Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (90 page)

The agonies of Stalin’s Russia, where about 500,000 people were judicially murdered (or just murdered) by the state in the post-war period up to March 1953, formed a gruesome contrast to the America against which it was pitted. While, in the immediate post-war, Stalin was piling fresh burdens on his frightened subjects, the Americans, contrary to predictions of government economists, who had prophesied heavy unemployment in the conversion period, were engaging in the longest and most intense consumer spending spree in the nation’s history. It began in autumn 1946 and accelerated the following year: ‘The great American boom is on’, wrote
Fortune.
‘There is no measuring it. The old yardsticks will not do…. There is a powerful consuming demand for everything that one can eat, wear, enjoy, read, repair, paint, drink, see, ride, taste and rest in.’
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It was the start of the longest cycle of capitalist expansion in history, spreading to Europe (as the Marshall Plan took effect) in the 1950s and to Japan and the Pacific in the 1960s; lasting, with the occasional dips, to the mid-1970s. For Americans, the taste of uninhibited prosperity was especially poignant, bringing back memories of the 1920s lost Arcadia.

There were other echoes of the Twenties. The xenophobic witch-hunting of the Woodrow Wilson administration was not repeated. Yet there was an air of patriotic tension, as Americans braced themselves to the magnitude of the global responsibility they were undertaking. Here again the contrast with Russia is marked and instructive. America was an astonishingly open society and in some ways a vulnerable one. It had possessed few defences against the systematic penetration of its organs which Stalinism practised on a huge scale in the 1930s. Agents of foreign governments had to register under the McCormack Act of 1938. Members of organizations advocating the overthrow of the US government by force or violence were open to prosecution, under both the Hatch Act of 1939 and the Smith Act of 1940. Such legislation was useless to prevent active Communists and fellow-travellers (including Soviet agents) from joining the government, which they did in large numbers during the New Deal and still more during the war. As Kennan put it,

The penetration of the American governmental services by members or agents (conscious or otherwise) of the American Communist Party in the late 1930s was not a figment of the imagination … it really existed; and it assumed proportions which, while never overwhelming, were also not trivial.

He says that those who served in Moscow or in the Russian division of the State Department were ‘very much aware’ of the danger. The Roosevelt administration was slow in reacting: ‘warnings which should have been heeded fell too often on deaf or incredulous ears.’
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Truman was more active. In November 1946 he appointed a Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty, and in the following March he acted on its recommendations with Executive Order 9835, which authorized inquiries into political beliefs and associations of all federal employees.
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Once this procedure got going, in 1947, it was reasonably effective. But it was only after this date that Congress and the public became aware of the real magnitude of the wartime errors which (it was supposed) led to the ‘loss’ of Eastern Europe
and, in 1949, of China. Roosevelt’s infatuation with Stalin and his fundamental frivolity were more to blame for the weakness of American wartime policy than any Stalinist moles. But Roosevelt was dead. And the moles were being dug out as the Cold War grew more intense and the follies of the past were scrutinized.

No evidence so far uncovered suggests that Soviet agents brought about any major decision in us policy, except in the Treasury, or delivered any vital classified information, except in the nuclear weapons fields. But these were major exceptions. The Soviet agent Harry Dexter White was the most influential official in the Treasury, the man who created the post-war international monetary system, with the help of Keynes. In April 1944 he was responsible for the American government’s decision to hand over to the Soviet government US Treasury plates to print occupation currency, a decision which ultimately cost the American taxpayer $225 million.
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In 1945 Elizabeth Bentley, a former Communist spy, told the
FBI
of two Soviet networks in the US, one headed by the Treasury economist Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, another by Victor Perlo of the War Production Board: classified information was also transmitted from the Justice Department, the Foreign Economic Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare.
FBI
and Office of Strategic Services (oss) raids also disclosed leakages from the Army and Navy departments, the Office of War Intelligence and the oss itself. Then, from the State Department, there was Alger Hiss, who had sat at Roosevelt’s elbow at Yalta and, more important, had been aide to Edward Stettinius, whom the British regarded as Stalin’s biggest (if unconscious) asset in the Allied camp. In the atomic field Soviet agents included Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, David Greenglass, Harry Gold, J.Peters (alias Alexander Stevens), to whom Whittaker Chambers acted as courier, and Jacob Golos, as well as Klaus Fuchs, who had been cleared by British security.

The extent of the damage these spies caused to Western interests cannot be known until the Soviet archives are finally opened. But the fact that Soviet Russia took only four years to make an A-bomb (1945–9), no longer than the Manhattan Project itself, was a stunning shock to the Truman Administration and its Defence chiefs (though not to some of the scientific community). It was badly received by the American public. It coincided with the
KMT
collapse in China. It came at a period when the problem of Soviet penetration of government had in fact been overcome but when the offenders were still being brought to trial. Not until 25 January 1950 was Alger Hiss found guilty of perjury in concealing his membership of the Communist Party. His was the case which attracted most attention.

A fornight later Senator Joe McCarthy made his notorious speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming that 205 known Communists were working in the State Department. That began the full-scale witch-hunt: in short, the phenomenon occurred after the realities which provoked it had been dealt with. McCarthy was a radical Republican; not a right-winger. He had become interested in espionage in the previous autumn when he had seen a confidential
FBI
report (already two years out of date). Shortly before the Wheeling speech he dined with Father Edmund Walsh, regent of the school of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. This was a Conservative Jesuit college (the Jesuits were not radicalized until the 1960s) which supplied large numbers of graduates to the State Department; it was concerned about the number of ultra-liberals who had entered during the period 1933–45. The Senator smelt an issue and brandished it. He was not a serious politician but an adventurer, who treated politics as a game. As his most perceptive biographer put it: ‘He was no kind of fanatic … as incapable of true rancour, spite and animosity as a eunuch is of marriage …. He faked it all and could not understand anyone who didn’t.’
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Robert Kennedy, the future Attorney-General, who worked for him, denied he was evil: ‘His whole method of operation was complicated because he would get a guilty feeling and get hurt after he had blasted somebody. He wanted so desperately to be liked. He didn’t anticipate the results of what he was doing.’
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McCarrhy would have been of little account had not the Korean War broken out that summer. His period of ascendancy coincided exactly with that bitter and frustrating conflict – one might say that McCarthyism was Stalin’s last gift to the American people. He was rapidly destroyed once it ended. McCarthy took advantage of the Congressional committee-system which empowers investigations. For the legislature to conduct quasi-judicial inquiries is legitimate. It was an old English parliamentary procedure, which proved invaluable in establishing constitutional liberties in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was grievously abused, particularly in the conduct of political and religious witch-hunts. Two aspects were particularly objectionable: the use of inquisitorial procedure, so alien to the Common Law, and the power to punish for contempt anyone who obstructs this procedure. Congress inherited both the virtues and vices of the system, which were inseparable. In the 1930s, the Congressional liberals had hounded the Wall Street community; now it was the turn of the liberals. In the 1960s and later it would be the turn of business; and in the mid-1970s the Nixon Administration. On the whole the advantages outweigh the defects, and therefore the system is kept. Besides, it contains its own self-correcting mechanism,
which worked in this case, albeit slowly: McCarthy was repudiated, censured and, in effect, extinguished by his own colleagues, the Senate. The damage inflicted by McCarthy on individual lives was due to two special factors. The first was the inadequacy of American libel laws, which permitted the press to publish his unsupported allegations with impunity, even when they were unprivileged. It was the press, especially the wire-services, which turned an abuse into a scandal, just as in the 1970s it was to magnify the Watergate case into a witch-hunt.
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Second was the moral cowardice shown by some institutions, notably in Hollywood and Washington, in bowing to the prevailing unreason. Again, this is a recurrent phenomenon, to be repeated in the decade 1965–75, when many universities surrendered to student violence.

Without these two factors ‘McCarthyism’ was nothing. The contrast with Zhdanovism in Russia is instructive. McCarthy had no police. He had no executive authority at all. On the contrary: both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations did all in their power to impede him. Above all, McCarthy was not part of the legal process. He had no court. Indeed, the courts were totally unaffected by McCarthyism. As Kennan pointed out: ‘Whoever could get his case before a court was generally assured of meeting there with a level of justice no smaller than at any other time in recent American history.’
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The courts resisted McCarthyism, unlike their behaviour twenty years later when they became strongly tinged with Watergate hysteria. In the last resort, McCarthy’s weapon was publicity; and in a free society publicity is a two-edged weapon. McCarthy was destroyed by publicity; and the man who orchestrated this destruction from behind the scenes was the new President, Dwight Eisenhower.

Eisenhower rightly perceived that the Korean War and the uncertainty surrounding cease-fire negotiations were the source of the frustration and fear upon which McCarthyism played. In November 1952 he had been elected to end the war. Peace has always been a vote-winning issue in the United States. Yet there is an instructive contrast in Democrat and Republican records. Wilson won in 1916 on a promise to keep America out of the war; next year America was a belligerent. Roosevelt won in 1940 on the same promise and with the same result. Lyndon Johnson won in 1964 on a peace platform (against Republican ‘warmongering’) and promptly turned Vietnam into a major war. Eisenhower in 1952 and Richard Nixon in 1972 are the only two Presidents in this century who have carried out their peace promises.

Yet in Eisenhower’s case his achievement has been underestimated. He regarded Korea as an unnecessary and repeatedly misjudged conflict. He was appalled by the number of occasions on which the
previous administration had contemplated using nuclear weapons against Manchuria and China proper, and even Russia; and by its readiness, in addition, to consider conventional bombing against China on a vast scale.
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He set about breaking the armistice-deadlock and, instead of planning to use nuclear force in secret, he employed nuclear threats in private diplomacy. This tactic worked and within nine months he had a settlement of sorts. He was bitterly criticized at the time, and since, for doing nothing to stem anti-Communist hysteria.
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The truth is he grasped the essential point: that it was the war which made McCarthyism possible, and that once it had been got out of the way, the Senator could soon be reduced to size. He gave the peace-effort priority and only afterwards did he organize McCarthy’s downfall. With considerable cunning and in great secrecy he directed his friends in the Senate to censure McCarthy, while using his press chief, Jim Haggerty, to orchestrate the publicity. The process culminated in December 1954 and is perhaps the best example of the ‘hidden hand’ style of leadership which Eisenhower delighted to employ and which research brought to light many years after his death.
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Eisenhower was the most successful of America’s twentieth-century presidents, and the decade when he ruled (1953–61) the most prosperous in American, and indeed world, history. His presidency was surrounded by mythology, much of which he deliberately contrived himself. He sought to give the impression that he was a mere constitutional monarch, who delegated decisons to his colleagues and indeed to Congress, and who was anxious to spend the maximum amount of time playing golf. His stratagem worked. His right-wing rival for Republican leadership, Senator Robert Taft, sneered, ‘I really think he should have been a golf pro.’
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His first biographer claimed that the ‘unanimous consensus’ of ‘journalists and academics, pundits and prophets, the national community of intellectuals and critics’ had been that Eisenhower’s conduct of the presidency had been ‘unskilful and his definition of it inaccurate …. [he] elected to leave his nation to fly on automatic pilot.’
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He was seen as well-meaning, intellectually limited, ignorant, inarticulate, often weak and always lazy.