Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (17 page)

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LTHOUGH THE EARLY MONTHS
of 1946 marked a turning point in official American attitudes toward the Soviet Union, they did not commit the United States to a completely coherent, overtly anti-Soviet policy. Truman made this privately clear, writing his mother and sister after the iron curtain oration, "I am not yet ready to endorse Mr. Churchill's speech."
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Until early 1947 he was firmer than he had been earlier, but he remained a little tentative, in part because he was still learning on the job, and he resisted making any dramatic changes in policy that would greatly increase tensions with the Soviet Union.

Some of this hesitation came from considerations of public opinion at home. This was in fact difficult to judge throughout most of 1946, but the majority of Americans were probably less concerned about Soviet behavior at that time than were top Truman officials. There were signs, to be sure, that some people yearned for a get-tough policy if that would bring order to international relations. Leading radio commentators, including H. V. Kaltenborn and Edward R. Murrow, seemed sympathetic to such

an approach, especially with regard to western Europe—which virtually all shades of American opinion considered the most strategically vital area of the world.
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The Luce publications,
Life
and
Time
, offered highly slanted accounts of perfidious Communist activities, especially in Asia. Luce refused to print dispatches that were unflattering to Chiang Kaishek, leading a top reporter, Theodore White, to resign in disgust.
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Other, less partisan writers also produced work in 1946 that may have hardened opinion among well-read Americans. Brooks Atkinson, a leading cultural critic, and John Fischer, a well-known magazine editor, traveled separately to the Soviet Union in 1946 and wrote articles and books describing their findings. Fischer had long been a student of Russia; neither he nor Atkinson was known to be anti-Soviet. Yet both found the Soviet Union to be a completely closed society. Fischer's book,
Why They Behave Like Russians
(1946), was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
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Many liberals, however, resisted a tougher policy. Three liberal senators, Claude Pepper of Florida, Glen Taylor of Idaho, and Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, issued a joint statement following the iron curtain speech: "Mr. Churchill's proposal would cut the throat of the Big Three, without which the war could not have been won and without which the peace cannot be saved." Some liberals truly feared an anti-Soviet policy would bring war. "If somebody doesn't call a halt," the reporter Thomas Stokes noted privately, "the interests in this country who seem hell-bent on a war with Russia—and soon—will get their way. Lots of people seem to have gone completely mad."
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Many of these liberals had little faith in the good intentions of the Soviet leadership. They were strongly anti-Communist, and they opposed any spread of Soviet influence in western Europe. But they considered it foolish to throw money to Chiang, and they seemed prepared to accept as irreversible the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe. One such writer was the theologian and intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr, who was by far the most highly regarded of anti-Communist liberals during the late 1940s. In his many writings at the time Niebuhr roused a generation of younger liberals—the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was the best known of these—to greater awareness of the Soviet threat. But Niebuhr was uncomfortable with what he considered to be excessively moralistic responses from Washington. In September 1946 he wrote in the
Nation
that the United States should end its "futile efforts to change what cannot be changed in Eastern Europe, regarded by Russia as its strategic security belt."

Western efforts to change conditions in Poland, or in Bulgaria, for instance, will prove futile in any event, partly because the Russians are there and we aren't, and partly because such slogans as "free elections" and "free enterprise" are irrelevant in that part of the world. Our copybook versions of democracy are frequently as obtuse as Russian dogmatism. If we left Russia alone in the part of the world it has staked out, we might actually help, rather than hinder, the indigenous forces which resist its heavy hand.
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Intellectuals like Niebuhr did not much affect policy-makers in 1946; the caution of Congress, however, could not be ignored. This caution reflected the continuing aversion of constituents to jump from the fires of World War II into yet another conflagration, as well as the determination of Congress to reduce defense spending. Congress made sharp cuts in military expenditures of all kinds in 1945 and 1946. The navy had to sell 4,000 ships, mothball 2,000 more, and shut down eighty-four shipyards. Near mutinies in the army in early 1946—some veterans even took out paid ads demanding release—hastened the demobilization of soldiers. In April 1946 Congress extended the draft through March 1947 but called for voluntary recruitment between April 1947 and August 1948. Then and later it rejected efforts by Truman to introduce universal military training. Some opponents thought such a system "un-American." For all these reasons defense spending declined from $81.6 billion in fiscal 1945 (ending June 30 of that year) to $44.7 billion in 1946 to $13.1 billion in 1947, remaining at that low level through the fiscal year ending June 1950. Aided by such reductions, the federal government actually ran small surpluses between 1947 and 1949.

All these actions drained the military establishment, setting off round after round of fierce and unedifying interservice fighting for scarce resources. By mid-1947 the armed forces of the United States totaled only 1.5 million, most of whom were needed to man bases at home or to stand occupation duty in Europe and Japan. Although America retained the world's largest navy and air force, it lacked the ground forces, as one historian has observed, "to intervene in anything greater than a minor conflict, such as the territorial dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia over Venezia Giulia."
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Even the nation's atomic monopoly was of questionable military value in these years. Until mid-1950 the United States relied heavily on World War II-vintage B-29S, all of which were based in Louisiana, California, or Texas, too far to fly safely to the Soviet Union. Military experts privately estimated that in a war it could take two weeks to drop an atomic bomb on the USSR, by which time the large Russian armies could have swept to Paris. Not until after the start of the Korean War in June 1950 did the United States have newer, longer-range B-36 bombers completely equipped for action over the USSR.
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America's atomic shield was indeed thin in those years. By mid-1946 the United States had around seven atomic bombs of the Nagasaki type; by mid-1947 it had around thirteen. These were not easy to use. They had to be transported in parts; a team of seventy-seven specialists had to work for a week on the final assembly of an A-bomb before it was ready for use. Only specially designed planes could carry the bombs, which were hardly precise: a test A-bomb at Bikini in the Pacific in 1946 missed its target by two miles. Uranium, necessary for fission bombs of the day, was known to be scarce, and future production was expected to be slow. Top-ranking advocates of strategic bombing anticipated that the weapons of World War II, mainly TNT and incendiaries, would have to be relied on heavily in a forthcoming war.
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Supporters of a get-tough policy against the USSR also found mixed support at best from major interest groups. The armed services, of course, battled for higher appropriations. And some top officials, such as Forrestal, held very broad views of what was necessary for long-range national security, including control of the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a system of outlying bases, and access to the resources and markets of Eurasia.
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Still, the Pentagon turned out to be relatively weak on Capitol Hill throughout the late 1940s. This was in part because the services fought so fiercely among themselves. It was also because the military-industrial complex, a villain of much revisionist history, lacked cohesion following World War II. Many leading businessmen had been intent on reconversion to lucrative civilian production as early as 1943, and others competed vigorously for the rapidly growing consumer home market after the war. American exports in these years actually fell below the norm (as a percentage of GNP) of the pre-Depression years, never exceeding 6.5 percent between 1945 and 1950. With some exceptions business leaders at the time imagined the country to have a vast, growing, and largely self-sufficient domestic market. Confident of profits at home, they did not lobby very hard to push American economic influence abroad in the postwar years.
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It was in this context of domestic irresolution and military retrenchment that Truman faced his last major foreign policy decision of 1946: what to do about Henry Wallace, his dovish Secretary of Commerce. Wallace was one of the most remarkable figures in the history of twentieth-century American politics. The son of Harding's and Coolidge's Secretary of Agriculture, he grew up an Iowa Republican and, as a young man in the 1920s, became a well-known farm editor. In 1928, however, he supported Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, and in 1932 he backed Roosevelt against Hoover. A progressive as well as a renowned scientist in the field of plant genetics, he became FDR's Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to 1940, and then Vice-President in Roosevelt's third term. There he remained a visible New Deal spokesman and administrator. But many main-line Democratic politicians found him increasingly insufferable. He was shy, dreamy, tousle-haired, sloppy in dress, and largely incapable of small talk. Sometimes he fell asleep in conferences. He was above all an idealist and a deeply religious man who was drawn to the ritual of high Episcopalianism, the mysticism of a White Russian guru, and the moral concerns of the social gospel.
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If he had a model, it was the prophet Isaiah.

By 1944 Wallace had many followers among Democratic liberals, who admired his concern for the downtrodden of the world. In 1942 he had proclaimed, "The century on which we are entering . . . is the century of the common man." He added, "The people's revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his angels can not prevail against it. They can not prevail, for on the side of the people is the Lord." But moderates and conservatives had had enough of idealistic perorations such as this, and they opposed his renomination as Vice-President in 1944. When Roosevelt reluctantly gave way, accepting Truman instead, he compensated Wallace by naming him Commerce Secretary early in 1945. There Wallace remained, working for the man who had replaced him as Vice-President, into the late summer of 1946.

Well before then Wallace had grown deeply interested in foreign affairs, and he brooded over the collision course that the wartime allies were on, especially the accelerating arms race. In July 1946 he wrote a long letter to Truman in which he urged more conciliatory policies toward the Soviet Union. His appeal was passionate:

How do American actions since V-J Day appear to other nations? I mean by actions concrete things like $13 billion for the War and Navy Departments, the Bikini tests of the atomic bomb and continued production of bombs, the plan to arm Latin America with our weapons, production of B-29S and planned production of B-36S, and the effort to secure air bases spread over half the globe from which the other half of the globe can be bombed. I cannot but feel that these actions must make it look to the rest of the world as if we were paying only lip service to peace at the conference table.

Wallace went on to stress the understandable desire of the Soviet Union, like Russia before 1917, to seek warm-water ports and security on its borders. The United States should offer "reasonable . . . guarantees of security" to the Soviets and "allay any reasonable Russian grounds for fear, suspicion, and distrust. We must recognize that the world has changed and that today there can be no 'One World' unless the United States and Russia can find some way of living together."
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Truman might have listened carefully, bringing Wallace into the loop of foreign policy-making. Or he might have told him to mind his own business. Neither option, however, was palatable to him. Instead, he kept Wallace in the Cabinet and ignored his unwelcome advice. Wallace then acted again, warning the President that he was about to make a major speech before a Soviet-American friendship rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on September 12. In the speech he offered some criticisms of the Soviet Union and insisted that the United States should not concede political control of western Europe to the Communists. But he otherwise elaborated on his letter in July, adopting a spheres-of-interest approach that accepted Soviet political (not economic) domination of eastern Europe. "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. "
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At Madison Square Garden Wallace rather maliciously mentioned that the President had read his speech in advance and had said it represented the policy of his administration.
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This revelation launched a barrage of editorials that blasted Truman for encouraging such dovish ideas. Truman had earlier told a press conference that he "approved the whole speech," but he now backed away, and he grew increasingly unsettled. By September 19 he was furious, noting privately that Wallace was "fuzzy," a "pacifist 100%," and a "dreamer." "All the 'Artists' with a Capital A, the parlor pinks and the soprano voiced men are banded together. . . . I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin." At this point Byrnes, trying to stand firm in negotiations with the Soviets in Paris, insisted angrily that Truman decide between Wallace and himself. European allies, Byrnes pointed out, had parliamentary systems in which governments were supposed to speak with one voice.
³⁹

Truman then demanded Wallace's resignation and replaced him with Harriman. But the episode damaged him and his administration. To Byrnes and others, including America's allies, he had seemed vacillating. To Wallace and many in the press he seemed dishonest in trying to claim (inaccurately) that he had not looked at the speech in advance. One characteristically snide judgment on his performance purported to answer a question as to why Truman had been late to a press conference that day: "He got up this morning a little stiff in the joints and he is having difficulty putting his foot in his mouth."
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