The Best and the Brightest (24 page)

Two events would change the American perceptions, and equally important in this case, the disposition to perceive nuances. (Many things, after all, were perceptible, if one wanted to see them, but the seeing involved increasing risk. It became better not to see the shades of difference—the fact, for instance, that Ho, although a Communist, might also be primarily Vietnamese and under no orders from Moscow.) The first event was the hardening of the Cold War as tensions in Europe grew; the second was the fall of China, which sent deep psychic shock waves into the American political structure. These events, coupled with the Korean War and the coming of Senator Joseph McCarthy, would markedly change the American perceptions of international Communism, and more important, change the disposition of high political figures to discern subtleties within the Communist world. The spectrum of American political attitudes would sharply narrow, and there would be an enormous two-party consensus of anti-Communism. The only main difference was on how to implement it, one centrist group believing in subtle anti-Communism, using economic aid as a weapon, using nationalism as a weapon; the other believing more in sheer military force. A major party would find itself on the defensive on the charge of having lost a major country to the Communists; and most remarkable of all, the key architect of an entire era of militant anti-Communism, Dean Acheson, would find himself the center of a national political campaign, the charge being not that he was too harsh in his anti-Communism, but that he had been too soft.

It was an unreal time. The events in Europe, the postwar drawing of lines between the Communists and the Western powers, probably had a historical inevitability to it. Two great and uncertain powers were coming to terms with each other, a task made more difficult by their ideological differences (each believed its own myth about itself and its adversary) and by the additional frightening factor of the atomic weapon. Long-range historical analysis will probably show that in those years they were like two blind dinosaurs wrestling in a very small pit. Each thought its own policies basically defensive, and the policies of its adversary basically aggressive. Out of this would come new tensions and new fears for a new world power like the United States. But the China issue, even more emotional, and the coming of the Korean War, would legitimatize the fringe viewpoints, would limit rational discussion and rational political activity. China would help freeze American policy toward Communism. A kind of demonology about a vast part of the world would become enshrined as accepted gospel. One major political party would be too frightened to challenge it, the other delighted to reap the benefits from it. All of this would affect Indochina.

Nineteen forty-seven and forty-eight were the watershed years. The lines of a hard peace were becoming apparent; the foreign ministers’ meeting had failed. Czechoslovakia went Communist in a coup, and Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk jumped or was pushed to his death. A few months later the Berlin blockade took place.

In 1947 Marshall had announced the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery, a move which the Soviet Union regarded as a gesture of economic warfare. In May of 1947 the Truman Doctrine was announced. The American policy was now clearly one of containment. The Soviet Union had become an adversary and the national security planners were committed to total and constant conflict.
The Forrestal Diaries,
which provide poignant insights into the thinking of one of the most forceful and persuasive architects of that period, are filled with references, first, to the dangers and vulnerability of the American public and the American press to Communist propaganda, and second, to the old post-Munich fear of the democracies of competition with a totalitarian dictator (in October 1947, during a lunch with Robert Lovett, Walter Bedell Smith, Robert Murphy and General Lucius Clay, Forrestal asked Smith, our ambassador to the USSR, if the Russians wanted war. Smith answered by quoting Stalin as saying the Russians did not want war, “but the Americans want it even less than we do and that makes our position stronger”). It would be this fear that the American public might be soft plus the parallel need to make decisions for it in this most difficult and complex struggle, which would become a basic tenet of faith for national security planning in this era; a belief that by its nature the competition was simply unfair. There was a certain irony here; it was as if the national security people in 1947 under Forrestal and Acheson had worked so hard to gear up a campaign of anti-Communism that some eighteen years later their lineal descendants could not escape the rhythms they helped create; having once mounted the tiger’s back, they found it difficult to descend.

But they were worried less about descending than about motivating this country to the threat they perceived. These men were all from the big investment and banking houses, or lawyers for them; they and their class had long harbored an abiding suspicion not so much of Russia as of
Communism.
Their tendency was to see the growing American-Soviet conflict in their terms and definitions, fulfilling their long suspicions. To them it was an ism, not just two new great powers struggling to find their balance. Thus the men who defined postwar American policy defined it in ideological, not national terms. Forrestal, who was particularly suspicious of Communist designs, was delighted to find a brilliant young diplomat-intellectual named George F. Kennan at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and Kennan’s warnings about Soviet intentions were immediately seized upon by Forrestal as intellectual and historical evidence of the great struggle ahead. Forrestal made the Kennan reports available to friends throughout Washington, and Kennan’s career took off overnight. His reporting was eventually published both in
Foreign Affairs
(under the byline
X
) and as a book which became the primer of postwar American diplomacy and was read by almost every college student at every great university, one of the most influential books of an entire generation. Kennan became known as the author of the containment policy, but he had been talking more about
Russia
than about Communists. He would eventually find his ideas being exploited, as it were, by his superiors, used as a justification for an increasing militarization of American foreign policy. He eventually broke with the other foreign policy architects because he thought they were too ideological and too military-oriented in their policies. He felt that the Communist world was much more nationalist in its origins than it was monolithic, and that we were creating our own demonology. His opinions in the early fifties represented the first truly major dissent within a largely consensus view of a nonconsensus world.

The Kennan experience was not to be the last time that the national security principals would take the intelligence reporting of their own experts and exploit it out of context, de-emphasizing the issue of nationalism and exploiting the issue of Communism. The same thing happened during the Korean War, when the China experts predicted accurately what China would do, not based on Communist intentions but on
Chinese
history, and the last time would be during the Vietnam war, when again the experts predicted accurately Hanoi’s responses to American escalation. But these were distinctions few were interested in twenty years ago; what was needed was a unity of national purpose against the Communists. Nothing else would suffice.

It was an ideological and bipartisan movement; it enjoyed the support of the press, of the churches, of Hollywood. There was stunningly little debate or sophistication of the levels of anti-Communism. It was totally centrist and politically very safe; anything else was politically dangerous. Acheson would note that in 1947, when Truman was discussing his proposals for American aid to Greece and Turkey with congressional leaders,

he stressed that these attacks and pressures upon these countries were not, as surface appearances might suggest, merely due to border rows originating with their neighbors, but were part of a series of Soviet moves, which included stepped-up Communist party activity in Italy, France and Germany. I can see Senator Vandenberg now, suddenly leaning forward on the sofa in the President’s office and saying, “If you will say that to the whole country, I will support you.” The presentation was put in this way, to the surprise and disapproval of some commentators.

Among those who were surprised was Acheson’s boss, George Marshall, who thought the statement a little rash and too broad. He misunderstood the coming need to overlook certain subtleties as the Cold War developed. Thus were Greece and Turkey the first dominoes, and thus did a Democratic Administration offer up as justification for its foreign policies something far closer to what the Republican minority wanted, which reflected the interests and prejudices of the most influential bankers and lawyers. In order to get the job done, the Administration was willing to see the conflict in ideological rather than nationalist terms. The Democrats, feeling themselves vulnerable on this question (liberals often associated with reform causes which were tainted with domestic Communism), were increasingly willing to trim their own sails and accept the assumptions of their more conservative domestic adversaries.

There were the first stirrings of domestic anti-Communism as an issue. Senators elected in 1946 were markedly both more conservative and anti-Communist as a group than the men defeated. In 1946 Richard Nixon had won a California house seat by comparing the voting record of his opponent to that of Vito Marcantonio, the left-wing New York congressman. The smell was in the air. In 1947, even as he was pronouncing the Truman Doctrine in foreign affairs, the President issued an executive order creating a Loyalty Security program which became the opening wedge for the security cases of the following years. Under the Truman decree the Attorney General drew up lists of subversive and front organizations; when questioned by friends who were uneasy about the direction and about this order, Truman replied that he had done it to take the play away from J. Parnell Thomas, who headed the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Truman’s friend Clifford Durr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, asked the President about it, Truman replied that if there were injustices he could modify the order or repeal it.

Rather than combating the irrationality of charges of softness on Communism and subversion, the Truman Administration, sure that it was the lesser of two evils, moved to expropriate the issue, as in a more subtle way it was already doing in foreign affairs. So the issue was legitimized; rather than being the property of the far right, which the centrist Republicans tolerated for obvious political benefits, it had even been picked up by the incumbent Democratic party. The first of the China security cases, that of John Stewart Service, took place in the Truman years. Yet in comparison to what was to come, this was all still quite mild.

In 1948, normal domestic issues dominated the presidential campaign. Foreign policy did not become a major point because the Republicans did not choose to make it one, for a very good reason. They were very much a part of the existing policies, and more important, they did not think they needed the issue. Out of power for sixteen years, they were now confident, indeed overconfident, of victory; they felt themselves rich in Democratic scandals, and they overestimated the degree of unhappiness in the country. They also underestimated Truman as a political figure. He was so different from the graceful, attractive Roosevelt, patrician, the perfect voice for the radio age, generating through the airwaves a marvelous self-assurance that was politically contagious, his confidence becoming the nation’s confidence. After four defeats by Roosevelt, the Republicans were glad of the difference. In underestimating the political attractiveness of Truman, jaunty, unpretentious, decisive, his faults so obvious, they failed to realize that these were the faults of the common man and that the voter identified every bit as much with Truman’s faults as with his virtues. It was a campaign where the common man versus big-business interests was still a credible one, and Truman was a marvelous symbol of the average American, the little man. Every bit the consummate politician, he made the issue of anti-Communism partly his own, and shrewdly seized the liberal center, isolating both Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats. The Republicans mounted a frail campaign, in substance a me-too campaign, and they lost. They would learn their lesson and become less scrupulous the next time; by 1952, foreign policy and alleged softness of the State Department would be major issues.

None of this had yet affected American policy toward Indochina, mainly because precious little policy toward it existed. What effect the rising domestic issue of anti-Communism had could not be good, but it was not yet bad. Then a major event took place in 1949 which meant that a French victory in Indochina was impossible, and yet, ironically and tragically, also meant that American support of the French was inevitable and that eventual U.S. entry into the war was a real possibility. The event was the fall of China and it was, again, produced by great historical forces outside our control; Barbara Tuchman would write in her book on General Joseph Stilwell in China: “In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.”

As World War I had taken a decaying feudal Russian regime and finally destroyed it, bringing on the Communists, so Japan’s aggression against China, the first step in what was to become World War II, did the same thing to China: a fledgling semidemocratic government was trying to emerge from a dark and feudal past and was pushed beyond the point of cohesion, the Japanese catching Chiang Kai-shek when he might have moved into the modern era and frightening him back into the past, revealing more his weaknesses than his strengths. The embryo China of Chiang came apart, and the new China would not be that of Chiang and the Western powers, but of Mao Tse-tung and the Communists, a powerful modern antifeudal force touching the peasants and the age-old resentment against foreign intrusion, liberating powerful latent feelings in that great country. American policy had been to support Chiang, to try and use him as a force against the Japanese; later, as Chiang’s forces began to collapse and the Communists became a more viable force, we tried as best we could to reconcile the irreconcilable and get them to work together. The young American foreign service officers in China warned that we had to come to terms with the failure of Chiang’s order. It was a story which would repeat itself in Vietnam: of Chiang, as would later be true for many years of Diem, it would be said that he was too weak to rule and too strong to be overthrown. His forces were corrupt, his generals held title on the basis of nepotism and loyalty, his best troops never fought; faced by mounting terrible pressures, he turned inward to listen to the gentle words of trusted family and sycophants. It was the sign of a dying order.