty boards quizzed employees as to their views of coexistence, peace, civil liberties, and other horrendous things advocated by the Communist party. Said a top loyalty boss, “The man who fears that his thinking will be curbed by a check of loyalty may be thinking things that tend to be disloyal to his country.”
To those who cried out that the program threatened the most basic and old-fashioned American value—individual liberty—the Administration retorted that communism threatened liberty even more. Moreover, it contended, the Democrats must clean house or the Republicans in their zeal would burn the whole house down. If the White House thought that its loyalty boards could outshine the real “red hunters,” however, it had underestimated the congressional lust to investigate. In the fall of 1947 HUAC opened a star-spangled extravaganza on communism in Hollywood. The dapper character actor Adolphe Menjou testified that anyone “attending any meeting at which Paul Robeson appears, and applauds, can be considered a Communist.” Gary Cooper, whose appearance evoked sighs from the audience, said of communism, “From what I hear, I don’t like it because it isn’t on the level.” Friendly witnesses had a glorious time trading in rumor and speculation.
The mood changed when the Hollywood Ten—a group of screenwriters, producers, and directors—contended that HUAC had no right to ask them about Communist party membership. Much shouting and gaveling-down ensued, all before an avid press. The Ten, who had expected their appeal to the First Amendment to be upheld in the courts, were fined and jailed for contempt and blacklisted by the studios. A purge by terrified Hollywood and radio executives followed. Some 350 Hollywood actors, writers, and directors and perhaps 1,500 television and radio employees lost their jobs in the next few years. Some ex-communists, on the other hand, came before the committee to expiate their sins—to name names, denounce former comrades, provide delectable details of disloyal activities. Some admitted their own sins but refused to name others; some named names reluctantly; some named them eagerly; and a few took up ex-communism as a livelihood, testifying at trials, writing books, touring the lecture circuit, acting as “expert consultants.”
Most of the government people targeted by HUAC were small game until, one day in 1948, a pudgy, rumpled, troubled man appeared before HUAC, a man who had consorted with tramps and prostitutes as well as communists, a self-confessed thief and perjurer. His name was Whittaker Chambers. He had come to name several government officials. One name leapt out, a Harvard Law School graduate, protégé of Felix Frankfurter, clerk for Justice Holmes, rising young State Department hand, adviser at Yalta, presider at the UN organizing meeting, now head of the Carnegie Endowment. His name was Alger Hiss.
Two days after Chambers named Hiss as a communist, Hiss testified that he was not. So persuasive was Hiss, so boyish of face and earnest and attractive of demeanor, that he received congratulations from spectators and even handshakes from HUAC members. One Republican committeeman moaned, “We’ve been had! We’re ruined.” But another member thought differently. Richard Nixon kept the case alive, arranged a Hiss-Chambers confrontation, pursued loopholes and inconsistencies in Hiss’s testimony. When the young New Dealer sued Chambers for libel, Chambers produced the “pumpkin papers”—microfilms of classified State Department material he had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm— as evidence that Hiss had been not only a Communist party member in the 1930s but a spy for the Soviet Union. Four days later, Hiss was indicted for perjury.
As the Republicans continued to exploit the communism issue, President Truman tried to defuse this atomic bomb of domestic politics. The menace of communism was not foreign agents, he told a Chicago audience, but the areas of American society in which the promise of democracy remained unfulfilled. He dismissed one HUAC hearing as a “red herring.” But Truman could not bottle up the genie of suspicion he had helped release. The spiral of fear intensified among Americans as the spiral of hostility intensified between Washington and Moscow.
A sudden sharp crisis early in 1947 spun the Administration toward a sphere-of-interest commitment in the eastern Mediterranean that almost equaled the Soviet Union’s in Eastern Europe. Warned by the British that they could no longer shore up Athens with economic and military aid, informed by advisers that the crisis-laden Greek government was near the breaking point, Truman responded largely to the communist threat. Moscow expected Greece to fall into its hands soon like a “ripe plum,” said an Administration adviser. Then “the whole Near East and part of North Africa” was “certain to pass under Soviet influence.” The domino theory was gaining adherents. In fact, although communists in neighboring Balkan countries were stirring up what trouble they could in the ancient “cradle of democracy,” Stalin himself was observing his sphere-of-interest deal with Churchill. If the domino was falling, it was falling of its own weight.
In mid-March, Truman asked Congress for $400 million for Greek and Turkish aid. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he told a joint session of Congress, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This urgent call to economic and military arms, soon named the Truman Doctrine, was followed three months later by a momentous proposal to shore up the European economy, still stricken by the effects of total war. General Marshall, now Secretary of State, from the steps of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard portrayed to “you gentlemen” of the graduating class—and to T. S. Eliot, another honorary degree recipient that day—a Europe near “breakdown,” requiring “substantial additional help.” Marshall announced that the United States would do everything possible to “assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” American policy, he said, was directed “not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” Such an effort could not be piecemeal, however—all nations must join, pool their needs, and present Washington with a single combined request.
At once the new plan—the Marshall Plan—was swept into the spiral of East-West hostility. It quickly became evident that Congress, now dominated by Senator Taft and other economizers and budget balancers, would respond far more enthusiastically to an “anticommunist” measure than to a welfare program for Europeans. But the more the plan was sold as anticommunist, the more Russian suspicions of it were inflamed. Invited to take part, Moscow at first seemed tempted, sending a delegation to Paris for consultations with other Europeans, then coldly declined, rightly suspecting that many of the inviters hoped that this particular guest would not sup at the table. Over the following weeks, while Congress debated the plan and the billions of dollars requested, Stalin immensely helped its passage by establishing the Cominform—the “Communist Information Bureau”—to replace the old Comintern, and by clamping harsh controls on Czechoslovakia just as debate over Marshall Plan funding came to a head. Then it was Washington’s turn to react, as Truman called for a renewed draft, worked out collective security arrangements with Western Europe, and declared his intention to set up an independent West German state.
The cold war appeared on the verge of turning red hot, as the spiral of fear and hatred reached its apogee. In part the hatred was the logical manifestation of Great Power conflict over ideology and interest. But even more it was a reflex of perceptions. Washington underestimated Moscow’s absolute determination to control its bordering states and grossly exaggerated Soviet designs outside its sphere. Moscow exaggerated Truman’s disposition to use atomic weapons and underestimated his genuine concern over the European economy and his absolute determination to unify Western Europe, including the West Germans, behind an anticommunist strategy. And behind the misperception lay age-old psychological tendencies, among which Ralph K. White included diabolical enemy images and moral self-images, overconfidence and worst-case thinking.
The growing anticommunist militancy that buoyed the Administration ran into political volleys from all directions—from Taft unilateralists, old-fashioned isolationists, pro-Soviet radicals, and a handful of pundits and publicists who viewed themselves as “realistic” as the most hard-nosed Truman hand. Among the latter stood Walter Lippmann, who differed so sharply with George Kennan that he devoted fourteen successive columns to refuting the “X” article—and to lambasting the Truman Doctrine, which Kennan’s long telegram had helped inspire. The Truman strategy was too grandiose, Lippmann contended, too indiscriminately global, too unrealistic in view of the nation’s limited resources, and based on false premises— especially the perception of Moscow as pursuing ideological and messianic goals rather than traditional sphere-of-interest and balance-of-power statecraft.
The Truman Administration could dismiss hostile pundits as not having the votes, unilateralists as mere go-it-aloners, isolationists as head-in-the-sand ostriches. But as 1947 gave way to the election year of 1948, the political leaders in Washington could not dismiss one man who was neither isolationist nor unilateralist and might have some critical votes. This was Henry Wallace, behind whom loomed at times the evocative figure of Eleanor Roosevelt. While Truman had switched back and forth between Roosevelt’s dual foreign policy tracks of Wilsonian idealism and conventional power politics, Wallace stayed squarely on the former path. He was still serving as Secretary of Commerce, the post FDR had chosen for him after easing him out of the vice-presidency. During 1946, as Truman’s advisers and Soviet provocations drew the President into an ever stronger cold war posture, Wallace’s friends—old-line pacifists, anti-anticommunists, liberals and radicals of all stripes, scientists heartsick over Hiroshima—fortified Wallace’s own determination to break with the White House.
The messy rupture began with a Madison Square Garden speech before the National Citizens Political Action Committee. Hissed whenever he said anything derogatory about Russia, Wallace called for a “real peace treaty” between the United States and the Soviets, amid such provocative remarks as “We should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe and the United States.” Wallace added—correctly—that the President had gone over the speech, and had said it represented Administration policy.
A Washington tempest followed. Byrnes threatened to resign. Vandenberg said that the Republicans could “only cooperate with one Secretary of State at a time.” Truman explained lamely that there had been a misunderstanding—he had only approved Wallace’s right to give the speech, not its contents. In a long face-to-face meeting Wallace told Truman that the people feared that American policy was leading to war, adding pointedly, “You, yourself, as Harry Truman really believed in my speech.” But Harry Truman the President made clear that he must keep unity in his cabinet and present a united front abroad. The President revealed his true feelings the next day in a memorandum about Wallace:
“He is a pacifist one hundred per cent. He wants us to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo. I do not understand a ‘dreamer’ like that.… The Reds, phonies and the ‘parlor pinks’ seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger.
“I am afraid,” he added, “that they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.” These remarks were a measure of Truman’s tendency to strike out at his adversaries in crude personal terms and of the completeness of his break with the anti-cold war forces.
Eleanor Roosevelt followed the rupture with rising concern. She had worked with Wallace during the New Deal and respected his idealism and commitment; she had counseled Truman on how to get along with both Churchill and Stalin. In the United Nations she was experiencing firsthand Soviet suspicion and stubbornness. As Truman and Wallace spun away from each other, she was left isolated in the void between them. She believed Wallace was unwise to make speeches in Europe criticizing Administration policy; she was disturbed by the go-it-alone aspects of the Truman Doctrine and by the President’s failure to offer relief and rehabilitation in cooperation with the UN. While lauding Wallace’s commitment to world understanding, she also approved of the Marshall Plan and admired its author. As the Wallace forces moved toward establishing a third party, however, Eleanor Roosevelt knew where she would stand. She had always believed in working within the Democratic party.
Political leaders on all sides had long expected 1948 to be a “showdown year.” At long last the Republicans could battle someone other than Franklin Roosevelt. The Democrats could no longer depend on the electoral magician in the White House. The Wallace movement, soon to be converted into the Progressive party, expected at least to hold a critical balance of power. Within each party too, rival leaderships hoped to establish their factional dominance. Conservative Republicans headed by Senator Taft planned to wrest their party away from men of the Willkie, Stimson, and Dewey stamp. The presidential Republicans, headed by aggressive young activists like Harold Stassen, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Dewey himself, labored to deny party leadership to the isolationists and to set the GOP on a steady course of moderation in domestic policy and of internationalism abroad. On the Democratic side, hawks and doves, as they would come to be called, fought for the soul of the Democracy, as did states’ righters against the Truman forces backing the social welfare and reformist programs of his Fair Deal.
In the center of the Democratic battlefield stood Harry Truman. Not for decades—certainly not since William Howard Taft had been beset by La Follette Progressives and Teddy Roosevelt Square Dealers in 1912—had a President seemed so isolated and deserted as Truman when he announced his candidacy early in March 1948. The Henry Wallace Progressives threatened to carve deeply into the “peace vote.” A number of labor leaders, personally furious with Truman after he had cold-shouldered them during a rash of postwar strikes, threatened to sit the election out. Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal, anticommunist group founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and a host of academics, politicos, and assorted old New Dealers, was sticking with the Democracy, but some of its leaders were working to draft the popular General Eisenhower as the Democratic standard-bearer. The Republicans appeared likely to renominate Dewey, who had his own lines into labor, liberal, and black enclaves.
Through it all Truman appeared his usual feisty self. He not only aroused antagonism—he seemed to solicit it. In the face of conservative opposition to his Fair Deal economic measures he inflamed southern Democrats even further with his sweeping civil rights message of February 1948. Based on the recommendations of a special presidential commission chaired by Charles E. Wilson, head of General Electric, the message called for a permanent federal commission on civil rights, a permanent fair employment practices commission, the outlawing of segregation in schools and transportation and other public facilities, and a federal antilynching law. Truman’s central strategy, however, was to stand on his Fair Deal extension of the New Deal—housing, welfare, labor and consumer protection, farm subsidies.
Soon Truman was besieged on three fronts. The GOP duly nominated Dewey on a moderately liberal and internationalist platform, a band of solid Southerners bolted the Democratic convention and later nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for President on the States’ Rights or “Dixiecrat” ticket, and a Progressive convention nominated Wallace. Truman’s whole instinct was to fight back, like the French general who cried, “My left flank is in ruins, my right flank is retreating, my center is caving in. Good! I shall attack.” By midsummer the voters were being treated to a four-cornered race reminiscent of 1912, as Truman crisscrossed the country in an exhausting “whistlestop” campaign by train, Wallace made his rustic, low-key appearances before hyperbolic crowds, Thurmond sought enough electoral votes to throw the presidential race into the House of Representatives, and Dewey tried to appear presidential in order to become presidential.
For a time, fortune scarcely favored the bold. At the Democratic convention Young Turks headed by Hubert Humphrey, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, had pushed through a strengthened civil rights plank that threatened to alienate even more of the southern Democracy. Zigzagging across the country, the Truman campaign repeatedly ran out of money, requiring frenzied appeals to fat cats, usually to oil barons with ready cash. Toward the end of the campaign the election forecasts, including roundups by The New York Times and other periodicals, had Truman so far behind Dewey as to arouse despair in the President’s entourage. Shown a poll of “fifty political experts,” all of whom predicted a big Dewey win, Truman blinked, grinned, and said, “Oh, well, those damn fellows; they’re always wrong anyway. Forget it, boys, and let’s get on with the job.”
In the end, fortune did favor the bold. The Dixiecrat bolt backfired, as most southern Democrats stuck with Truman while northern blacks credited his timely civil rights position. Two or three million Republicans stayed home out of overconfidence, or so Dewey later complained. Wallace’s strength steadily ebbed as liberals and laborites feared to waste their ballots on a third-party ticket. They also suspected extensive communist influence over the campaign, and rightly so. Warned of this influence, Wallace was unwilling even to investigate, for fear that he would be guilty of the very red-baiting that he had warned Americans against. He felt far more pressed from the right. Bold enough to stay overnight in the homes of southern blacks, he would remember his campaign through the South as “one long succession of tomatoes and eggs.” The author of The Century of the Common Man later remarked that the “common man can be very, very barbarous.”
Dewey, seeking to soften memories of his blatant linking of the Democrats with communism in 1944, took the high road, lost his fighting edge, and embraced bipartisanship in foreign policy to the degree that he could not exploit Truman’s chief vulnerabilities. The President skillfully employed FDR’s tactic of attacking the congressional rather than the presidential Republicans. He called Congress into special session, challenged the Republicans to pass the legislation demanded in their party platform, and hung the congressional failure to do so around Dewey’s neck.
Truman’s close but decisive victory was so unexpected as to be sensational. It quickly became the pride of historians prone to demonstrate the power of individual leadership against historical forces. People saw “a brave man,” in Richard Kirkendall’s words, “fighting almost alone against great odds,” and bringing off the greatest upset in American history. But Truman finally won by not fighting alone. With the help of Stalin’s aggressive blockade of land traffic between Berlin and West Germany, he played on the anticommunism latent in millions of Americans. He received Eleanor Roosevelt’s benediction and exploited the momentum and mythology of the Roosevelt heritage. He depended heavily on the Democratic party, which produced a set of congressional victories as significant as the presidential. He remobilized the economic voting groups of farmers, workers, and urban consumers bequeathed by Roosevelt.
The gutsy little man from Missouri had ridden these forces, even guided them, rather than being overwhelmed by them. Americans, recovering from their election-night shock, took this underdog—this winning underdog—to their bosom.
For the political leadership of the nation 1948 had indeed been a showdown. For Dewey, whose popular vote fell short of his 1944 total, it would be the end of the presidential road. Thurmond’s States’ Rights party, winning 1,169,000 popular votes and 38 electoral votes, fell far short of its electoral hopes in the South. The Wallace Progressives, garnering even fewer popular votes than the Dixiecrats and no electoral votes, learned once again the bias of American traditions and elections against third parties. Congressional Republican leaders, set up as a perfect target by the Democrats, lost their House and Senate majorities. And renowned political prophets suffered the derision of the winners and the wrath of the losers who castigated them for their sloppy polling techniques.
For the longer run, however, the 1948 election was less dramatic. In the lexicon of political scientists, it was a “maintaining election,” reflecting persisting party loyalties and stable group attachments. The excitement of a four-cornered battle had not brought out a big vote. In many respects the 1948 election was a fifth presidential victory for FDR and the New Deal. For most Americans, voting Democratic had become a habit.
Yet in a far more momentous way 1948 was a different kind of maintaining election—an election that sustained the Truman Administration in its Fair Deal posture but above all in its anticommunism. It seemed likely that Truman’s loyalty program and his increasingly hard line toward Moscow had blunted Republican charges of “soft on communism” and helped turn Dewey against the weapon he had used in 1944. Even more, the election ratified the sphere-of-interest strategy on which the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and other Administration foreign policies were grounded. The Administration’s unofficial protectorate over Greece and Turkey, its insistence on holding West Berlin through a resourceful air-supply program—along with its reluctance to interfere in the Soviet sphere—suggested that the war-torn world of the early 1940s was settling down into some kind of Great Power stability based on mutual containment.
Maintaining that stability, however, would call for the most exacting statecraft on all sides; it would call for clear perceptions of nations’ interests, dependable estimates of the military potential and intentions of rival powers, sophisticated political intelligence about the interplay of national interests within and among rival blocs, realistic estimates of strategic possibilities and impossibilities, skillful national leadership and tenacious diplomacy. The historic balances of power of past centuries had depended on the statecraft of military and political leaders possessing such Bismarckian qualities. But the sphere-of-interest, balance-of-power way of stabilizing international relationships—especially difficult for democracies to manage—was always hostage to one powerful force: change. Alterations in the actual military and economic power of rival and friendly nations, combined with misperceptions of popular attitudes and the intentions of leaders, all in a context of fear and hostility, could—and often did—bring the trembling mobiles of the balance of power crashing down.
The years 1948 and 1949 bristled with events full of potential for arousing fear and hostility, misperceptions and miscalculations, among the Great Powers. The mysterious, awesome might of the atomic weapon was proving a source more of fear than of security among nations. Evidence of atomic espionage by Soviet spies struck fear in American hearts that the Russians would steal the “secret” of the bomb. The Soviets, knowing that Washington would never permit international controls that would give Moscow that secret, worked feverishly on their own bomb. Despite scientists’ advice that Moscow would not be slow to develop an atomic weapon, many Administration officials confidently assumed that they would continue to hold this trump card. Then in September 1949 came the dread news: winds blowing high over North America were carrying radiation from a Soviet atomic test. A few months later Truman announced that the United States would begin to develop the hydrogen bomb—potentially many times more destructive than the A-bomb.
Germany was another crisis point. The standoff following the Soviet blockade and the Western airlift left heightened fears and hostility on each side, in turn drawing the divided Germans into the East-West spheres of interest. This balance-of-power tendency might have stabilized the situation, save that a divided Berlin remained a tempting and vulnerable island in eastern Germany. Officials on each side, moreover, now feared that the adversary would seek to draw all of Germany into its own embrace. Step by fearful step, the two camps lost the opportunity, limited in any event, to shape a unified and disarmed Germany.
But the most profound change—perhaps the most significant transformation of the mid-twentieth century—was threatening the balance of power on the other side of the globe. The civil war in China had accelerated, despite patient efforts by General Marshall to mediate the conflict. By the end of 1947 Mao Tse-tung’s communist armies had won control of Manchuria and by the end of 1948 most of northern China; during 1949 it became clear that soon they would drive Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces off the Chinese mainland. Chiang’s withdrawal to Taiwan created one more outpost—a counterpart to Berlin—that could be protected against invasion only by Western power. And it left fear and anger among Americans who cherished their country’s historic involvement and sympathy with China—most recently with Chiang and Madame Chiang’s Republican China, which they imagined could be guided toward Western-style democracy.
It was not in Germany or China, however, or in some atomic confrontation, but in the little-known land of the Koreans that statecraft failed and the balance of power began a wild oscillation.
Although this remote land, protruding into the Sea of Japan out of the great haunch of Manchuria, had for centuries been a jousting ground for rival powers, it had been viewed during the postwar years of tension as one of the less likely theaters of hot war. Divided along an “administrative dividing line”—the 38th parallel—after World War II, Korea fell into the hands of militant communists in the north headed by Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang and militant anticommunists in the south headed by Syngman Rhee in Seoul. The two regimes, each hoping to take over the whole country, glared covetously at each other’s lands across the parallel.
In January 1950, Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor as Secretary of State, described to Washington journalists an American defense perimeter that ran from the Aleutians to the Ryukyus to the Philippines but excluded Korea, though the secretary added that if such other areas were invaded the people attacked must resist with the help if necessary “of the entire civilized world under the charter of the United Nations.” American occupation troops pulled out of South Korea, leaving light weapons and ammunition but no aircraft, tanks, or heavy naval craft. Washington’s idea was that Rhee would be able to defend but not attack. Moscow, Peking, and Pyongyang looked on with interest.
The war that erupted after North Korean troops drove through the parallel on June 25, 1950, was in part an old-fashioned campaign of movement and maneuver. Within two days President Truman, without waiting for Congress to act, ordered United States air and naval forces to Korea and authorized the dispatch of a regimental combat team within a week. The North Koreans quickly captured Seoul and drove south down the peninsula, seizing Pohang on the southeastern coast by early September and cornering their foe at the foot of the peninsula. On September 15, American forces under General MacArthur struck back with a brilliantly conceived and executed landing at Inchon, on the coast west of Seoul. Within eleven days the counterattackers had captured Seoul, and by late October they had taken Pyongyang, a hundred miles to the north. Intoxicated by his success at Inchon, by hopes of a glorious triumph over communism, and by visions of his return home to a hero’s welcome, MacArthur drove his troops still further north, toward the Manchurian border.
The world looked on aghast—World War II was not yet five years over in the Pacific and Americans were once again fighting Asians. How could this “most unnecessary of wars” have started?
The misperceptions that dominated the Korean War rivaled the blunders that had led to hostilities in earlier centuries when both intelligence and communication among nations were still primitive. Its origins were parochial. Kim feared that Rhee would wipe out communists in the south and then turn north; Rhee feared that Pyongyang would seek to “unify” the country by mobilizing those same southern communists. According to Khrushchev’s later account, Kim, during a trip to Moscow, sought Stalin’s permission to strike south and topple Rhee. Somewhat reluctantly Stalin assented, doubtless calculating on a large gain at small risk. Even so, Stalin ordered all Soviet advisers out of North Korea so that Moscow would not be compromised in the venture. He also had Kim clear the decision with Mao, or perhaps did so himself when Mao visited Moscow. Both the Russian and the Chinese dictator expected that the Americans would not intervene, at least not in time to stop Kim’s conquest of the south. But Truman, under attack himself for “losing China,” was not going to “lose” more real estate. The fall of South Korea would gravely menace Japan.
The Americans and South Koreans counterattacked far more quickly and effectively than the communist leaders had expected. But now it was the Americans’ turn for miscalculation.
Truman, assuming wrongly that Moscow had instigated the invasion and that Korea was the first step in the communist march to world conquest, had hopes of rolling back communist power and unifying Korea. Now, with the North Korean forces reeling backwards, he could win a relatively cheap victory. But it would not be cheap. After MacArthur’s forces neared the Yalu River and launched a general assault to win the war, the Chinese counterattacked in heavy force. Soon it was MacArthur’s army, divided and immobilized in the mountain passes, suffering bitterly in the winter snow and ice, bleeding heavily from close Chinese pursuit, that stumbled back to positions on the other side of the 38th parallel. There the two sides sparred with each other for years, suffering further heavy casualties, until an armistice was signed in July 1953, a few months after the death of Stalin.
Both sides had failed to assess correctly the other’s strategic capability. Both sides were militarily unprepared for the battle they would undertake. Each had underestimated the other’s willingness to fight and then had exaggerated the other’s fighting as part of a long-planned strategy of global conquest. Each assumed that the “other” Korea was the enemy’s puppet. Originally Korea had not been part of either side’s master plan, but the outbreak of the Korean War, resulting from miscalculations and misperceptions, made Korea part of a crisis plan.
Then, too, the Korean War had a dire and unexpected impact on the relationship of Moscow and Peking. It was, Adam Ulam concluded, one of the biggest blunders of postwar Soviet foreign policy. “On the surface it appeared as a master stroke to make Peking the lightning rod for America’s wrath and frustration while the Soviet Union remained a sympathetic bystander. In fact, those two years when the Chinese had to assume the burden of the fighting marked their psychological emancipation and speeded up the process of equalization between the two states” that had begun with negotiations between Mao and Stalin in Moscow. The increasing tension between Peking and Moscow heartened Western leaders, but it was a further destabilizing factor in the quivering balance of power around the globe.
Perhaps the Korean War’s major effect in the United States was on the mass public’s fears and hostility. Anticommunists now cried out that their warnings had been justified, that the North Korean attack proved Russia to be bent on world conquest, that the Chinese attack across the Yalu confirmed that Peking was bent on Asian conquest. It was in this context that anticommunist feeling was reaching a new pitch among Americans.
After his election “in his own right,” President Truman carried on his anticommunist campaign, holding that his “responsible” efforts might moderate or head off the “irresponsible” red hunters. In July 1948 his Justice Department won the indictment of twelve Communist party leaders, including Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall, for violating the 1940 Smith Act, which made it a crime “to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence.” The trial dragged on through most of 1949. The prosecution based its case largely on the testimony of ex-communists and on readings from “Marxist-Leninist” classics, with former Daily Worker managing editor Louis Budenz explaining that however innocent the language of the classics might appear, it had an altogether different and sinister meaning to trained communists. The twelve sought but failed to put “the Government… on trial.” The judge’s charge to the jury that there was “sufficient danger of a substantial evil” eliminated the “clear and present” test of the First Amendment from the jury’s deliberations. Conviction duly followed.
Administration actions of this sort, however, appeared not to quench popular fears of the reds at home and abroad but to stoke them. Those fears flamed higher after the Chinese intervention across the Yalu and Harry Truman’s sacking of MacArthur for publicly advocating, against Administration policy, that the war be carried to communist China. Korea was now closely linked with “Red China.” A militant “China Lobby,” embracing such notables as Clare Boothe Luce, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and James Farley, and such publications as the Hearst newspapers and the Luce magazines, kept up a drumfire: Who lost China? Senator Taft charged that “the proper kind of sincere aid to the Nationalist Government a few years ago could have stopped communism in China,” but a “pro-Communist group in the State Department” had promoted “at every opportunity the Communist cause in China.”
At the center of the China Lobby’s target stood Dean Acheson. This sternest of cold warriors was described in the Senate as having “whined” and “whimpered” as he “slobbered over the shoes of his Muscovite masters.” Acheson was vulnerable. Though lacking a political base of his own, he made no attempt to modify his bristling Groton-Yale-Eastern Establishment demeanor. Acheson showed his class manners and his moral code when he told reporters that he would never “turn my back” on Alger Hiss, but this only goaded his foes to a new fury.
“I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism,” cried Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska, “and I want to shout, Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United Stales for years.”
During the late forties the war on “reds in America” had lacked a single dominant leader—or perhaps it had suffered from too many leaders vying for headlines and photographs. Then there emerged a figure that only a movement of the fearful and the paranoid could have brought to the fore. Decades later it was difficult for historians to fathom just why an obscure junior senator from Wisconsin named Joseph R. McCarthy suddenly became the notorious spokesman and symbol of American anticommunism at home. “Tail-gunner Joe,” as he was somewhat derisively called, had won some note in 1946 by shooting down a famous senator and heir to a great Wisconsin dynasty, Robert M. La Follette, Jr. In Washington he soon won a small reputation for abusing Senate procedures, harassing witnesses, and using “the multiple untruth,” as Richard Rovere later termed it. He employed these tactics indiscriminately against advocates of public housing, communists, fellow senators.
McCarthy had been casting about for some exploitable cause when the GOP sent him out on a routine barnstorming trip in February 1950. At Wheeling, West Virginia, he offered to an audience of Republican women the usual grab bag of parings from newspaper columns, Senate testimony, and anticommunist talks—this time a two-week-old Nixon speech, which he plagiarized. After the tired old cracks at traitors and fellow travelers and striped-pants diplomats in the State Department, McCarthy tried his version of the Big Lie. “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” he said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
This was pretty stale talk, and the Wheeling speech itself received little press attention. But as McCarthy continued his tour and spewed out charges and numbers, he gathered more and more headlines. It was still not clear why. His Wheeling “list” had come from a 1946 letter—which he did not “hold in his hand”—to Congress from Secretary Byrnes. The letter reported on a preliminary screening, made no mention of Communist party membership, contained no names; and McCarthy had no idea how many of them were still in State. But something about this man increasingly riveted press attention—his sullen, jowly, dark-shaven features, his menacing voice, the recklessness with which he offered specific figures instead of hazy accusations.
Indeed, he had the audacity to renew his charges on the Senate floor. Fishing papers out of his briefcase, he embarked on an eight-hour, case-by-case analysis of what were now “81 loyalty risks.” His speech was a masterpiece of distortion of a two-year-old House of Representatives report drawn from unsifted State Department files that were in turn based, in many cases, on rumor and hearsay. McCarthy promoted a suspect in the House report from an “active fellow traveler” to an “active Communist,” converted a man “inclined towards Communism” into simply a “Communist,” transformed a “friend of someone believed to be a Communist” into a “close pal of a known Communist.” Even Senator Taft called it a “perfectly reckless performance.”
Questioned by a Senate investigating committee under the chairmanship of Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings, McCarthy twisted and parried and obfuscated. Pressed for names, he threw out those of culprits with abandon and sometimes, it seemed, at random. After a four-month investigation the committee concluded that McCarthy had perpetrated a “fraud and a hoax” on the Senate.
But for many Republicans the Wisconsin senator was now changing from an embarrassment to an artillery piece in a wider war. Any Republican could use this freewheeling red hunter against the Democrats without taking responsibility for him. And conservative, isolationist Republicans could use him against moderate, internationalist ones. Soon Taft, despite private doubts, was encouraging McCarthy to “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another one.” Moderate Republicans were prepared neither to embrace McCarthy nor to join his Democratic foes. Rather they sought a middle ground that proved to be unstable. After seven moderates, headed by Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, issued a “Declaration of Conscience” that scored both Truman and the exploiters of fear, five of the seven backed away as they felt the political heat.
That heat was rising as the elections of 1950 and 1952 neared. McCarthy received hundreds of invitations to speak for his party’s candidates, more than all other senators combined. He appeared in fifteen states, most notably in Illinois, where he backed Everett Dirksen, and in Maryland, where he opposed Tydings. In the 1950 elections Democrats kept control of both houses, but the result was seen as a stunning triumph for McCarthy, who brandished the scalps of at least five anti-McCarthy senators, including Tydings. Later election analysis deflated McCarthy’s role, but it was the perception that counted. To oppose the Wisconsin senator, it appeared, was to commit political suicide. A reporter noted in 1951: “The ghost of Senator Tydings hangs over the Senate.”
His 1950 crusade elevated McCarthy to the high priesthood of Republican right-wing extremism. McCarthyism, said the rising young conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., “is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” The trick of McCarthy’s success was becoming clear too. He appeared to have an almost instinctive skill for manipulating the press during an age of fear. He dexterously handled the wire services, which supplied most of the country’s newspapers and radio stations with national news. He knew how to make headlines and catch deadlines; he knew that wild charges were played big while denials were buried among the want ads; he knew that the wilder the charge, the bigger the headline.
Covering McCarthy was a “shattering experience,” remembered George Reedy of the United Press. “We had to take what McCarthy said at face value. Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho—but he was a United States Senator.” He was also both a reflector and an exploiter of the age of fear.
It was in this atmosphere of hostility and fear that Americans entered the election year of 1952. Already the sides were lining up but more so within the parties than between them. Senator Taft, cherishing his growing image of “Mr. Republican,” had already made clear his aim to win the nomination that twice had eluded him. Harry Truman, beset by the triple charges of “K1-C2” (Korea, corruption, and Communism), was not expected to run again—unless some Dixiecrat or populist Democrat threatened to make off with the nomination. McCarthy continued to play his own game. And to the consternation of Taft Republicans, the hated “Eastern Establishment,” after losing twice with Dewey, was preparing to foist another “New Deal Republican” onto the Grand Old Party.
That Establishment was busy recruiting its man. Dwight Eisenhower’s wartime reputation and popularity, projected through his soldierly bearing and infectious smile, made him the favorite of both Democrats and Republicans for their presidential candidate. A stint as president of Columbia University, glamorized by the New York press, followed by his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, had kept the general in the center of the public eye. By late 1951 Dewey, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, and a dozen other northeastern senators and governors were forming an Eisenhower organization and dispatching missionaries to NATO headquarters in Paris to draft their man.
Their man was proving curiously undraftable. Appealing to his ambition was useless. He had pretty well hit his peak in history, he liked to tell visitors, when he accepted the German surrender in 1945. “Now why should I want to get into a completely foreign field and try to top that?” The old soldier, now in his sixty-second year, also had the typical distaste of the American military man for the seamy side of politics. But he also had a sense of duty, even of indispensability, and it was on these vulnerabilities that the recruiters played while the “isolationist” Taft threatened to win the nomination, the Korean War festered, and China appeared more and more “lost.” Ike wanted the expression of duty to take tangible form, however—nomination and even election by acclamation. As Taft proceeded to line up delegates early in 1952, it became clear that the convention would not draft the general. Playing on his combative instincts, the missionaries won his grudging agreement to come home and fight for his nomination.
By late spring, when he returned home, Ike was ready for a fight, but not for the one that awaited him. Somewhat familiar with the ideological warfare between the old guard and young moderates within the GOP, he still had not realized the intensity of that conflict. It was not merely isolationists versus internationalists, or eastern and western “coastal” Republicans against midwestern Republicanism. The GOP was virtually two parties, each with its own ideology, traditions, and policies, its own leadership, electoral following, institutional foundations in federal and state governments. These two parties, one entrenched in Congress and state legislatures, the other in the federal and state executive branches, ordinarily kept their distance, but they could not escape collision in the campaign for delegates to the GOP national convention.
The Taft and Eisenhower forces came into sharpest conflict in Texas, where anti-Truman Democrats, anti-Taft Republicans, and just plain “I Like Ike” voters sought to wrest convention votes away from the old-guard regulars. Fierce battles erupted in precinct caucuses when the regulars, many of them accustomed to holding these meetings in their front parlors, found “one-day Republicans” crowding in to vote for Ike. Some precinct bosses ousted the intruders, who then held rump caucuses out on the lawn; other “hosts” were shoved out of their own homes and had to hold their own rump meetings outside. The upshot, after the Taft-controlled state convention met, was a ferocious fight over two competing delegate slates to the national convention.
This kind of fight over delegates’ credentials was nothing new; indeed, Taft could remember a similar battle between his father and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Whether a party should represent the old dependables who stuck with it in good times and bad, for power or profit or principle, or the independents and volunteers and irregulars who “raided” the party either from opportunism or from idealism was one of the oldest political questions, in both theory and practice. What was new was the skill of the public relations men around Eisenhower in elevating the matter to a transcending moral issue. Soon his forces were embarked not on a messy old credentials dispute but on a crusade for moral purity, THOU SHALT NOT STEAL, proclaimed Dewey, Lodge & Co. Ike forces waved signs: ROB WITH BOB and GRAFT WITH TAFT. Eisenhower joined with his followers in denouncing the “Texas steal.” Taft offered to compromise, but how could the Ike crusaders compromise on a moral issue?
It was one of the more spurious “moral” issues in American history, but it was nonetheless effective. The Eisenhower forces won the credentials fight at the national convention in Chicago and then, with their strength augmented, held full command. There was hell to pay. Thrusting a limp, quivering finger toward the New York delegation, Taft stalwart Everett Dirksen, senator from Illinois, from the convention podium charged Dewey with taking “us down the path to defeat.” He cried, “Don’t take us down that road again!” Conservatives and moderates blasted one another on the convention floor. But Ike had the votes. Despite a prompt and friendly visit from the nominee, Taft left Chicago a deeply embittered man. His presidential road, like Dewey’s in 1948, had come to an end. But he could not understand why. He had taken the traditional path toward the White House. He was “Mr. Republican.” He asked a reporter, “Why do they hate me so?”
Could the two Republican parties remarry, at least for the campaign? It was a matter for negotiation. After demanding assurances from the nominee that he would exclude Dewey as Secretary of State from an Eisenhower cabinet and give the Taft forces equal representation, Taft was more conciliatory at a breakfast meeting on New York’s Morningside Heights. Eisenhower, after barely looking at it, approved a statement making “liberty against creeping socialization” the central campaign issue, promising to “battle communism throughout the world and in the United States,” and playing down the foreign policy differences between the two men.
Democrats would have viewed Ike’s “surrender at Morningside Heights” with pleasure, except that they were plagued by their own divisions. Truman still planned not to run, but only if he could bequeath the office to an acceptable—i.e., pro-Administration—nominee. This ruled out an engaging young senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, whose chairmanship of a committee investigating crime in politics had supplied Republicans with ammunition against White House “cronies.” Southern Democrats, still angry over the President’s civil rights program, were planning once again to break out of the party tent in one direction or another. Truman’s eye lingered on Adlai E. Stevenson, whose high-toned, good-humored governorship of Illinois was drawing national attention. But Stevenson was a curious political animal—he liked being governor and had little hankering for the White House. Offered the nomination by Truman, he declined. Pressed to run by hosts of Democrats ranging from Chicago bosses to Manhattan intellectuals, he repeatedly stated that he was not a candidate. To be sure, he did not issue a “Sherman,” and some expert decoders of the Delphic utterances of politicians made much of his having said, not that he “would not” accept the nomination, but that he “could not.” Others believed he had closed the door.
The vast majority of the delegates hardly knew Stevenson when this slight, balding, vibrant man welcomed them to Chicago in words of polished elegance and wit that many present would never forget. Here on the prairies of Illinois, he said, “we can see a long way in all directions.” Here were no barriers to ideas and aspirations, no shackles on the mind or spirit, no iron conformity. Here the only Democratic governors chosen in a century had been John Peter Altgeld, a Protestant, Edward F. Dunne, a Catholic, and Henry Horner, a Jew. And “that, my friends, is the American story, written by the Democratic Party, here on the prairies of Illinois.”
The delegates sat hushed, spellbound, as Stevenson turned to the Republicans. For almost a week “pompous phrases marched over this landscape in search of an idea, and the only idea they found was that the two great decades of progress in peace, victory in war, and bold leadership in this anxious hour were the misbegotten spawn of socialism, bungling, corruption,” and the rest. “They captured, tied and dragged that ragged idea in here and furiously beat it to death.…” After all the denunciations of Washington he was surprised that his mail was delivered on time. “But we Democrats were not the only victims here. First they slaughtered each other, and then they went after us.” This speech brought howls of laughter and wild applause, and helped produce Stevenson’s nomination a few days later—one of the few genuine presidential drafts in American history.
With both nominees chosen, the election outcome turned on each candidate’s capacity to unite and mobilize his party. Eisenhower’s was the more formidable task. Placating Taft and the congressional Republicans was one thing; bringing around McCarthy and the McCarthyites was something else. Holding his nose, the general made the necessary concessions. In Indiana he shared a platform with Senator William Jenner, who had called Eisenhower’s revered boss George Marshall a “front man for traitors” and a “living lie.” In Wisconsin, under pressure from midwestern politicians and from McCarthy himself, he deleted from his speech a tribute to Marshall’s “profoundest patriotism” in “the service of America.”
But the harshest test of Eisenhower’s effort to follow the high road while exploiting the low came with the revelation that running mate Richard Nixon, whom he had named in an effort to appease both Taft and the McCarthyites, possessed a “secret fund” fattened by businessmen. Although there was nothing illegal about the fund and the money had been used for legitimate campaign expenses, Nixon’s charges of Democratic corruption exposed him to fierce counterattack. First the general allowed him to twist in the wind while Republican politicians and editors—most of them from the Eastern Establishment—urged the vice-presidential candidate to quit the ticket. Then he waited until Nixon delivered a maudlin television talk about his wife and his daughters and his dog, Checkers. Only after several hundred thousand or more telegrams and letters deluged the Republican party with expressions of support did he embrace Nixon as “my boy.” The “boy” would never forgive Eisenhower for making him undergo this ordeal.
With biting humor Stevenson dug at these open sores in the GOP, quipping after the Eisenhower-Taft summit conference that Taft had lost the nomination but won the nominee, that the general was worried about Stevenson’s funny bone but he was worried about the general’s backbone. He liked poking fun at the war between the “two Republican” parties. But the Democratic candidate had his own two parties to deal with. With some Southerners ready to bolt again, the Democrats had adopted a platform exquisitely ambiguous on the key issue of federal fair employment legislation. They had chosen as Stevenson’s running mate Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, whose record on civil rights was such that fifty black delegates had walked out of the convention. Stevenson was caught in the middle of this issue, while Eisenhower, inheriting much of Taft’s symbolic and personal support in the South, took a conservative position on civil rights but a strong stand for ownership of the oil tidelands by the states. With the prestigious Senator Richard Russell applying steady pressure from the right, and black and white civil rights liberals from the left, Stevenson hoped that he could at least sweep the South in time-honored Democratic style.
But the South was no longer for the Democratic taking. Eisenhower proved to be the great unifier, just as his recruiters had hoped, and campaigned extensively in the South. Then, when he made the electrifying statement that he would “go to Korea”—after Stevenson had considered and rejected the idea as inappropriate for himself—election-watchers knew that the fight was over. The general swept the northern industrial states and carried Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee—but not the states of the “solid South” that had bolted the Democracy in 1948. Election analysis demonstrated that his winning margin was far more a tribute to his personal popularity than a victory for the GOP. Almost half the poor did not vote, but among the poor who did turn out, most voted for Ike.
“Someone asked me, as I came in, down on the street, how I felt,” Stevenson told his weeping followers on election night. He was reminded of a story about Lincoln after an unsuccessful election. “He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”
The Senate Caucus Room, April 22, 1954. Bathed in brilliant television lights, senators, counsel, witnesses, bodyguards huddle around a small, coffin-shaped table, surrounded in turn by several score reporters. Men who are famous—and others who will be—are there: Joe McCarthy, smiling and frowning and giggling, his face heavier and stubblier than ever, the center of exploding flashbulbs; his aide, a smooth-faced young attorney named Roy Cohn; Joseph Welch, a little-known, old-fashioned-looking Boston attorney; Robert Kennedy, the twenty-nine-year-old minority counsel. Jammed into the room are four hundred spectators, including such Washington celebrities as Alice Roosevelt Longworth and “hostess with the mostest” Perle Mesta.
For weeks the eyes of the nation would be focused on this Senate cockpit. The formal issues seemed almost trivial, considering all the fuss: Did McCarthy and others put improper pressure on the Army in order to win preferential treatment for Private David Schine, Cohn’s good friend; did Army officials use improper methods to deflect earlier McCarthy probes? The stakes in fact were much bigger. “They ranged from the integrity of the Armed Forces to the moral responsibilities of federal workers,” in David Oshinsky’s words, “from the separation of powers to the future of Senator McCarthy,” pitting President against Congress, Republican against Republican, senator against senator.
The subcommittee chairman rapped an ashtray, the television lights brightened, the subcommittee’s special counsel opened his mouth to speak, then:
“A point of order, Mr. Chairman. May I raise a point of order?”
Once again McCarthy was moving audaciously, outrageously, stealing the scene from all the others, putting himself at the center of the affair— and there he would remain day after day, exposing himself to millions of avid television watchers for 187 televised hours.
“Point of order, Mr. Chairman, point of order.” The phrase engraved itself on the memory of a nation.
Fifteen months after Dwight Eisenhower had taken the oath of office the shadow of Joseph McCarthy lay across his Administration. At the moment the Wisconsin senator’s target was the Army. It appeared, though, that he was attacking not only the usual suspects—Communists, fellow travelers, intellectuals, Democrats—but the very foundations of the republic: the armed forces, the Senate, the White House, even the churches. Earlier his man J. B. Matthews had charged in The American Mercury that the “largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant clergymen.”
It was not as though the President had ignored the matter; it had been a source of attention, irritation, anger. But he had tried to defuse McCarthy rather than confront him. Ike’s 1952 running mate, after all, had savaged Stevenson as an appeaser who “got his Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” In his Checkers speech, Nixon had attributed his slush-fund woes to those who had opposed him “in the dark days of the Hiss case.” Later Nixon had charged that Stevenson “has not only testified for Alger Hiss, but he has never made a forthright statement deploring the damage that Hiss and others like him did to America because of the politics and comfort they received from the Truman Administration and its predecessors.” To McCarthy these were weasel words. He had shown Nixon the real stuff, castigating Stevenson as the candidate of the Daily Worker and supporter of “the suicidal Kremlin-shaped policies of this nation.”
The President raged at McCarthy privately but would not openly take him on. “I just will not—I refuse—to get into the gutter with that guy,” he said to intimates. Moreover, he did not want to jeopardize his right-wing support in the Senate. A Republican White House, he hoped, would reassure and tame the Wisconsin “trouble-maker.”
Such hopes were dashed within a month of Eisenhower’s inaugural on January 20, 1953. Using as his vehicle the previously sleepy Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, stacking it with loyal Republicans and dominating it as chairman, McCarthy went off on a rampage against the State Department, charging sabotage in State’s Voice of America program, discovering communism in the Overseas Libraries Division, taking up cudgels against Eisenhower’s friend Charles Bohlen, FDR’s translator at Yalta. When the new President proposed Bohlen for ambassador to the Soviet Union—a cold war nomination, considering Bohlen’s record— McCarthy was infuriated. Bohlen was “at Roosevelt’s left hand at Teheran and Yalta,” he said. Dirksen orated: “I reject Yalta, so I reject Yalta men.” After the “Yalta man” was confirmed Taft told the President, “No more Bohlens.”
It was a severe burden on Eisenhower and the nation he now led that this legacy of the past rested so heavily on his Administration. Not since Herbert Hoover, at least, had a new President been better prepared to be Chief of State and chief foreign policy-maker. He had helped shape some of the nation’s key policies abroad, such as its military and economic linkages with Western Europe. He had been trained from his West Point days to be a leader—to take charge, to plan ahead, to unite diverse men in common effort, to be consistent and persistent, to be “fair but firm.” More and more distanced from Truman and the Democracy during the 1952 campaign, he was eager to launch new initiatives toward world peace and national security.
He had a typical piece of “Ike luck” when Joseph Stalin died only six weeks after he took office. Stalin had appeared increasingly paranoid during his last years; now he was succeeded by a collective leadership that seemed more moderate. Eisenhower’s own collective leadership was bolstered by Republican majorities in House and Senate. Taft’s election as Majority Leader in the upper chamber gave promise of a continuing collaboration between the President and the legislative leader who had fought him for the nomination and then fought for him in the election campaign.
To throw off the burdens of the recent past—the spiral of fear, the freezing of attitudes, the rigidification of policy—Eisenhower needed a Secretary of State who could devise and carry out fresh initiatives. His selection of John Foster Dulles seemed irreproachable, indeed almost inevitable. Grandson of a Republican Secretary of State under Harrison and nephew of a Democratic Secretary of State under Wilson, member himself of the American delegation to the Versailles peace conference of 1919, Dulles embodied the American foreign policy tradition. He was the one eastern internationalist whom Taft had approved for the job. To be sure, many found Dulles a windbag, a bore, and a prig. But the President could overlook such qualities in a man who seemed able to unite the two Republican parties and to make a fresh start in foreign policy.
The fresh start was slow in coming. Dulles seemed to maintain the worst of the Truman-Acheson cold war posture rather than shifting it. Like Acheson, he “approached relations with the Soviet Union as a zero-sum game,” according to Gaddis Smith. “A gain in power for the United States was good. A gain for the Soviet Union was bad. An outcome of any issue that was advantageous to both sides was hard to imagine.” The President could—and occasionally did—rein in his secretary. But Dulles was everlastingly at it, day after day, in speech after speech, junket after junket.
His rhetoric far surpassed his chiefs. Eisenhower in his inaugural address warned that because “forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history,” it was all the more urgent to seek peace, especially since “science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.” Dulles in this same month of January 1953 declaimed that Soviet communism viewed people as “nothing more than somewhat superior animals,” and that as long as communism held such conceptions, there could not be “any permanent reconciliation.” He saw an “irreconcilable conflict.” In the following months Dulles did more than negotiate with the hard-liners in Congress and in the country—he often represented them in Administration councils. Time and again he threatened to lay a blighting hand on the President’s hopes and initiatives.
Thus Dulles’s calls for liberation of Moscow’s satellites and for “massive retaliation,” which evoked countervailing fear and hostility in the Kremlin, went far beyond the President’s vague calls for freedom for the captive peoples. At a time when Eisenhower was seeking to lower tension between the two sides in Korea and stabilize the front, Dulles was siding with Rhee’s demands for reunification (under him) after a massive new “preemptive” strike to the north. At a time when Eisenhower was seeking to strengthen Western European unity and even help shape a “United States of Europe,” his Secretary of State was threatening that the United States might go it alone. At a time when his chief was denouncing “book burning” in a speech at Dartmouth College (though he backed off a bit later), Dulles was still pressing for the clearing out of suspect volumes in overseas libraries. At a time when the President sought some stabilization of relations between Peking and Chiang’s new government on Taiwan, Dulles favored “unleashing” the Nationalists for some kind of offensive on the mainland.
It was not that Dulles vetoed or openly sabotaged the President’s plans and policies—in general, Eisenhower stayed on top of his Administration. Rather the Secretary of State frustrated that part of Eisenhower that wished to mobilize the forces for peace in the world and amplified that part of Ike that was a cold warrior. It was the old story of the “pragmatist” feeling his way, exploring opportunities, trying out initiatives, all the time that his true believer of a Secretary of State was scaring the adversaries— and even more the allies—half to death.
The tumultuous Middle East offered Eisenhower ample opportunity for “pragmatic” action. When Iran’s Prime Minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, appeared soft on communism—he had accepted financial support from Moscow and political support from the Communist party in Iran—Eisenhower authorized a CIA-financed coup that drove Mossadegh out of office in 1953 and put Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlevi on his path to the throne. While the Administration was eager to help United States oil interests, Eisenhower’s central motive was the “Soviet threat”; Eden reported to Churchill after a talk with the President that he “seemed obsessed by the fear of a Communist Iran.” When the pro-Western government of Lebanon appeared likely to collapse in 1958 amid Christian and Moslem rioting, Eisenhower sent Marines into the country. In both cases the President had responded to what he perceived as a Soviet threat expressed directly or through “puppets”; in both cases he and his advisers miscalculated, for the real threat was militant Middle Eastern nationalism.
Still, Eisenhower’s main accomplishment in his early years as President was what he did not do. After visiting along the Korean front lines, viewing the misery of the soldiers and sizing up the formidability of the mountainous terrain, he did not order an attack to the north. When the Chinese communists began to bombard the islands of Quemoy and Matsu off their coast late in the summer of 1954, the President rejected the advice of Air Force and Navy chiefs that the United States, together with Chiang, carry out bombing raids—including atomic bombing—on the mainland. Repeatedly, when the French were facing defeats in Indochina at the hands of the communist-led Vietminh, he resisted urgings of Vice President Nixon, of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and—off and on—of his Secretary of State to intervene with conventional and even atomic arms. “Five times in one year,” observed his biographer Stephen Ambrose, “the experts advised the President to launch an atomic strike against China. Five times he said no.”
Eisenhower’s ability to say no to new departures in domestic policy as well as to adventurism abroad, his endless search for compromise and consensus, his acceptance of Establishment values led contemporary observers to describe his Administration derisively as the “bland leading the bland.” By the 1980s historians were treating him more favorably, as fresh data revealed what political scientist Fred I. Greenstein termed his “hidden hand” legislative and political tactics, his effort to give a New Look—more atomic firepower, expanded Air Force, less cost for conventional arms—to his foreign policy, his concept of leadership as raising followers above their individualistic, short-term goals to embrace long-run moral goals. His main failing—lack of strong, consistent policy direction stemming from inability to link broad ends to explicit and specific means—reflected central ambiguities in this man of war who was also a man of peace.
Above all, in his presidency, a man of peace. For Eisenhower had to live with the horror of atomic war as few others did. On a June evening in 1955, as he was leaving the Oval Office, an aide hurried toward him to blurt out the fearful words—the enemy had attacked the United States—fifty-three of the biggest cities had been devastated—vast numbers were fleeing— there were uncounted dead—fallout had spread over the country. Casualty estimates were stupefying—up to 60 or even 100 million.
It was a mock exercise, of course—part of Operation Alert, an effort to simulate a real atomic attack. The President had instructed that he not be told in advance when the exercise would be mounted. If he “survived,” he and his cabinet would be evacuated to a secret site in the Carolina mountains.
To build peace, time for Dwight Eisenhower ran short. Twelve weeks before he took office a hydrogen device as large as a two-story house, weighing some sixty-five tons, and almost a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, had obliterated a Pacific island a mile wide. Twelve weeks after taking office the President told a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors that in exchange for certain Soviet concessions, including agreement on a “free and united Germany” and the “full independence of the East European nations,” he was ready to sign an arms limitation agreement and to accept international control of atomic energy under a “practical system of inspection under the United Nations.” He warned of a life of perpetual fear, of enormous financial costs. Struck even as he spoke by an intestinal attack that brought sweat, chills, and dizziness, he clung to the rostrum and went on:
“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” The cost of one heavy bomber equaled that of two fully equipped hospitals. A single fighter plane cost a half-million bushels of wheat. “This is not a way of life at all”—“it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Late in August 1953 Moscow announced that it had tested an H-bomb. Before the United Nations in December the President proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union contribute part of their nuclear stockpiles to an international atomic energy agency. To this “Atoms for Peace” proposal the 3,500 delegates responded with a prolonged ovation, but the Russians, fearing it would enable the Americans to get ahead of them, answered with long stalling tactics. On March 1, 1954, the United States exploded a nuclear device on Namu Island in the Bikini atoll. The stupendous fireball lighted the skies for a hundred miles around; the wave of radiation sickened Marshallese on the islands and Japanese on an unlucky fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon. By now the H-bomb was becoming central to Western strategy; Britain and France would have the bomb before the decade was over.
The oratory continued while the atomic arsenals expanded. At a Geneva summit in the summer of 1955 the Soviets urged that the manufacture and use of atomic weapons be prohibited and that the armed forces of China, Russia, and the United States be limited to a million and a half men each. Eisenhower proposed that each nation give the other a “complete blueprint” of its military establishments and that each permit the other free photographic reconnaissance over its lands. The Russians rejected this “Open Skies” proposal as a bald espionage plot. A year later Adlai Stevenson, once again nominated by the Democrats, suggested suspension of nuclear tests; a year after that, in August 1957, the reelected President asked for a two-year suspension.
Eisenhower’s initiatives were not working, nor were Moscow’s. Fear continued to dominate diplomacy. And so did politics: Nixon had called Stevenson’s proposal for a halt to nuclear tests “not only naïve but dangerous to our national security.”
But the President could still display his greatest skill—not going to war. During the early 1950s both the Soviets and the Western powers became increasingly involved in the Middle East, largely because each side feared penetration of the area by the other. In part to neutralize a Soviet arms sale to Egypt, Dulles—at a time when the President was still recovering from a serious heart attack—first offered to help Egypt finance the building of the Aswan Dam, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s top economic priority, and then withdrew the offer. Both steps were taken in light of American strategic needs rather than the Egyptian people’s needs. After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel, each for its own reasons, plotted—the term is not too strong—to retake the Suez. The Israelis drove into the Sinai while British and French forces attacked Egypt. A fully recovered and furious Eisenhower threw every ounce of his influence for a solid week into bringing the invasion to a halt. The President not only did not go to war—he stopped a war.
During this time came another and sterner test of Dulles declamation versus Eisenhower deescalation. Although “liberation of captive peoples” had been quietly dropped as an operational practicality during Eisenhower’s first year in office, Administration propagandists kept alive hopes and expectations at home and abroad. In October 1956, after Poland was swept by rioting, a new leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, warned Moscow defiantly that the Polish people would defend themselves against any effort to push them “off the road of democratization.” Inspired by the Poles, Hungarians took to the streets against their Soviet-dominated government. Massive Soviet intervention followed against Hungarian “freedom fighters” hurling homemade Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks. Eisenhower’s main concern was to give Moscow no reason to think that the United Slates would support the freedom fighters; he feared that Moscow might even start a third world war to maintain its hold on Eastern Europe.
“Liberation was a sham,” wrote Stephen Ambrose. “Eisenhower had always known it. The Hungarians had yet to learn it.”
Many on the Republican right shared such bitterness. Not least of these was Joe McCarthy, but in 1956 the Wisconsin senator could no longer threaten the President. The Army hearings had turned into a disaster for McCarthy, who revealed himself to the public as an inquisitorial bully. Near the end, after McCarthy had gratuitously pounced on a young, vulnerable lawyer, Welch said that he had not dreamed the senator could be so reckless and cruel “as to do an injury to that lad.” When McCarthy, glowering and storming, resumed the attack, Welch told him to stop. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” The audience burst into applause. McCarthy was bewildered. Grim, sweating, he kept asking, “What did I do? What did I do?” Six months later the Senate formally “condemned” him for abusive conduct toward his fellow senators. In three years he was dead of alcoholism.
McCarthy left human wreckage behind him—men humiliated and browbeaten, their reputations tarnished. Among the diminished was Dwight Eisenhower. He had dealt with McCarthy in his own way, by indirection, by persuading others to attack him, by pronouncements that conspicuously failed to mention the senator by name, by blowing off steam to intimates, by various other “hidden hand” manipulations. He had damaged his foe, but he had never struck at his jugular. “Eisenhower’s only significant contribution to McCarthy’s downfall,” according to a sympathetic biographer, “was the purely negative act of denying him access to executive records and personnel. Eisenhower’s cautious, hesitant approach—or nonapproach—to the McCarthy issue did the President’s reputation no good, and much harm.”
McCarthy also left a legacy of unreasoning fear. Part of that legacy materialized weeks after the Army hearings ended, when Congress passed the Communist Control Act, in effect outlawing the Communist party, which was already moribund. The vote was overwhelming in each house. The author of the bill was Hubert H. Humphrey, Minnesota Democrat.
It was the communists in Russia, not in America, who posed the true challenge, and the challenge was not purely military. In October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik—“traveling companion”—the world’s first man-made satellite. Sputnik II followed, carrying a dog and instruments. The feat was a “distinct surprise,” Eisenhower admitted. The popular reaction at home astonished him even more. Americans were chagrined, astounded. The Russians were supposed to be far behind on such matters, to be backward in general. Americans indulged in an orgy of self-examination and scapegoating. Seizing on education as the source of the trouble, the authorities instituted crash programs in science and languages.
American scientists were already racing to loft their own Sputnik. After vast publicity a Vanguard rocket lifted off before television cameras. It rose for two seconds, attained an altitude of four feet, caught fire, crumpled down, and blew up. The world jeered. It was a hard time for Eisenhower. A committee headed by H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., had just given him a secret and frightening report that American military defenses were inadequate against the Russians, that Moscow had a huge nuclear arsenal, that its intercontinental ballistic missile would soon be operational, that the Soviet GNP was growing faster than the American, and more. The Gaither committee of experts was so frightened that three members urged an immediate preventive war. For the first time in its history, Eisenhower told Dulles, the United States was “scared.”
Still, the President would not overreact. He knew—though he could not say so without compromising the source of his information—that the United States had great strategic superiority. But for how long? The Soviet challenge stirred him to one last effort, in the closing years of his Administration, toward détente with Moscow. And he now found himself dealing with a man in the Kremlin with whom it seemed possible to try such a venture. This was Nikita Khrushchev, who had emerged as the Soviet leader during the post-Stalin years.
Western leaders found Khrushchev almost a welcome relief from the grim gray men who had succeeded Stalin—and a striking contrast to the silent, implacable, paranoid Stalin. Short, broad, bald, no matter how well dressed he looked to Americans like an unmade bed. His earthiness, suspiciousness, rough speech revealed the “worker and peasant” origins of which he was proud; his shrewdness in Kremlin infighting, sense of timing, grasp of when to speak out with biting candor and when to be silent and patient reflected his long immersion in party affairs and foreign policy. At a showdown Plenum of the Central Committee, Khrushchev and his cohorts chastised Foreign Minister Molotov to his face for Stalinist, even “imperialist,” interference in Tito’s Yugoslavia, patronizing and arrogant intrusion into Polish affairs, blundering in approaches to Mao Tse-tung. There had probably never been another communist gathering, according to David Dallin, “at which so much unvarnished truth was spoken about Soviet behavior abroad.” But the outcome had been carefully prepared: a solid vote against Molotov, followed by his “admission” of errors and his inevitable downfall.
Six months later, in February 1956, Khrushchev astounded the Twentieth Party Congress with a blistering attack on Stalinism—on its old assumptions that capitalist wars and violent revolutions were inevitable, that “peaceful coexistence” among nations with differing social systems was impossible. Amid perhaps uneasy cheers from the delegates, he castigated Stalin for his personality cult and dictatorial ways, for underestimating the American resolve to defend Korea, for his “lack of faith in the Chinese comrades,” for his “shameful role” in Yugoslavia, and—jumping back more than fifteen years—for relying on his pact with Hitler and not preparing for the Nazi attack. While Khrushchev and his allies made clear that the United Slates was still the great adversary, the speech signaled major departures in Soviet policy: a shift from bipolar confrontation to more conventional rules of multilateral diplomacy and pluralistic accommodation; an acceptance of existing territorial arrangements in Europe; political rapprochement toward uncommitted neutrals and toward nationalist, even bourgeois, regimes; widening of the “socialist camp” to embrace independent communist states like China. And it was now clear that Khrushchev was cock of the walk.
Accepting an invitation from Eisenhower, the Soviet dictator in September 1959 treated the United States with a visit. Khrushchev made the most of his twelve days, visiting the Eisenhowers in Washington and Camp David, appearing at the United Nations, seeing the sights in Hollywood and the Iowa heartland and industrial plants, all the while wisecracking, praising, arguing, criticizing, and complaining. His loudest complaint was that he and his party had not been allowed to visit Disneyland.
“Why not?” the dictator had asked as he reported to a Hollywood luncheon. “Is it by any chance because you now have rocket-launching pads there?” It was for his own safety, he had been told. “What is it? Has cholera or plague broken out there that I might catch?” His audience guffawed. “Or has Disneyland been seized by bandits who might destroy me?”
Khrushchev’s visit survived such contretemps, however, and culminated in what came to be known as the “Spirit of Camp David.” Though Khrushchev disappointed the President by appearing not at all impressed by the abundant American homes, highways, and cars that the President had arranged for him to see by helicopter—too crowded, expensive, and wasteful, the dictator said—he pleased his host by appearing more conciliatory about Berlin and agreeing tentatively to a summit meeting in Paris in August i960.
A summit in Paris in the last year of his administration—the President now looked forward to this as the culmination of his efforts for peace. Could he will the means to this great end? As a man of peace he devoutly wished for détente with the Russians; as an old soldier he had to know what the Russians were up to, both as a military precaution and also as a means of keeping hard-liners and Pentagon spendthrifts at bay by assuring them that the Russians were not ready to go to war.
A remarkable new intelligence machine was serving this purpose—the U-2, capable of flying so high above the Soviet Union as to escape missile fire, but low enough to photograph military installations and preparations. It was this plane that assured Eisenhower of the Soviets’ relative strategic weakness. Faced both by eager CIA demands for frequent flights and by warnings as to the potential Soviet reaction, the President monitored and limited the U-2 missions over Soviet territory. As the summit conference neared he cut the flights more sharply to avoid provoking Moscow. Finally he allowed one last foray by May 1. For fourteen days Russia was covered by clouds. On May 1 the weather cleared, and Francis Gary Powers took off from his U-2 base in Turkey for Bodö, Norway.
He never made it. The President was informed next day that the plane was missing and must be down inside Russia. Since the craft was equipped for self-destruct of both plane and pilot, Powers was surely dead. Eisenhower did nothing, on the assumption that Moscow would do nothing, at least publicly, in order not to jeopardize the summit. Eisenhower approved a statement that a weather plane had been lost. Next day the Kremlin published a photograph of a wrecked plane, calling it the spy plane—but it was not a U-2. Why? Khrushchev was luring the White House into a trap. The longer Eisenhower stuck to his story about a “weather plane,” the more discredited he would be when the truth came out.
Then Khrushchev sprang his trap. He had “parts of the plane” and also “the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking.” Hardly able to believe the news, the President now faced a terrible dilemma. He could admit that the Administration had lied but argue that Soviet secrecy had made overflights necessary. This might wreck the summit. Or he could say that the fliked thought had been unauthorized. But as an old army man he could not confess that his outfit was out of his control; as President he could not legitimize charges that he had lost command of his Administration. Soon the Administration was caught in such a tangle of falsehoods, with the Kremlin joyfully exploiting every misstatement, as to leave Washington embarrassed, angry, and fearful of the implications for the summit.
“This was a sad and perplexed capital tonight,” James Reston reported in The New York Times, “caught in a swirl of charges of clumsy administration, bad judgment and bad faith.” The President was so upset that he talked briefly of resigning. He could hardly doubt the price to be paid: Khrushchev would not sit down at the summit with a President whose spy had invaded the Russian homeland—and on May Day, the worldwide communist holiday.
In retrospect, the incident was a microcosm of the ills—the fears, suspicions, misperceptions, and miscalculations—that had afflicted Soviet-American relationships for years. Just as the Kremlin had underestimated Washington’s reaction to the invasion of South Korea, so Moscow underrated American fears of Soviet aggression—fears that in turn led to provocative spying. And typically men in the Kremlin viewed the whole affair not as a series of blunders but as a plot by the Pentagon or the CIA—perhaps by the President himself—to produce an incident that would abort the summit. The Americans repeated all their old errors: putting undue faith in intelligence technology, keeping “secret” the U-2 flights long after Moscow and other capitals—indeed, all but the American people—knew of them; allowing intelligence agencies too much influence over policy; evoking the worst of Soviet fears about intrusion onto their turf. Eisenhower and Khrushchev each underestimated the vulnerability of the other to hard-liners; hence each brought out the worst in the other.
It was one of the saddest moments in postwar history, for each of the leaders, in his better half, genuinely wished for détente. Eisenhower came off the worse. He went on to Paris, but the “summit was over before it started, all the hopes for détente and disarmament gone with it,” in Ambrose’s bleak words. He had only a few months left to see his Vice President, Nixon, defeated, a brash young Democrat elected, and no further progress toward détente. At least he could advise the nation. In his Farewell Address he pointed to the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” and warned Americans that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The price of such acquisition could be the loss of freedom.
His great solace was that he had “kept the peace.” People, he said later, asked how it had happened. “By God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that!” But he told a friend not long before his death in March 1969 that he had longed to bring world peace but “I was able only to contribute to a stalemate.” Could anyone else have done better? Ike had the wry satisfaction of living through two Democratic presidencies for which the U-2 affair was a dress rehearsal—a minor flap compared to the real crises and stalemates of Cuba and Vietnam.