Although Acheson would make clear at his confirmation hearings that his assistant had been Alger’s brother, Donald, who was then a law partner, and that testimony by former assistant secretary of state Adolph Berle before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his ties to Alger Hiss was inaccurate, the Senate committee insisted on publishing a statement emphasizing Acheson’s anticommunism. Acheson, who had been an architect of Truman’s Cold War opposition to postwar Soviet aggression, was made to reaffirm his hostility to Communist ideology: “It is my view that communism as a doctrine is economically fatal to a free society and to human rights and fundamental freedom. Communism as an aggressive factor in world conquest is fatal to independent governments and to free peoples,” Acheson was quoted as telling the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
It was an exercise in political theater propelled by the growing national fear of Communist subversion that the most patriotic and consistent anti-Communist members of the government had to deny any connection to Stalin. Everyone in the Politburo must have taken satisfaction and hope for their cause from the idea that Americans distrusted officials as outspokenly anti-Communist as Dean Acheson, who some on the right accused of being a Soviet spy. It told the Kremlin that millions of Americans doubted the capacity of their government to stand up to the Communist challenge.
On taking office, Acheson confronted a world beset by troubles and dangers. Closest to home, Latin America, the neglected stepchild of U.S. foreign policy, seethed, he said, with “an explosive population, stagnant economy, archaic society, primitive politics, massive ignorance, illiteracy, and poverty.” Acheson believed that conditions in Central and South America and the Caribbean were an invitation to Communist takeovers.
Likewise, a Chinese civil war that threatened to replace a pro-American Nationalist regime with a hostile Communist one, joined with anticolonial revolutions against Dutch and French rule in Indonesia and Indochina, seemed likely breeding grounds for Soviet influence. North Africa, where French control in Algeria seemed equally vulnerable to collapse, was another worry for Washington. The competition for hearts and minds in emerging nations raised fears of long-term defeat for the West. The outlook, except in Europe, Acheson recalled, was “one of deterioration and gloom.”
The irony is that the Truman administration’s principal anti-Communist initiative came not in Latin America or Asia or Africa but in Europe, where the democracies were in the ascendancy. True, Truman proposed Point Four, a major program for technological assistance to developing countries—helping suffering peoples by giving them the know-how to increase food production, shelter, and energy that could “lighten their burdens.” But the program never gained significant traction because, as its intended recipients declared, what was most needed in Third World nations was not technological instruction but capital to build infrastructure. Western leaders disputed this conviction, arguing that without “technological and managerial competence,” capital infusions would fall short of expectations. But whatever the superior formula for promoting advance in the Third World, Washington’s principal effort to combat communism was a European defensive alliance.
It was the least effective way to defend the West against Communist gains. But the mindset in Western Europe and the United States was fixed on building military might against Soviet aggression. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was the product of outsize fears of Russia and Germany in France, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States. Never mind that U.S. troops remained as an occupying force in West Germany, with no suggestion that they would be withdrawn at any time in the foreseeable future—a deterrent to any Soviet plans to expand its control westward or to any likelihood that an emerging West German state would pose a threat to its neighbors in the West or farther to the East.
But governments everywhere were held fast by false analogies with the past. America’s isolationist history made its current allies fearful that public opinion in the United States might force a sudden withdrawal from Europe and leave Germany’s former victims vulnerable to another round of attack by that country’s virulent nationalist forces. Similarly, leaders in the West saw Stalin as another Hitler, who burned with ambition to conquer all of Europe in order to create a thousand-year Communist empire. Stalin may well have yearned to impose communism on all of Europe, but the backwardness of the Soviet economy and the limits of its capacity to extend its control beyond Eastern Europe made any such wish an unrealizable dream.
Moreover, if Stalin were another Hitler, he was a much more cautious aggressor. In the first four months of 1949, as the NATO treaty moved to completion, Stalin signaled his willingness to end the Berlin blockade, which in fact occurred in May. It was a prelude to another Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in Paris to discuss differences over Germany and Berlin in particular. Stalin’s back-down on Berlin was seen not as an indication that he was loath to risk war with the West, but as a reason to believe that the Allies had learned how to deal with a ruthless dictator: firm action, including a readiness to take up arms, as demonstrated by the airlift and the emerging NATO alliance, were the proper answers to Soviet aggressors intent on exploiting any sign of weakness. A more rational calculation in Europe’s Western capitals would have been: Stalin feared war with a nuclear-armed United States and was acting not out of aggressive ambition to roll his tanks into their countries but from fear of a revived Germany, which would use NATO to avenge its defeat in World War II.
The great majority of Americans made their own miscalculations about what would best serve the country’s national security. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans favored NATO, the first offensive-defensive alliance in U.S. history since the agreement with France in 1778. Although most supporters of the pact believed it was strictly for defensive purposes, they saw this U.S. military commitment as a belated effort to do what they should have done in the 1930s—join Britain and France in an alliance that might have prevented the outbreak of World War II.
Without NATO, as Kennan believed, the Warsaw Pact was unlikely, and massive economic resources could have been available for more productive purposes. But spending money on combating potential Communist threats elsewhere than Europe did not have much appeal. Setting up a military alliance that directly confronted Soviet power in Eastern Europe had far greater attraction than countering potential Communist subversion in the Third World. Most Americans could identify more comfortably with combating the Communist threat in Europe, where most of their ancestors had lived, than in Asia or Africa, which seemed remote. A Communist regime in North Africa or South or Southeast Asia, while unwelcome, seemed less threatening than one in Paris, Rome, or Berlin, however unlikely that might be without a military alliance.
Despite the receptivity to leadership of NATO, the U.S. Congress was less enthusiastic about giving substance to the commitment by appropriating the billion-plus dollars needed to build the alliance’s military muscle. At least, that was so until news of a Soviet atomic bomb test arrived in September 1949, sending a chill of fear through the U.S. political establishment that spurred agreement on finding the money to fund a military assistance program.
After Potsdam, Stalin had made the bomb’s development his highest military priority. It was named “Task Number One,” and Stalin told the lead scientist, “If a child doesn’t cry, the mother does not know what she needs. Ask for whatever you like. You won’t be refused.” Between 330,000 and 460,000 people were assigned to the project, including 10,000 technicians. Although the scientists were given special treatment, living well above the standard of the average Soviet citizen, they operated in an atmosphere of terror enforced by Lavrenty Beria, who told one manager, “You’re a good worker, but if you’d served six years in the camps, you’d work even better.” When one scientist had the nerve to tell Beria that his work might improve if he were free, Beria replied: “Certainly. But it would be risky. The traffic in the streets is crazy and you might get run over.”
Beria could
be even more threatening: “Don’t forget we’ve plenty of room in our prisons,” he told members of the production team. It was more a verbal spur to keep everyone in line than a prelude to punishment. His advice to Stalin about complaints from the scientists: “Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.” When the bomb was tested successfully, Beria was ecstatic, menacingly declaring, “It would have been a great misfortune if this hadn’t worked out.”
Although Truman and Acheson were more than willing to use the Soviet A-bomb test to prod the Congress into passing a military appropriations bill, the president was reluctant to announce the Soviet achievement. Moscow’s nuclear capacity seemed too likely to stir anxieties in Europe and America, and intensify accusations about Soviet agents stealing atomic secrets from Democratic administrations infiltrated by Communist sympathizers. How otherwise could Moscow have built the bomb more quickly than anyone in the West anticipated? When Truman was warned that news of the Soviet A-test would leak regardless of what he did and could undermine public confidence in him, he announced the Soviet success. The public did not overreact to the information. In the fall of 1949, a majority of Americans did not believe that the Soviet bomb would significantly change international affairs.
Few in either the Soviet Union or the United States saw Russia’s greater armed might as increasing the likelihood of a third world war. The accepted Soviet wisdom was that the capitalist countries, locked in competition for international economic resources, would inevitably fight each other. Reluctant to further unite the West against the Communist East, Stalin and the Soviet press issued reassuring statements of peaceful intent about its nuclear capacity. Moreover, Stalin privately expressed the belief that an atomic war would run counter to what “people” would allow. He told one of his courtiers, “If war broke out, the use of A-bombs would depend on Trumans and Hitlers being in power. The people won’t allow such people to be in power. Atomic weapons can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world.” By lifting the Berlin blockade, Stalin hoped to leave the “natural” fissures in the West more room to grow. He was confident that eventually Britain and France, as well as a resurrected Germany, would rise up in competition with the United States and fight another “capitalist war.”
Moscow’s warnings of America’s war preparations and devotion to a showdown with the East were meant less to prepare Soviet citizens for a military conflict with the United States than to entice Westerners to support a pro-Soviet peace movement. A World Peace Congress representing 600 million peace advocates was part of a Moscow campaign to encourage antiwar activism in capitalist countries that might limit defense budgets and inhibit military buildups in response to Soviet efforts to outdo the West in an arms race.
Few in the West took Soviet propaganda at face value. Stalin’s speculation on a war among the capitalists—like Soviet boasts about inventing the telephone, air flight, and the radio, and claims to higher living standards than those in the West—was the sort of nonsense that made people outside the Eastern bloc dismiss communism as a crackpot ideology. Stalin registered on most people in the democracies as a cautious Hitler—a power-hungry dictator ready to exploit any show of weakness, but intimidated by America’s greater might and unwillingness to appease him.
Although Moscow now had the bomb, Americans remained confident that the United States continued to enjoy military advantages: more and bigger bombs in its arsenal and the new NATO alliance. Nonetheless, Americans were divided on what made greatest sense in dealing with the Communist threat. Some favored a war while the United States held a military edge that seemed to promise a quick and relatively inexpensive victory. Others preferred clandestine action that could destabilize and subvert communism outside of Russia as a prescription for destroying the Soviet empire and eventually bringing down the Soviet Union itself. Yet others believed that Russian communism was so economically unproductive that it would self-destruct in time, and that the best strategy was to reach an accommodation with Moscow by creating a neutral zone in Central and Eastern Europe.
It is remarkable how much distorted thinking dominated the governments and populations of the two most important powers in the postwar world. The Soviet belief that capitalist competition would inevitably produce war between the Western democracies was as gross a distortion of reality as the German belief in Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich.
Americans had good reason to assume implacable hostility toward the West from Moscow. But the conviction that a buildup of military might was the most vital element in restraining the Soviets from running roughshod over Western Europe was a miscalculation that did more to extend the Cold War than to shorten and end it.
In May 1949, when the Council of Foreign Ministers met in Paris—the price the Allies had agreed to for an end to the Soviet blockade of Berlin—it quickly became clear that neither side was ready to concede anything on its basic positions about Germany. The West remained eager to reestablish a self-governing and prosperous Germany among the family of nations, and the Soviets aimed to keep Germany divided and weak as a defense against another German drive to the east in search of renewed European dominance.
Yet despite Soviet intransigence, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Vishinsky, a slim, slight man, unlike the heavyset Soviet officials and secret police agents who surrounded him, came across to Acheson as not a skilled, worldly diplomat but a dull mechanical bureaucrat, who tediously espoused predictable Communist propaganda. British foreign minister Bevin opposed evening meetings because, he said, Vishinsky’s long-winded speeches put him to sleep. Vishinsky observed that Bevin had the habit of sleeping during afternoon sessions. Unembarrassed, Bevin recommended it as a useful device for getting through the meetings, in which both sides talked past one another.
The meeting in Paris convinced Acheson that the Marshall Plan had revived Western European confidence and optimism. By contrast, the Soviet pronouncements on Germany convinced Acheson that Moscow had moved “from an offensive attitude in 1947 to a defensive one in 1949”—a conclusion that seemed to suggest that the NATO pact was superfluous.
No one in Washington or in any of the other Western capitals took strong issue with the prevailing wisdom of what must be done to secure the democracies against the Soviet danger—except George Kennan. In 1946–47, his brilliance as an analyst of Soviet behavior and how the West could limit further expansion of postwar Soviet power was recognized and rewarded by his appointment to the directorship of the State Department’s newly created Policy Planning staff. By 1949, however, he had become something of an outsider—an independent thinker who proposed long-term policies for Germany and Europe that were at variance with the thinking of most policymakers, including Secretary of State Acheson, as sensible means of guarding the West from the Communist menace.
Kennan described himself as trying “to look ten to twenty years into the future. My friends in Washington, London, Paris, and The Hague were thinking of the problems we had immediately before us…. I did not believe in the reality of a Soviet military threat to Western Europe…. I was concerned not so much to provide protection against the possibility of such an attack … as to facilitate the retirement of Soviet forces, and with them dominant Soviet political influence, to limits closer to the traditional boundaries of the Russian state. My friends, less concerned about the division of Europe, and indeed in many instances quite content with it, were thinking of how to deter—and if it could not be deterred, how to withstand—a Soviet attack envisaged by the military planners as likely to ensue in the early 1950s.”
Although Kennan had ideas that might have changed the course of the Cold War, his views were considered interesting but impractical—the ruminations, in Kennan’s words, of “a court jester, expected to enliven discussion, privileged to say the shocking things, valued as an intellectual gadfly on hides of slower colleagues, but not to be taken fully seriously when it came to the final, responsible decisions of power.” By the end of 1949, Kennan, sensing his negligible impact as a d
issenting insider, decided to resign from the State Department and take up residence at Princeton University’s Institute of Advanced Study, where he would be freer to speak his mind in the hope of having a greater impact on the direction of U.S. foreign policy.
But the political climate in which Kennan and official Washington lived at the time made bold initiatives at variance with formulaic anticommunism unpopular and suspect. Paranoia and messianic thinking were hardly the exclusive preserve of Moscow and other Communist capitals.
In the United States, the belief that communism everywhere was tied to Moscow and an unquestionable threat to U.S. security was a distortion that no rational discussion of Soviet power and Communist intentions in other countries could alter. Single-minded anticommunism in the United States impeded the wiser course of trying to reduce tensions by neutralizing Europe and wooing nonaligned and Communist regimes outside of Russia. Of course, Soviet bombast about capitalist war plans could not help but agitate fears in the United States of universal Communist determination to destroy Western governments and social systems by political subversion or direct military conflict if necessary. But the failure to see this as rhetoric that outran capacity or as talk from Moscow that masked national tensions in the Communist camp was a misreading of political and international realities that ill served U.S. national security.
No greater blunder occurred in this regard than U.S. dealings with the Chinese Communist government that established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949, after driving Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists off the mainland to the island of Taiwan. The Communist victory, though increasingly evident in 1948 and 1949, came as a shocking defeat for the United States. It had refused to abandon Chiang, despite his widely unpopular government and mismanagement of military campaigns against initially less numerous and less well equipped Communist forces.