From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (106 page)

Despite leaving office in disrepute, the Truman administration bequeathed an extraordinary record of accomplishment in foreign affairs.
United States officials often misread and sometimes misrepresented Stalin's intentions. They exaggerated the Soviet threat. They unwisely rejected negotiations, leaving unanswered the question of whether the Cold War might have been ended earlier, its worldwide effects somehow mitigated. Still, their firm but measured responses to the challenges of postwar Europe produced creative initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and NATO. United States policies helped to ensure the economic and political recovery of Western Europe, purge it of self-destructive internecine hatreds, and produce firm ties to its trans-Atlantic partner.

Truman and Acheson were much less sure-handed and effective in Asia. Certainly U.S. officials implemented reforms that helped demilitarize and democratize Japan and integrate it into the Western trading community. But the administration could not disentangle itself from the mess in China, with huge consequences for U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics. Its actions and statements likely encouraged Stalin to give Kim the go-ahead to invade South Korea. The free hand given MacArthur after Inchon provoked a wider and much more destructive war. This said, the Communist side still suffered the greatest losses in the Korean War. The United States was perhaps least successful in dealing with problems posed by decolonization. Americans overestimated the economic and strategic significance of the periphery and its vulnerability to Soviet blandishments. Their concern for NATO allies made it difficult to accommodate the new forces of revolutionary nationalism. The extension of the containment policy to Southeast Asia put the United States on the wrong side of nationalist revolutions, laying the basis for war in Vietnam.

Successes and failures aside, the Truman administration in the short space of seven years carried out a veritable revolution in U.S. foreign policy. It altered the assumptions behind national security policies, launched a wide range of global programs and commitments, and built new institutions to manage the nation's burgeoning international activities. Perhaps most important, during the Truman years foreign policy became a central part of everyday life. As early as 1947, the doyen of the Establishment, Henry L. Stimson, would express in somewhat curious but telling words the change that had occurred: "Foreign affairs are now our most intimate domestic concern."
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On March 6, 1953, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party announced with "profound sorrow" that Joseph Stalin was dead. Citizens of the USSR must have greeted the news with a mixture of relief and anxiety. Editorialists in the United States expressed undisguised joy at the demise of the "murderer of millions" but permitted themselves only a glimmer of hope. The great struggle of the century would continue, they averred. Stalin's successors could be as bad or worse. The world might be plunged into an "era of darkest uncertainty."
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In fact, Stalin's death, along with the development of nuclear weapons with destructive capacity too awful to contemplate, changed the Cold War fundamentally in the 1950s. The conflict shifted to new battlegrounds, took new forms, and required new weapons. New leaders on both sides struggled to cope with a more complex and, in some ways, more menacing world.
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While speaking of peaceful coexistence, they lurched from crisis to crisis. The end of the decade brought simultaneously major steps toward substantive negotiations and one of the most dangerous periods of the postwar era.

The Cold War remained the dominant fact of international life in the 1950s. It was still primarily a bipolar affair between the United States and the Soviet Union, with blocs massed around each of the central combatants. It resembled traditional power struggles between nation-states, but it was also a fierce ideological contest between two nations with diametrically opposed worldviews. The two sides saw each other as unremittingly hostile. They used every imaginable weapon: alliances; economic and military aid; espionage; covert operations including targeted assassinations; proxy wars; and an increasingly menacing arms race. The conflict extended across the world and even below the earth—the CIA dug a tunnel deep beneath East Berlin to better intercept Soviet bloc communications. With the advent of missiles and satellites in the late 1950s, the Cold War soared into space. The possession by each side of thermonuclear
weapons and delivery systems capable of reaching the other's territory meant that any crisis risked escalation to a nuclear confrontation. Ironically, what Winston Churchill called the mutual balance of terror also provided a powerful deterrent to great-power war. The adversaries chose to wage the conflict largely through client states, diplomacy, propaganda, and threats of force. The challenge was to gain advantage without provoking a nuclear conflagration.
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The international system became more complex during this period. Fissures began to appear in Cold War alliances. Rebellions against Soviet rule broke out in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. By the end of the decade, a long-simmering feud between the Soviet Union and China boiled to the surface. The Suez Crisis of 1956 provoked bitter conflict between the United States and its major allies, Britain and France.

During this heyday of decolonization, more than one hundred new nations came into being, creating a fertile breeding ground for great-power competition. The Cold War thus increasingly shifted to a battle for the allegiance of what a French demographer labeled the Third World. As with the United States in the Napoleonic era, some leading Third World nations sought to insulate themselves from great-power struggle and also exploit it through what came to be called neutralism, a refusal to take sides in the conflict that raged about them. India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito assumed leadership of a budding neutralist movement that posed major challenges for the great powers. The advent of the Cold War to the Third World sometimes brought with it proxy wars causing massive physical destruction, loss of life, and disruption of domestic politics. While often victims of the Cold War, Third World leaders in seeking to exploit it for their own ends sometimes expanded, intensified, and prolonged the great-power conflict.
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Events in the Third World cannot be viewed solely through the prism of the Cold War.
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To be sure, U.S. policymakers generally looked at issues this way, distorting their understanding of what was happening. They also perceived, however dimly, the equally or even more disturbing
possibility that the non-white masses with or without the Soviet Union might align against the industrialized nations. East-West conflict could be augmented or possibly supplanted by North-South conflict. Some U.S. officials worried that pan-Arabist and Islamic movements might provoke a clash of civilizations. Race played an increasingly important role in world politics. In April 1955, at Bandung, Indonesia, delegates from twenty-nine nations gathered for the first worldwide meeting of peoples of color, raising fears among U.S. diplomats of a "rip-tide of nationalism" among Africans and Asians, even a new "yellow peril."
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By the mid-1950s, the Cold War had altered beyond recognition America's national security apparatus and global presence. In 1953, the defense budget exceeded $85 billion, constituted 12 percent of the gross national product, and consumed 60 percent of federal expenditures. Conscription was an established feature of postwar life; the nation had some 3.5 million men and women under arms. A State Department with five thousand prewar employees expanded to more than twenty thousand. Through a global network of alliances, the United States was committed to defend forty-two nations, a level of commitment, Paul Kennedy has observed, that would have made those arch-imperialists Louis XIV and Lord Palmerston a "little nervous."
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More than a million U.S. military personnel manned more than eight hundred bases in a hundred countries. The Sixth Fleet patrolled the Mediterranean; the Seventh Fleet, the Pacific. The foreign aid budget averaged $5 billion per year between 1948 and 1953. Henry Stimson had snarled in the 1920s that gentlemen did not read each other's mail. In the intelligence agencies, gentlemen—and ladies—now regularly read each other's mail and listened in on telephone conversations and radio transmissions. The CIA illegally opened the mail of U.S. citizens corresponding with people in the USSR. To win the global competition for hearts and minds, Americans stationed abroad helped grow crops, build schools, train military personnel, and manipulate the outcome of elections. The wives of servicemen became unofficial ambassadors, sometimes repairing the public relations damage done by rowdy GIs and seeking to inculcate local women in the American way of life. Foreign governments hired U.S.
public relations firms to boost their image and secure maximum economic and military assistance.
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As part of the Cold War quest for influence, the embassies built in other countries became political statements. The government recruited top architects such as Edward Durrell Stone and Walter Gropius to produce designs reflective of the nation's values and capable of boosting its prestige. The Cold War and modern architecture joined forces with sometimes stunning results. Designers sought to win goodwill from host nations by avoiding ostentatious display and where possible conforming with local architecture. Their buildings employed the glass curtain wall to stress openness and transparency, a sharp contrast with drab Soviet styles—a glass curtain juxtaposed against an Iron Curtain. They sought to capture the nation's spirit of freedom and adventure, self-confidence and prosperity. Stone's embassy in New Delhi achieved worldwide acclaim. Ironically, the structures built to symbolize the United States of the 1950s became easy targets for anti-American attacks in the next decade.
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The Cold War defined American domestic life in the 1950s. A huge spurt in population growth—the postwar baby boom—along with continued high demand for U.S. products abroad, fueled a period of sustained economic prosperity. What economist John Kenneth Galbraith called the "affluent society" produced a certain complacency and retreat from the reformist spirit of the New Deal. Abundance brought the fruition of American consumer culture.
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The Communist threat produced a mood of near hysterical fear, paranoiac suspiciousness, and stifling conformity. Top government officials—including the attorney general of the United States—ominously warned that the Communists were everywhere—"in factories, offices, butcher shops, on street corners, in private businesses . . . they were busy at work 'undermining your government, plotting to destroy your liberties, and feverishly trying, in whatever way they can, to aid the Soviet Union.' " Filmmakers, television producers, newspaper editors, and novelists spewed forth fear-mongering products with such suggestive titles as
The Red Menace, I Was a Communist for the FBI,
and
I Married a Commmunist.
Federal and state
governments harassed, investigated, and deported real and suspected Communists and even encouraged citizens to spy on each other.
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The danger posed by godless Communism spurred a religious revival. Church membership soared; religious motifs suffused the popular culture. President Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged this phenomenon with outward displays of faith, the addition of "In God We Trust" to coins, and the inclusion of religious themes in his speeches. For Eisenhower, his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and other U.S. leaders, the Cold War was the equivalent of a holy war. Even the administration's national security statements affirmed that religious principles should inspire and direct U.S. domestic and foreign policies.
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Various segments of society joined in waging the Cold War. Universities welcomed government contracts for defense-related research and dispatched technical and agricultural missions to Third World countries to win friends for the United States. "Our colleges and universities must be regarded as bastions of our defense," Michigan State University president John Hannah exclaimed in 1961, "as essential to the preservation of our country and our way of life as supersonic bombers, nuclear-powered submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles."
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Private charitable organizations such as CARE and Catholic Relief Services willingly sacrificed their independence by accepting government funds and some measure of government supervision to expand their good works in priority areas.
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Race relations—the most divisive issue in American life in the 1950s—became inextricably entangled with the Cold War. The persistence of virulent racism in the United States and its most blatant manifestation in rigid, legalized segregation in the South gave the lie to U.S. claims for leadership of the "free" world and became a stock-in-trade of Communist propaganda. Diplomats from non-white countries encountered humiliating experiences in the United States, even in Washington, D.C., which
remained a very southern city and for diplomats of color a hardship post. Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. labeled racial discrimination "our Achilles' heel before the world."
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Even the Eurocentric Dean Acheson conceded that the United States must address the issue of racial injustice to deprive the Communists of "the most effective kind of ammunition for their propaganda warfare" and eliminate a "source of constant embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations."
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Dwight David Eisenhower in many ways epitomized the zeitgeist of the 1950s. A product of rural nineteenth-century America, he personified the values the nation clung to under external threat. Conservative in his politics, he was also moderate in his approach to life and avuncular in demeanor. He brought to the presidency a lifetime of experience in the national security matters that now held top priority. His leadership of Allied forces during World War II had "internationalized" him, setting him apart from the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. Though he was often dismissed as an intellectual lightweight and a political bumbler, his seemingly placid disposition and clumsy rhetoric concealed a clear mind, a firm grasp of issues, instinctive political skills, and a fierce temper. His casual attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons was balanced by his innate caution. His basic integrity won the trust of Americans and allies alike.