Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (87 page)

Read Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership Online

Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
3.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Immense controversy arose in the United States and corresponding hopefulness in Europe; Truman started a challenging selling job in the Congress, and a conference was swiftly organized in Paris with the prospective recipients. Stalin had told Molotov to object to any pooling of capital that implied Russian resources being spent in Western Europe, and also to object to the American requirement for a detailed accounting of how American taxpayers’ money was being spent. On this unhopeful note, Molotov stormed out of the conference, denouncing what was officially called the European Recovery Program as a “vicious American scheme for using dollars to buy” influence in Europe. Under pressure from Moscow, all the satellite countries would decline to participate, including Czechoslovakia, which, having not been covered by any of the wartime or postwar conferences, had fallen under a communist-dominated coalition. It remains a mystery that normally loquacious memoirists among the Western leaders, including Churchill, Eisenhower, and Truman, skirted around without touching how the Czechs, at least, fell between the cracks. (Slovakia was certain to be occupied by the Red Army.)
This was another disastrous blunder by Stalin; in pulling out and attacking the U.S. plan, he assured its passage by the Republican-led Congress and painted Soviet Communism as a retrograde, dictatorial empire of brute force and economic stagnation, against the American-led forces of democracy and economic growth. When the international political game evolved from hurling millions of soldiers westward while pursuing chicanery in international conferences and subversion, to the rights and welfare of the war-weary masses of the world, Stalin’s heavy-handed treachery and authoritarianism were exposed and uncompetitive, especially against the collective efforts of the brilliant strategic team that Roosevelt had assembled and that flowered under an equally courageous but less suave and domineering president. The Marshall Plan (Truman typically refused to take the credit for it), as it was soon known, was as brilliant and imaginative a policy as Lend-Lease had been.
It was indicative of the times that the Congress overrode Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, which banned the closed shop and political contributions from unions, required audits of unions and anti-communist loyalty oaths from union leaders, and made unions liable for breaches of contract. On July 25, 1947, the Congress did pass Truman’s comprehensive National Security Act, setting up the Air Force as an independent service, uniting the War and Navy Departments into the Department of Defense, setting up the National Security Council, and enhancing the status of the Central Intelligence Agency. (Navy secretary James V. Forrestal was the first secretary of defense.)
On September 18, 1947, Andrei Vishinsky, Soviet deputy foreign minister, denounced the U.S. government as “warmongers” in the United Nations General Assembly, and on October 5, Moscow announced the creation of the Cominform, successor to the Comintern (Communist International) that Stalin had theoretically discontinued in 1943 as a sop to Roosevelt and Churchill. On November 29, the United States and the Soviet Union pushed through the United Nations a resolution approving the partition of the Palestine Mandate into predominantly Jewish and Arab areas. Britain announced it would withdraw its 50,000 soldiers from Palestine within six months, and pressures immediately arose within and on the United States in particular for and against the creation of a Jewish state. Marshall and Forrestal were strongly opposed, because of the animosity it would cause in the Arab world, and Forrestal emphasized that the United States did not have the military personnel to replace the British in the area, which the Pentagon estimated would require 100,000 men, more than three times what was available.
On February 25, 1948, a coup d’état in Prague installed the Communists and on March 10, Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister, who had been through the Munich betrayal 10 years before, apparently committed suicide, though rumors have abounded ever since that he was murdered by the Communists, and successive subsequent investigations have come to different conclusions. The coup and Masaryk’s death, however it happened, dramatized the steadily rising tension in Europe. On March 17, Truman addressed a joint session of Congress, cited the Soviet Union as a menace to peace which sought the conquest of all Europe, and asked for immediate passage of the Marshall Plan and restoration of the military draft.
The Italian election of April 18 was an unprecedented slanging match between the Christian Democrats led by Alcide De Gasperi and the Communist-dominated Popular Front led by Palmiro Togliatti. There was considerable violence in northern Italy and the Christian Democrats accused the Communists of seeking to seize the nation’s children and turn them into witnesses against their parents in criminal proceedings. The two leading parties were heavily funded by the CIA and the Soviet Union, and Pope Pius XII intervened decisively, implying that a vote for the Popular Front was an act of self-excommunication. (“When you cast your ballot, God sees you; Stalin doesn’t” was the popular formulation.) It was a clear victory for the Christian Democrats, 48.5 percent to 31 percent, and the Socialist Party soon flaked off the coalition with the Communists.
On May 14, the United States recognized the new state of Israel as soon as it was proclaimed, after a rending struggle within the government in which General Marshall said he would vote against Truman in the next election if he went ahead with it. Marshall never again spoke to Clark Clifford, a champion of Israel, Truman’s chief assistant and a future secretary of defense, and one of Washington’s greatest power brokers for 50 years.
On June 11, 1948, Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan presented and had adopted a resolution authorizing military alliances with regional collective-security groups, in furtherance of the United Nations Charter. On June 23, the Western Allied Powers in Berlin enacted currency reforms in West Berlin, contrary to the Soviet ambition to circulate Russian currency throughout the city. The next day Stalin abruptly closed the land access from West Germany to West Berlin. The United States, with full British and French cooperation, began the air supply of the 2.1 million residents of West Berlin. It was well understood that East bloc interception of Western aircraft would be considered an act of war. On June 28, Truman ostentatiously sent two squadrons of B-29s to Germany, which were assumed to be there to execute an atomic attack on Russia if provoked. (This was a ruse, as the aircraft were not equipped to carry atomic bombs, but the Russians never discovered that.)
This was another disastrous error by Stalin, seeming to break his undertakings, threaten war, and strangle the prostrate city of Berlin, in which there were no military targets. And he failed; he was clearly afraid of the power of the United States, and after 321 days, he abandoned the effort and reopened land access to West Berlin from West Germany. The United States had ceased its industrial dismantling of Germany in May 1946, as that policy had never been anything but a sop to Stalin anyway, and henceforth the objective in Germany was to resurrect it as a powerful, democratic ally in the constellation of states determined, under American leadership, to keep the Russians out of Western Europe. The British and American occupation zones were merged administratively on December 2, 1946. And the coordinated policy was the swiftest possible resuscitation of Germany as a democratic, stable, industrial power.
6. THE PEOPLE’S TRIUMPH
 
As the Democratic convention neared, there was great disillusionment with Truman. He had spoken in favor of civil rights for African Americans, which seriously rattled the South, and his hard-line Cold War stance had driven off Henry Wallace and the left; Wallace had publicly criticized Truman and was promptly fired. There was a stampede to draft Eisenhower, who had retired as army chief of staff and was now president of Columbia University. Eisenhower was not interested, but Roosevelt’s ne‘er-do-well sons and liberals Claude Pepper of Florida, Chester Bowles of Connecticut, and Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis; Auto Workers’ leader Walter Reuther; southerners Senator John Sparkman and South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond; and bosses Jake Arvey of Chicago, Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York, and Frank Hague of New Jersey all started screaming for Eisenhower (whom none of them knew, and who had never been a Democrat). Truman was nominated anyway, with Senate Majority Leader Alben W Barkley of Kentucky for vice president, after midnight at Philadelphia on July 15. The event was celebrated by the release of a large number of long-cooped, agitated, and incontinent pigeons, portrayed as doves of peace, including the two that landed on former (and future) Speaker Sam Rayburn’s glabrous head.
138
It was generally assumed that the Republican nominees, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York and Governor Earl Warren of California, would win easily. Humphrey had moved to pass a pro—civil rights resolution, and when Truman finally addressed the convention, he was direct, tough, and feisty, and portrayed the campaign as the underdog, the working people, the small farmer, against the slickers, the privileged in their country clubs, and the ancient enemies of everything he and Roosevelt had done to save the country, in the last 15 years, from the Republicans’ Depression and isolationism. It was an instant reinvigoration, and he ran a very spirited campaign.
Two days later, the “Dixiecrats,” as they called themselves, southern segregationists, nominated Thurmond for president and Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi for vice president, and two weeks later, in the same hall in Philadelphia where the Republicans and the Democrats had met, the Progressive Citizens of America, in the biggest convention of all, nominated Henry Wallace for president, and the “Singing Cowboy” of Idaho, Senator Glen H. Taylor (“Oh Give Me a Home By the Capital Dome”), for vice president. Wallace refused to repudiate his communist support, and his platform opposed the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and the draft, and advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament. Acidulous commentators H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker, and even perennial Socialist candidate Norman Thomas, denounced Wallace as a communist dupe. His candidacy effectively sank at the outset.
Truman embarked on his historic, 22,000-mile “whistle-stop tour” of the country in Roosevelt’s well-traveled railway car, the
Ferdinand Magellan
, on September 17. The polls were unfavorable, but the reception, everywhere in the country, was very positive. Everywhere he sounded the theme of the dauntless underdog, and the Dewey campaign responded with torpid overconfidence. The president generally began: “I’m Harry Truman, I work for the government, and I’m trying to keep my job.” The crowds grew and called out “Give ’em hell, Harry,” and he did. He was greeted by over a million people in New York on October 29. Closing polls showed Truman had narrowed Dewey’s lead to five points, and the commentariat—Alistair Cooke, Walter Lippmann, Drew Pearson, Marquis Childs, the Alsops, and H.V. Kaltenborn—were, as usual, all chanting the conventional wisdom: that Truman would lose badly.
The 1948 election is generally reckoned the greatest electoral upset in American history: Truman took 24.2 million votes, 49.6 percent of the total, and 303 electoral votes, to Dewey’s 21.99 million votes, 45.1 percent of the total, and 189 electoral votes, to Thurmond’s 1.18 million votes, 2.4 percent of the vote, and 39 electoral votes, and Wallace’s 1.16 million votes, 2.4 percent, and no electoral votes. Truman won Ohio, Illinois, and California by a total of just 57,000 votes, and if any two of those states had gone to Dewey, Thurmond could have forced the vote to the House of Representatives (where the Democrats were again in control and Rayburn assumedly could have saved the election for Truman). General Marshall, who with uncharacteristic pique had threatened not to vote for Truman over his support of Israel, wrote him: “You have put over the greatest one-man fight in American history.” This was almost certainly true and the world had now to take note of a determined, sage, and very considerable reelected president. Harry Truman was assured of a challenging second term, but probably would not have wished it any other way.
7. THE FALL OF CHINA
 
The new term opened very smoothly. General George C. Marshall, facing a kidney operation, retired, and was replaced as secretary of state by the very experienced and capable Dean G. Acheson. It was clear that Truman had outwitted Stalin with the Berlin airlift, which, when the blockade was lifted on May 12, 1949, had been broken by nearly 278,000 flights bearing 2.33 million tons of supplies. On April 4, what became the most successful alliance in world history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was launched. The United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Iceland, Portugal, and Norway initially joined in a pact that an attack upon one was an attack upon all. The subsequent clause left some liberty about what steps would be taken by each member in response to such attack, but it was effectively, a United States military guarantee for the other countries. In 1952, Greece and Turkey would join, and in 1955, the fate that Stalin had feared, West Germany would join. Many other countries followed.
As time passed, the United States would station 300,000 men of their armed forces in Western Europe, and the revival of Western European prosperity and purposefulness would steadily build a formidable defense against any assault from the Red Army, backed by the entire worldwide arsenal of the United States, nuclear and conventional. Roosevelt’s policy of American engagement in Europe and the Far East, and the containment policy originally envisioned as the response to Soviet bad faith by George Kennan, took shape and gained strength, and the domestic Communist parties in Western Europe failed to dislodge the democratic parties.

Other books

American Bad Boy: A Military Romance by Eddie Cleveland, Sadie Black
Remember this Titan by Steve Sullivan
Academ's Fury by Jim Butcher
Wartorn: Resurrection by Robert Asprin, Eric Del Carlo
The Coil by Gilbert, L. A.
Hot in Here by Sophie Renwick
Forbidden Fantasies by Jodie Griffin