American Experiment (338 page)

What seemed to be lacking in both Kennan and Lippmann was an overriding philosophy of international relations and a coherent strategic concept that could stand the test of repeated shocks like Korea and Berlin,
Hungary and Suez, as well as the endless currents of change. And no one seemed readier to supply this need than Hans J. Morgenthau, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago. A veritable child of conflict, Morgenthau had grown up in a Bavarian city seared by race hatred even in the early 1920s; when, as a young
Gymnasium
student at the top of his class, he was chosen to give the annual Founder’s Day address, the deposed duke of the region sat in the front row during the speech holding his nose in an obviously anti-Semitic gesture. Morgenthau left Germany as the Nazis moved toward power and later settled in Madrid to teach diplomacy, only to be overwhelmed by the Spanish Civil War; he made his way to Paris during the Popular Front days and then to Brooklyn College, only to be vilified there by young ideologues who were put off by the émigré’s sober and scholarly approach to some of the passionate questions of the day.

Later, at Chicago, Morgenthau produced a series of volumes—
Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Politics Among Nations, In Defense of the National Interest
—that marked him as a formidable strategist of international politics. Morgenthau began with the premise that power politics, “rooted in the lust for power which is common to all men,” was inseparable from all social life. There was no escape from it: “whenever we act with reference to our fellowmen, we must sin and we must still sin when we refuse to act.” Power was the central, almost the exclusive, foundation of national interest and criterion of foreign policy. Such power, essentially military, must of course be prudently managed, but managed also quickly and decisively, which required strong executive leadership. The executive branch, however, took little initiative in foreign policy, Morgenthau lamented to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1959, because it feared Congress, and Congress feared public opinion. Yet public opinion, he went on in much the same vein as Lippmann, should be not the cause but the result of “dynamic executive and congressional leadership.” Public-opinion polls measured the impact of past leadership, not the potential of the new. They must not be the yardstick of foreign policy.

“The history of America,” Morgenthau instructed Senators J. William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, and Wayne Morse among others, “is the story of the enthusiastic responses of the American people to dynamic leadership on behalf of foreign policies which can be shown to have a positive bearing upon the national interest.”

Critics were not slow to challenge Morgenthau’s realism. If the national interest was the foundation of foreign policy, they said, the power underlying it must be clear and measurable, which meant military power—but even this power had often been miscalculated by both its wielders and its
targets. The professor himself, the critics added unkindly, had miscalculated the national interest—for example, in his expectation that the Soviets would risk or even start a ground war in Europe once they acquired nuclear power. There were, moreover, other tangible and intangible bases of power—economic, psychological, ideological—that had to be included in assessing the might of nations. Yet if these were included, the “national interest” became such a tangle of multiple, shifting, and dynamic forces as to defy measurement and analysis. Hence to be for the national interest or for realism was no more clarifying than to be for wisdom or common sense or statecraft. Who wasn’t?

Realism, in short, was a necessary but inadequate component of a strategy of international relations. It was a preoccupation with means—the marshaling of power—in a series of world crises that called for a sense of proportion and perspective, a wider comprehension of ends, a philosophy of world politics, even a theology of the human condition. If this was the call, it appeared to have been answered in the 1950s by a theologian-philosopher-politician who had for twenty years been leaving church pulpits and college campuses dazzled by his stabbing oratory and pungent sermonizing. This was Reinhold Niebuhr.

Schooled at Elmhurst College in Illinois and at Yale Divinity School, he had held an evangelical pulpit in Detroit until 1928, when he joined the Union Theological Seminary in New York, much to the dismay of the established theologians there who deplored his lack of a doctorate, his bumptious midwestern manner, and his outspoken radicalism. His years in Detroit had left Niebuhr filled with fierce indignation over the industrial and human wasteland he had witnessed outside his own middle-class parish.

Detroit made Niebuhr a socialist; then for the next thirty years he followed a zigzag route through a series of doctrines and causes as he tried to come to grips with the depression, the New Deal, and the cold war. What kept him from intellectual faddism was his philosophical ambivalence—his tendency to embrace different doctrines at the same time in a kind of continuous internal dialectic; even while proclaiming a thesis he nurtured the seeds of its antithesis. Thus in Detroit he proclaimed the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch even while he exhibited, in his passion for new ideas and his instinct for irony and political practicality, many of the intellectual traits of the pragmatism of James and Dewey. His Detroit experience and the onset of the depression now moved him toward Marxist ideas, but it was Niebuhr’s own brand of Marxism, shot through with concern over the havoc of capitalism, fear of rising fascism, an ornery repugnance for communist dogma and messianism, and a hatred for Soviet
bureaucracy and oppression. During the late 1930s, after holding the New Deal in some distaste for its opportunism and its “whirligig” of reform, he deserted Norman Thomas and the socialists to vote for Roosevelt. This shift too was marked by ambivalence: Niebuhr, who turned to FDR in part because of the President’s resistance to Nazism, had earlier attacked him for expanding the Navy.

By the 1940s Niebuhr could best be described as a liberal realist who was faithful to his earlier Social Gospel compassion in seeking to push the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations further to the left, in the process taking active leadership in Americans for Democratic Action and other liberal groups. At the same time he took a militant stand against Soviet expansionism and left-wing dogmatics. The old tensions and ambivalences remained. During the war he had hoped that “the companionship in a common purpose” with Russia would persuade the Soviets “to disavow political forms and fanaticisms which outrage standards of freedom established in the Western world.” This was the kind of “liberal illusion” that Niebuhr at other times denounced. He inveighed against American pride and self-righteousness but he also educated a rising generation of politicians in “realistic,” hard-nosed politics—in the notion, according to Richard W. Fox, that “moral men had to play hardball.”

By the 1950s Niebuhr had reached the height of his fame. “He was the father of us all,” George Kennan said of him. The ADA in a formal resolution named him its “spiritual father.” The theologian’s words excited so many agnostics, backsliders, and heretics that someone proposed a new group, “atheists for Niebuhr.” How to account for this extraordinary influence? The answer lay less in Niebuhr’s own ideological “whirligig” over the years than in the power of his theology of human nature. Whatever his current credal passion, it was informed by his biblical awareness of original sin, but sin now armed by technology with new destructive power, his rejection of Jeffersonian “illusions” for a Dostoevskian recognition of human evil, his sensitivity to human alienation, anxiety, and the “dizziness of freedom,” his constant reminders of pride, aggressiveness, sinfulness. Always sin—sin as the “narcosis of the soul.”

Audiences would never forget the sight of this man behind pulpit or rostrum, his bald pate gleaming as he pitched his hawklike face forward, his words tumbling out as his whole body seemed to weave and thrust, while his listeners tried frantically to scribble down his dazzling epigrams and polemical outbursts. His written words also had a stunning impact; for Harvey Cox his first reading of
Moral Man and Immoral Society,
gulped down in one sitting, was an intense revelation that made him “an instant Niebuhrian.” But when the sermons and books were digested, the question
remained whether Niebuhr had done much more than clothe liberal realism in a powerful theological frame without resolving the ultimate in his paradoxes—the tension between liberal compassion, hopes and dreams, and hardheaded realism. Was Niebuhr simply one more example of the great Tocquevillian failure in American intellectuals—the failure to connect practical expedient politics informed by human possibility and limitation to lofty but explicit goals that might challenge the best in humankind?

No more than Morgenthau or the others did Niebuhr take on the toughest intellectual task of all: to explore the dimensions of liberty, the structure of freedom, the ambivalences of equality—and the tension among these values—and to link these with the strengths and weaknesses of American institutions, politics, and leadership. What was desperately needed in postwar America was analysis of the intervening linkages between ends and means, but this would have called for an analysis of political parties and electoral processes and public opinion and governmental structures—analysis hardly conducive to evangelical sermonizing and radical rhetoric. It was this failure that—granted the empirical richness and political wisdom of Lippmann and Kennan, Morgenthau and Niebuhr—set them a rung below the intellectual leadership of the 1780s. The Framers had crafted a constitution that superbly fixed their goals of individual liberty to concrete governmental institutions and electoral processes—so superbly that leadership in the 1950s still had to operate through their centuries-old system in seeking to reach twentieth-century goals.

Nor did these four political analysts—in even sharper contrast with the Framers in their time—hold much sway over foreign, even European, opinion. Kennan, a visiting professor at Oxford in 1957-58, lectured for the BBC on “Russia, the Atom and the West.” The stoutly anticommunist newspaper
Le Figaro
ran Lippmann columns. Lippmann indeed had a fan in General de Gaulle, who found
Le Crépuscule des démocraties
—the French edition of
The Public Philosophy
—full of “rare perceptions,” mainly because the two men shared strong doubts about the equation of democracy with parliamentarism and the “usurpation of popular sovereignty by professional politicians,” in de Gaulle’s words. But in general the ideas of the four were hardly exportable, conditioned as those ideas were by America’s geopolitical worldview.

Other things American, however, were most exportable. Europeans found their continent awash in American advertising and consumer goods. Turn the corner near Beethoven Strasse in Amsterdam or push your way through Piccadilly Circus or parade down the Champs-Elysées and you
could hardly escape the ads for Kent cigarettes or Coca-Cola or Ford cars. Or escape the products themselves in the shops—Maxwell House coffee and Sea & Ski suntan lotion and Heinz tomato ketchup and Revlon lipstick. American cars seemed to be conquering European streets and mores, crowding highways, requiring car parks, changing suburban and recreation patterns.

Americans were exporting their corporations along with their goods. In the late fifties some two hundred American companies a year were settling in Belgium, Holland, and Prance, and about the same number in Britain. These enterprises employed tens of thousands of Americans and Europeans. Businessmen and politicians denounced the invaders for paying higher wages and salaries and for “disruption of orderly marketing.” American loans, or American management practices, or American competition would make Britain—or France or Italy or Belgium—the “49
^th
State.” The Yankee traders, moreover, were taking back European art and other treasures. A London antique shop featured in its window a bristling sign: “Americans are not served.”

Other Europeans fought back in ways known to old cultures. Despite much advertising, some American products simply could not make a go of it: Campbell soups had trouble competing in the home of famous
potages;
the British did not take to motherly Betty Crocker and her cake mixes; General Mills tried to market Cheerios but Londoners stuck with their cornflakes and their kippers. Europeans attacked American economic and cultural “imperialism”: the Marshall Plan as a “dollar noose,” American loans as the work of a “shabby moneylender,” American managers as crass and unknowing, American GIs as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” For some Americans the height of indignity was a report by a
Russian,
the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, after a trip to the States that Americans suffered from “spiritual standardization”—“the same houses, the same furniture, the same crockery.”

No place on the globe, critics complained, escaped “Coca-colonization.” Arthur Koestler noted: “The motorbus which carries the traveller at 5
A.M.
from Bangkok airport to the center of the capital of Thailand has a loudspeaker through which American crooners purr at him, and makes him wonder whether his journey was really necessary. The Arabian desert is ploughed by Cadillacs, and the exhibition of Eskimo handicrafts at the airport of Anchorage, Alaska, bears the same hallmark of the Late Woolworth Period as the idols of Krishna, made of plastic, which are worshipped in Indian homes.”

How could the “other” America be presented abroad—the good America, the America of books and music, of the Bill of Rights and
representative government, especially at a time when the Kremlin was reputed to be spending half a billion dollars a year on propaganda? This was the job of the United States Information Agency, the successor to a series of agencies going back to the wartime propaganda units. By the end of the decade the USIA was running a wide range of information and cultural activities— books, films, lectures, radio programs, exhibits, student and teaching exchanges—through 200 posts in over 80 countries. No agency was more vulnerable politically both at home and abroad; while young European radicals were assaulting overseas libraries from the outside, McCarthy’s men were doing so from the inside. Some overseas librarians hid books by Tom Paine and other radicals; a few timid souls actually burned books— only about a dozen, but enough to touch burning memories of the Nazis. “For the free world outside the U.S.,” wrote a Canadian journalist, “McCarthyism is not just a spectacle. It is a tragedy.”