From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (101 page)

Through the rest of 1947, U.S. officials hammered out the details of a major new aid program. They insisted that the Europeans take the initiative in planning but set firm guidelines for them to follow. The essential goal was to spark economic recovery and relieve the vast human suffering. But the administration also sought to use U.S. aid to check an alarming leftward drift in European politics. Communists were to be excluded from recipient governments and socialist tendencies in domestic planning curbed. Americans pushed for balanced budgets, convertible currencies, and guarantees for U.S. trade where dollars were used for purchases. They required Britain and France to accept a reindustrialized Germany and France to abandon plans to detach the Ruhr, in effect substituting for a unified Germany a combined Western zone integrated into the rest of Europe. To promote greater efficiency and check ancient and destructive tendencies toward narrow nationalism, they designed a "creative peace" that would integrate the Western European economies and Britain and promote multilateral trade. They pushed the Europeans to institute mixed, collaborative systems such as the United States had created through the New Deal, in the words of one cynical Briton, "an integrated Europe looking like the United States of America—God's own country."
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Not eager for Soviet participation but anxious to avoid responsibility for the division of Europe, the administration invited Moscow to join but set terms it believed Stalin could not accept. Some Americans even hoped that a powerful, reintegrated Western Europe might help split off Eastern Europe from its Soviet masters.

The Marshall Plan was not an easy sell at home. The amount proposed—$25 billion—and the multiyear authorizations were without precedent.
Many Americans fretted that such expenditures would fuel an already insidious inflation. Critics from the right loudly protested a U.S.-funded European New Deal, from the left a "Martial Plan" that would irreparably divide Europe. The administration shrewdly attached Marshall's name to the program to minimize partisan attacks, but in an election year it was impossible to avoid politics. Over vigorous administration objections, Republicans insisted that aid also go to Chiang Kai-shek's embattled government in China, then losing its civil war with the Communists. A Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, along with the alleged suicide—possibly murder—of popular Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, evoked terrifying memories of Hitler's conquest of that same country a decade before, generating popular support for the program. With official backing, the Committee for the Marshall Plan, modeled on the prewar Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, mounted a massive "public education" program. Composed of a bipartisan group of top leaders from business, labor, and academia, the committee sent out more than 1.25 million reprints of articles, organized petitions, sponsored radio broadcasts, and lobbied Congress. "There was never such propaganda in the whole history of the nation," one critic complained.
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The administration also scaled back the amount and reluctantly agreed to assist Chiang. Congress passed the legislation in April 1948, a $6 billion appropriation in June.

The United States did not replicate itself among the economies of Western Europe, as some U.S. officials had hoped. The Europeans were dependent but by no means powerless. While welcoming America's aid and even advice, they resisted the imposition of its ways. The result was a mixed economic system similar to that of the United States but far from identical. The Americans could not establish the type of France they preferred.
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While moving closer to Europe, Britain clung to its special relationship with the United States. It also held on to the pound sterling and even secured a U.S. commitment to back it. Western Europe and Britain were thus no more than "half-Americanized."
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European revisionist historians have correctly pointed out that the Marshall Plan was not by itself responsible for Europe's dramatic postwar recovery, as Americans often assume, but they err in suggesting that it was not even an important factor. In fact, U.S. aid, along with the massive
spending by the United States and its allies for the Korean War, provided the indispensable margin that made possible European recovery.
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Between 1948 and 1952, the Marshall Plan furnished $13 billion in economic assistance. United States funds performed a dazzling array of tasks, helping to rebuild Italy's Fiat automobile plant, modernizing mines in Turkey, and enabling Greek farmers to purchase Missouri mules. The Marshall Plan provided the capital and imports essential to European recovery without sparking inflation. The import of American methods helped improve Western European budgeting and economic planning. By 1952, industrial productivity shot up to more than 35 percent over 1938 levels, agricultural production by 11 percent. Aid from the United States helped stabilize currencies, liberalize and stimulate trade, and promote prosperity. It started the process of integration that led to the Common Market and ultimately the European Union. Where possible, Europeans had to use U.S. funds to purchase American supplies, boosting exports and promoting prosperity at home. For Europeans and Britons, the Marshall Plan provided a huge psychological boost and restored hope and optimism. It helped to resolve the German problem by promoting reindustrialization and integration into Europe in ways acceptable to France, thus mitigating a bitter conflict dating to the late nineteenth century. It also solidified the shaky European governments against Communism, thereby reducing opportunities for Soviet expansion into Western Europe. The Marshall Plan was the one of the United States' most successful twentieth-century initiatives.
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The United States did not rely exclusively on economic assistance to contain Communism in Western Europe. Exporters pushed the distribution of such things as films and Coca-Cola—"the essence of capitalism in every bottle"—to promote the American way of life, provoking in a dependent and therefore especially hypersensitive France charges of "Coca-colonization."
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Claiming to be the "spearhead of the democratic world," the American Federation of Labor opened a European office in late 1945.
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Sometimes working with the CIA and the State Department, it set out to combat radicalism in European trade unions. In France, the AFL and the International Ladies' Garment Workers
Union provided to conservative unions moral support, advice, and substantial money, some of it furnished by the U.S. government and corporations. The French accepted the money and rejected the advice. The AFL's influence remained limited. It had much greater success in Germany, where, with government support, it provided urgently needed funds and relief assistance to help conservative unions gain control of the West German labor movement.
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The Truman administration employed many of its new national security mechanisms, including a CIA covert operation, to prevent a Communist victory in the crucial Italian elections of 1948. The threat seemed immediate and urgent, and there was talk of a possible civil war and even Soviet and U.S. military intervention. The United States employed carrot and stick. Top officials publicly threatened to cut off aid should the Communists win. Immigration visas were denied to Communists, and U.S. party members were threatened with deportation, endangering the livelihood of numerous Italians who depended on support from relatives in the United States. The administration also provided generous interim aid before the Marshall Plan went into operation, gave Italy twenty-nine merchant ships, and furnished arms to the Christian Democratic government. With firm U.S. backing, the Vatican mobilized Catholics to vote and excommunicated some Communists. The Voice of America broadcast a steady stream of propaganda. Films such as the anti-Soviet satire
Ninotchka
were distributed to Italian viewers. Prominent Italian Americans such as boxer Rocky Graziano and leading entertainers such as Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore affirmed support for a democratic Italy. Italian Americans urged relatives in Italy to vote Christian Democratic. In its first major covert operation, the CIA channeled huge sums of money to the Christian Democrats for their newspaper and for electioneering purposes. The party won a resounding victory, saving Italy from Communism, bolstering other Western European governments, and boosting Truman's stature among Italian Americans in an election year. Having solidified their power, on the other hand, the Christian Democrats refused to institute reforms Americans deemed essential for Italian democracy. Success in Italy, the result of many factors, also produced inflated faith in the utility of covert operations, leading to other, more questionable ventures.
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Early challenges to Soviet control of Eastern Europe were far less successful. A policy of containment implied U.S. acquiescence in Moscow's sphere of influence, but from the onset of the Cold War the Truman administration thought in terms of rollback. Kennan proposed in 1947 a radical program of political warfare using sabotage, guerrilla operations, and propaganda activities to stir up rebellion in Soviet bloc countries and perhaps even the USSR itself. At least, he reasoned, such operations might have nuisance value. A top-secret agency innocuously titled the Office of Policy Coordination took charge of Operation Rollback. It dropped refugees and displaced persons from Eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain by plane and ship. The results were generally disastrous. Soviet agents infiltrated training camps and were well informed about the operations. Some of the infiltrators were betrayed by British spies. Most were easily captured, many executed. Kennan later conceded that Operation Rollback was "the greatest mistake I ever made."
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The dramatic U.S. initiatives of 1947–48 hardened the division of Europe. Stalin at first displayed interest in the Marshall Plan, sending Molotov to a meeting in Paris and permitting Eastern European leaders to attend. Once it was clear that the terms were unacceptable and even threatening, especially the revival of Germany and the possibility that Eastern Europe might be drawn into the western economic orbit, the Soviet dictator abruptly changed course. Increasingly certain that U.S. policies were designed to undermine Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, he rejected the Marshall Plan, abandoned further efforts to negotiate with the West, and cracked down on his sphere of influence. In the summer of 1947, the Soviet Union "negotiated" a series of bilateral trade treaties with Eastern European nations collectively known as the Molotov Plan. In September, representatives gathered in Poland and established the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) to enforce ideological purity. In words strikingly similar to those of the Truman Doctrine, Stalin's representative Andrei Zhdanov spoke of a world divided into two camps. From this point, Stalin refused to tolerate diversity within his sphere, insisting upon pro-Soviet governments that tailored their policies to his specifications. Through rigged elections, Communists took over in Hungary in late 1947. The Czech coup followed in early 1948. An increasingly paranoid Stalin and his henchmen in the East European satellites used purges, show trials, forced labor, and exile to eliminate possible enemies and squelch dissent.
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The Soviet crackdown

initiated forty years of brutal repression in Eastern Europe. The divided Europe that both sides had declaimed about rhetorically was becoming reality.

The most serious crisis of the early Cold War soon followed. Alarmed at the prospect of a reindustrialized West Germany under Allied control, Stalin launched a risky gamble to restore movement toward a unified Germany or drive the West from its Berlin enclave and solidify Soviet
control over East Germany. When U.S. military commander Gen. Lucius Clay announced plans for currency reform in the Western occupation zones, a major step toward a West German state, nervous Soviet occupation authorities in July 1948 sealed access to the city by highway, rail, and water.

The Berlin Blockade posed a major challenge for the United States and its allies. They correctly perceived that Stalin did not want war, but they also recognized that the blockade created a volatile situation in which the slightest misstep could provoke conflict. Certain that the Allied position in West Berlin was militarily indefensible, some U.S. officials pondered the possibility of withdrawal. Others insisted that the United States could not abandon Berlin without undermining the confidence of Western Europeans—a "Munich of 1948," warned diplomat Robert Murphy.
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Previously more open to negotiations with the Soviets than Washington, Clay now urged sending an armed convoy through East Germany to West Berlin.

Truman and Marshall chose a less risky course, "unprovocative" but "firm," in Marshall's words.
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Drawing on Army Air Force experience carrying supplies over the Himalayas to China in World War II and a mini-airlift during a Soviet "baby-blockade" of West Berlin just months before, they turned to air power to maintain the Western position in Berlin and sustain its beleaguered people. It was the sort of thing Americans do best, a stroke of genius. The United States backed up the airlift by dispatching two squadrons of B-29 Superfortress bombers to Germany and Britain, signaling to the Soviets the danger of any escalation of the crisis. For eleven months in what was called Operation Vittles, fleets of C-47 Skytrain and C-54 Skymaster transports flew 250 missions a day around the clock, moving an average 2,500 tons of food, fuel, raw materials, and finished goods daily into Berlin to feed and heat two million people and maintain some semblance of a functioning economy. At the height of the blockade, planes landed every forty-five seconds. Some of the pilots who had bombed Berlin during the war now saved it. The Soviets also handled the situation delicately, refusing to challenge U.S. aircraft and, reflecting their contradictory goals, allowing huge gaps in the blockade that helped Berlin survive. Stalin's gamble proved a major blunder.
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America won German
gratitude for its firm response, and Truman earned crucial accolades at home in an election year. German anger undermined already slim Soviet hopes of heading off Western plans for a divided nation. Recognizing that the blockade had been counterproductive, Stalin in the spring of 1949 backed down. Originally, he had insisted that he would not drop the blockade until the United States and its allies scrapped plans to rebuild West Germany. By the time he gave in, West Germany was near reality. A remarkable indication of Western military and economic power and political will, the Berlin airlift also sealed the division of Europe that would mark the Cold War.
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