Memories of The Great and The Good (9 page)

Dean Acheson was alive and well while a new generation was becoming articulate—verbose, anyway—and looking back in anger to the Truman-Acheson years. I cannot forget the first time I felt the blast of this new indignation. It was the late 1960s and I was up in Minnesota during its perishing winter, dashing out of twelve below zero into the ninety-degree oven of a university auditorium. I was to talk to an audience of a thousand or more students. They were polite and even cordial until I started to recall the years just after the Second World War, the threadbare years when Europe was an invalid and a total dependent of the United States, an invalid greatly alarmed by the Soviets' pressure first in northern Iran, then down in the Mediterranean, then during one terrifying summer in Berlin. I was not proposing a thesis, or even thinking to defend such blessings as we had come to take for granted: the Marshall Plan or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

What I was appalled to discover was that the great majority of these students had apparently never heard of the Marshall Plan. There was, however, a minority that knew of it and were pretty cynical about it, as about the first grand installment of an American insurance scheme: I realized, a little late, that when the Russians had been huffing and puffing, when all these great and awful things were happening, these students were unborn, and therefore Azerbaijan and the siege of Berlin and the Marshall Plan lay, for them, in that dead zone that exists in every mind between what is too late to get into the books and what is too early for you to have lived through. From hot little speeches masquerading as questions, I learned two separate and opposing prejudices about Truman and Acheson. One, they were sleeping partners of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, quick to see Communism under every bed and reacting in panic with billions for arms. This opinion came, obviously, from students inclining visibly to the left. The other complaint came from the fewer leaners to the right: that on the contrary, both the president and his secretary of state were shameless “coddlers” of Communists. This charge sprang from the disdain that both men expressed for loyalty oaths, and for McCarthy's trembling assertions that there were scores of Communists on active undercover service inside the State Department. In the presidential election year of 1952, the Republicans found this propaganda line too tempting to resist and, mostly actively, one Richard M. Nixon pictured Acheson as something very close to a traitor if not an underground Communist agent. There was a shabby scene at the Republican Convention in 1952 when somebody unfurled a banner inscribed with the legend: “Acheson—Twenty Years of Treason” and there was a thunderclap of cheers.

It would have been easy, it would have been forgivable self-protection, for Acheson to throw a few sacrificial lambs in the State Department to McCarthy's slaughterhouse. But he never did. And when a minor official, one Alger Hiss, was found guilty of passing on secret papers to the Soviet Union, Acheson was on the touchiest ground of his public life. He had been a friend of Hiss, and at his next press conference he was asked how he felt about Hiss now. The secretary had anticipated the question. He picked up the New Testament and said, ‘You will find the answer in the gospel according to St. Matthew.” Pressed to say that Hiss was well worth renouncing, he simply said, “I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss.” To the people who, like Acheson, probably thought Hiss innocent, this was a courageous act of friendship; to the rest, to the Republicans especially, it was a typical flourish of Acheson arrogance. In any case, it let off another national uproar.
[It would take more than forty years for us to have access to the KGB and the Hungarian Communist archives, which revealed—what Acheson didn't know, nor for that matter did McCarthy—that there really was at that time a small group of dedicated Communists in the State Department]

During his last two years as secretary of state, Ache-son's public appearances were frequently booed, he went in danger of physical harm, his telephone rang incessantly with threats and obscenities. I wondered at the time if he could survive all this without a breakdown. Somehow, under a strain his intimates agonized over, he managed. It is part of the common tragedy of the passing of time that those who know what such a man as Acheson did don't need to be reminded of it, and the rest are either too bored or too skeptical to care. Nevertheless, we had better remind ourselves that whether or not our present troubles stem from Truman and Acheson or from earlier or later times, Acheson was the man who, with one other man in the State Department, brought forth the Marshall Plan. Will Clayton conceived it, and Acheson delivered it.

Will Clayton's is a name you will not find in the almanacs or encyclopedias, though he came to play a great role backstage, away from the limelight, the great names, the powerful egos. A mild-spoken southerner, a businessman who had gone into diplomacy because he felt politicians were, on the whole, either ignorant of or indifferent to economics. He was not so much interested in how the war was to be won as how Europe was to renovate its shattered economy. Would it again manage a favorable balance of payments? Could there ever again in Europe be a prosperous commodity market? These are not concerns that inflame the multitude. Clayton was sent by President Truman to Britain and to the continent of Europe to look over the devastation. Behind the ruined cities he saw, to his consternation, a general lack of the simplest goods of everyday life. He came back and at once devised a grand plan to restore the economy of Europe by direct aid from America, not the promise of aid later on, but grants, loans, massive American investment in steel, coal, mining, construction—Now! He wrote many memoranda on this big theme, enlisted the intellect and enthusiasm of Dean Acheson, General Marshall's second-in-command at the State Department, and brought in several economists, and the department's Soviet expert, George Kennan.

Together, they put together a speech, which Acheson proposed to give at a small college in Mississippi as a trial balloon for, perhaps, a presidential address later on. Acheson went down to Mississippi flushed with the belief that he was proposing nothing less than a plan “to restore the fabric of European life.” Nobody paid attention, and a disheartened Acheson at once got hold of Clayton and made the audacious proposal that General Marshall, who was due to make the commencement address at Harvard, should substitute the body of Ache-son's speech for whatever else he had meant to say. The general agreed, and Harvard had the honor of hearing the first presentation of the grand plan. But General Marshall's speaking style was so monotonous, his prose so flat: he was simply too thoroughly decent a man to have a spark of theater, a hint of ham, about him. Again, nobody—including the best newspapers—paid more than polite attention. Moreover, the promise of radical aid to European industries was deliberately vague, for Marshall knew that the temper of the Congress just then was to restrict American help to military aid for countries, like Greece and Turkey, that were palpably threatened by the Communists from within or without.

However, as I have told elsewhere, Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, saw that the plan was nothing less than a massive attempt to rescue Europe from “hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.”

Two big problems stood like roadblocks in the way of moving the plan off the drawing board into action. Was the plan to include the Soviet Union, the newfound enemy, which had, like Britain, been a principal beneficiary of the lend-leasing of war materials? The answer was—yes. But would an American Congress pour out money for a former ally which was now giving every sign of meaning to overrun Europe? Luckily, for the other beneficiaries (and the passage of the plan!), the Soviets were against any beneficence to the whole of Europe. They would decide, one at a time, which nations qualified for aid. It was an impossible bid for precedence, and Molotov walked out in a huff proclaiming that the whole plan was an imperialist racket to swamp Europe with American goods and arms.

The next, and high hurdle, was Congress. Mocked and pilloried by Truman as a “Do Nothing” Congress, its Republican majority was not about to do his bidding. It was embittered by the tendency of the new European governments to turn left and was inclined to revert to its old isolationism, to leave “old sick Europe” to its own devices. This grudge was hardened by the well-publicized derision of the United States even by its most loyal recent allies. Bevin, the very foreign secretary who had “grabbed (the Marshall Plan) with both hands” had recently called Britain “the last bastion of social democracy … against the red tooth-and-claw of American capitalism and the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia.” So now he was begging alms from the red tooth-and-claw!

At the time, it appeared to be an impossible sell to Congress. Marshall himself appeared before the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee and presented his case in his usual grave monotone. He was followed by Acheson. First, he suggested the folly of a piecemeal approach to this country and that toward which the Soviet Union had obviously malign intentions. He described more graphically than anyone else had done the ruination that Clayton had seen: the hundreds of miles of twisted railroad tracks, the bombed-out factories and shipyards, the rubble heaps of what once were city centers, the charred skeleton of a whole city that was Berlin. He glossed over the creative, more abstract, economic side of the plan and saved his passion for the theme that alone could swing the Senate to approve an appropriation of anything like the thirteen billion dollars that would eventually be disbursed.

He worked himself up to his main argument by recalling the swift brutality with which the Soviets had imposed Communist governments on Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and warned it was not beyond belief that, unaided and left to rebuild itself, the whole of Europe, a broken continent, poor and hungry—would be raw meat for the Soviet glutton. Seeing him glaring at the committee, his face as purple as a lobster in anger, I marveled then at the passion he managed to manufacture over this hellish prospect. Manufactured or not, his passion won the day. His throbbing testimony had given frightening reality to that Iron Curtain which, only a year before, Churchill had envisioned as the new and threatening division of Europe. “These people,” Acheson pleaded, “are desperate. Simply to restore the fabric of European life, this thing must be done.”

It was done. And in the long run, the children or the grandchildren of Acheson's present detractors will know who was the American who did it. More than most presidents, and public magnificoes, he deserves, somewhere in Europe, a statue. Make it an equestrian statue, with his cape rising in the wind from the east, and his mustachios bristling, and the inscription underneath: “Dean Gooderham Acheson, 1893-1971: To Restore the Fabric of Europe.”

A
lthough as a working correspondent I had “covered” Eisenhower from the convention that nominated him on through his years as president, an invitation to go to Gettysburg and spend some days talking with the general about Churchill was one I accepted with alacrity. During several years of moonlighting as a television master of ceremonies, I had discovered that few casual experiences in peacetime offer such a rewarding and sustained glimpse of a man as that of working alone with him on a long television dialogue.

Intelligent actors complain that the chronic ordeal of their profession is “the waiting, not the acting.” But it is during the waiting intervals, which tend to be prolonged and uncertain, that you can sit down and talk usefully with a man to no set purpose. And during the three days at Gettysburg, I spent many hours alone with the general (as he preferred to be called) talking in his office, and up at the farm, about everything from politics to golf, from the code of a soldier to the temptations of a newspaperman, from the private trials of the presidency to the public life of a small Kansas town in the early 1900s. We deliberately avoided elaborating on his reminiscences of Churchill, thinking it better to let these come out instinctively in the freewheeling talk that was done under the cameras.

The general was always cordial and relaxed in the mornings and again at the end of day. In between, he was inclined to fret at the unsoldierly routine of waiting for action that was unscheduled and unpredictable, and very often he would glance at his watch and screw up his eyes—as he always did when in doubt or suspicion—and wonder “what those fellows are up to.” Inevitably, I suppose, a lifelong officer is put at his ease by knowing precisely what his subordinates are doing and when they are expected to appear at the double. He could never understand why a change of lighting or camera setup could take ten minutes or an hour, and to my assurances that everything was under control he would shake his head and concede that “it's a weird business.” Then I would ask him about his favorite part of England, or what was the toughest course he had ever played, and he would light up again and be off in his earnest, restless, rollicking manner.