The Arc of a Covenant, page 27
These were the political realities that continually tested Truman’s ability to control his own party and the national agenda. That he survived as long as he did and won a full presidential term in the face of them is a remarkable accomplishment. That he was able to carry out a vigorous foreign policy under the circumstances is extraordinary; few presidents have accomplished so much in such difficult circumstances.
Trouble Abroad
Given his troubles at home, Truman might have wished for a calmer international scene. He didn’t get it. From the first day of his presidency as the fires of World War II still raged until he stepped down in the midst of the Korean War, international events would force him, time and time again, to set aside domestic goals and priorities to handle one foreign crisis after another.
The end of the Second World War left much of the world hungry, angry, and insecure. The cities of Japan, China, and most of Europe had been leveled by the most devastating air attacks in the history of warfare. Tens of millions had been killed, tens of millions more driven from their homes, forced into slave labor, or otherwise displaced by the tides of war. States had ceased to function in many places, most currencies were worthless, and trade, agriculture, and industry were prostrate and paralyzed. Food shortages stalked the civilized world. Stalin, it soon became clear, was grimly determined to impose the vicious system of communist rule wherever the Red Army stood. The gulags were stuffed with new prisoners as all those who opposed or might have opposed the Red Terror were hauled off into the living hell of concentration camps far behind what would soon be called the Iron Curtain.
The moral destruction was as bad as the physical. Years of war in both Asia and Europe had broken up families, brutalized millions, and left homeless orphans to fend for themselves in the rubble of great cities. The social capital embodied in churches, schools, and civic institutions had been heavily damaged and in many cases wrecked beyond repair. The veterans and survivors of war were scarred by their experiences. Some of the most glorious monuments humanity had ever produced had been deliberately destroyed. Total war in an age of science and technology resulted in millions of civilian deaths and the systematic destruction of the infrastructure on which the survivors depended. Untold numbers of people had committed atrocities that would scar their consciences forever; millions more had suffered them. Religious and political leadership was often compromised by alliance—however unwilling—with totalitarian power.
The web of world trade, already strained by a decade of Depression, further frayed during the war. Food-growing countries lacked the shipping to export their produce. Food-consuming countries lacked the foreign exchange to buy. Banking and trading systems had fallen apart. Famine threatened much of China and India, to say nothing of Europe and the Middle East. The factories that survived the war could not import the necessary raw materials or secure the needed energy. Shortages made the task of reconstruction extremely difficult. Particular attention had been paid during the war to the destruction of the vital rail networks and the rolling stock that operated on it. From commuter rail systems to the national and international railways needed to move cargo of every kind, rail transport had ground to a halt across Europe and Asia. Mines were flooded, power generators bombed, bridges blown up across the combat zone.
The global political situation was just as bad. The great powers and global empires of earlier times were crippled by the war. The French, British, Belgian, and Dutch colonial empires were suspended between imperial authorities who increasingly lacked the resources or legitimacy to act, and untried, untested nationalist movements just beginning to grapple with tasks of state building and development. China, devastated by a generation of warlordism and the vicious Japanese invasion, was ruined, exhausted, and about to undergo another round of civil war between the communists and the U.S.-supported Kuomintang. British India was moving toward independence even as growing conflict between Hindus and Muslims prefigured partition and the mass murder and flight that accompanied it.
In 1945, no one quite understood what the dynamics of the postwar world would be. Nobody knew whether or how after such horrific crimes Germany and Japan could rejoin the community of nations; Roosevelt advisor Bernard Baruch warned in November 1945 that both might be planning wars of revenge.[25] Great Britain had clearly been damaged by the war, but most British and foreign observers believed that to a large extent, it would recover. The United States, the only major economy to have escaped the physical devastation of the conflict, lacked both the experience and the will for global leadership. American forces had returned home quickly after World War I; most observers believed that the country would once again demobilize and close down the bases it had come to occupy during the war. The Soviet Union, while sustaining immense economic and manpower losses in the brutal fighting on the eastern front, had become the dominant military power on the European mainland as a result of the war. What use the Soviets would make of this position was unknown. Both the Americans and the British hoped that the wartime alliance could continue.
Over everything loomed the specter of the atomic bomb. Developed in the United States (with considerable help from British and exiled German scientists), this powerful weapon disturbed world politics. Initially, the Americans had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and no one in western governments knew how effective Stalin’s espionage was or how close he was to developing a bomb of his own. Humanity was in the early stages of a process that is still going on today: learning to live in the shadow of nuclear destruction.
Trouble at Home
There was bound to be a contentious debate over American foreign policy as the United States shifted from the problems of winning the greatest war in the history of the world to building peace in the midst of the greatest chaos and dislocation the world had ever seen. Just as Democratic liberals continued to support the New Deal policies at home, and believed that it was Truman’s duty to honor and extend FDR’s domestic policy legacy, they believed that FDR’s foreign policy should be preserved and honored abroad.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin’s charismatic, passionate, and politically active widow, had seen herself as the guardian of her husband’s liberal conscience during their years in the White House. After his death, she became the guardian of his liberal legacy. She had been the most prominent and politically engaged first lady in the history of the United States during her husband’s unprecedented twelve years in the presidency. With a syndicated newspaper column appearing six times a week across the country,[26] and a mass following among Democrats and liberals who revered her both for herself and for her association with FDR, she was the most powerful woman in the history of American politics. She was a committed internationalist who felt the horror of war, sympathized deeply with its victims around the world, remembered America’s failure to build a peaceful world following World War I, and was determined to ensure a different outcome this time.
For Eleanor Roosevelt, there was no doubt about the foreign policy that the United States should follow after her husband’s death: his, as understood by her. The postwar order should rest on two pillars: continued cooperation with the Soviet Union and the development of the United Nations as the principal forum for international politics. The emergence of postcolonial countries offered a great opportunity for the United States to ally with progressive forces around the world, ushering in a new and more peaceful and democratic era in world politics. By resolutely opposing efforts by countries like Britain and France to cling to their empires, by dealing honestly and openly with Stalin, and by offering support to emerging national movements around the world the United States could be true to its principles while building a strong foundation for world peace.
Aligned with Eleanor Roosevelt on these issues was the man who many liberal Democrats believed was Franklin Roosevelt’s preferred successor, Henry Wallace. After the end of Wallace’s vice presidential term, FDR (who never admitted publicly that he had agreed to replace Wallace with Truman) signaled his continuing respect for Wallace by naming him to the cabinet as commerce secretary.
This yearning for a progressive foreign policy was the vision not only of the former president’s widow and former vice president, but of the Democratic liberal establishment, the majority of the nation’s religious leaders, leading intellectuals, and the professional upper middle class. The horrors of war, the shock of the atomic bomb, the millennial aspirations that, as we have seen, play such an important role in American life: all combined to impress much of the United States with the conviction that the aftermath of World War II demanded a unique response.
The cascading disasters and crises of the postwar years were so immense, so unprecedented, so complex, and so terrifying that it is difficult for people today to comprehend the psychological and mental state of our ancestors on whose heads the great storm broke. It was not just the vast scale of the starvation and homelessness, the economic disarray, the physical disruption or the anarchic conditions in so much of the world. Something much bigger was at work. The unprecedented horrors of the war, with unspeakable cruelties practiced by Germany and Japan of which the Holocaust was only the most conspicuous, revealed a depravity in the human spirit that seemed to destroy all hope for the kind of gradual amelioration in the human condition that had for two centuries been the mainstay of American and Enlightenment optimism.
The rise of inhuman totalitarianisms in Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan also delivered a profound shock to believers in the doctrine of progress. The Enlightenment, Americans had long believed, was leading to an inexorable amelioration of the human condition. More wealth and more education would, by all the laws that governed human nature, lead societies to adopt more liberal and more humane forms of government. Societies that rested on free competition and cooperation would, Americans had long held, inevitably triumph over those that restricted human freedom or subjected human economic activity to the rigors of central control. The totalitarian governments of the 1930s made that assumption questionable; that victory over Germany and Japan had only been possible by an alliance with the most murderous and destructive regime of them all was a grim truth that deprived triumph of much of its joy. Triumph and Tragedy was the title Winston Churchill would choose for the final volume of his war memoir. While cynics might claim that the tragedy he had in mind was his unexpected general election defeat in the summer of 1945, the title struck most readers as an accurate description of the profoundly disturbing consequences of the bloodiest war ever fought.
At the same time, the detonation of American atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki raised the prospect, even the certainty that a third world war would be far more destructive than the second. It was not hard to look into the future and see the overthrow of all civilization and perhaps the annihilation of the human race coming about as the result of the next war.
These shocks felt by policymakers and national leaders echoed and reverberated through the whole of society. The terrible new realities of the human condition were anything but obscure. Everyone could see how Europe and Asia were filled with emaciated and shell-shocked survivors picking through the ruins of their lives in search of their daily bread. Even in sheltered America, millions of soldiers had seen the ferocity of technologically enabled war at first hand. Eyewitness accounts and newsreel footage of Nazi and Japanese atrocities were everywhere. The size and consequences of the nuclear blasts were discussed in full and at length at kitchen tables as much as in cabinet meetings.
Without taking these circumstances into account, it is difficult to understand both the motives and the actions of many American policymakers in the early postwar years. Otherwise intelligent people were willing to believe in Stalin’s good intentions and peaceable character less because they loved communism than because an accurate understanding of the evil he represented and the threat that he posed made the world look unendurably grim. Americans clung with such tenacity to the empty shell of the United Nations, imbuing it with unrealistic hopes less because they were stupid than because they could not imagine a future for human beings without an effective international institution that could prevent future wars.
Later generations, who have learned the limits of the United Nations through bitter experience, find it difficult to understand just how intensely so many Americans longed for a truly effective international organization to emerge or how determined they were to give the new organization the chance to succeed. Establishing an effective international organization to prevent war was going to be difficult, but since the alternative was annihilation, the effort had to be made—and it had to succeed. Clearly, reasoned Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and millions of Americans with them, the United States must not only join the United Nations; it must lead the world in supporting it.
In October 1946, the New York Times editorial board described the United Nations as “the great adventure in international cooperation that must be the foundation of peace and prosperity,” and “the Town Meeting of the World and the conscience of mankind.”[27] These views were unrealistic; they were even idiotic given the structure of the United Nations and the condition of the world, but they were to a large degree inevitable under the circumstances of the time. And idiotic or not, they were the settled views of a large section of both the leadership and the base of a political party that Harry Truman led but did not control.
Opposed to this consensus, which dominated the Democratic Party and the internationalist, establishment wing of the Republicans, was an equally irrational and equally unrealistic isolationist school associated with conservative Republicans like Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. This school, which was by and large bitterly opposed to the New Deal’s expansion of federal power, believed that the United States should have as little to do as possible with questions of world order. While some Taftians supported membership in the United Nations, they opposed all talk of a global superstate.[28] They mistrusted both the Soviet Union and Great Britain, and believed that other powers were using the gullibility of American liberals to enlist the power of the United States for their own selfish ends. The United States was the strongest power in the world, unique in its possession of nuclear weapons, the greatest oil producer, the greatest industrial power, the most technologically advanced country in the world, the world’s greatest producer of food; of course other, weaker nations sought to bend American power to their own purposes. The League of Nations had been a fraud and a disaster; the United Nations was likely to fail whether or not the United States belonged to it. The safest course was for the United States to tend to its own strength at home, secure the Western Hemisphere, and remember George Washington’s wise advice against participating in entangling alliances in Europe. Against the Wilsonian liberals, the Jacksonian and Jeffersonian conservatives on the right flank of the Republican Party wanted as limited an American foreign policy as possible. In its way, this approach was as naive about the Soviet danger as the most woolly-minded followers of Eleanor Roosevelt. The belief that the world would somehow stabilize without American engagement was as utopian and impossible as any fantasy that Henry Wallace could conceive.
There was also a third school, which represented the opinion of many of the people in the State Department and the Pentagon. These officials had been close to power under FDR and watched the evolution of Soviet policy in 1944 and 1945 with dismay. One by one, key foreign policy officials like Averell Harriman, George Kennan, and Robert Lovett came to feel the need for a tougher American stance against Stalin. While many in this group remained modestly hopeful about the future of the United Nations, the need to balance the Soviet Union’s power was becoming their highest priority, and Great Britain, the strongest remaining noncommunist power in the world next to the United States, was seen as an indispensable ally. Including soldiers like Marshall and diplomats like Kennan and Lovett, this group sought to build American alliances with noncommunist Europe in order to limit the power of the Soviet Union. They had chafed as Franklin Roosevelt, in their view, refused to rethink his Soviet policy as Stalin broke one pledge after another in Eastern Europe.[29]
As Truman, whom FDR kept out of the loop on all important foreign policy and war strategy issues even after he was inaugurated as vice president, struggled to find his footing in the hurricane of events following FDR’s death, he faced two major problems. The first was his own inexperience. Truman was a newcomer in the world of international diplomacy. He had no idea how to carry on negotiations with foreign leaders. When he meant to sound firm, he would often sound brash. Missteps with the Soviets in particular worried even some of the State Department officials who approved of Truman’s tougher stand against Stalin, and helped to promote an image of Truman as a bumbling amateur that would undermine his authority throughout his presidency.
More seriously, Truman gradually came to the view that both the liberal Democratic and conservative Republican approaches to American foreign policy were hopelessly out of touch with the requirements of national strategy. The State Department mandarins were right and the Roosevelt approach to Stalin had to end. The United Nations was a hopeful experiment and Truman would use it as much as he could, but the Soviet veto and the inherent limits on the effectiveness of international institutions constrained its ability to manage the Soviet challenge. To check Stalin’s ambitions, the United States would need to work with European allies. These ideas were anathema to Taftian Republicans. More importantly for Truman, they were also directly opposed to the foreign policy approach that Democratic icons like Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt wanted him to follow.
