Cultural Amnesia (72 page)

The intelligentsia, ever on the lookout for signs of intolerance, regards all questions about culture as racist at the
root. That the common voters should ask such questions is taken as evidence of Australia’s role as a source of the world’s problems, and not as a refuge from them. Luckily the
refugees themselves do not agree. They are in
flight from a different story. They might not fully understand it as yet, but they have certainly felt its power. In the late
1950s, a man as intelligent as Chris Marker could still feel that there might be such a thing as a totalitarian answer to the world’s miseries. That was the story told by his beautifully
made little films. But the story wasn’t true. Gradually he realized it, and, being at heart an honest man, he steadily lost the capacity to make the same sort of films again. Art had not
been enough. When it takes politics for its material, that’s the danger that it always runs.

JOHN M
C
CLOY

During and after World War II, John McCloy (1895–1989) was a key member of the East Coast
foreign policy elite, whose story is told in one of the best modern books about American politics,
The Wise Men
, by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. The
foreign policy elite is often looked on as an old-money nest of privilege in the europhile style, with its members all born into the same lofty social stratum, and attending the same prep
schools and colleges. But the fact that it included a man like McCloy, who could, and did, later lay proud claim to having been born on the wrong side of the tracks, is an indication of its
true strength: it made room for social mobility impelled by talent and ambition. The other Wise Men were Robert Lovett, Averell Harriman, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan and Dean Acheson. After
the defeat of Hitler, the elite, operating through the State Department and its dependent agencies, built the globalized American system of influence and alliance that expressed the principle
of containment, the perceived necessity to block the hegemony of the Soviet Union—the necessity which had first been expressed by George Kennan. A complete and final reversal of
America’s traditional isolationism, this world-embracing U.S. foreign policy is the
one that we still live under today: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
America of global reach might have found itself off balance, but was unable to draw back. A denigrator such as Gore Vidal calls the elite’s creation the Security State, but the foreign
onlooker needs to remember that Vidal himself comes from the elite’s milieu, thus reflecting a far-reaching truth about its power: that it generates even its own contrary forces.

By now, little more than half a century later, the elite’s heritage generates not only most of
what is said in favour of its policies, but most of what is said against them. Almost everything that matters on issues relevant not just to U.S. interests, but to the world entire, is
written within driving distance of Washington. Armed by close contact with polticians and officials, elegant writers such as Elizabeth Drew, and less elegant ones such as Bob Woodward, have
given us, in their shelves of books, the history of how the United States has shaped the modern world. This tradition of higher political journalism goes back to Henry Adams, but by now it
has got beyond the status of a useful individual study and become both indispensable and all-embracing. Two of the best recent books about the larger conflicts in the world, Fareed
Zakaria’s
The Future of Freedom
and Paul Berman’s
Terror and Liberalism
, were both written in the
United States. So was Samantha Power’s
A Problem from Hell
, a book which was taken by some grateful foreign critics as evidence of the
U.S.’s modern history of imperialistic interference. Actually Power’s main conclusion, one she probably didn’t want to reach, was quite different. She concluded that nothing
stops a genocidal government except armed interference, which, usually, only the United States provides. Whether providing it means inflicting it is the question.

The answer that matters will eventually be arrived at in Washington itself, or else it will not be heeded. The answer,
however, will be arrived at through argument, if not through congressional debate. American power is not monolithic. Nor was it in the crucial period after World War II, when there were
plenty of voices within the elite who realized that to make
anti-communism a popular cause, in order to get the Marshall Plan through Congress, would open the way for
McCarthyite demagoguery. They had a right to feel sure, however, that the Marshall Plan itself was benevolent, at least in the sense that it was in America’s long-term interests to be
disinterested in the short term. There are those who, in retrospect, and with some plausibility, condemn the Marshall Plan, NATO and the rest of the U.S.’s post-war initiatives in
Europe as the elements of an imperialist campaign. But plausibility becomes absurdity when they try to frame the United States with a single purpose, as if it had been totalitarian. They
would have a better chance of doing this if they confined their attentions to Latin America, where the U.S.’s anti-Communist strategies were truly disastrous: but even then, its
agonized internal reaction to a string of public embarrassments (truly unprincipled states never blush) proved that it was not a totalitarian power.

It wasn’t and still isn’t. It would be easier to analyse if it were. Trying to analyse America and its
position in the world, we can’t do without the copious literature that is supplied by America itself. Least of all can we do without that literature when it comes to examining
America’s faults, mistakes and crimes: it’s not as if anyone in Europe is going to do a job like Gary Wills or Seymour Hersh. The student in search of a world view can plausibly
read in no other language except the English written in America. Doing so, the student could very easily get the idea that America is the world. But at the source of all that literature lies
the story of the Wise Men like John McCloy, and they had another idea. Standing sadly victorious in the ruins of older civilizations that they understood and valued, they really did want to
bring a complex world back to life, not just to make it over in the image of their own nation. Nor was their grief, and their hope for a better future, confined to Europe. McCloy had an
infuential hand in the July 1945 Potsdam Declaration that offered Japan something less harsh than a fully unconditional surrender. If the Japanese war council had spotted the significant gap
in the wording that left the way open for negotiation about the Emperor’s fate, they might
have accepted the offer, and the atomic bombs need not have been dropped.
After they were dropped and Japan surrendered, U.S. foreign policy towards Japan was predicated entirely on an occupation designed to dismantle itself after the country had recovered.
Whatever the subsequent developments might seem to say to the contrary, at the end of World War II the last thing the American foreign policy elitists had on their minds was a post-war
American empire ruled by force. To misinterpret their essential generosity as an assertion of power is to go beyond cynicism into wilful distortion, by which it becomes impossible to give a
realistic account of America’s actions even when we find them offensive.

An economically stable Europe, with the impetus it can give to
free ideas, is one of the greatest assurances of security and peace we can hope to obtain.

—JOHN J. MCCLOY, MEMO
DRAFTED WITH HENRY STIMSON AT POTSDAM, QUOTED IN
The Wise Men
BY WALTER ISAACSON AND EVEN THOMAS, P.
306

O
NE OF THE
stars of the
group of American diplomats and civil servants that was later to become known as the East Coast foreign policy elite, McCloy had just been driven through the ruins of Berlin, where he saw women
and children pulling apart a dead horse with their bare hands. The McCloy–Stimson memos on the subject of rebuilding Europe with economic aid were a big stimulus to what eventually
happened, but essentially all the members of the East Coast foreign policy elite reached the same conclusion: whatever the putative merits of an isolationist attitude pre-war, a post-war
isolationist attitude was impossible for the United States, and the best way of taking a political initiative in Europe would be to help its devastated nations to recover economically. Nor did
common compassion allow any other course. Some of the elite’s members—certainly Dean Acheson, “Chip” Bohlen and Averell Harriman—thought initially that the Soviet
Union should be among the nations offered help. No members of the elite, not even
George Kennan, favoured a purely military answer to Soviet encroachment, even as the reports
coming out of the Soviet-occupied East European countries became more and more dismaying. Kennan’s famous Long Telegram, sent to Washington from his post in Moscow in March 1946, is
sometimes interpreted that way. At the time it was being read, indeed, disquiet engendered by Stalin’s behaviour in the satellite countries had grown to the point where Kennan’s
emphasis on “containment” was seen as the only theme the telegram had.

But Kennan’s analysis, although distrustful of the USSR’s political intention, never depended on purely
military means to contain it. They scarcely could have contained it, since the United States, at the conclusion of the war, had pretty well disarmed. It is hard to remember at this
distance—mainly because of the success of a long
gauchiste
programme to rewrite history—that the Marshall Plan did not need to be imposed on the
European nations at gunpoint. Nor were there any guns to impose it if it had. It is also hard to remember at this distance that Kennan’s distrust of Stalin’s intentions, as it was
interpreted at the time, would have been understandable even had it been wholly meant. On February 9, 1946, at the Bolshoi Theatre, Stalin made a speech that blamed World War II on the inherent
contradictions of capitalism. Lip service was paid to the “freedom loving” Western allies, but only as a preliminary to the renewed emphasis on the time-honoured bugbear
“capitalist encirclement.” For many of the encircling capitalists, Stalin’s Bolshoi speech had a more dramatic effect than Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech was to have
later on. Churchill’s speech merely confirmed them in the impression that Stalin’s speech had already created. Stalin’s speech itself was merely confirming an impression; the
impression given by the Soviet Union’s unyielding ruthlessness over Poland; the impression that it would allow no concessions to democracy in any territory it saw as falling within its
sphere of influence. Apart from Kennan, who had never believed that “a community of interest” with the Soviets was possible, the foreign policy elite were honourably reluctant to give
up their hopes of cooperation with the Soviet Union, especially on the subject of the atomic bomb. Acheson and Stimson were both for international control, which would have entailed giving the
secret to the Soviet Union. (It was not yet known that the Russians already had the secret.) International atomic energy
control was an aim not ruled out even as the Marshall
Plan idea grew closer to reality. Harriman can be called the father of the Marshall Plan but really it had multiple paternity: almost the whole of the foreign policy elite were in on it.

The only real split was over the question of whether the Russians should participate, and even that split
was less over the if than the how. Even Kennan thought they should be invited in, at least in the first instance. (He thought they would withdraw when they realized that not only would they have
to give up their claim to reparations, they also would be helping to create what they would see as an encirclement by capitalist countries; but at least the invitation would be on the record, so
that the United States would not have to take the blame for dividing Europe.) As it happened, the Russians decided the issue. Molotov could have killed the Marshall Plan by joining it. Instead he
walked out, on Stalin’s instructions. Poland and Czechoslovakia, which both desperately needed economic support in order to recover, were plunged deeper into cold night, and Europe was
divided. It remains tantalizing to wonder what would have happened if America had found a way of imposing its economic generosity on the Soviet Union, but we must remember that Tantalus, tied to
the stake, was never granted that drink. Stalin’s obduracy was the historical fact that defeats imagination. Given his intransigence, no other scenario than armed confrontation was really
possible. The idea that the United States chose to fight the Cold War can be discussed, but only in the context of the reality that it could not have chosen to call it off. The Soviet Union had
been fighting it since Lenin took power. That was what the Comintern propaganda offensive had meant, and all the deeds that lived up to it. The members of the East Coast foreign policy elite can
scarcely be blamed for taking Soviet foreign policy pronouncements at their word.