Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (13 page)

Truman's analogy with Hitler would have made eminent sense to many fellow citizens at the time. Why shed the blood of Americans to rid the world of one dictator, only to have another tyrant take over? The analogy went still further, for many people blamed "appeasement" in the 1930s for the rise in Nazi power that led to the war. This must not happen again. "No more Munichs" was virtually a battle cry to alarmed and anxious Americans throughout the postwar era of conflict with the Soviet Union.

American anger at Soviet dictatorship went well beyond fears of appeasement, great though these were in 1945 and thereafter. It was also righteous and passionate. A specially religious people, many Americans approached foreign policies in a highly moralistic way. This was not only because Communism embraced atheism, though that mattered, especially to Catholics and other religiously devout citizens. It was also because many Americans believed so fervently in the Tightness of their political institutions and the meaning of their history. America, as the Puritans had said, was a City on a Hill, a special place that God had set aside for the redemption of people. It followed that the United States had a God-given duty—a Manifest Destiny, it had been called in the nineteenth century—to spread the blessings of democracy to the oppressed throughout the world. The power of this messianic feeling lent a special urgency—indeed an apocalyptic tone—to American Cold War diplomacy as well as to repression of Communists at home.
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Despite these sources of tension, the United States did not dare take too hard a line against the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Truman administration (and its successors) felt obliged to acquiesce in the Soviet oppression of eastern Europe. Millions of people there remained in thrall for more than forty years. Still, virtually all American foreign policy leaders—from the Truman administration through the 1980s—expressed their anger and outrage at what they considered to be grossly excessive Soviet behavior. All believed that the Soviets must not be allowed to go farther. The alternative, appeasement, would encourage aggression and World War III.

Revisionists make several points in rejoinder to defenders of American policies.
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They highlight first the entirely understandable fear and hatred that Russians felt concerning Germany. In 1914 and again in 1941 Germany had swept across northern Europe to invade the Motherland. World War II had ended with the destruction of 1,700 Russian towns, 31,000 factories, and 100,000 collective farms. This was staggering devastation, especially in contrast to the relatively benign experience of the United States, which had no fighting on its soil. No wonder Stalin stripped eastern Germany of its industrial potential in 1945 and insisted on dominating East Germany in later years. No wonder, too, that he insisted on controlling his east European neighbors, especially Poland, through whose flat and accommodating terrain the Nazi armies had torn just four years earlier.
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Many revisionists stress three other arguments. First, there was little that the West could do about Soviet domination of eastern Europe: Soviet armies, having driven to the heart of Germany during the war, were in control of the area, just as Western armies were in control of western Europe, and could not be dislodged. The division of Europe was yet another powerful legacy of the war, one which statesmen might deplore but which "realists" should have had the sense to live with. Britain's Winston Churchill had done so in 1944, signing an agreement with Stalin that ceded the preeminence of Soviet interests in Bulgaria and Romania. Just as Americans had their own "sphere of interest," including all of the Western Hemisphere, so, too, the oft-invaded Russians desired theirs.
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Many revisionists stress a second point: that Stalin's foreign policies were more flexible than anti-Communist Americans could admit, either at the time or later. There was truth—some—to this argument. Brutal to opponents at home, Stalin was more cautious, conservative, and defensive abroad. This was in part because he had to focus on serious economic and ethnic problems at home. In 1945 Stalin did demobilize some of his armed forces. He acquiesced until 1948 in a coalition government in Czechoslovakia. Rebellious Finland managed to secure some autonomy. Stalin gave little aid to Communist rebels in Greece, who were ultimately defeated. His pressure on Iran and Turkey, while frightening to government leaders there, was intermittent; when the United States protested strongly in 1946, he backed off. Stalin lent little support, either moral or military, to Communist rebels under Mao Tse-tung in China. Instead, he formally recognized Mao's bitter enemy, Chiang Kai-shek. The sum total of these policies suggests that Stalin did not hold strongly, if at all, to Leninist doctrines of worldwide Communist revolution.

Critics of American hard-line reactions stress finally that the policies of the United States magnified Stalin's already heightened sense of insecurity. During the war Roosevelt had delayed opening up a second front in western Europe until 1944, thereby forcing Russian soldiers to bear the brunt of the fighting. This was probably a sensible military decision; to have moved earlier on Normandy might have been disastrous to Allied forces. But the delay fed Stalin's already deep suspicions. The United States and Britain, moreover, had refused to share their scientific work on atomic weaponry with the Soviet Union—or even to tell the Soviet government about it. When the European war ended, the Truman administration abruptly cut off lend-lease shipments to the Soviet Union and refused to extend a loan that Stalin urgently needed. To the Soviets, highly suspicious of capitalist behavior, the United States seemed to be ganging up with nations like Britain and France to develop an empire in the West.

In trying to make sense of these often angry debates about the origins of the Cold War, one must understand the situation as it existed in 1945. This means returning to the starting point: World War II left a new and highly unsettled world that bred insecurity on all sides. The United States and the Soviet Union, by far the strongest powers in the world, suddenly found themselves face-to-face. Dissimilar ideologically and politically, the two nations had been especially cold to each other since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and they had different geopolitical concerns in 1945. Conflict between the two sides—a Cold War—was therefore unavoidable.

That this conflict could have been managed a little less dangerously is true. America's leaders frequently whipped up Cold War fears that were grossly exaggerated, thereby frightening its allies on occasion and deepening divisions at home. Soviet officials, too, often acted provocatively. Whether the Cold War could have been managed
much
less dangerously, however, is doubtful given the often crude diplomacy of Stalin and his successors and given the refusal of American policy-makers to retreat from their grand expectations about the nature of the postwar world.
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M
ANY OF
F
RANKLIN
D. R
OOSEVELT'S
opponents always thought he was something of a lightweight: charming, buoyantly optimistic, politically deft, but intellectually soft. Critics of his diplomacy see the same traits. The British politician and diplomatist Anthony Eden wrote later that FDR knew a good deal of history and geography, but his conclusions therefrom "were alarming in their cheerful fecklessness. He seemed to see himself disposing of the fate of many lands, Allied no less than the enemy. He did this with so much grace that it was not easy to dissent. Yet it was too like a conjurer, skillfully juggling with balls of dynamite, whose nature he failed to understand."
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Roosevelt's detractors especially lament what they think was his credulous attitude toward Soviet behavior during the war. After meeting Stalin for the first time at the Teheran conference in late 1943, he told the American people, "I got along fine with Marshal Stalin . . . I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed."
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In March 1944 Roosevelt dismissed the thought that the Soviets would be aggressive after the war: "I personally don't think there's anything in it. They have got a large enough 'hunk of bread' right in Russia to keep them busy for a great many years to come without taking on any more headaches."
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Optimistic statements like this, of course, could be expected from a leader who needed reliable allies during the war. What else could he have said? Moreover, many Americans did admire the courage of the Russian people.
Life
magazine, a Luce publication, declared that the Russians were "one hell of a people . . . [who] to a remarkable degree . . . look like Americans, dress like Americans, and think like Americans."
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Other Americans saw no good alternative to working with Stalin. Max Lerner, a liberal journalist, said in 1943, "The war cannot be won unless America and Russia win it together. The peace cannot be organized unless America and Russia organize it together."
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This was essentially FDR's attitude. He was indeed a bit feckless, especially in expecting that his own personal charm could forge a strong personal bond between Stalin and himself. He worked at that project with little success both at Teheran and at Yalta. But Roosevelt was hardly a naive idealist. In seeking Soviet-American cooperation after the war he tended to think that Stalin was moved less by ideological passions than by considerations of national interest. He refused, therefore, to worry much about Communism, which he thought had little appeal in the West. If Stalin caused difficulties, the United States had carrots and sticks. Over-optimistically, FDR hoped that the threat to withhold economic aid could keep the Soviet Union in line.

In other ways, too, Roosevelt eschewed flights of idealism in his approach to the postwar order. Although he supported creation of the United Nations, established after his death in 1945, he did not expect it to resolve major controversies. He hoped instead that the United States and the Soviet Union, along with China and Great Britain, would act as "Four Policemen" to secure a postwar peace.
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Here, too, Roosevelt was overoptimistic, especially about China, which for many years was far too divided to do any effective policing. But he was surely correct about a major geopolitical reality: without cooperation between the world's strongest powers, much of the heroism of World War II might be wasted.

This is not to argue, as some have, that FDR's death in April 1945 prevented the United States from working out a better relationship with the Soviet Union. Given the array of formidable problems emanating from the war, it is doubtful that one person, however charming or wise, could have made a great difference. Moreover, in his foreign policies (as in his New Deal at home) FDR often acted deviously, confusing not only the American people but also advisers who tried to apprehend his thinking. His neglect of Truman in early 1945, one of his greatest failings, compounded the difficulties that arose later in the year. He told him virtually nothing about his thinking and kept him totally in the dark about the Bomb.

Roosevelt also misled the American people, largely hiding from them the growing strains in Soviet-American relations that alarmed Harriman and others in early 1945. Nowhere is this more clear than in his glowing public report in February 1945 on the Yalta conference. The Allied leaders there could not agree on many matters, including postwar arrangements for Germany. They postponed decisions and awaited further developments. The Declaration on Liberated Europe, they recognized, was hardly a ringing endorsement of democracy. It committed the powers only to
consult
on ways to help democracy develop among "liberated" people. Admiral William Leahy, a key military adviser, complained to FDR that the Declaration was "so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it."
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FDR did not disagree; he knew Leahy was right. But he never let that be known to Truman, the Congress, or to the American people, most of whom assumed that the Declaration was a Soviet commitment. When the Russians "broke" it in the next few months, many Americans were stunned and angry. Among them was Truman, who berated the Soviets in the probably mistaken assumption that Roosevelt would have done the same.

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of April 12, 1945, when Roosevelt died suddenly in Georgia, Harry S. Truman left the Senate chamber, where he had presided as Vice-President, and headed for the office of his old friend Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House. He intended to have a drink with a few other Democratic leaders, who frequently met to "strike a blow for liberty." When he arrived, Rayburn told him that White House aide Stephen Early had phoned and wanted him to call back. Truman did so and was asked to come to the White House. There he was taken to see Eleanor Roosevelt. "Harry," she said, "the President is dead." Truman fought to collect his emotions, then asked, "Is there anything I can do for you?" Mrs. Roosevelt responded, "Is there anything
we
can do for
you?
For you are the one in trouble now."
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Truman was indeed in trouble, for contemporaries struggled to cope with the shock of change in presidential leadership. Millions of Americans had come to think that Roosevelt, inaugurated in January for an unprecedented fourth term as President, was the only leader for the country. Many had little knowledge of Truman, a sixty-year-old party regular who had secured the vice-presidency as a compromise choice following unusually convoluted, last-minute back-room politicking at the 1944 Democratic convention. Those who did know him included prominent Democratic liberals who associated Truman with the malodorous political machine of Thomas Pendergast of Kansas City. David Lilienthal, director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, confessed privately that he felt "consternation at the thought of that Throttlebottom, Truman." Max Lerner added, "Can a man who has been associated with the Pendergast machine be able to keep the panting politicians and bosses out of the gravy?"
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