Penguin History of the United States of America (111 page)

Yet the rest of the world could not be allowed to go hang. The American people and government had seen what that led to and were determined to shoulder their responsibilities – rather too determined, it emerged.

Matters were most nearly straightforward in the Far East, except (a large exception) for the Chinese puzzle. Since the United States had undoubtedly played much the greatest part against Japan, it felt free to exclude all its allies from any part in the post-war settlement. The Japanese, who had never been conquered before, showed themselves willing to adopt the ways of their conquerors, so General Mac Arthur, who had received their surrender, set out to teach them democracy. Surprisingly, given the General’s autocratic temperament, the experiment turned out excellently. Mac-Arthur had a deep understanding of what the historical moment required of his country and repudiated the imperialist tradition. America would lose a golden opportunity, he said, if she used her immense new influence ‘in an imperialistic manner, or for the sole purpose of commercial advantage… but if our influence and our strength are expressed in terms of essential liberalism, we shall have the friendship and the co-operation of the Asiatic peoples far into the future’. Time would eventually destroy these hopes; but meanwhile Mac Arthur ruled with huge success. He comported himself very much as a new Shogun (the Mikado Hirohito had kept his title but been shorn of his divinity and political power) and at his command the Japanese set about turning themselves into democrats and rebuilding their
shattered country. They were startlingly successful in both respects, to the gratification of the Americans. Reconciliation was hastened by the triumph of the communists in China in 1949, an event equally displeasing to the Japanese and the United States, and by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. A formal peace treaty was negotiated, and signed in September 1951, at the same time as one committing the Americans to undertake the defence of Japan against any foe, since the Japanese were forbidden to have any armed forces themselves.

No such happy outcome could be expected in Europe, if only because Germany was now divided into two parts. This was a quite unintended result of the war, and came about because Russia and her allies found it impossible to agree on the government of the defeated country. It was possible to set up a tribunal at Nuremberg which tried and sentenced the surviving Nazi leaders; all other matters were divisive. Stalin was determined to eliminate all possibility of a repetition of the 1941 attack on Russia and to squeeze the utmost in reparations out of the Germans. Unfortunately the reparations policy, unacceptable to Western statesmen on economic grounds (they clearly remembered what trouble reparations had caused between the wars), soon became indistinguishable from one of wholesale plunder; and Soviet security seemed to demand the permanent subjugation of Germany and the establishment by brutal means of communist governments, backed by the Red Army, everywhere else. In Central Europe only Czechoslovakia held out for a time; in South-Eastern Europe, only Greece – and there a civil war was raging between the government and communist guerrillas.

Policy-makers in Washington watched these developments with growing indignation. The truculent diplomatic conduct of the Soviet government did nothing to better international relations. Molotov would soon become notorious for always saying ‘
nyet
’ to any Western proposal, and in this way a Russian word entered the English language. President Truman stated privately that he was tired of ‘babying the Soviets’. And the surest friends of the United States were deeply alarmed, in the late forties, by Soviet conduct. The British did not fear a communist
coup d’état
in their own country, but the consequences of a communist takeover in Italy, France and West Germany would have been most unpleasant to them, for Europe would thus have been united under the hegemony of a single aggressive power – the thing which British policy had worked and fought so hard for so long to prevent. To French democrats the issue was even more pressing. Having just endured the horrors of one occupation and one sort of collaboration they were unwilling to risk another which was likely to be more permanent. France’s Communist party was notoriously subservient to Moscow: it could not be trusted to respect either French liberties or French diplomatic interests. Italy, a former enemy, might not have won a hearing, even though there were millions of Italian-Americans in the United States, but for the existence of the papacy. Pius XII had never seen fit to take the
lead in opposition to Nazism or fascism; but he exerted his authority and influence to the full in opposing Stalinist communism. Poland, the most Catholic country in northern Europe, had been swallowed up: Italy must not go the same way.

All these fears found expression in Winston Churchill’s celebrated speech at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, which announced to the world, and to President Truman (who was sitting on the platform behind him and had read the address beforehand), that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent’. Russia, through the agency of Communist parties and fifth columnists everywhere, was trying to destroy Christian civilization. She must be resisted by a permanent alliance of the staunch English-speaking peoples – the United States, Great Britain and the British Commonwealth.
⁴
This bellicose message was not well received in all quarters, but it chimed in very well with the contingencies of American domestic politics.

The Republican party had now been excluded from national power for nearly fourteen years. It could not regain the Presidency before 1948, but meantime there were the Congressional elections of 1946 to look forward to. Working in the Republicans’ favour were the inevitable reaction against the party of the war which had toppled Churchill in Britain and the long-flowing conservative tide which had set in in 1938. But they needed a cry, or thought they did, and the slogans of anti-communism were just the right sort of thing. They were familiar, from the days of the Red Scare; Stalin’s actions made them plausible; and the Yalta agreements, which had been presented as such a triumph of Soviet-American friendship, such a proof of the special understanding between FDR and Uncle Joe, made the Democrats vulnerable. For it was becoming gospel on the Right that at Yalta vital national interests had been given away, either in treachery or folly.

In the event, the Republicans did extremely well, regaining control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1930. It is doubtful if their general victory owed much to the anti-communist cry: the process of adjustment from war to peace was proving painful, price controls had been lifted and as a result the cost of living was galloping upwards; but here and there were signs of how the wind was setting. In California a returning serviceman, Richard Milhous Nixon (1913 – 94), was elected to the House of Representatives, having waged an unscrupulous campaign insinuating that his opponent was a secret communist. He was not unique.

The Truman administration had to take account of these signs. It was entering on a very difficult period. The outstanding figure in the government was now General Marshall, Army Chief of Staff throughout the war, recently
returned from an unsuccessful mission to China, where he had hoped to reconcile Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Tse-tung and bring peace to that unhappy country. In January 1947 he had been appointed Secretary of State. His chief assistant was Dean Acheson, an able lawyer of long Washington experience. President Truman himself was proving to be, as Acheson later called him, ‘the captain with the mighty heart’. All three were men of compassion, courage and (within the limits of their humanity) wisdom. Europe was foundering in the throes of the worst winter in living memory. If the victory over Hitler was to be worth anything, the peoples of that continent must first be rescued from starvation, and next put on the road to a renewal of strength and hope. Otherwise the whole of society might collapse for good, or again succumb to dictatorship. And if the rich, well-fed, well-organized Americans stood by and simply watched disaster happen, they would never be forgiven, nor deserve to be. A programme of economic aid must be devised; but how was a discredited Democratic administration, which everyone expected to be defeated in the next Presidential election, to get such a programme through the Republican Congress?

The answer was, by a series of delicate strokes. Truman first asked Congress for a grant of $350 million for the prevention of starvation. Then, in March, Britain having stated that she could no longer bear the burden of propping up the Greek and Turkish governments against the threat of Soviet-backed communist insurgency or economic collapse (it being as much as the British could do to keep themselves warm for a few hours each day), the President appeared before a joint session of Congress to say that ‘it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’ (what later became known as the Truman Doctrine) and to ask for Congressional authorization for aid to Greece and Turkey in the form of money, trained personnel, commodities, supplies and equipment. Senator Taft warned in vain against this renewed abandonment of isolationism: Senator Vandenberg of Michigan, a somewhat vacuous Republican whom the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had been cultivating for years, came out in support of the proposals, which became law in May. But help to Greece and Turkey left Western Europe still prostrate. General Marshall, returning from a fruitless visit to Moscow, had seen for himself the vast desolation. The health of the American economy needed a healthy Europe for mutual trade. It was now the unanimous view of the administration that the Soviet Union was bent on expansion at all costs, and meant cunningly to exploit the opportunity to carry communism as far as the English Channel. Such fiendish plots must be checked. So on 5 June 1947 General Marshall made a celebrated speech at Harvard. ‘Our policy is directed against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos,’ he said. ‘Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.’ He invited proposals from Europe, promising a generous response. The fish rose to
the bait – non-communist Europe expressed enthusiastic interest and deep appreciation, and soon had put together a programme to present to the United States which set the recovery campaign off to a good start and meant that, when all ended happily, the programme would be known forever by Marshall’s name. Senator Vandenberg rallied to the flag again. Dean Acheson, who had temporarily left the administration, led a Citizens’ Committee for the Marshall Plan, which by dint of endless speechifying up and down the country mustered widespread support for the programme. Acheson was greatly helped by Stalin’s refusal to take part, or to allow his East European puppet governments to take part either; and in February 1948 the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. These developments made the administration’s insistence that the Marshall Plan was an anti-communist measure, and an urgent one too, all the more convincing, and unhappily most Americans – at any rate, most Republicans – were more impressed by anti-communist arguments than by suggestions that it might not be altogether moral to leave America’s recent allies to starve to death, or even that it might not be economically prudent to do nothing to rescue the world economy, now more prostrated than it had been during the Depression. So it would have been a grave embarrassment had the Soviet Union joined the programme; it did nothing of the kind, the plan was voted through Congress by comfortable majorities, and in the end $13,000,000,000 was made available to fund it. Presently a vast flood of American goods poured eastwards, and the rebuilding of Europe got under way at last.

It was the most unambiguously and triumphantly successful of all America’s post-war policies. One of the reasons for this was that it was also the most tactful. Marshall Aid was administered by a small group of Americans in Paris, whose principal job was to approve European shopping-lists. Once so approved, dollars were exchanged for European currencies, and with those dollars the Europeans paid for their purchases. In this way American aid, though essential, was almost invisible: ordinary Europeans noticed only that they were dealing with their own authorities; no friction or resentment was created, as would certainly have been the case had the United States tried to administer its aid directly. To be sure, the Europeans were not given any clear cause to be grateful; but then gratitude is a transient and unreliable emotion at the best of times. A more solid
quid pro quo
was provided by the so-called ‘counterpart funds’ – the vast holdings in European currencies that resulted from the Marshall transactions. They were available to American businessmen wishing to invest in Europe, and as American industrial profits began to pile up there were many such. The economic bonds linking the two continents thus diversified and tightened.

Yet even the Marshall Plan had its drawbacks. In the first place it marked the moment when the USA and the USSR formally and publicly became enemies. Years and years would pass before they found it possible to
negotiate seriously again, years during which huge vested interests, with overwhelming stakes in the continuance of the conflict, would emerge. Secondly, what began as a policy of economic containment of Soviet messianism, as promulgated by George Kennan of the State Department, soon modulated into military confrontation. The division of Europe into East and West which the Marshall Plan signalized would soon become a division between military alliances. Third, the way in which the plan was presented to the American people had unfortunate consequences. The administration was chiefly, indeed exclusively, concerned with the Soviet threat to international peace; but anti-communism in the United States tended to be quite as much concerned with a wider range of issues, not all of which could reasonably be connected with the Cold War, and with the imaginary threat of internal subversion. The selling of the Marshall Plan blurred the difference between the two approaches and made the nastier, sillier, more demagogic form of anti-communism respectable. Worse: the intellectual processes behind the formulation, both of the Truman Doctrine and of the Marshall Plan, were deeply confused. The practical instinct of the policy-makers led them to the right policies – to rescue Greece from a communist take-over, to restore Europe to prosperity – but the reasons given, even in the innermost sanctum of the State Department, were fanciful. Dean Acheson, for example, said that a communist victory in Greece might lead to the loss of three continents to Russia. This was pure fantasy, and pointed to an abiding weakness of American diplomacy: its practitioners still found it difficult to recognize reality. Finally, the success of the Marshall Plan not only confirmed America’s position as leader of the West but encouraged policy-makers in Washington to undertake bold, ambitious schemes in the high confidence that American strength and will would be sufficient to carry them out. Hysteria at home and over-confidence abroad were the two unhappy states of mind which the designers of the Marshall Plan unintentionally fostered.