Cultural Amnesia (73 page)

Nor can they be blamed for subsequent military developments in the European area. A more powerful American military
presence was never something that the elitists wanted. Exhausted, like most Americans, after years of tension, they didn’t want to maintain the military presence they already had. It was
the European countries who wanted the American presence, so that the Soviets could never start something against them without killing Americans. The effective atomic force of the United States in
Europe in 1946 was nil. Later on, after a scraping
of the barrel, a single squadron of B-29s arrived, but they could not have delivered an atomic bomb even if it had been
divided among them. From the beginning, Europe was an economic battlefield, and remained that way even as it filled up with weapons over the course of decades. When trying to decide what kind of
economic battle it was, it helps to remember that the argument stressing American economic imperialism is not very good. As in the case of Japan, America did less to penetrate foreign markets
than to finance foreign competitors. But there can be no question about the military battle: there wasn’t one. From the Berlin airlift until the arms race passed its danger
point—which was the point
before
mutual destruction was assured—all the military developments were logical. Western satirists had fun mocking
the gung-ho language from the American side of the face-off (since most of the satirists were American themselves, few of them had any idea of what the Soviets sounded like when
they
were being gung-ho) but the idea that America’s security state grew according to the principle of some sinister initial plan was a fiction in the minds of
novelists. It grew, but it grew like Little Topsy. The real danger zone was never Europe, where the two main antagonists were debarred from fighting each other directly. The danger zone was
everywhere else, and on this point the East Coast foreign policy elite really was vulnerable to criticism. It had been since the Marshall Plan was formulated, because there was no means of
getting the Marshall Plan through Congress without the aid of a Red scare.

The elite had enviable access to the quality press. Acheson leaked information to James Reston, Chip Bohlen to Joe Alsop,
James Forrestal to Walter Lippmann: this was an old boy network that left the United Kingdom’s looking atomized. The elite had all been to the same prep schools and colleges and they had
large influence in the corridors of Washington. But the United States is a democracy, the separation of powers is a fact, and a measure the size of the Marshall Plan could not be pushed through
without the consent of Congress, in which, finally, the voice of the people is the voice of God. If Congress had never needed to be persuaded to finance aid to Greece and Turkey, America could
have done without the rhetorical commitment to anti-communism which was mandatory from thence forward. (Here lies the fallacy in Gore Vidal’s otherwise persuasive argument that in the
Security
State the American people are not consulted: the American foreign policy measure that troubles us most was launched on a wave of demagogic hot air, for no other
reason except to secure the allegiance of the people.) The rhetoric opened the way for the suppurating reality of the junior senator from Wisconsin. Though the sum total of injustices brought
about by Joe McCarthy in his whole madcap career scarcely amounted to a single day’s depredations in Bulgaria, those who disliked America were given reason for their dislike,
and—worse—those with reason to be grateful were given an excuse to express the resentment that the person helped to his feet always feels. Worse still, the domino theory came into
operation.

Kennan had been perfectly right about the Kremlin’s intention of subverting democratic government anywhere it could
be reached: the Kremlin had never had any other intention, nor—to give it points for honesty—had it ever tried to disguise its aim. But it was a big and presumptuous step to assume
that if communism became victorious in any country the countries next door would be toppled by the shock. The step once taken, the temptation was very large to make retaliation pre-emptive,
cooperating with incumbent authorities, however brutal, against left-wing protest however justified. What François Furet was later so usefully to deplore as America’s “limited
inventory of evil” came fatally into play. The United States went to war against socialism in all its forms. In Europe it could hardly eliminate social democrat governments once they had
been constituted. But in Iran in 1953 it could certainly cancel an attempt to nationalize the oil fields, and in Guatemala in 1954 it could certainly influence an election. From Guatemala to the
debacle in Vietnam was a direct road. Bob Woodward tells the story of the CIA’s part in this sad process in his lumpily written but vitally informative book
Veil
. But we need Isaacson and Thomas’s book to face the full tragedy of the East Coast foreign policy elite’s role in putting the country they had served
so well on the path to a disaster. Acheson, in particular, could be seen as a figure of Greek tragedy if the true tragic figures were not to be found among thousands of dead soldiers, murdered
peasants, and burnt children. But Acheson had been a hawk since long before the first fateful steps down the jungle path into Vietnam. The time when he could envisage cooperating with the
Russians was far in the past, at the other end of a long active
life. It had been, however, a real desire. What made it impossible was the intractable fact that the Soviet
Union was not under the control of the United States.

During the Cold War, a side effect of the antipathy of many Western intellectuals towards U.S. foreign
policy, and their distrust of its physical power, was the belief that the United States could change the world in any way it liked. The only brand of American imperialism to which that belief
even remotely applies is cultural imperialism. In the long term, U.S. cultural imperialism, wherever in the world it is brought to bear, is bound to be influential. But in the short term, for a
smaller country to suppose that it can do nothing to resist U.S. cultural imperialism is a policy of despair, and equally it is a policy of arrogance for us to suppose such a thing on the small
country’s behalf. When the Japanese army marched into Singapore and ended the period of British dominance in Southeast Asia, the film showing at the fanciest cinema in the city was
The Philadelphia Story
. In her novel
In the Eye of the Sun
, Ahdaf Soueif tells us what everyone in Egypt was watching
on television on the evening of the Six Day War in 1967. It was
Peyton Place
. But America was not influencing the decisions of the Japanese army, and in the
region of the eastern Mediterranean it has been a continuous lapse on the part of intellectuals in the Arab countries to think that Israel’s foreign policy is exclusively an American
creation. One particularly deleterious consequence of that last assumption is that the Arab nations might fail to realize that Israel, rather than be dissolved as a state, and whatever the United
States might think desirable, would rather bring the world to an end. Those who credit the United States with a monopoly of powers for working mischief are making the same mistake as those who
credit it with a monopoly of powers for doing good. Both sides of the assumption arise from the historical accident that America emerged relatively wealthy from a war that reduced Europe and
Japan to poverty for at least a generation, while the Soviet Union, except in the military sense, had been reduced to poverty from its inception and couldn’t recover from it unless it
changed its ways.

The East Coast foreign policy elite had large powers of discretion in uniquely favourable circumstances, at a time when
their initiatives could palpably alter the world. They were cultivated men, many of
them of formidable intellectual and scholarly prowess: they did an impressive job of
keeping their heads. But it was inevitable that they should fall prey to the sin of pride, which is at its most insidious when dressed as destiny. As I write, the elite is in its last phase,
where it begins to forget the car keys through the effort of remembering the door keys. My mentor Gore Vidal is a case in point. He has forgotten that he was born and bred as a member of the very
elite whose evil deeds he castigates in his brilliantly written polemics. The way he remembers it, the elite was even more powerful than it was in reality. In 2001 he published an article in the
TLS
by which he managed to suggest that the foreign policy of the United States tricked the Japanese Empire into a war in the Pacific. With some reluctance
I tried to rebut that contention in the paper’s letters column. Clearly he took exception to a pupil’s rounding on him. But as an Australian I had a good reason. Though
Australia’s own foreign policy sometimes tries to give the impression that the country’s future is bound up with the wholesale burgeoning of the region called the Pacific Rim, this
glittering dream could not even be dreamed unless in the presence of a seldom spoken-of reality—the reality of a liberal democratic Japan. In view of this indispensable condition, nothing
should be done to favour the belief of Japan’s ever-hopeful right wing that it was tricked out of military power by the machinations of Washington. Japan went to war on its own initiative.
The reasons went far enough back to look inevitable, but when it came to the point, the Japanese government, such as it was at the time, could have done something else. The same is rarely untrue
anywhere in the world. It would help if the world’s very large supply of anti-American commentators could decide on which America we are supposed to be in thrall to: the Machiavellian
America that can manipulate any country’s destiny, or the naïve America that can’t find it on the map. While we’re waiting for the decision, it might help if we could
realize the magnitude of the fix that America got us out of in 1945, and ask ourselves why we expect a people rich and confident enough to do that to be sensitive as well. Power is bound to sound
naïve, because it doesn’t spot the bitter nuances of feeling helpless. The East Coast foreign policy elite were as bright as could be. In their young manhood, they had seen a lot of
the world in which America,
they correctly guessed, was bound to play a big part, although not even they could guess how big. They had the mental resources to sound as
sophisticated as Talleyrand and Metternich put together. If, in retrospect, they look like big, clumsy children—well, they didn’t yet know what it was like not to get their way.

ZINKA MILANOV

Zinka Milanov was born Mira Teresa Zinka in Zagreb in 1906, and died in New York City in 1989,
after a long career as one of the Metropolitan Opera’s most beloved sopranos. When she retired from the stage in 1968 she had sung a full twenty-nine seasons in New York, to which she
had migrated from Europe at the end of what she later called her “lucky year” of 1937. After a preparatory decade of hard work in the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak opera houses, her
lucky year had included her debut in Vienna, starring in
Aida
for Bruno Walter. Walter’s recommendation got her an audition with Toscanini for the
Verdi
Requiem
in Salzburg, but her American career was already under way, because she had a contract with the Met in her pocket. She made her New York
debut in December 1937, three months before the
Anschluß.
A whole political study can be made about what happened to European musicians and
singers in the Nazi era, but we should not ignore that America had its attractions even before the event: a striking instance of the power of American cultural imperialism, which, even in the
high arts, already shaped, from the angle of consumption, the world of classical music as it shaped the world of painting. (That the angle of consumption would eventually determine
the angle of production was not yet evident.) All of them made for American labels, Milanov’s recordings date from the second part of her career—she was already
forty before she stepped into a studio—but they can be recommended as dazzling events for anyone making a start on grand opera. A born mezzo who added her top notes later, she had a
voice as rich as blackberry juice in the middle, with champagne sparkling in the upper register. Beginning listeners should avoid boxed sets of entire operas, in my opinion: it is too easy to
nod off before the fireworks start. The thing to go for is what used to be called “highlights” records. Milanov singing the showstoppers from
Tosca
(with Jussi Bjoerling) or
Il Trovatore
(with Jan Peerce) should be enough to get anyone addicted to opera straight
away. Because singers lead very physical lives, what they have to say about the art they practise tends to be refreshingly down-to-earth. Zinka Milanov said something which, if quoted at the
right moment, can come in handy for interrupting the momentum of anybody who is dragging too much technical information into the discussion.