The Cold War (2 page)

JAMES CHACE

On May 7, 1945, at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters at Rheims in France, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, formally ending almost six years of war in Europe. It took less than a year, three seasons only, for the Grand Alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union to fall apart, and with it, lasting hopes of a peaceful international order. In that time the Soviets had swallowed much of Eastern Europe, and the West was beginning to accept, however reluctantly, the inevitability of a divided continent. The Soviets were also occupying northern Iran and were threatening to extend their influence, if not their outright domination, to the Persian Gulf. But as the year 1946 began, no country felt the menace of Soviet expansionist pressure more than Turkey. The Russians were asking— demanding, rather—to be allowed to establish naval and army bases in the Bosporus and Dardanelles. Would control of the eastern end of the Mediterranean be next? Soviet troops began to mass on the borders with Turkey.

As early as January 5, 1946, the new American president, Harry S. Truman, worried out loud to his secretary of state, James Byrnes, that the Soviets intended to invade Turkey. “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language,” Truman said, “another war is in the making.” Then he added (and remember, this was a time when the American armed forces were demobilizing thousands of men each day), “Only one language do they understand—‘How many divisions have you?’” A month later, the Soviet ruler, Joseph Stalin, gave a speech announcing a new five-year plan. He went on to attack capitalism and to remark threateningly that his nation should be prepared for “all kinds of eventualities.”
Back in Washington, Justice William O. Douglas remarked to the secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, that Stalin's speech sounded like “the declaration of World War III.”

The gloves were off. The former British prime minister, Winston Churchill, spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5; Truman introduced him. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill said, “an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.” His words were not a call for war—not yet—but a counsel of preparedness. The time had come to check Soviet expansionism. “From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.” Stalin could not let the Fulton speech go without a public comment: “Mr. Churchill is now in the position of a firebrand of war.”

Truman's January 5 outburst, Stalin's February broadside, or Chur-chill's Missouri warning: One might pick any number of symbolic days when the ideological and military struggle that was to consume the world for the next forty-five years began. James Chace, the biographer of Dean Acheson, argues that the pride of date belongs to August 19, 1946. That was the day when the Truman administration publicly rejected Stalin's call for joint Soviet-Turkish defense of the Straits—and backed up its words by dispatching a naval task force to Istanbul. For the first time (and not for the last), the United States had proclaimed to the Soviets that, to protect its interests, it was not afraid to resort to arms.

JAMES CHACE, who died in the fall of 2004, was a distinguished historian, foreign policy analyst, editor, and teacher. He is best known for his biography,
Dean Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World,
as well as several books on international affairs, including
Solvency, America Invulnerable
(with Caleb Carr),
The Consequences of the Peace,
and a memoir,
What We Had
. His final book was
1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—the Election That Changed the Country
. The former managing editor of
Foreign Affairs
and editor in chief of
World Policy Journal,
Chace was the Henry Luce Professor in Freedom of Inquiry and Expression at Bard College.

I
N LATE AUGUST 1946
the world's largest aircraft carrier, the
Franklin D
.
Roosevelt
, accompanied by two destroyers, weighed anchor for Gibraltar and the eastern Mediterranean. The ships were to rendezvous off Lisbon with three more American destroyers and two cruisers dispatched from British waters. Their final destination: Istanbul. There they would join the U.S.S.
Missouri,
the battleship on which the Japanese surrender had taken place a year earlier. The
Missouri
had already arrived in the Straits of the Dardanelles on April 5.

And for what purpose was this formidable array of sea power intended? None other than to confront the Russian navy at the mouth of the Black Sea if required. At the very least, this flexing of military muscle was aimed at making the Soviets think twice about putting any more pressure on Turkey.

Twelve months after the end of World War II, the tensions between Moscow and Washington had reached a breaking point. In Iran, the Soviets, who had occupied the northern part of the country during World War II, had refused to withdraw their forces six months after the end of the war (the length of time they had agreed to in 1943). They bowed to U.S. pressure only in the spring of 1946. In Greece, Stalin was supporting the Greek Communist bands who were fast bringing the country to the brink of civil war. With Soviet-controlled governments in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, and Communist parties active throughout Europe, it seemed to Western leaders that Soviet expansion had to be countered.

As early as December 1945, Soviet troops were massing on the Russo-Turkish border. Meanwhile, at least two hundred Soviet tanks crossed the Iranian border, and about a third of these mobilized along the frontier between Iran and Turkey. By the summer of 1946, the United States decided to risk the end of the wartime alliance in a naval show of force—one that signaled a virtual end to American efforts
to accommodate the demands of the Soviet Union. Relations between the two powers would never be the same again.

Even during the halcyon days of the wartime alliance, Stalin was insisting on a Russian military presence in the Dardanelles and Bosporus (together known as the Straits), the vital gateway in and out of the Black Sea for the Russian fleet headquartered at Sebastopol. At the Yalta summit in February 1945, Stalin declared that the Montreux Convention—which the great powers had signed in the 1930s, giving Turkey the right to defend the Straits—must be revised. Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed. But then Stalin spoke in more threatening tones, asserting that he found it “impossible to accept a situation in which Turkey had a hand on Russia's throat.”

Stalin's demands escalated after the war in Europe, and in June 1945 he insisted that the Kars and Ardahan districts of eastern Turkey, ceded by Moscow to Turkey in 1921, would have to be returned to the Soviet Union. In addition, he demanded that the Turks consent to Soviet bases in the Straits.

A month later, meeting with Truman and Churchill at Potsdam outside the ruined city of Berlin, Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, declared that the bases were not enough: Turkey and Russia should become joint custodians of the Straits. Neither Truman nor Churchill thought much of that idea.

Stalin's desire to acquire the lost territories in eastern Turkey may well have been inspired by Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police and, like Stalin, a Georgian. According to Khrushchev's memoirs, at one of those “interminable” suppers with Stalin, Beria “started harping on how certain territories, now part of Turkey, used to belong to Georgia.” He then convinced Stalin that “now was the time to get those territories back. He argued that Turkey was weakened by World War II and wouldn't be able to resist.”

As Soviet demands intensified, Washington took a hard line. By the time Secretary of State James F. Byrnes returned from the Moscow Conference in December 1945, Truman was complaining to him: “There isn't a doubt in my mind that Russia intends an invasion of Turkey and seizure of the Black Sea Straits to the Mediterranean. Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they under-stand—‘How many divisions have you?’”

The Turks also had no intention of satisfying Soviet demands. In the weeks after Potsdam, the Turkish foreign office believed a Soviet invasion was likely, but, they said, “We would rather die on Turkish soil than be deported to
Siberia.” The American ambassador in Ankara was convinced that Moscow wanted to convert Turkey into a Soviet satellite, and, from Moscow, George F. Kennan warned that no concessions would satisfy the Soviet Union, whose aim may have been to establish, as he put it, a “friendly” regime in Turkey.

Kennan, who had been trained in Russian from the 1920s, was serving in the Soviet capital as deputy to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman. He had long chafed at being on the sidelines as Washington made decisions affecting Amer-ica's relations with the Soviet Union. At one point he was so despondent about being marginalized that he seriously considered resigning from the foreign service altogether.

But in February 1946, Washington asked for his views of Soviet behavior, and he seized the occasion to send an eight-thousand-word message to the State Department—the so-called Long Telegram—describing the “Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs” that would make it impossible for the Soviet Union to coexist with the West. “Here was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do,” he wrote later. “They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it.”

The Soviet leaders, he believed, could compensate for the “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” only by going permanently on the attack “in [a] patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of [a] rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.”

As he had hoped, his warnings were heeded back home, and now American policy makers closely scrutinized his analyses of Soviet intentions.

By late March 1946, Kennan was convinced that Stalin was insatiable: “Nothing short of complete disarmament, delivery of our air and naval forces to Russia and resigning of powers of government to American communists” would alleviate Stalin's distrust, and even then he would probably “smell a trap and would continue to harbor the most baleful misgivings.”

As the crisis deepened, former Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, who had been associated with a more friendly policy toward the United States in the 1930s, gave a revealing interview on June 18, 1946, to the CBS correspondent in Moscow, Richard C. Hottelet. The old Bolshevik explained that there “has now been [a] return in [the] U.S.S.R. to [the] outmoded concept of geographical security.” When Hottelet asked if Soviet policy would be mitigated if the West were to give in to Soviet territorial demands, Litvinov said that “it would lead to [the] West being faced after [a] period of time with new series of demands.”

On August 7, 1946, Moscow sent a detailed memo to the Turkish government and copied Washington. Moscow now demanded a joint Turkish-Soviet defense system in the Straits, which would necessarily require Soviet bases.

In the absence of Secretary Byrnes, who was in Paris, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson took charge. For Acheson, the Soviet message marked a turning point. It meant that Moscow was bent on expansion whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself. Acheson's policy up till now had been to press the administration to seek common ground with the Soviets. This approach was no longer acceptable. While the Soviets may not have been planning a direct military assault on Turkey, their demand for bases in the Dardanelles implied eventual projection of Soviet power into the eastern Mediterranean. Even if it meant war, Acheson was prepared to recommend a hard line to Truman, and the president was ready to follow it.

At fifty-three, Acheson was nearing the peak of his power and performance. Before the war he was an acerbic and brilliant young lawyer, once described by a partner as “the shiniest fish in the sea,” and service in Franklin Roosevelt's State Department had smoothed some of his sharper edges. Now with Truman as president, he was second in command under Secretary of State Byrnes. But for much of Byrnes's tenure, Acheson was acting secretary of state in Washington, as Byrnes was out of the country 350 of the 562 days he was in office, negotiating with the British, the French, and the Russians.

Tall and imposing, with his guardsman's mustache and his seemingly imperious manner, Acheson was also without guile or self-importance. Although he appeared to some the personification of a British diplomat, his close friend and colleague Sir Oliver Franks, the British ambassador to Washington, described him more accurately as “not at all an English or British type. He is a pure American type of a rather rare species. He is imbued with a love of cabinet making and gardening, never forgetting and ever going back to the roots from which it all springs.” Acheson was, said Franks, “profoundly American in this regard” and, above all, “a blade of steel.”

Acheson was a realist, not an ideologue. Despite his distaste for the Soviet regime, he believed that the United States had to deal with the Soviet Union as a great power whose interests might well conflict with those of the United States, but whose cooperation should be sought whenever possible.

During the tough negotiations with Moscow over Soviet withdrawal from Iran earlier that year, and in his efforts to persuade Stalin to internationalize
atomic energy, Acheson had persisted in trying to find ways to satisfy the Soviet Union's security concerns. But he was also becoming convinced that the United States would have to assume a more prominent moral, military, and economic role in confronting any Soviet probe.

The problems bedeviling American foreign policy were not like headaches, he said that June—when you “take a powder and they are gone.” Instead, “They are like the pain of earning a living. They will stay with us until death.”